Now that everyone is in a rush to embrace the next round of consoles, I think we should take a moment to choose our favourite game from the last generation - PS2, GC, XBox, DC. Just pick the one game with a few reasons; none of this 'I can't choose between....' fence-sitting pony!
I'll kick off then, with Metroid Prime - I've never played anything that felt as organic as MP before, that presented the last gasps of a dying world so vividly, dripping with atmosphere & imbued with history (thanks to the Chozo Lore)
A truly epic sense of scale, fantastic, tough boss fights, beautiful to look at & an incredible soundtrack - both tunes & spot effects. It's a page-turner of a game & one that I couldn't put down. I often find myself musing on various aspects of the game when doing other things - true testament to how involved with it I am.
What say you?
I would have to fence sit. One of:
Space Channel 5 Part 2 - a happy-emotional journey
F Zero GX - incredibly deep racer
Super Monkey Ball - exceptional world tilt mechanic and level design
Band Brothers - incredibly deep rhythm action
For me it's Shenmue. Don't really want to go into pages of analysis as that's sort of missing the point. Suffice to say the period whilst I played through Shenmue was the first time since childhood that a game fired my imagination whilst away from the Tele. Just walking down the road and looking at people made me feel like I was back in the game. It wasn't a case of Shenmue reflecting real life rather that real life was a slightly less colourful Shenmue experience.
Oh yeah... and Shenmue. Shenmue II specifically. I will never run a pachinko stand again
Viewtiful Joe
Destroying the Magnificent Five and pwning Fire Leo was the high point of the last gen for me.
Plus everything Saurian has ever said about this game hit home like I was hearing THE WORD!
Some of my favourite ones are:
You Mach Speed the jumping dive and slow it when it connects to the floor rapidly tapping zoom!
KP cancels - keep cancelling the K P faster and faster as you move towards an enemy then mix it into the crouch equivalent faster and faster and BUSS IT with one last punch + ZOOM!
When you connect slow 360 kick on multiple targets you keep rapidly tapping Zoom to make it look SICK!!
Chain uppercuts with zoom - setup 4 or 5 enemies and Uppercut slide cancel them in sequnce adding a longer Zoom each time.
Uppercut - then go Slow PKPKPK damn fast so only the last move (A Flashkick to put Guile's to shame) actually comes out. I've memorised Air Joe and know how many PK cancels active each move.
Mach speed run while rapidly taping Zoom
Up-up to make Joe go "w00t w00t"
SLOW + ZOOM and hold it in when the Rainbow V comes up and the crowd cheers - It's pure cheese but IT's LAW!
Just a total life event really.
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My Wii left Hong Kong 8/12/06
Right, I don’t care, I’m sitting on the fence! It’s too hard to single out one.
Advance Wars – Utterly addictive in single player, and, well, utterly addictive in multiplayer too. I’ve lost hour after hour with this game.
Metroid Prime – Nothing much to add to everything that has already been said in the Prime thread.
Katamari Damacy – So much FUN. Constantly made me laugh out loud, and pretty much every second of playtime was spent with a huge smile on my face. Cracking soundtrack too.
Super Monkey Ball – Pure gameplay. It’s just such a perfect game, and if you mess up you have nothing or no-one to blame but yourself.
Wario Ware – All incarnations; I just love this series. Can’t quite describe why it’s so brilliant – it just is.
I’m sure I’ll think of a few more when I get home and browse the collection. Honourable mentions must also go to: Viewtiful Joe, Halo, Jet Set Radio, GTA Vice City. I haven’t even started Zelda: TP yet but I bet it’ll go straight on the list when I do.
Damn I'd forgotten about KD. I'm sticking with Shenmue though.
It's gotta be Killer7 for me. Stunning visuals, psychotic story and characters, brilliant script, wonderfully simple controls and THE best music I've ever heard in a game...
Resi 4 and quite a lot of Clover stuff was oh-so-close, but you made me choose one.
Gradius V
A simple horizontal shmup from the early nineties that atually came out in 2004. Pure Gradius. During my stint of unemployment I came to spend more time on it than any other of it's kind. For something to topple Area 88 (which is, no WAS in my all-time top 10) in this day and age deserves a mention. I spent around an hour on it the other night and I've lost most of my skills but I could tell it wouldn't take me more than a day to get back in there and re-memorise all my usual patterns and start looping again. If this was the only game I had in my collection I'd be happy, and that can also only be said for a certain N64 FPS.
...now my proper fave game/s of last gen...
Metroid Prime 1+2
For all the reasons mentioned above really. I'm finding it difficult to add any sort of conversational praise as I'm totally lost for words when I think of these games so I think I'll just resort to slagging off the people who don't like them: For anyone who doesn't 'get' these games then I'm sorry but you lack a very basic level of taste. The sort of people that don't like the Prime games are the same sort of people that don't like books. I don't read much myself but that intelectual appreciation for something deeper than GFX and even gameplay is still there, I think. Also, I can never help but think I'm playing an adult version of Jumping Flash when it comes to Prime, which always makes me smile.
I'll be playing Prime 3 naked to make it an utterly sexual experience.
Console of last gen goes to the Cube. So much concentrated class on that platform, probably more class spread out on the PS2 to be fair but if I combine everything up my amount of time spent on the cube is quite unhealthy to say the least.
Halo.
For so many reasons.
Top five:
Resident Evil 4 - Sublime to play and seldom has the word reinvention been more revelent.
Chu Chu rocket- MOUSE MANIA! ...need i say more
FFXI- one of those mmorpgs which is a pleasure and a pain but if you play a game for over 2 years it should deserve to make the list.
