2003 is one of the most significant years of my life, both as a gamer and as a person. I finally got out of the purgatory that was high school. Sure I wish I could go back and change some things, but it wasn’t a good time. Nor was it really all that bad. It was just worthless. More significant was entering College, a freshman at the Rochester Institute of Technology, kick starting one of my largest academic mistakes ever: not only majoring in Software Engineering, but thinking I could glide on through just as I had in high school.

I began my freshman year of College as I had ended my senior year of high school; spending five minutes on homework and the rest of my time gaming. While this was enough to nail me a B-average in what was a pretty high reputation high school, it almost failed me out of College and completely set me back a year.

So while my personal life was looking dark, video games were looking fantastic…sort of.

N-Gage Goes Retail

Ok, maybe they weren’t looking fantastic after all. My final year as a GameStop employee saw the rise of the N-Gage. By rise I mean it was just sort of there, like the belly button. It had no use, nor did anyone really care that it was there. No one really thought about it. But it was there and gathering lint.

When I first heard Nokia was making a cell-phone and gaming hybrid, I was open-minded. After all, everyone thought the Xbox was going to be terrible, but it had become my favorite gaming machine. With the launch of Xbox Live it was starting to slowly establish its own place in the market. But one look at the N-Gage was enough to know it was bound for failure. As a gaming device it had too many buttons in all the wrong places squeezed into too small of a surface. As a cellphone it was awkward, uncomfortable and unnatural. It was, without a doubt, the worst cellphone and handheld gaming device on the market in one.

Of course, just because a device is trash doesn’t mean it won’t sell. The Playstation 2 and Xbox 360 practically came out of the box broken, yet each sold like Tickle-Me-Elmo. Despite numerous competitors developing superior devices to the iPod, Apple’s music player continued to dominate the market and still does. Yet the N-Gage lacked a solid marketing campaign to beat out the GameBoy brand, as well as a software line-up of more than just ports.

The fact that the device lasted as long as it did is of greater surprise to me.

Interplay Closes Black Isle

Another sign of the end times for PC gamers, Interplay had shut down Black Isle Studios. The founders of the Fallout franchise and developers of Planescape: Torment were forced to shut their doors and cancel all future projects. Interplay was beginning to die, and one by one they were amputating themselves in desperate attempts to live on another day.

Of course, the members of Black Isle turned right around and founded Obsidian Entertainment, who worked on such titles as Neverwinter Nights 2 and Knights of the Old Republic 2. They are currently developing Alpha Protocol and a new entry into the Fallout series, so while their loss at the time was tragic, gamers haven’t really lost anything at all. Guess time really does heal all wounds.

Child’s Play is Founded

Love or hate Penny Arcade all you want, these humble comic artists know no bounds in terms of ambition. After becoming an overwhelming success founders Tycho and Gabe chose to give a bit back, founding the Child’s Play charity. The idea was to allow gamers to submit money or games and toys to children’s hospitals where kids would have more to entertain them than daytime television.

Each year the charity manages to outdo itself, raising huge amounts of funds to donate to an ever increasing list of hospitals. In a time where the Hot Coffee mod was big news, the Child’s Play charity showed that gamers weren’t violent degenerates of society. They actually care about greater causes.  The charity has since become a huge monster of its own, and will probably outlive Penny Arcade themselves.

Xenosaga

Xenogears was a fantastic though obviously low budget game. When Squaresoft threw the franchise away it was just another excuse to hate what had become of the company. Then Namco-Bandai picked it up, providing the massive budget the project deserved. The highly anticipated Xenosaga finally released on Playstation 2, sure to be a greater success than the original.

Someone allocated that bigger budget incorrectly, because the game sucked.

It had pretty graphics alright, and enough cut-scenes to rival even Metal Gear Solid‘s bloated script. Yet the story was uninteresting and, most importantly, the gameplay sucked. While chaining combos together in the lower budget Xenogears was a quick and fun challenge, combat in Xenosaga was tedious, boring and took too long. Of course, fights could always be avoided, but if you chose to skip along through the story you’d inevitably encounter bosses beyond your abilities. So your option was to spend hours trudging through bland and boring combat or to risk having to start over later on because you’re simply not strong enough.

What could have been a rival to the successful Star Ocean or Final Fantasy franchises instead fizzled out, leaving one question lingering in the minds of gamers. How could anyone screw up that badly?

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

To say Lara Croft ever starred in a great game is a bald faced lie. In fact, Tomb Raider is one of those franchises that everyone willfully ignores the flaws of just so they can seem awesome in school with their peers. A circle of gamers that know they are all playing a bad game, but no one dares admit to it because they want to seem cool. They want to fit in with everyone else.

