A Decade of Gaming: 2004
By Chris CesaranoIf there were any year to mark as a major milestone in the games industry, it feels as if 2004 should be the one of the decade. Major announcements made, titles released, and the first steps into the current generation of consoles. So much had happened that it would take a long time before any year could come close to seeing as many major releases and events all at once.
Of course, milestones such as this are not always in the best interest of the industry. Some of the changes made will be better in the long-term, certainly. However, there are also many that set the tone for hype, disappointment and the new industry market: the MTV frat boy.
Nintendo DS Released, Revolution Announced
I still remember my first thoughts watching the original E3 preview video for the Nintendo DS. I thought it was a joke. My friends thought it was a joke. Not only was Nintendo already replacing their GameBoy, but they thought two screens was enough to change the world. The videos portrayed one school lunch table single guy playing his DS surrounded by his male friends, supposedly playing with a girl at an opposing lunch table surrounded by her female friends via wireless communication. Suddenly, all of the girls pulled their own DS systems from their purses and pocket books.
“Wow, Nintendo has really lost sight of who their market is,” I thought. After all, these designer clothes wearing GAP shopping girls would never all own a DS of their own.
Little did I and all the other skeptics know what was really happening. By thinking of consumers outside of the socially awkward and smelly geek, Nintendo was beginning to appeal to a much larger audience. The very same people that I had felt outcast from were now going to be partaking in my hobby. Yet the DS was a major success, and within the walls of Nintendo they were hard at work on the Revolution/Wii. A little console that would do what no other could, it would get grandmom and girlfriend to play.
Nintendo made us all look like a bunch of idiots that didn’t know what we were talking about. Of course, we didn’t know what we were talking about. Ever since they’ve gained success, the commentary from “professional journalists” and arguments of casual vs. hardcore on forums have only revealed a single fact. Anyone involved in the gaming industry is a mental adolescent, so convinced of their knowledge and superiority when, in fact, they are nothing more than a bunch of childish raving fanboys.
Nintendo was on its way to becoming the most influential and important company in the industry once again. Thank God for that.
Microsoft Announces XNA as DirectX Successor
XNA is more than a graphics library for programming. It’s a complete set of tools that make game development easier. As a result, this became a major step in bringing independent developers forward into the limelight while simultaneously pushing the Xbox platform forward. No one really knew what sort of change was in store at the time, but it turned out to be a pretty huge one.
Game development has become incredibly expensive, yet studios still lack the manpower to tackle the ambitions of their projects on their own. So any small time developer trying to get known out of their garage would typically be considered out of luck. However, Microsoft has pushed the XNA library in Colleges and professionally that it has provided a chance for small-time developers to be known again.
Just look at some of the games on the Xbox Live Arcade today. Castle Crashers, Braid, Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, The Maw, and even larger published titles such as Shadow Complex. While it was most known for ports at the start of the console’s life, XNA has pushed independent development so far forward that Microsoft had to add the Indie Arcade channel just to fit it all in.
The move has also followed suit on the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii, providing small developers the chance to shine on whatever platform of their choosing (as long as they can afford a development kit for the latter two consoles, that is). XNA has single-handedly sparked an Indie revolution larger than has been seen in years.
Acclaim Declares Bankruptcy
Here is a name that can certainly determine whether you are “old” or not. If you recognize the studio name “Acclaim”, then you’ve been gaming for quite a while. Otherwise, you’re just some young punk that needs to educate themselves.
Though there isn’t much to educate on. Acclaim had a few last good titles on the N64 and Playstation, but for the most part they were only truly good during the two-dimensional era. With a series of Double Dragon, Simpsons and Spiderman games, the last decent titles to emerge from Acclaim were Turok and Burnout. Otherwise, most of their titles were about as memorable as BMX XXX, originally a Dave Mirra game.
If none of that sounds familiar, that’s because the Dave Mirra games were lame by default. A desperate attempt to not only cash in on Tony Hawk Pro Skater‘s success, BMX XXX had also hoped to gain sales through controversy.
Acclaim has since revived itself, but only as a provider of free online games to play. Certainly nothing compared to what they were back in the 90’s…actually, scratch that, it’s a quite fitting place for them.
Year of the Sequels
Half-Life 2. Halo 2. Doom 3. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Metal Gear Solid 3. Every platform had a major killer app releasing in 2004, each highly anticipated, and each making big promises.
To devote paragraphs to each individually would take too long and only overshadow other games. Still, each game is still deserving of a blurb.
Half-Life 2 is still looked upon by PC gamers as some sort of messiah, even though it’s greatest achievement was a fantastic physics engine as opposed to world-bending game design. After having smooth controls for vehicles in a game like Halo, Half-Life 2 dropped you into pieces of garbage that were only convenient in the distance that they traveled. They were combat ineffective and often times made you more of a target as you were trying to manuever them in any convenient way. Yet as an entire package, Half-Life 2 was certainly fun and lived up to its six year old predecessor. Not exactly the biggest achievement, really.
