2000-2009: The ones that got away

20/01/2010 in News

The beginning of the year 2010 marks the end of another decade. A decade in which lots of video games got made. Most of them got played too, although some of them maybe didn’t get played as much as they should have, or didn’t get the recognition we think they deserved. We’ve compiled a list of 33 games, although it really could have been any number, that we loved for one reason or another. Maybe you’ve already played them, but maybe you’ll find a game that you never played. If, in our finite wisdom, we’ve missed a personal fave of yours, please correct this injustice and tell us what and why in the comments.

2000

Sled Storm, PS1 (Will)
By my memory, Sled Storm was the first game in which I ever felt competitive. When I was watching the Matrix for the first time (well after its release, mind), Rob Zombie in the background of the club scene made me nostalgic for playing Sled Storm with my brother. We’d make up what we thought were the lyrics to the song as we blasted through the snowy tracks.

It was the first racer of its kind that we played that allowed customisation of vehicles, and I still remember several of the tracks vividly. One of us would find a shortcut and keep it secret from the other until the one race where we really needed to use it, and we’d reappear later on in the course laughing all the way. There were shortcuts available that were only useful if you had a certain tread and weight, because the snow was deeper, or some that were blocked off by an ice wall that could only be accessed if you were going a certain speed. I remember snowmen, and rabbits, that were worth points if you ran them over.

For us, long before Motorstorm or Pure, Sled Storm built the niche they would fall into so comfortably.

Vib-Ribbon, PS1 (Will)
For a long time, whenever I bought a new album, I would listen to it first through Vib-Ribbon. There’s something about interacting with the music that really grabbed me – perhaps that’s the reason I’m such a fan of music rhythm games today. Vib-Ribbon took any music CD you owned and turned it into progressively harder 2D levels to traverse, matching the mood of the track perfectly while still providing a superbly engineered and natural difficulty curve.

Fur Fighters, Dreamcast (Lewie)
Before they made their name with racing games set in the city where the Batman lives, and neon complex maths simulators, Bizarre Creations made a third person shooter for the Dreamcast. It looked great, and the titular fur fighters all controlled excellently. The levels where huge, and they successfully married combat, platforming and puzzle solving. I remember laughing a fair bit too, but I was 12 at the time, so don’t hold me to that. It’s probably the type of game that wouldn’t get made today, but you can certainly see some of it’s DNA in things like The Club.

ChuChu Rocket!, Dreamcast (Lewie)
Shh. It’s thinking.

There was a time when you couldn’t enter your local Electronics Boutique without having a free copy of ChuChu Rocket shoved into your hands, and tripping over a crate of them on the way out. But did anyone actually play it? I know I did. It’s the kind of multiplayer game that ends friendships, and often leads to actual fights. It’s just a game of numbers and grids and squares, but it’s all packaged together in a nice little friendly bundle, with mice and cats and rocket ships. I guess it was the dawn of a new era of console online play too, and it’s pretty surprising that Sega haven’t got this on the live arcade yet.

2001

Tsurugi (Blade of Honor), Arcade (Will)
I don’t remember when, but at one point, my mother took us on a trip to Scotland. Partly, it was to see my father’s family, but mostly because she was doing research into our family tree and wanted to go hunting around graveyards. My brother and I would have been more than a little bitter about trudging around churchyards after a long car journey at the best of times, but for this particular break we managed to catch Scotland in the most blustery, wettest, coldest period we could have done. In one particular camp we stayed in, we were pitched directly on the coast, and the side of the tent bowed inward so dramatically that I could barely move without the rain soaking through onto my face. I probably would have complained a lot more, if it weren’t for Tsurugi.

The camp we were staying in had a small arcade, far too overpriced for what it was, but for me at the time, the only decent gaming I could get. After a few rounds of Silent Scope, Tsurugi caught my eye – it was, to me at the time, the epitome of technological advancement. This thing is still, in my mind, the precursor to the Wii – you held a sword hilt that positioned itself with a pair of accelerometers and an IR camera. It had one button, used to initiate a special move, and a pedal to step on in order to lunge forward. In every other respect, it was an on-rails slash-em-up, and I absolutely adored it. It was a level of interactivity I’d not before seen, and I put pound coin after pound coin into its slot until my money for the day was exhausted. It’s a crime that there has not been a Wii port of this. I would buy it immediately.