Yet no one could delude themselves enough to say Angel of Darkness was a good game. Lara Croft stepped away from raiding tombs to try and stealth her way through office buildings and museums, all wrapped up in a B-movie plot. The popularity of the Tomb Raider franchise was waning while Metal Gear Solid was only increasing, so Eidos desperately attempted to compete by adding shoddy stealth mechanics that only hurt more.

Fortunately for any fans that still remained, the absolute failure of the game forced Eidos to go back to the franchise roots. Yes, poor control mechanics combined with glitches and a festering plague of mediocrity was a good thing.

Maybe one day someone will quit fooling themselves and take a shotgun to this rabid dog of a franchise.

Manhunt

Rockstar’s success over Grand Theft Auto proved that the masses didn’t need polished gameplay or good design to enjoy a game. In fact, reviewers didn’t require these things to plaster a 10 across the board! All that was needed was gratuitous violence and controversy and you had a hit!

Thus a concoction of blood, foul language and Chemical X gave birth to Manhunt, one of the crappiest games to grace the Playstation 2. The only selling point of this game was all the gruesome ways you could kill someone. The actual gameplay mechanics and stealth elements were horrible, but that didn’t matter. The publicity focused on nothing more than the violence and gore, and as a result the game sold.

Unlike Grand Theft Auto, however, no one was fooled into believing this was actually a fun title.

Man, didn’t I say 2003 was a good year?

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

Ah, that’s right! Amongst all of the failures lied several excellent pieces of gaming work as well. One of them being Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

By this generation platformers were beginning to slowly die out. People were tired of the Mario 64 style of play and also growing older. They needed something more substantial than large environments with coins scattered about. So the original developer of Prince of Persia wrote a story and came up with a style of platformer that showed the world the next evolution of the genre.

The game wasn’t simply jumping from platform to platform, but adding a major focus to acrobatics as well. Run across walls, grab a rope and swing over to a ledge. If you failed, you could simply rewind time back and try it again. The story and setting allowed adults to enjoy it while remaining stylized enough for children. A true game for everyone.

That would later be transformed so only hip-hop teens wearing sideways hats could enjoy it.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!!

While the rest of the gaming world seems to hail the pixelated Mario Kart 64 or the new Mario Kart Wii as the best in the series, I’m left defending the greatly under-rated Double Dash!!. The increase in processing power and visuals allowed for larger courses with more jumps, dips and gimmicks while keeping enough of a balance on ability to keep any gamer entertained.

I’m still uncertain what people’s complaints about the game are, in fact. A multitude of cars were added, allowing players to further customize their preferred racing style. Teaming different pairs of characters would yield different results, including a variety of unique abilities to different racers. An additional game mode allowed players to go through every race track in a single circuit, easily killing an hour of relaxing and casual game time.

I cannot in any way comprehend why Mario Kart 64 would be a “better game” aside from simple nostalgia. Furthermore, while Nintendo had tried to make concessions to give new players an even chance against more experienced ones, it was nothing compared to the chaos of the new Mario Kart Wii, where skill is punished and massive suckage is rewarded with blue shells and lightning bolts aplenty.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is easily the best in the series and still fun to play to this day, unlike Mario Kart 64 which has aged horribly.

Viewtiful Joe

There’s a lot of things that can be said about Viewtiful Joe, the first being its annoyingly retro difficulty level. Yet more so was bringing a retro style into modern consoles without feeling like a gimmick or throwback. Viewtiful Joe managed to create a new type of experience that provides hours of fun.

The combat focuses on fighting defensively, countering your opponent’s attack skillfully and chaining in a combo to knock him and his buddies flat. While it sounds simple enough, it becomes a major challenge as the number of foes increase. Add in the creative yet powerful bosses and you have a recipe for broken controllers plastered into living room walls.

Yet what truly captured the hearts of gamers was the style. The lead character was an average joe turned super hero, the visuals were beautiful to look at and the story was so bad it was great. As the industry was beginning to try and find the quickest way to be a sure fire hit, Viewtiful Joe was a game that focused on being fun. You’d be surprised how rare that is these days.

Metal Arms: Glitch in the System

Premiere and sole game of Swingin’ Ape Studios, Metal Arms caught my attention with a five second trailer. I decided nothing could hurt in asking for it on Christmas, and by chance the game turned out to be one of my favorite of the previous generation.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a lie to say the game did nothing new, but it isn’t the truth either. On the surface the game is merely a third person shooter with plenty of hours of gameplay, but through each level it gradually dropped in more and more weapons and abilities that kept things fresh. A few platforming elements were added in with a few jumping puzzles, though not many, and scattering money, hidden upgrades and other unlockables throughout maps. The gameplay was good and fun.