Eternal Darkness- Creepy and very lovecraft based. really messed with my head at 3am once.
Donkey Konga and Samba di amigo- i like to party.
on a differnt note..top 5 games of last generation that i wanted to be great but got let down.
Halo 2 - Way to easy. plot was all over the place and even though i loved it. I wanted so much more.
MSG 2- oh lordy...like dickens said "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" Raiden:barf: Got to see Snake doing his thing..got to collect dog tags which was a hoot. But damn, raiden sucked and the plot in the last half just went down the toilet.
FFX(controversial)- i loved playing it. But they took away my world map and my exploration, they told me where to go in my airship instead of letting me find out if i could park it on an island in the middle of nowhere. They gave me another blond teenager who iritates me. I loved the sphere grid concept i didnt like the acting. wish it had been more.
FF Tactics Advance- why..why..why.. though i still find it unforgivable that europe never got the original on the PS i hoped that would change when Advance came out. Its still a great game but why did they turn it into a kiddy game. They took out the religion and the polotics which for me made the first a very powerfull game.
Breath of fire 4- Zxnosaga. geez. Xzenogears i still own both game and sountrack and will always hold the game dear to my heart. I knew the team had moved house but still had my hopes raised. They turned it into a cold, dull clean world which had me quite bored to tears.
very sad
Anyways...those are my hits and misses, apologies for ranting
We going on the wikipedia definition of this generation crap?
I.e. 6th Generation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games_(Sixth_generation_era)
'cos.... that's the whole of the DC, GC, PS2 and Xbox.... alot alot of very good games over all those consoles.
Y'got OutRun2... F-Zero GX... Shenmue... Viewtiful Joe... Metroid Prime... Driver Parallel Lines... Virtua Fighter 4... many more... possibly made by Sega
For some reason my brain always says, if I was going to tell someone the single reason why I played computer games, and the 1 game I'd say that encapsulates what I like about the whole darn shooting match, personally it would have to be F-Zero GX it's so hyper real, fantastic and brilliant to play beyond anything else. Metroid Prime comes close... as do a few mentioned above. But there is something pure about F-Zero GX that I find difficult to articulate, maybe its my intrinsic bias towards driving games, sci fi games and brilliant games.
Here's some exciting geeky things I did at the time of release:
Ahhh.... no idea what the Wheel Barrow is about...?
GX are teh sex - I still cant get enough of it!
I aint got time to write an essay - on a quick ting, mine are:
Devil May Cry 3 -
Controlling Dante is an art, there's no upper limit as to how far you can take this control. It's the relationship between the player and the character I'm most into with gaming, for that - DMC3 is perfection.
Viewtiful Joe -
Same reasons as DMC3 - controlling Joe is like having an extension of yourself that you FUCK the game up with!
F Zero GX -
Apart from the snaking shit, my favourite racing game ever - even better than rrrrRRRRRIIIIIIDDGGEEE rrrRRRRAAAAAAAAAAACCCCEEEEEERRRRRrrrr!!!11!!1!111!11eleven
Plus the characters are all nutcases XD - you can be an alien, a superhero, robot or dinosaur as and when you like and I love them all!
Psyvariar 2 -
It takes you to another place that regular shoot em ups dont go. I cant explain what that place is - but I like it there; you can judge the fill rate of the Neutrino without looking, dive in and out of laser attacks that look like the birth of the universe - and I cant stop playing it! AND I STILL CANT DO GLUON!!!!1 XO
Resident Evil 4 -
Leon S Kennedy. Pimp. Playah. Legend. Smoother than the cream in a cream egg.
Soul Calibur - (proper DC Calibur not that SHIT that came after it)
I love the world, the story, the characters, the atmosphere - everything so damn much. It plays like a dream come true and I'm a FILTHY NASTY HORRIBLE bastard on it - Namco with their secret spy cameras saw this and did really, really bad things to all the following games....things that would make easily make Miyamoto weep and send sob story emails. Infact he'd wear out his keyboard and tear glands if he worked for that company.
Metroid Prime -
Best 2D to 3D transition in gaming history. It's Metroid - in 3D....and it works perfectly O_o
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"I laughed in her face and stole some pick&mix!" -
LOL - we were all into making diagrams and such for GX, ace times those.
I can't pick one so here's five titles that have defined the previous generation for me.
Gradius V
This has cemented the standard for the traditional horizontal variety of shooters. I've logged about 250 hours on this according to the system clock.
Metroid Prime
The definitive FPS experience on a console, with a killer soundtrack.
F-Zero GX
When some people start complaining about difficulty you know you're on to something special.
Metal Gear Solid 2
The ultimate video game mindjob of all time. Brilliant.
Shin Contra / Shattered Soldier
A return to form, loved it so much I S-ranked it over and over and over...
So hard to pick one...
Shadow of the Colossus - It proved that platform games could still be wildly inventive and playable. Great visual style too. Beautiful music. This craps all over ICO, in my opinion.
Super Monkey Ball - The first perfect game since Tetris. Expert level design. Polished presentation. And, of course, Monkey Target.
Chibi Robo - The best Zelda game that isn't actually Zelda. It's one of the most touching videogames I've ever played and has an awesome sense of scale as your tiny robot finds new ways to explore the vast expanse of his family home.
Metroid Prime Pinball - The BEST pinball game ever made. That's all I need to say.
I got so excited about Metroid Prime Pinball I emailed the developers like some freak show stalker telling them how awesome I thought it was... never got a call from the police, so it must'nt have been that bad....
http://www.fusegames.com/
They're recruiting! AWESOME! (cue heavey breathing phone interview)