My Favorite Game From Every Year I've Been Alive Part 3: 2002 to 2004

Lots to talk about in this one.

The Takes Don’t Get Any Better

During the 2000s, videogames became a massive industry. This means more games, which means more things to talk about, which means I will start covering less years per article. If I did five I’d have to either skim the years and be brief with my words, which will never happen, or type out a 16,000 word manifesto. No one would read that. Who am I kidding, no one will read this regardless.

Enjoy my terrible takes as we venture into the era of MTV edginess and frosted tips: The early 2000s.

2002

There was stuff happening in the world in 2002, but I don’t remember any of it. Looking through the news of the time, we were still feeling the effects of 9/11. Not much else happened. On a personal note, that year saw the release of the movie Treasure Planet, which I was obsessed with as a kid. I don’t know why.

Who cares about world events or my bizarre hyper-fixation on an underrated Disney box-office failure when there are video games to discuss? Apparently this year was stuffed with games. A lot of interesting, high-profile releases, and as always, a bunch of niche nonsense no one but me cares about.

Starting this list with Stuntman on the PS2. It’s a driving game where you are a Stuntman (as it says on the box) and your job is to perform stunts for a movie. These stunts require precise driving, and they get considerably harder as the game progresses. It puts you in a bunch of different cars with radically different handling, speed and weight, making each vehicle feel unique. The game’s detailed driving physics was a great middle-ground between easy to play arcade action and realism, making for an addictive and skill-intensive experience.

This game sounds great, doesn’t it? I bet you’re going to go to your emulation website of choice to snag a ROM to try it out. Only one problem: this game doesn’t run on emulators. There’s some inaccuracies with how the PS2 emulator works that makes this game crash halfway through the first mission. It never got a digital release, and it will never get a port or remake, so the only way to play it is to get a physical copy and put it into an actual PS2. A real shame, since it’s a driving game that doesn’t use driving just for racing. A hint of another game to come… soon. Ominous!

Speaking of niche games where you drive, ever heard of Robot Alchemic Drive? It’s a game where you pilot a giant robot, but you don’t control the robot from the cockpit. You play as an anime teen, and you control the robot with a little remote, and all the action is seen from the perspective of the little character, so you have to find good vantage points to see everything. It’s a really unique game that captures the feeling of piloting a giant robot in a way other mech games don’t. You don’t feel like you’re just playing as a big human, like in most Gundam games or the new Armored Core games. You feel the weight, the momentum, the scale of it. It’s kind of jank, and the graphics look like vomit, but the game itself is a lot of fun. Today, it’s mostly known for its horrific voice acting and awkward cutscenes.

Robotech: Battlecry was also a robot game. It was my first exposure to the Macross franchise, and I was hooked. Fighter jets that transform into robots? Sign me up! It’s like an army of Starscreams but they’re not sniveling fools. The game itself was pretty fun. As was Kirby: Knightmare in Dreamland, which doesn’t feature mechs. That’s probably why it’s getting mentioned here and not as my favorite. This was a fun little GBA game that I mostly remember for its annoying earworm commercial that used to play all the time on 4Kids.

DodonPachi: Dai Ou Jou brought us another fun game about fighter jets shooting stuff. It’s a fantastic arcade shmup with well-crafted levels, excellent graphics, a fantastic soundtrack and it’s bone-crushingly difficult. A great time all around. Along with that, fans of guns were rejoicing with the release of Ratchet and Clank, a shooter/platformer with fun, creative guns and a cynical sense of humor.

If you liked your shooters with Samus in them, you were spoiled for choice with TWO whole Metroid games. The series was absent for an entire console generation, so seeing it come back was a big deal. Both games were pretty dang great, too.

If instead of shooting the aliens, you wanted to be the alien, you had Alien Hominid. This was a massive deal for me. The original Alien Hominid was a flash game on Newgrounds, which I played a ton of. To see that become an official console release was mind-blowing. It was one of the first times the Internet crossed over with the real world, and it was one of the first indie games to make it to the big leagues.

Enough about original games, let’s talk about some sequels. Burnout 2 improved on the original Burnout in every way imaginable making a high-octane arcade racing game that had an incredible sense of speed and technically impressive crashes. The cars crashed, that is. Not the game. This was back when games had actual Quality Assurance.

Super Monkeyball 2 brought us a second monkey ball, to complete the swinging pair, and it was great. More Monkeyball. How could you go wrong?

Soul Calibur 2 brought fighting games into everyone’s living rooms with its easy to learn hard to master fighting system and great single-player content. It also helps that it had Link from Zelda as a playable character (on the Gamecube only).

