Board 8 > Thirty years of video games -- a transience retrospective.

(+) Yeah! (+)

my favorite Madden is the original because when somebody got injured, they'd drive the ambulance right out onto the field, but the players wouldn't get out of the way, so the ambulance would push them around with the appropriate "UGH" sound effect emanating from everyone who got hit

sadly future Maddens changed this so the players got off the field when the ambulance came on
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LeonhartFour posted...

my favorite Madden is the original because when somebody got injured, they'd drive the ambulance right out onto the field, but the players wouldn't get out of the way, so the ambulance would push them around with the appropriate "UGH" sound effect emanating from everyone who got hit

sadly future Maddens changed this so the players got off the field when the ambulance came on

Just like the original NHL game had blood

Early 90s sports games FTW
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oh man that reminds me of NHL '94

best hockey game ever

not sure what I put at #1 for that year but it should probably slide over and let that game in instead
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You totally should lol

My 90s NHL game was actually NHL 96
My friend and I (The same one who I played Hitz with) would create entire custom teams of players and then co-op the entire season.

This was back when they actually had a skill restriction with points and you could not make everyone super amazing. So much was lost in our opinion when you were able to make every character 100 in everything

It was so much fun and I wonder if the SNES cart still has the save on it (It did in 2010 lol)
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transience posted...

The biggest news item of 2003 has to be the Square/Enix merger. I could write a book about Square, but the FF movie came out in I think 2001, bombed, caused Square to post a huge loss and eventually triggered the merger.

This was the message board rumor, but what read was pretty much the opposite - that the merger was already in talks and in fact Enix got antsy about it after Spirits Within bombed.
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Nah DQ is the thing that defined Enix. I can't consider it to be Square.
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JonThePenguin posted...

transience posted...

The biggest news item of 2003 has to be the Square/Enix merger. I could write a book about Square, but the FF movie came out in I think 2001, bombed, caused Square to post a huge loss and eventually triggered the merger.

This was the message board rumor, but what read was pretty much the opposite - that the merger was already in talks and in fact Enix got antsy about it after Spirits Within bombed.

I've read both sides. my take on the decline of Square is that the ascension of Yoichi Wada killed that company. Wada took over after the movie bombed. Wada was CEO from 2001-2013. Square's had a big resurgence lately and I think it's because he's no longer in charge. they're taken so many chances lately, all of them good. Hitman being episodic, Life is Strange existing at all, games like I am Setsuna trying to inspire a JRPG comeback, Nier: Automata.. all a little risky, and most things that wouldn't have happened under Wada. the merger, in my eyes, just correlates with the decline of Square so neatly that it's a good narrative, true or not.
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Now we are talking. Ikaruga, best handheld Castlevania, best 3D Zelda, and FFTA. Great year.
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just started looking at 2004 and hoo boy

time to start writing. probably the last one that will fit in this topic.
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Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake Eaterrrrrrrrr

that's one of the games I know what year it came out
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Fall 2004 was the last period of gaming i was actually excited for from an entire industry standpoint. I still get excited for the individual game release every so often, but Fall 2004 had a lot going on for it.
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halo 2 preceded a november of san andreas/mgs3/wow. it was absolutely nuts. hyped for this one. 2002-3 are good years but not earthshaking.
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It's weird that on its surface, 2004 is a loaded year, but its strongest game is weaker than a lot of years' strongest game. Makes me wonder how it'll affect its strength in this contest.
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2003 Top SHINE 5

F-Zero GX - Never has there been or will there ever be a finer racing game. Thanks to help from Amusement Visions the F-Zero series reached its final form and was never heard from again barring a few anime based GBA games. I still consider finishing story mode on Very Hard to be one of my greatest accomplishments. Make an HD version of this on Switch!

Castlevania Aria of Sorrow - SOME F***ING CRUZ. Actually no forget that. JULIUS F***ING BELMONT! Still sad we never got the 1999 game starring him.

Zelda: Wind Waker - Best ganondorf design. I still need to play the HD version of this. I honestly don't have much to say about this game because i only played it once and have forgotten most of it.

Viewtiful Joe - DAVIDSON IS THE HOUUUUSE. HULK DAVIDSON IS BORN TO BE WIIIIIIILD. Clover's first game and really the game where I really started to pay attention to Hideki Kamiya. I could tell you how great this guy is at making video games and how sad I am that Scalebound is cancelled but if you really want to know go ask your mom.