Hacking had not only spiced up the single player campaign, allowing the player to take control of robots at any time and use them as disposable troops on the front lines. It had also made multiplayer extremely enjoyable and different. While there were plenty of vehicles in lieu of Halo‘s success, the real reason to play Metal Arms competitively was the ability to hack into robots throughout the stage. It allowed for players to deal damage without harming themselves, control over walking (or flying) tanks and, if timed right, the ability to disconnect from the possessed robot right before destruction. After all, sticking in the robot until it’s destroyed just counts as a death anyway, so risk is still involved.

What really pushed this game into being a favorite, however, was the writing. The game was absolutely hilarious, the characters were entertaining and you simply wanted to move on to see what would happen next. The beginnings of an excellent plot were also there, but unfortunately the studio never delved too deep. Small things were hinted at but the story remained straight forward.

Unfortunately, the game went unknown for the most part. Few people purchased it, and there was no online play available. Chances are you never got to enjoy the multiplayer to its full potential because no one else knew how to play. The studio was interested in doing a sequel, but could make no promises as it was under the control of the publisher. At this point, a sequel is impossible.

Planetside

While I complained about people enjoying the Tomb Raider games despite their obvious mediocrity, I must confess I loved Planetside despite poor mechanics, animation and balance. The game did not run as smoothly as any other shooter online and followed a cone system of accuracy that I still can’t stand to see used, no matter how realistic it is. If you’re playing a game where you need at least half a clip to take someone down then short-controlled bursts just aren’t going to cut it.

Yet what made this MMOFPS so excellent was the atmosphere. Gearing up your character while waiting for the drop ship to arrive, hopping on board and selecting where you wanted to land, it provided a feeling of warfare. Moreso were the actual battles themselves. Games like Battlefield had made a big deal out of 64-player battles, and MAG is currently hyping up 256-player combat, but nothing compared to the war that was Planetside.

This was a game where you might drop down to a moderately defended fortress at, say, 6p.m., start to take over with your squad and other comrades, and suddenly by 7p.m. you’re getting pushed back to the outposts by overwhelming numbers. Finally, by 8 or 9p.m. your army has overtaken the enemy base, victorious. A sudden calm washes over the army as players level up, change their class, swap out equipment, prepare vehicles and start to plan out the next target.

It wasn’t about the mechanics, it was about the atmosphere. Since then no other game has even come close to such atmosphere. Each battle is an isolated map in an isolated game focusing on scores. It doesn’t feel like anything has been accomplished. Granted, there was no way any one side could win anyway as you couldn’t attack any team’s primary base, but spending two or three hours to overtake a fortress feels like you helped everyone on your side get one step closer to taking over a continent.

With luck, Planetside 2 will not only have a better engine, but also be multiplatform. There need to be more MMO games that are trying to be different instead of trying to compete with World of Warcraft.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

I was never able to get into KotOR myself, as the combat just wasn’t my style. However, the game was certainly the first steps toward a game like Mass Effect, and also introduced a different strain of RPG to the mainstream.

While Bethesda brought players to a massive world of endless sidequests and huge possibilities, Bioware introduced console gamers to a more customizable story-based campaign. In JRPG’s, while story was a huge focus, all of the player’s choices were also railroaded. You didn’t have many options of good or evil. KotOR allowed players to choose their player’s response, and as a result reactions changed.

The game was also a saving grace to all fans of Star Wars who were getting their hearts torn into pieces by the prequels. Here a story was presented maturely, letting them know that the franchise wasn’t a joke.

Even so, while I love me some D20 role-playing, it doesn’t convert well to video games. I wanted to enjoy the game, but I just couldn’t play past the first few hours without being bored. Fortunately, Bioware has long since learned their lesson, providing much more playable Mass Effect and Dragon Age in our modern day.

Other noteworthy titles of 2003:

SimCity 4, Devil May Cry 2, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Dark Cloud 2, Master of Orion III, Pokemon Ruby and Saphire, Amplitude, Dynasty Warriors 4, Siren, Enter the Matrix, Rise of Nations, WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$, Silent Hill 3, F-Zero GX, Soul Calibur II, Homeworld 2, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Jak II, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, Call of Duty, Fire Emblem, Beyond Good & Evil, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, Deus Ex: Invisible War

2003 in video gaming on Wikipedia

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What do you remember from 2003?