Speaking of Gamecube Only, we got Super Mario Sunshine. An incredibly anticipated new entry into the 3D Mario series. It was so anticipated that the game was seen as overhyped and not as good as Mario 64. Then the anti-hype calmed down and everyone saw that yea, this game does in fact rule. This is the part where I’d say something like “at least from what I’ve heard, it was good”, and that’s what you’re expecting, but no, I’ve played this one. Hold your applause, please. It’s a great game, and anyone who says it’s bad is objectively wrong. My reasoning? Because I said so.

Another game I have a strong, controversial opinion on is Kingdom Hearts. It married the worlds of Final Fantasy and Disney and it did to teenagers what crack did to the black community. When a kid stops being a kid, they start hating anything they think is for babies, which is everything they used to like until last week. The exception to this is when the thing is presented as edgy, which is why Kingdom Hearts was so successful. It took Disney, which is for babies now that you’re a mature 13 year old, and paired it with Final Fantasy, which is edgy, and it make Mickey angry and talk about darkness. That’s some real mature shit right there. This is the kind of grown-up media I need as an angsty teen. I’m not the same guy I was when I was 12. I have a single hair on my chin, and I think girls aren’t gross anymore.

I actually played Kingdom Hearts, and hated it. Adults used to tell me that videogames were a waste of time, and I didn’t believe them, but Kindgom Hearts felt like a real waste of time. It’s an insipid game with boring combat and levels that were designed as an afterthought. The cutscenes, which are the game’s main draw, look fantastic and are animated beautifully, but the things that happen in them are embarrassing. The story is terrible, on every level. It’s a poorly cobbled together mess of cliches and hack writing techniques. Amnesia, false memories, evil twins, time travel. It stinks and the only explanation I can find as to why this series became a hit was because it one-shot 13 year olds.

Speedrun of other games: Controversy was brewing thanks to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It’s GTA, we all know what it is, it was fun and the music was amazing. If you still needed more controversy, we got BMX XXX. An edgy BMX game for radical teens that features sex jokes, swearing and actual naked boobs. Another game that one-shot thirteen year olds. I never played this, but it looks like a grimy version of the Dave Mirra games, which are just okay. Worse than the Tony Hawk series, which also got a release this year with Pro Skater 4. I love this game, and in my opinion, it’s the peak of the Pro Skater franchise. It has a lot of cool mechanics that all work perfectly with each other and great levels to play around in. Then came the other games and added more mechanics for the sake of it.

We got the first Splinter Cell game, the first Battlefield game, the first Sly Cooper and the first Blinx game. Along with that, the first and only Eternal Darkess. Sad. Many such cases.

There’s also Zelda Wind Waker. I’ve heard it’s good.

Out of all these, what weird, rinky-dink bullshit am I going to pick for my favorite?

My pick for 2002: Road Trip Adventure

Image from Wikipedia

No, I did not just make this game up. This is an open-world RPG racer. A Car-PG if you will. You drive around different towns, talk to other cars, run errands for them and participate in races, where you earn money to get better parts.

It’s a fun, cozy game full of soul. The world is big, but not big enough to get boring. Each area has its own theme. You start in a small town with a peach orchard, there’s one themed around Edo period Japan, a snow town, Las Vegas and more. I loved it as a kid, and still love it now. The only downside is that the driving itself is really janky. The physics are off, and jumping doesn’t feel right at all. Gravity is all sorts of messed up in this game. Even with that, the charm and overall experience makes it worth checking out.

There are tons of mini games to play, cool places to explore. There’s a city in the sky you can reach if you have wings (which you can buy and put on your car). It’s a rare example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a pretty bad racer with nice exploration and fun customization, and it all combines to make a really memorable game.

Runners up: La Pucelle: Tactics. A great tactical RPG where you collect monsters. It’s from the makers of Disgaea. It’s a lot of fun with some cool combo mechanics.

Mega Man Zero. An edgy reboot of the Mega Man franchise that makes it even more difficult. A great time. It was responsible for draining entire packs of batteries back in the day.

Shinobi (PS2). A tough-as-nails action platformer with a unique combat system centered around killing enemies at the same time. It took me a few tries to get into it, but once it clicked, I was hooked.

Sonic Advance 2 and Super Monkeyball Jr justified my purchase of a GBA, along with Mega Man Zero.