Fire Emblem - I think I hated this game at first. Somewhere around the middle of the game I just straight up stopped playing it for 6 months. I came back to it and suddenly it all clicked and the weapon triangle and the permadeath were things I embraced and was able to finish it.
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Just put Super Mario 64 DS in the pic and try to hide that it's not the original
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2004: year of the sequels and also Board 8 found Tales of Symphonia.
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I want to know how much of B8 were Tales fans before Symphonia came out.

I had played Phantasia before that, but never tried Destiny or Eternia at the time.
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2004
https://i.imgur.com/ctoe1aX.jpg

Notable Games:

Cave Story
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
Everquest 2
Fable
GTA: San Andreas
Half-Life 2
Halo 2
Jumper
Katamari Damacy
Lumines
Metal Gear Solid 3
Metroid Prime 2
Metroid: Zero Mission
Ninja Gaiden
Paper Mario 2
Pikmin 2
Shadow Hearts: Covenant
Silent Hill 4
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
Star Ocean 3
Star Wars: battlefront
Tales of Symphonia
World of Warcraft

transience's take:

1 - Metroid: Zero Mission
2 - Cave Story
3 - Shadow Hearts: Covenant
4 - Jumper
5 - Katamari Damacy

Overall: 5th

Gamerankings top 5:

1 - Half-Life 2
2 - GTA: San Andreas
3 - Halo 2
4 - Burnout 3: Takedown
5 - World Soccer Winning Eleven 7 International

GOTY Media Picks:

1 - Half-Life 2
2 - Halo 2
3 - GTA: San Andreas

GameFAQs:

1 - GTA: San Andreas
2 - Halo 2
3 - Metroid Prime 2

2004 is a fascinating year. It's either the #2 or #3 year all-time for blockbuster releases. I think 2004 is one of the more interesting years to look back on because you have what was a Big Deal then vs. a Big Deal now.

For example, I think the two biggest releases in 2004 were probably GTA: San Andreas and Halo 2. San Andreas released at the height of the GTA controversy and was way bigger, more violent and more offensive than ever. It was better produced than its predecessors; it pushed the limits of what an open world game could achieve. It was also the perfect controversial game for the perfect time. You played as a black guy. He was voiced by a hip hop artist. Vice City was set in the 80s, featured the mafia and was very "glam"; San Andreas was inner city gang violence. The game's scope and attention to detail combined with the ongoing controversy to be the hugest game ever made. I'm pretty sure this was the best selling game of all time at one point. GTA5 has sold something like 80 million copies but I don't think GTA was ever bigger than it was in 2004 and 2005. San Andreas dwarfed the game industry.

Halo 2, on the other hand, gave us online multiplayer on console. I don't think this game is as big of a deal as it seemed in 2004. Online multiplayer was inevitable; the Xbox was just the first system that had the infrastructure in place to handle it. Played today, Halo 2 seems like a middling Halo game, stuck between 1 and 3 in terms of quality and seems notable mostly for the nostalgia of the early days of console multiplayer. I'm talking it down from a modern context but we shouldn't understate its importance at the time: there was nothing on console like Halo 2. It sold like crazy. It was the magnum opus for the Xbox in most ways, and you could call its swan song as well. The Xbox 360 would be on store shelves in 12 months.

The game that took home the media awards was Half-Life 2 though. It's probably the consensus best FPS of all time? Half-Life 2 wasn't as influential as the original, but it was straight up better. Better paced, better physics, better everything - basically Half-Life refined - but not earth shattering. That said, every cinematic FPS released since 2004 has basically been trying to reinvent the magic that made Half-Life 2 great.

One hugely notable thing about Half-Life 2, and something hugely controversial at the time, was the forced install of some kind of DRM called Steam. Steam came out in 2003 but was extremely minimal and really just limited to Valve's games at this point in time. PC gamers hated this at the time which is amazing in retrospect. I don't think I had really heard about Steam until Half-Life 2 came out. It was both great PR and awful PR.
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Anyway, those are the biggest games from a 2004 perspective, but in my mind, the biggest game of 2004, and maybe the decade, didn't really hit me until a year or two afterwards.

https://i.imgur.com/cZnr7us.jpg

At the time, I thought Everquest 2 was going to be the big new MMO. Everquest 1 was a proven beast and World of Warcraft was completely unproven. How wrong I was. World of Warcraft took that Blizzard magic and built an absolutely engrossing world. World of Warcraft would grow and grow in popularity over the years, crossing 5 million, 7 million, 10 million subscribers, but I don't think anything was quite like getting in on the ground floor. That first year was amazing due to the sheer scope of the world. It was way beyond anything else on the market. In the years following its release, there wasn't really an MMO boom - it was just a WOW boom. Other companies spent years trying to chase that WOW money and absolutely none of them succeeded. 13 years later, WOW is still the king. It's way past its prime but the market is such that no other MMO will ever be able to match what it did.