Mars Matrix: Hyper Solid Shooting, Dreamcast (Lewie)
I’m fairly convinced that basically any game design can potentially be improved with the addition of the right kind of RPG elements. Mars Matrix is a rather fast vertical scrolling shmup, with a superb in game shop/unlocking mechanic. Essentially each playthrough, by collecting gold, you can then unlock things like extra lives, power ups and other advantages which you get to keep forever. This acheives two things. Number one, it sidesteps the issues of how to make shmups, which traditionally are designed around arcade play, play more like a console game. Number two, it keeps you coming back for more, whatever your skill level.

2002

Gitaroo Man (Lewie)
Is this to blame for the aisle of plastic instruments in HMV? Quite possibly. It’s a music game that uses one stick, and some buttons, and out of that is spins pure joy. Happy happy happy music, and a boy going on an adventure with his best friend (who is also his pet dog). I’ve never actually finished it, so I don’t know if he saves the world and gets the girl. What I do know is that I still have the songs in my head and in my heart.

Go! Go! Beckham! Adventure on Soccer Island, GBA (Will)
This is possibly the weirdest licenced property ever. David Beckham is stranded on a desert island; an island whose inhabitants happen to use balls for every purpose imaginable. The evil Mister Woe has stolen all the balls and turned animals into monsters to form his own football league – monsters known by such names as the Strika, the Winga, or the Keepa. Yes, really.

Behind all this ridiculousness, though, lies a really solid and unique platformer by Denki. Essentially, you are useless without the various balls in every level, which allow you different powers – whether it’s the standard ball that you use to knock out enemies, the cannonball that’s much heavier and more powerful, the rubber ball that bounces, and so on. Each level plays like a puzzle to be solved, along with the twitch response and preparation that you’d expect from a platformer. A really solid title that’s unfortunately difficult to find right now.

James Bond 007: NightFire (Will)
Another entry that defines itself, for me, by the multiplayer. Long into the night, my friends and I would set up randomised weapon matches on Skyrail, grappling to buildings halfway across the map and flying over each others’ heads, and controlling Sentinel missiles into each others’ faces. One of our favourite modes was one of indirect kills on Snow Blind – through trip mines, remote detonation, and when all else failed, a pistol. I can’t tell you exactly what held us so much about Nightfire – it wasn’t the most balanced game, although it did better than Goldeneye with the characters having different stats – Oddjob was impossible to hit, of course, with his homing hat as a secondary weapon that got far more kills than it should have. Jaws, though, had more health than others. Some of the standard soldiers were extremely well-camouflaged for different levels, giving an advantage that was far too significant, and of course whoever was wielding the Golden Gun would streak ahead without any recourse. There was no real reason we should have loved it so much, but the first time I flew a remote-control helicopter into a friend, I was hooked.

Nightfire’s also worth mentioning just for the territory it broached with the single-player campaign. For the first time, a Bond game tried to survive on its own merits and story without just a film licence and Pierce Brosnan to back it up. For the most part, it worked, with all the cheesiness and considerably more action than a film, and set a very respectable stage for 2004’s Everything or Nothing

2003

The Chzo Mythos, PC – 2003-2007 (Will)
When Yahtzee rose to internet fame with Zero Punctuation a few years ago, it was long-deserved. Having been introduced to Fully Ramblomatic in Sixth Form by a friend, I’d been following his ridiculous brand of wit for quite a while. His breakdown of how Wind Waker is about a young boy struggling with issues of homosexuality and incest and the imagery therein is still an article I recommend whenever I get the opportunity, and the Silent Hill sketch ‘A Big Red Shiny Helmet’ is still one I would like to see produced. However, the reason I loved Yahtzee was that he was a competent game designer as a team of one.

Using Adventure Game Studio, Yahtzee built a point-and-click adventure with his own pixel art and script to accompany it, called 5 Days a Stranger. Over the next few years, he released three more games – 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby’s Notes, and 6 Days a Sacrifice, all of which combined top-tier puzzle gameplay that was never frustrating, with his brand of gallows humour and sardonic wit slipping perfectly into the guise of the main character, Trilby. The Days games have legitimately been some of the most creepy and exhilarating games I have ever played, especially Trilby’s Notes, a text parser game that very rarely misunderstands the input, the final act of which is simply superb.

Special mention also goes to the non-Days game Teddy Murder, an alphabet shooter which unfortunately seems to have been removed from the internet entirely.