2003

The Iraq war was in full swing, with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. What a way to start a paragraph in the article about videogames. Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected Governor of California, Evanescence releases their debut album urging everyone to wake her up and Linkin Park released Meteora. On the subject of influential albums, we also got Metallica’s St. Anger. The record that pioneered playing a trash can as a drum and making music solely for the purpose of torturing the listener.

I don’t have any relevant memories from this time, so let’s go into the videogames.

If you were still reeling over the controversies brought on by GTA: Vice City and BMX XXX, then avert your eyes because 2003 brought us two more controversial games. We got Postal 2, an open-world shooter where you play as a guy in a black trench coat shooting guns. You go around town completing mundane errands while trying to stay alive. You can shoot people, cut them apart with axes, piss on them, set them on fire and worst of all, make them sign petitions. It was the sequel to Postal, which was already in hot water, and it upped the crudeness, profanity and violence. It was hated by everyone over the age of 30. There was also Manhunt, a game about making snuff films, that got significant free advertisement from news stations making breathless condemnations of it on prime time. Don’t play this edgy game about killing people! It’s violent! Here’s a full 15-minute segment outlining all the game’s features. Look at those grayfix! Just don’t buy it, especially not at your local EB Games.

If you prefer your controversies with more boobs, you could check out Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. This game with a mouthful of a title brought you an eyeful of titties. Play as the iconic female characters from the Dead or Alive franchise as they frolic on the beach in skimpy swimsuits. It didn’t do much to change the perception of games as dumb entertainment for horny teens. The game itself was alright. Yes, I actually played this.

I also played Downhill Domination. It’s a cool arcade bike racing game for the PS2. It’s so cool that I could talk about it for an entire review… which I did! You can go read it here.

On the subject of games from 2003 that I reviewed: Hot Shots Golf Fore! The fourth entry in the long-running Hot Shots Golf franchise. Check out the review here.

Two more arcade racing games came out this year: F-Zero GX and SSX3. F-Zero GX is the pinnacle of the F-Zero series and one of the best games ever. It’s brutally difficult, with excellent, precise controls and great tracks. The series has been dormant since that game, and I’m okay with that. I don’t think anything can match it, much less surpass it. A sequel is unnecessary. SSX3 was also great. It made it so you could go through every course seamlessly, and it was a ton of fun. It had these challenges at the end of each peak, with the final peak being a 30 minute race from the top of the mountain to the bottom. The controls are tight, the tracks are creative and chaotic, the soundtrack is excellent and it features a bunch of customization options that are a lot of fun to unlock and try out. The game has an excellent 2000s futuristic feel to it, too, which is great.

Shooter fans were eating good this year. GunZ: The Duel released, giving thousands of players carpal tunnel syndrome with its high-APM shooting action. Metal Arms: Glitch in the system is an underrated third person shooter where you play as a little robot. It’s pretty tough for what it is, and it had a style of humor that was like Ratchet and Clank’s, but edgier. It’s a ton of fun. For some reason Blizzard owns the rights to this franchise now. Don’t expect to see it pop up anytime soon. Jak and Daxter return with Jak II, which is now a shooter for some reason. It also has an open world with GTA elements like stealing cars and a wanted level. It’s a much better kid-friendly GTA than The Simpsons Hit and Run (which also released this year). If you want more shooters, you can play Call of Duty, which debuted this year.

Devil May Cry 2 was a game.

So was Drake of the 99 dragons. A terrible Xbox game that I only know of for how infamous it is. It doesn’t even look “so bad it’s good”, it just looks miserable.

Out of all these winners, which one was the winningest?

My pick for 2003: Advance Wars 2

1v1, Bean Island, Sami only

This game was a bonding experience for me and several of my friends. I played it a few years after it released, but I played the hell out of it. Me and a few friends would pass around a GBA SP and play this all throughout the day during different classes and recess. Epic 2v2 campaigns, with tenuous alliances, cheesy tactics and many, many soldiers snuck unto the enemy base to get captured by Sami’s CO Super power. That was my preferred tactic. There was one friend of mine I could never beat. He seemed to be able to see into the future. Then I found out he was an excellent chess player, and realized I was just completely outclassed in the brain department. The game itself is fantastic, too. I’ve played a lot of it on my own, so it’s not just that it’s “Fun with Friends tm”.

It has a deceptively simple rock/paper/scissors loop to it, with certain units beating other units, but it gets complex once you start mixing units and ranges and special powers. It’s a ton of fun, even if the CPU opponents are a little dumb.

Did you know there’s a website that’s been running for almost two decades where you can play Advance Wars by email? It’s called Advance Wars By Web. I think I tried it once way back in the day, but my friend and I decided it was too much hassle, and we could just get our Advance Wars fix by playing in person. That’s no longer an option.

