Here's the GameFAQs list, which I think was decided by a poll.
1. 2000: Chrono Cross
2. 2001: Final Fantasy X
3. 2002: Metroid Prime
4. 2003: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
5. 2004: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
6. 2005: Resident Evil 4
7. 2006: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
8. 2007: Super Mario Galaxy
9. 2008: Super Smash Bros. Brawl
10. 2009: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
You just gotta be fucking kidding. For serious.
Compile your own list, as I did here (using
this page on Wikipedia).
2000: Diablo II. The game was the definition of a fucking genre. Few games in the year even come close to its quality or significance, so I won't bother to list any of them. Not one.
... okay, Deus Ex. There, I mentioned Deus Ex. But I'm not saying another word about it. Fucking thing was overrated.
2001: The top contenders in my mind here are:
PSO, because of its lasting popularity and the groundbreaking technology it used (it was a console MMO in 2001 for fuck's sake. We haven't seen that done well since, have we?)
Final Fantasy X, which made the GFAQs list, but mainly because it had amazing graphics early in the PS2's life.
GTA3, which rebooted the sandbox murder sim genre.
MGS2, because you faggots seemed to like the fucking thing and I won't get away with not mentioning it.
Halo, which came close to perfecting the console FPS (to be distinguished from the PC FPS by its terrible fucking controls and lack of flexibility).
And finally, Super Smash Bros Melee, which is significant in that it was the one of the two good GameCube games. And it was a lot of fun until some faggots figured out wavedashing and L-cancelling.
Of these choices, I'll have to go with...... SSX Tricky. That game ruled.
2002: WarCraft III. I sound like a blizzfag already, I know. Let me be specific: I liked War3's single player campaign, but I hated the base multiplayer game. It was a muddled mess of mechanics. Micromanaging your hero while building your base and commanding your hero and expanding your base and blahlablahlablahahlbabhl it's the reason I hated the modern RTS until a little company called Relic figured out what sucked about it and started boiling it down to the important bits.
The reason I choose War3 is the powerful, versatile mapmaker. We owe the fledgling genres of the tower defense game and the hero arena game to War3's modding community. The mapmaker made it easy for someone to develop and distribute multiplayer strategy games; there are a few very professional products that are playable only through War3's custom games lobby.
Also worth mentioning are Kingdom Hearts and Splinter Cell, which are basically the same game... you run around killing stuff... pretty cool...
2003: There were no important videogames released in 2003. WarioWare was cool though.
2004: I kind of have to say World of Warcraft. I won't get into why because you know.
Other great games:
Battlefield: Vietnam, funnest game in the series because it emphasized close-quarters jungle combat rather than hey guys i've got an airplane wheeeeeeee.
Sims 2, a veritable revolution in the I-have-a-god-complex genre.
Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door, the other good GameCube game, is legitimately the funnest RPG ever made, of any stripe, for any system. You know how Portal, at two hours, was a great experience that was too short? Paper Mario: TYD was too short at 30 hours.
Katamari Damacy, solely and entirely for the scratching noise that the King of All Cosmos makes when he talks.
edit: I forgot Half-Life 2. It was important.
2005: Guitar Hero. If we're talking about important, significant, world-changing games, Guitar Hero runs away with this year and never gives it back, munching on it in the corner and growling at every other game that comes close.
Also important, if not good, were the following games:
Civ 4, which tried desperately to take the 8-hour empire-building game and take it online.
Resident Evil 4, which you faggots liked but was just the best game ever made in the shitty, stupid survival-horror genre.
Guild Wars, which tried desperately to take the MMO experience and remove monthly fees (and any interaction with anybody else).
Psychonauts, which tried desperately to revive the action/adventure genre but god damn it it's gone, ok, just let it die. The game had some funny jokes and neat graphics but the platforming was rote.
2006: Rough year (unless you only care about your Nintendo DS). I'm going to go with Company of Heroes because it represented the beginning of the repair of the damage done to the RTS genre by Command and Conquer.
Twilight Princess had some neat graphics I guess but it was a Zelda game and every Zelda game has basically been Link To The Past except worse for like fifty years.
2007: Team Fortress 2. The world needed a reboot of the class-based team FPS, and TF2 came along and said "Rather than just rebooting it, we'll perfect it and then nobody else will be able to live up to our example."
Call of Duty 4 is still the best military-style team shooter in the world. (Note that I will artfully fail to mention the new Modern Warfare 2, which is the same game.)
Mass Effect solidified BioWare as the only company you can trust to produce a decent RPG anymore.
Mario Strikers Charged for Wii was a game you didn't play that I played an embarrassing amount of. The online matches were quite smooth and the game was a lot of fun and normally quite tense. Few games feature the element of "twitch strategy" which can make a game like this compelling; not just whether you can pull off a maneuver, but whether you can do it in the right situation and at the right time. Street Fighter is probably the closest analog.
A BioShock is fine too.
2008: I'd pick SSBB, but GameFAQs picked that so I can't. I'd also pick GTA4 but, while that game had a pack of technological innovations, it wasn't particularly important.
I'd pick Fallout 3 but I think it was just a tad overrated. It was a great game with an absolute metric fuckton of content, but it wasn't very original. It didn't do something new, it did something old very well.
Left 4 Dead, like Company of Heroes, is the beginning of a reboot of the cooperative multiplayer genre. Hopefully the mechanics are used for something more interesting than zombies soon.
Honorable mention for Spore, which taught us that
hype sucks.2009: nothing new came out last year.
2010: Heroes of Newerth, like
BattleZone before it, will signal the birth of a genre.
(The Action RTS did really well, right guys? Right?)
ok comment and make your own