There were so many other games in 2004 too! Metal Gear Solid 3 is probably the peak MGS game to the most fans. It's on another narrative level from the other games in the series. Well, MGS2 is really that, but for totally different reasons. MGS3 is pretty universally liked for its story as opposed to actively trolling you the whole time. MGS3 is still seen as an all-time classic today.

Metroid had another killer year in 2004. Metroid Prime 2 wasn't as beloved as the original, but was still pretty good. Metroid: Zero Mission, on the other hand, is an amazing retelling of the original Metroid, restored everything that Fusion stripped away and has probably the greatest control of any 2d game ever made. That is a special video game, especially for fans of the series. It isn't as good atmospherically as Super Metroid but it holds up in most other ways and surpasses it in some.

Let's quickly run down some other huge games. Ninja Gaiden was a revelation on Xbox, basically one-upping Devil May Cry both in execution and challenge. It was surprising because it was a Japanese game going exclusive on Xbox. Tales of Symphonia blew up because it was a Tales game on the Gamecube. The cel shaded look and gameplay style endeared itself to Nintendo fans; it was familiar territory to them. It also helped that it was a pretty good game. Paper Mario 2 was also a big hit on Gamecube. Shadow Hearts: Covenant was a fantastic JRPG that quickly became a cult favorite in the years following. It played similar to an FFX but was dark like a SMT game.. until it decided to have a man festival. Speaking of SMT, its breakout game hit in 2004, Nocturne. Nocturne hated you and punished you left and right. I think it's probably still the highlight game in the series.

2004 is also notable for the indie games that spawned, the most notable of which has to be Katamari Damacy. While not technically an indie game, Katamari was a breath of fresh air in a generation that was getting increasingly drab. Metal Gear, Halo and Half-Life were all realistic looking games and Katamari just came out with tons of colors and style and na naaaaaaaaaa na na na na na. Namco made the brilliant move to price this at $20 and it really exploded in popularity, especially on the internet. On the PC, a cute little one-man freeware game called Cave Story came out. Cave Story is the original 2d indie game. It had amazing sprite work, awesome gameplay and great music. I love Cave Story a whole lot. Games like this just weren't made by one person and they certainly weren't free. It's the forefather of so many games, Braid and Super Meat Boy and N and VVVVVV and Limbo and many others. Jumper was a Matt Thorson game also in that vein but it never blew up quite like Cave Story. Still, it's one of my favorite 'masocore' platformers of all time.
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I've written like three posts here and I've left out one huge piece of gaming news: the DS and PSP launched in 2004. This was an uncertain time in the portable space: the DS didn't feel like a real followup to the GBA. It had two screens and why? Nintendo wasn't even advertising it as a successor. Meanwhile, the PSP looked like a powerhouse. It had media capabilities and was way more powerful. It felt like a repeat of the N64 vs. the PS1. The DS launched with a bunch of mediocre games and a bad port of Mario 64; the PSP launched with Lumines and a bunch of standard Sony launch games like Wipeout and Ridge Racer. (I'm not even sure if this is true and I'm not looking it up. Sony just always has those kinds of games available at launch.) The PSP really wanted to be the PS1 but ended up feeling more like the Xbox; very nice features, great hardware and a great system for homebrew, but lacking in games and ultimately more of a second device that hardcore gamers had. In 2004, everyone wanted the PSP and Nintendo fans really just wanted the GBA to keep going. That would change in 2005.

