Other Games of 2005
Games worth talking about, but not honoring.
List items
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I expected Animal Crossing to finally click. I rented the GameCube version before, but lost interest. When the DS version hit, I bought it because I believed that a portable incarnation would alleviate my boredom. I can play while watching television or in bed! Nope, turns out that I just don’t like Animal Crossing. I haven’t touched the series since.
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I have a frustrating history with Half-Life 2: at some point, I managed to grab the Steam version of Half-Life 2, but my computer at the time was so underpowered that spots were choppy. Regardless, I managed to go through about 3/4th of the game before the action ramped and my computer just said no.
Shortly after, the Xbox version was released. It wasn’t pretty and it also was a little rough in spots, but I managed to make it through. It wouldn’t be for a few more years before I played a decent-looking version through the Orange Box, which I will undoubtedly mention when that year comes.
Still, Half-Life 2 was such a big release that I felt remiss if I didn’t mention it. Shame that it was prompted by finding out that the Xbox version was released this year.
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I don’t *get* Minish Cap. It’s a solid Zelda game, but when people start talking like it’s a masterpiece, I just stare blankly. Nothing about it felt exceptional, from the overworld to the bosses to the story. It’s all very… good… but not amazing or even great. It nearly made the Favorite Games list, but I couldn’t include it feeling the way I do. Even so, I still wanted to give it a shout.
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There seems to be two camps: those who prefer Meteos over Lumines and vice-verse. Since Meteos is in THIS list and Lumines is in the OTHER list, it’s obvious where I stand. That’s not to mean that I dislike Meteos, so here’s my official shout-out.
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By 2005, the benefits of touch screens on gaming were still hazy, but using the stylus to “pet” your virtual dog made the most amount of sense in the entire world. Nintendo DS’s library was also lacking, so we latched onto anything that justified the new hardware. Maybe this was one game I could’ve avoided, in hindsight.
Still beats owning a real dog, though.
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I inherited this game, which is good because there’s zero chance I would ever want to spend money on this garbage. I never cared for the original Perfect Dark, but at least that felt like a solid game that just didn’t click with me. PDZ is just horrible from nearly every perspective. The graphics were a shiny mess in 2005, the story uninteresting, and the stages bloated. When the developers are forced to add arrows layered onto the ground just to point the right direction, something’s wrong. Not to mention that the AI is very dumb.
Multiplayer was halfway decent, allowing a good number of players to fight. There were also vehicles to pilot, although anyone with a huge enough interest in that was probably playing Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on the original Xbox.
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When Quake II was bundled with Quake 4, it probably wasn’t intended that people spend more time with the former than the latter. I crawled through Quake 4 and did enjoy it to a degree, but I sped through Quake II and enjoyed it considerably more. Maybe it’s a lesson that simpler can be better.
Now let us move onto the next game, where I complain about simple gameplay
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In this case, I’m referring to the DS version, which is a mediocre port of the N-Gage version. While the N-Gage version actually saw decent review scores, maybe it’s because the N-Gage was shit, so anything halfway decent seemed impressive. Regardless, Chaos Theory on DS is a poor game that can’t run at a decent frame rate for ten seconds. It’s a cautionary tale about buying something just because you have little else to place on your fancy new console.
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Here’s a game that continues to get accolades years after, but I never understand why. The reason for that may have to do with expectations. I assumed that Yoshi Touch & Go would be a larger game with more depth, but we got was very simple and very short, built to replay for a better score. I rarely care for such games, so Touch & Go didn’t appeal to me at all. But other people seemed to enjoy it, so there’s that.
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