Runners up: Viewtiful Joe. HENSHIN A GO GO, BABY! A fantastic beat em up from Capcom. It needs a PC port.

Astro Boy Omega Factor. Developed by Treasure, this is a 2D beat-em-up/shmup for the GBA. It’s a ton of fun, really tough, but it’s held back a little by the constant slow down. Having more than a few enemies on screen makes the game chug.

War of the Monsters. A 3D kaiju fighting game for the PS2. I remember it being a ton of fun, and I played it for hours, but I have to admit, I haven’t played it in years, so I don’t know if it holds up.

Espgaluda. An arcade shmup where you can change gender to get more points. Makes sense in-game. It’s an excellent game with an addictive scoring system and an absolutely brutal difficulty spike. The graphics are gorgeous, too.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! This is where the Mario Kart franchise peaked. Played a ton of it with my friends and siblings.

2004

The most important event of the year was the Numa Numa dance. One guy dancing in front of his webcam became a massive, viral hit. It was a simpler time. You could get famous for one unedited 240p video. You didn’t even have to get naked or say a slur. A simpler time.

On the subject of music, this year saw the release of The College Dropout, Kanye West’s debut album. This marked the start of a generational 4 album run. He fell off in recent years, but to understand how hard the fall was, you have to understand the dizzying heights he reached before plummeting.

Along with that we got two monumental albums from MF DOOM: MM.. FOOD and Madvillainy. These three albums pretty much overshadow anything else that might have happened this year, so on to the videogames.

The biggest release of the year was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Now, with these big games, I usually mention how I haven’t played them, which is pretty bad. Now I ask you, is it worse if I haven’t played them, or worse if I have played them, but don’t like them? The first is like when you are about to ask a girl out. You don’t know if she will say yes, but she hasn’t said no. Once you ask, you might get rejected, and once it happens, that’s it. Before asking, there’s the possibility of a yes. Same with games I haven’t played that you like. I might enjoy them if I give them a shot. I don’t enjoy San Andreas.

This might be heretical, but I just think it’s kind of boring. Most of the fun people have with the game is with the open world aspect and using cheats. That’s fun for a bit, but everything else about it stinks. The world is huge and empty, so traversing it is a chore. The missions are dumb and incredibly restrictive. Maybe if I had played it as a kid I would have had fun with it, but as a crusty old man back when I first played it a decade ago, it wasn’t much fun. GTA3 had a lot more freedom, and Vice City’s map was smaller and easier/more fun to navigate.

The world of shooters had two massive releases starting with the letter H year with Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. Halo 2 added online multiplayer to the already mega-popular shooter, introducing millions of Xbros to features that have been basic on PC since the 90s. Or you could play Unreal Tournament 2004, which also released this year.

Half Life 2 was the sequel to the cinematic Half Life game, and it was more cinematic than ever. It featured a cool physics engine that the game made sure you used, constantly throwing barrel puzzles at the player. It was a fun game, and its implementation of cinematics was done a lot better than games that came after it. The Bioshock series pales in comparison.

For big firsts we got the first Katamari game, which I reviewed here. The first Far Cry game, which pioneered Ubislop. The first Monster Hunter, which was the definition of a weird niche game. It filtered most people, while delighting a small minority who would become die-hard fans.

We also got the first Fable game, which was the beloved game from 2004 I haven’t played that I mentioned in the previous article. Unlike other beloved games on this list, I don’t feel the need to play this one. All I know about this game comes from the video Sseth made and it still doesn’t look interesting.

On the other side of the coin, Metal Gear Solid 3. Landmark title, incredibly important, haven’t played it, looks great, it’s on my list. I’ll get to it. It got a remake recently, which doesn’t look very interesting. I’d rather try the original.

This year was deep into what a lot of fighting game fans call “the fighting game dark ages”. Source? King of Fighters got its first 3D title with Maximum Impact. A game that played nothing like King of Fighters, and it was a clowny, janky mess where everything comboed into everything. The game was also about as balanced as a one-legged drunk on a ship during a storm. It didn’t stop me from playing it for hours upon hours, though. It’s a fun kusoge.

Capcom Fighting Evolution came along to put another nail in the coffin for fighting games. It was a Capcom crossover title, featuring iconic franchises like Street Fighter, Street Fighter and Street Fighter. Yes, this clash of titans title had a roster that was 3/5 Street Fighter characters, counting Street Fighter II and III as separate franchises. The game was also a mess of clashing art styles, low resolution backgrounds and, much like Maximum Impact, it had the balance of a guy with vertigo on a unicycle. Unlike Maximum Impact, I only played a few hours of this before slamming it into the garbage.