2004, man. I wasn't big on the hugest games of the year but games like Zero Mission, Cave Story and Shadow Hearts 2 are all-time games for me. It's certainly got some of the most notable video games ever made like WOW and Half-Life 2. Great year.
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FF14 is probably the second-most popular MMO of all time and I think it's absolute peak subscribors were like 1/3 (maybe 1/4) of WoW's peak. It's amazing how many other MMOs tried to chase that dream and utterly crashed and burned. Remember Elder Scrolls Online? Me neither! Remember The Old Republic?...Actually I do remember that one for how poor the reception to it was, but yeah.

I think as far as general popular culture goes, WoW has got to be the game since the 8-bit era that broke into the public consciousness the most. Call of Duty is close but I think most of the public just knows it as 'that shooter game'. WoW was super interesting to a lot of people because of how different it was at the time. Video games were creating worlds and communities now, and ones that sucked away your life if you weren't careful. Freaking South Park did an episode dedicated to this.
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Is FF14 more popular than FF11?
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2004 SHINE Top 5

Metal Gear Solid 3 - Hideo Kojima reached perfection here. I still did not have a PS2 at this point (although I shortly did the next year thanks to a certain game). I once again borrowed a friend's PS2 just like I did with MGS2 and played through this. I was not expecting to love Big Boss even more than Solid Snake and The Boss is one of the best final boss fights ever created. This is also one of the few games with the distinction to make me cry with its ending

Tales of Symphonia - I felt like I was following the hype for this game for like 2 years since its original japanese announcement. I was a fan of the Tales series playing Phantasia before that and every trailer that came out I was seeking them out the minute they came out. I may have even contemplated importing that Mint green Gamecube >___>

GTA: San Andreas - I waffle whether this or 5 is the best GTA game. I do know at the time this was the biggest and most ridiculous game I have ever played. I also grew up on a Grove St so that street being in this game was cool.

Paper Mario 2 - Please make another game like this one? Please?! No? awww :(

Metroid Prime 2 - I think I'm the only person to like this the most of the Prime Trilogy
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KamikazePotato posted...

Freaking South Park did an episode dedicated to this.

Also Guitar Hero, which I think surpassed WoW in pop culture relevance
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I don't think FF11's peak numbers come close to FF14's peak numbers. It's probably not even in the Top 5 of peak MMO numbers. It was a popular game with incredibly long legs but it was an MMO that didn't take off on PC and largely stayed limited to the PS2. The PC market is the only place where MMOs can truly thrive. FF14 also got a ton of press for having a catastrophically bad launch and then remaking the game from the ground up into a great experience - no one has ever done that before and no one ever will again.
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transience posted...

Halo 2, on the other hand, gave us online multiplayer on console.

Chuchu Rocket
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Jakyl25 posted...

KamikazePotato posted...

Freaking South Park did an episode dedicated to this.

Also Guitar Hero, which I think surpassed WoW in pop culture relevance

Hmm, you could be right. I forgot about the Guitar Hero and Rock Band era. It's debatable for sure.
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eh, gta and halo and mortal kombat and modern warfare and guitar hero and angry birds and nintendogs and wii sports and farmville and you can go on. a lot of games have broken into the public consciousness. I don't think world of warcraft is unique there.
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Jakyl25 posted...

transience posted...

Halo 2, on the other hand, gave us online multiplayer on console.

Chuchu Rocket

XBAND tho
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Games since WoW have broken into the public consciousness as well - I was more referring to 'up to the point' sort of thing.

Halo I don't think did. That was more of a gamer thing. Nintendogs no way. I wasn't around for Mortal Kombat so I can't say. GTA is a good one though.
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Pong was the first video game to be in the public lexicon/consciousness
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pokemon, mario, sonic, street fighter.. lots of stuff has permeated the mainstream, I'd say.
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Madden of course
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Pokemon has a South Park episode as well.
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f***, Pokemon

Okay that wins
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Well you said "since the 8-bit era"

Pokémon was from a handheld from the 8-bit era
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South Park has crushed almost every episode they've done about video games. Matt and Trey know games and have for a long time.
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2004: Metal Gear Solid 3 > Shadow Hearts Covenant > Tales of Symphonia > Paper Mario TTYD > Halo 2

Pretty great year.
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KamikazePotato posted...

WoW has got to be the game since the 8-bit era that broke into the public consciousness the most

Didn't see this when I said Pong
So after the 8-bit era, Mario does not count.

Hmm

Mortal Kombat
Sonic

a bunch of things
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new topic

https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/75187081
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Chu Chu Rocket was rad.
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Video
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Games
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Are
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Rad
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