Border Down, Dreamcast (SamArtRiot)
Is the best shmup on the Dreamcast (YES IT IS). What makes it special is the “border down” system. You have three ships. When the ship you’re currently using is destroyed, rather than losing a life and starting from the same point in the level, you “border down”. This increases the difficulty and places you on a different route on that level. This keeps you on your toes and also leads to you seeing the other ships destroying stuff in the background while you’re playing. It’s brilliant.

PN03, Gamecube (Lewie)
Before there was God Hand, and before there was Resident Evil 4, there was PN03. One of the Capcom 5, but the only one to not disappear or get a PS2 port. Critics basically didn’t get it, and gamers bought it even less, but there is an excellent game in here. Shinji Mikami made his name with the Resident Evil series, and PN03 feels like it was a dress rehearsal for the radical (and hugely successful) overhaul he gave the series with RE4. It’s a sci-fi third person shooter, with robots. The combat is more like a shmup than anything else though, and you can sink hours into practicing the rhythmic attack system, but still have more to learn.

F-Zero GX, Gamecube (Lewie)
The beautiful marriage of Sega and Nintendo. The thing of childhood dreams, and an end product that lives up to them.

It’s a sci-fi racing game. No, it’s the daddy of sci-fi racing games. When F-Zero enters the room, wipeout ducks into the corner and hides it’s head in fear.

It’s brutally difficult, and equally fair. Technically superb, with a framerate that never drops below 60 frames a second despite the blistering speed. Insane track design and beautiful graphics make it still look incredible today, and has lots of stuff to do. The story mode has the cut scenes that you skip, then has a really diverse set of challenges. The grand prix mode is a mammoth task, sets of 5 tracks, and each track has 30 competent racers all after first place. It has a vehicle creator, and a tonne of unlockables. I’m convinced that the main reason there hasn’t been a Wii sequel is that Nintendo know that there is no way that kind of magic could happen again. Sometimes lightning only strikes ones.

If you’ve got a Wii, but never had a Gamecube, you owe it to yourself to track down a copy of this.

Breakdown, Xbox (Lewie)
A genre unto itself, this is a JFPS. It’s not really that good. In fact, it is largely horrible to play. It’s pacing is way off, it has a rather terrible story (which is pretty poorly told), and it is frustrating and unrewarding to play. However, what it does offer is a completely new perspective on first person shooters. It feels like it’s been designed from the outside looking in. As if they glanced at doom and thought “I can do that”, without being aware, and therefore not relying on, a lot of the genre conventions. It is certainly original, and it deserves some attention for that. I bet DICE played this at some point before making Mirror’s Edge. Probably the worst game on this list, but by no means the least interesting.

The Temple of Elemental Evil, PC (Michael Hanretty)
What everyone wanted and nobody bought: a modern-day, completely-faithful-to-the-rules, PC game adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons. In a better world, the radial menu system it pioneered would have completely revolutionised the realm of computer game RPGs. As it stands, it remains the least-loved of Troika Games’ legendary portfolio. True to its pedigree, it was kicked out the door by the publisher before any comprehensive game testing had taken place. That the game’s plot was really nothing to write home about was what probably sealed its fate as the oddball of the family. Still, fan mods (and by that I mean the Circle of Eight series of patches) have allowed rather more of the game’s potential to be realised.

In a decade where MMORPGs really captured the credit card numbers of the masses, ToEE stands out – out of time and out of place – as a distillation of the classic PC gaming experience: reducing community-driven pastimes to oh-so-solitary affairs. Just close the curtains, would you? The glare of the monitor’s putting me off.

2004

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, PC (Lewie)
The saddest thing about this game is that I’d love to tell you it is fantastic and you absolutely should buy it, but I can’t. It is the buggy mess that is reputed to be, but not to the degree that you shouldn’t play it. It’s probably the closest we are ever going to get to Deus Ex with vampires, although structurally it’s a lot less linear than Deus Ex. The highlights are breaking into a hospital blood bank, a frankly haunting haunted hotel, and some of the sharpest dialogue I’ve encountered in a video game.

2005

Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land, DS (Lewie)
Whilst the Tony Hawk games were busy slowly pissing away their fanbase on the consoles, and setting EA up to go on to have huge success with the Skate games, the DS iterations of the series were actually some of the strongest around. Starting off with American Sk8land, these were basically the type of Tony Hawks games that gamers actually wanted to play. They had a lot less of the nonsense that the bloated console counterparts had, and were just a fun game about making combos. Add into the mix a great visual style that plays to the DS’s strengths, and a surprisingly competent online mode, this is probably how the Tony Hawk games should be remembered.

Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, Gamecube (Lewie)
“From the team that went on to make Super Mario Galaxy” is all the endorsement that this should need, but I’m not stopping there. Nintendo are rather good at making playable, well paced, digital video game entertainment products. But every now and again they have a spark. A magical moment of braveness, where they craft a game that is just a great idea excellently created. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is a platformer with 4 buttons. Left bongo, right bongo, both bongos at the same time, and *clap*. It also has a hell of a lot going on at once. You’ve got the arcade game sensibilities, where you will replay levels over and over again to perfect them, and get those high scores. Easy to complete with a pathetic score, but I dare you to try and get gold on all the levels. It’s rhythmic platforming is largely unlike anything else out there. It tests your basic skill at timing jumps, and then offers you opportunities to get some incredible scores, and find secret areas, if only you were better at the game.

Some of the levels are grandiose events, although some of the boss battles are a little weak. I remember reviews saying it was a little short, but I imagine that they never unlocked the super hard bonus world. Or just didn’t spend much time beating their scores.

The Wiimake doesn’t control as well, sadly. You need the bongos, get the original.

Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, Xbox (Lewie)
A completely different side to the phenomenal Oddworld series. 3rd person action, First person shooting, and some of the most interesting combat idea’s in a game for a long time. You play a bounty hunter, in an insane western setting, hunting down outlaws. Live captures are much more challenging than straight up killing them, but you’ll earn more cash in return. It kind of has to be played to be beleived, keep an eye out for the PC port on the way.

2006

Rockstar Presents: Table Tennis, 360 (Will)
Table Tennis is famous for being the test-bed for Rockstar’s RAGE engine before it reappeared in GTA IV, but it was a decent game in its own right. It was also hard as nails.

Table Tennis was the game that I was playing when my first 360 started to crash out of games. Maybe I associate it with it being difficult because when I was doing well, it would crash and make me redo the tournament all over again, but it was worth replaying the tournament and risking more damage to the console because it was just that good. It tapped into that annoying part of the gamer brain that will suffer defeat and frustration over and over again just in search of that elusive win. it was so simple, but it enthralled me for months.

2007

Excite Truck, Wii (Lewie)
The unique selling point, and critical mechanic of Excitetruck when it comes to high level play, is the scoring system. Pretty much every action rewards you with some stars and at the end of a race it’s the number of stars you’ve managed to collect that determines how well you’ve done. Air time, crashing into an opponent, or grazing trees at the edge of the track, are just some of the ways to add you your star counter, and there is a big pot of stars available at the end of the race, and the better you place, the more you get. The constant drip feed of shiny things is very rewarding, especially since the HUD is loud and proud and in your face, shouting “Super Tree Run!” in big letters across the screen.

It’s really fast too. Boosting at full pelt you‘ll be flying into the screen at a real breakneck speed. And whenever you jump, the camera swoops right above you to give you a fantastic view of the track ahead of you, and you can see for miles. As an arcade racer, Excite Truck somehow manages a perfect mashup of old Nintendo difficulty and trial and improvement gameplay, and new Nintendo accessibility and waggle centric gaming. It somewhat channels elements of burnout, but the major difference is that the environment is you biggest opponent in Excite Truck.

Super Rub-A-Dub, PS3 (Will)
Super Rub-A-Dub was the first PS3 downloadable game that I bought when I got my PS3. For me, it was the first game that really sold the idea of motion control for the system.

I originally played it at a friend’s, it having been his first downloadable title for the system as well, and the idea of competition with him drove me through the game to get gold medals on every stage and every duck available. It’s still a shame that there’s never been any DLC for it – I’d buy it in an instant.

Earth Defense Force 2017, Xbox 360 (Richie from PEOWW)
Imagine looking across a city to the furthest reaches, beyond any normal draw distance limit and seeing a skyscraper so far away that it is just a few pixels on your screen. Then imagine seeing an ant so big that you can actually make it out as it crawls over said skyscraper. Then imagine launching a rocket at the structure and seeing it crumble with one shot. Then imagine laying waste to hundreds more of these intergalactic arthropod bastards whilst your squad shout ‘EDF! EDF! EDF!’ at you. Earth Defense Force is a b-movie rumpus of a game with enough weapons to keep North Korea happy, ginormous amounts of ginormous aliens and a sense of fun that so many current-gen titles miss. Sure, it’s got a frame-rate that occasionally drops to single figures – and by occasionally I mean often – but that doesn’t matter because this game is most pick-up-and-play title since the Dreamcast.