In the wide weeb world of RPGs we saw the creation of the Trails series. Not the Tales of series, the Trails in the Sky series, the one by Nihon Falcom. It’s a good SRPG, but the one I’m going to focus on is Mega Man X: Command mission. Yes, they made a full JRPG for Mega Man. It doesn’t take full advantage of either side of the equation. It doesn’t have the grand scope, exploration or story of a JRPG, and it doesn’t have the open-ended level selection, power copying and collection aspect of the Mega Man X series. A missed opportunity, but it’s still a decently solid JRPG, even if it is a lot shorter than average. Hey yo!

We also saw the launch of World of Warcraft, the life-ruiner. This game has absorbed more man-hours than every project in history combined. It was the biggest game ever at one point and it’s still going to this day. I have played very little of it. The idea of paying a subscription to play one game doesn’t sit right with me. I already pay rent and utilities. I don’t want to add a game onto that, too. My inability to part with my money probably saved me from developing a crippling addiction to WoW. Thank goodness for being a broke boy.

For games I actually did play we have Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, which was garbage and I hated it. Jak III, which was a great finale to the Jak series even if it had too much emphasis on the cars. Mushihimesama, which is a bug-themed arcade shoot-em-up. Phantom Dust, an Xbox deckbuilder game that’s really bizarre and will get a review in the future. Rumble Roses, which is a wrestling game with girls with big awooga bazoogas. Transformers on the PS2, a third person shooter that’s actually pretty dang good, and Under the Skin, a game where you’re an alien. Viewtiful Joe 2 was also a game. It was fine, but not as good as the first.

“I can’t believe this Roger guy” you say in disgust. “He hasn’t played Metal Gear Solid 3 or Fable, but he’s played Rumble Roses and… Under the Skin? How does this clown pick what games to play?”

How do I pick what to play? Poorly. Oh, and I didn’t just play Under the Skin. I also reviewed it, because of course I did. Read all about it here.

There was also another Riiiiidge Racer! Remember that one?

Since a year can’t go without controversy, we got JFK: Reloaded. It was a first person shooter where your job was to assassinate John F. Kennedy. You got points for making the shot as accurately as possible to the real thing. The game go a lot of backlash for seemingly making light of the tragedy. The game’s creator defended himself by saying it was supposed to be a historical research tool to teach people what happened on that day. No one bought the story. The fact that you could win a cash prize of $100,000 for perfectly replicating the shot didn’t help matters much.

From all these on offer, what absolute clown shoes game did I pick as my favorite?

My pick for 2004: Tony Hawk’s Underground 2

On that grind

This was the last good Tony Hawk game. The mechanical bloat was starting to show, but it was still an excellent game. The controls were perfect, the speed was good, the levels were huge and offered a ton of routes and lines to combo off. The singleplayer story was also a lot of fun. It tapped into the early 2000s edginess perfectly, and it had Bam Margera, who was massive during the time. Everyone between the ages of 13 and 20 loved the guy, and the game was a perfect vehicle for him to show off.

I played this a ton with my brother. We used to go head-to-head, trying to outdo each other with multi-million point combos. He would win often, then he started practicing and could land 60 million+ combos like it was nothing, and I could never win again. It was still a lot of fun, and the game holds up perfectly to this day. There’s a mod for it on PC that lets you play online and on custom levels, providing hours of fun. Just make sure you use your totally legit copy of the game. Piracy is wrong, kids. If you don’t buy it, Bam Margera won’t be able to afford another HIM-themed Lamborgini.

Runners up: Burnout 3: Takedown. One of the best arcade racers. Excellent soundtrack, too.

Custom Robo: Battle Revolution. Nintendo completely forgot this franchise, but I haven’t. Build little robots and fight them out in isometric combat that reminds me a lot of the Gundam VS series.

Ninja Gaiden. My experience is with the Black re-release of the game, but it’s still one of the best action games of all time.

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. I completed this game 4 times in a row one summer. It had an online component, too, which was insanely fun, and one of my first experiences with online shooters.

Conclusion

Join us next time for more bizarre picks, more weird games, more controversy and more popular games I’ve never played. Next up we have Devil May Cry 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Sonic and even Ridge Racer. Which one of these haven’t I played? Find out and be disappointed next time on Load Last Save!

Let me know which games were your favorite from these years, and tell me how wrong I am for picking Road Trip.