Two Worlds, Xbox 360 (Richie from PEOWW)
This action RPG may not be anywhere close to being the ‘Oblivion Killer’ that we were promised but it does have better combat, less fussy levelling and a great stacking system for your inventory. It also has eight player co-op that inevitably turns into a giant shopping trip. Heavy on the loot, light on the technical expertise. It may be the shoddiest piece of programming you can buy for the 360 but, for patient gamers at least, there is a lot of fun to be had here.

Space Giraffe, Xbox 360/PC (Lewie)
Possibly the most misunderstood game on this list. Jeff Minter’s design is pretty uncompromising, and that’s probably it’s single greatest strength. It’s secrets are hidden under layers of psychedelia and an audiovisual density that a lot of people find intimidating, or outright unplayable. It is worth persevering though, I promise you. Every death caused by not quite understanding what was happening just adds to the feeling of joy when you get those eureka moments. See my review for more.

2008

Everyday Shooter (Lewie)
A twin stick shooter that’s mechanics are as beautiful as it’s music and graphics. Is it art? Quite probably. Each level is a different “song”, with completely different strategies and rules needed to be learnt to have any chance to do well at it. Utterly gorgeous.

I-Fluid, PC (Lewie)
Nice little French indie platformer come puzzle game. You play a drop of water, and you have to complete platforming objectives. The neatest thing about it is how convincing the domestic setting is, it’s like a modern take on the Micro Machines scale, where pencils and paper clips are sizable obstacles.

The Club (Lewie)
I namechecked it before when talking about Fur Fighters, but whatever end of the decade Bizarre make their silly fun shooty games, they seem to get ignored. You know how in a lot of shooters, there is time between shooting one guy, and shooting the next guy. In The Club, that time is generally filled with shooting guys.

Alone In The Dark, Xbox 360 (Richie from PEOWW)
When Atari released this game they put a review embargo on there which could only be broken if you gave the game at least eight out of ten. Unfortunately, it really isn’t worth it but it might just scrape a seven given that it has two of the most epic sequences you’ll ever seen in a game. The escape from the crumbling building and the car chase through demon-infested New York definitely make the awkward controls and horrific camera options worth tolerating and the neat fire-based combat system actually adds enough interest to distance it from your Silent Hills.

Alone In The Dark, Xbox 360 (Lewie)
It really is a shame this game has so much that lets it down, because the good bits are really good. The inventory system is a nice idea, and it sort of pulls off having an open world survival horror game. Except the inventory ends up being a real faff, especially when you are under any time pressure, and the open world is just an empty hub. The fact that you can skip any section is a nice idea, but in reality they use it more as a crutch for weak game design. It’s dirt cheap now, get it and play it for a bit, and wonder what might have been.

2009

Afrika/Hakuna Matata, PS3 (Will)
Afrika was promised for the PS3 since before launch, and when it arrived in China in 2008 with full English support I jumped on the cheapest import copy I could find. While it’s oddly inconsistent – the animations of the animals polished to near-perfection, but the vehicle physics barely extant – it’s one of the most unique titles available for the system. Perhaps it was a little romanticised by how hard it was to obtain and how long it had been promised, but for me, it was Pokémon Snap, a game I adored, with more freedom and much more grounded. It’s rumoured to arrive in the West at some point soon, but I recommend picking up a copy from anywhere you can if you are able.

Little King’s Story, Wii (Xagarath)
I’m still not quite convinced that this exists at all. Any attempt to describe it reads like one of those lists rattled off by 13 year-old would-be designers: “Yeah, it’ll have the combat from Pikmin and the world from Zelda and the town building from Harvest Moon and there’ll be hundreds of people with individual lives so it feels like a real place”.

The game then proceeds to couple this bizarrely ambitious design with suprisingly subversive streaks of humour (this is a game that merrily contains polyamory, alcoholism and obscure references to transvestites), a vast, varied world, a gigantic array of boss fights containing some of the most original I’ve run across in years, and an awful lot of charm.

Little King’s Story feels like playing one of those games you remember from your childhood- the clunky old RPGs that drew you into their badly-translated worlds. The difference is that it actually has the intelligence, polish and imagination you think you remember them having.

Atomhex, Xbox 360 (Lewie)
An intelligent, yet utterly accessible dual stick shooter, from the dude that made a Geometry Wars clone so good that Bizarre had to politely ask him to stop. And it’s only 80MS points to boot. The lack of coverage that this, and other gems from the XBLIG, have gotten from a lot of mainstream press is a real shame.