Halo 2 had a much more cinematic story than the first, which varies between improvement and detriment depending on who you speak with. It sported a fresh coat of superior graphics that pushed the limits of the Xbox, a dual-wielding system that functioned for a multitude of guns and allowed for powerful combinations, and turned the Covenant into more than a cardboard cut-out of villains. Too bad it was incredibly linear, only took place on Earth for one level and had one of the biggest cliffhangers in gaming history. Often viewed as the black sheep of the family, Halo 2 is still a more fun game to play than Halo 3. Not to mention the script is actually competent and entertaining. As for everyone’s complaint about the Arbiter, I say they can go shove it. The Master Chief is an empty shell of green space armor. The Arbiter was a much more interesting character, therefore his levels were a great addition into the setting.
Doom 3 gave you a choice of being able to shoot your target or being able to see them. You weren’t allowed to have both. Despite being a beautiful game to look at and possessing an atmospheric opening, it soon dissolved into a prettier version of older shooters. Simplistic A.I. focusing on cheap scares and powerful overwhelming numbers, Doom 3 was a major disappointment to everyone that had highly anticipated the game. It wasn’t bad, it was just…underwhelming.
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was perhaps one of the most disappointing titles. The light and dark world offered for some interesting puzzles akin to Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but needing to constantly watch your health could make trips to the dark realm tedious. Additionally, squeezing yet another game between the events of Metroid 1 and Metroid 2 started to feel too cluttered. The idea that Samus rushed to SR 388 as soon as she saw the dangerous powers of the Metroid race is gone. Now it feels like she waited until she was bored one weekend to go about wiping out an indigenous species. Perhaps the greatest problem is simply adding very little to the franchise while simultaneously leaving out that special something that made the first so great. To this day I still can’t really place it, but Echoes just lacks that genuine Metroid feel.
Metal Gear Solid 3, well, can’t tell you much other than you can eat snakes. I lost interest in the series after number two, but considering how much people enjoyed a blast to the past in Snake Eater I’d say it was a major success.
Metroid: Zero Mission
I had hated Metroid Fusion. It wasn’t a bad game, but it just didn’t feel like a proper Metroid title. The bosses felt as if they belonged in another game. Introducing a new parasite felt like desperately trying to keep the franchise alive. The monologue of heroine Samus Aran was not the personality or voice I had expected to hear from all of the games previous. Progression was mostly too linear.
So when Metroid: Zero Mission was announced I was expecting another disappointment. However, those worries were unfounded as the remake of the first proved to be one of my most frequently played on the GBA. It felt like a proper sequel to Super Metroid, including an improved engine with better performance and response. The only problem was the inclusion of a surprise mission inside of a Space Pirate ship against the worst Mecha Ridley I had ever seen.
Even so, the game was excellent and provided some of that old school feeling again. Easily one of the best titles to release on the GBA during its short lifetime.
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Unreal Tournament 2004
At some point Epic had thought releasing a new Unreal Tournament every year would be a good idea. They imagined the game could be updated similarly to sports titles, with new maps, modified gameplay and a new roster.
This plan failed, but not before pumping out UT2K4. I had held off on 2K3 because they left out some of my favorite modes from the original, including Assault. However, UT2K4 was putting them back in as well as adding vehicles (yes, even Epic was trying to imitate some of Halo‘s success), and playing the demo with friends at College convinced me it was a must-have title.
For a few years that one game brought me back to the campus LAN parties. A night of Assault, Invasion and Onslaught were all I could need in multiplayer gaming. I’ve never been much of a competitive gamer, but enough UT2K4 game modes focused on tactical work as a group that I was sucked right in. In particular was Invasion, where a number of players took on A.I. opponents trying to survive wave after wave of hostiles (sounds like a game mode in a more recent Epic title, doesn’t it?). The best way to play the game was with insta-gib turned on, blowing anything away in one shot. Powerful foes would fill up the screen firing homing-rockets, killing us as easily as we could kill them, but the adrenaline always guaranteed a good time.
Too bad most everyone wanted to play nothing but the drastically over-rated Onslaught, which was more of a “people-crashing-vehicles-into-environment” game mode than anything else. At least Invasion is seeing a resurgence in modern games. Now if only they’d bring back the insta-gib modification and Assault…
Fable
Project Ego was one of the most hyped titles ever. Peter Molyneux didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. He told press members that the world would change in real time as you grew older. If you had a family and abandoned them while your child was at an early age, your kid would come to hate you and possibly even hunt you. Of course, if you stuck around they would want to be just like you. The game would allow two players to cooperate, one jumping into the world of another using the Xbox Live service and in splitscreen.
Many of these same features are barely alive in the sequel, Fable 2. When the original Fable had released, it was met by two separate reactions. Absolute hatred by those that bought into Molyneux’s inability to control himself, and simple enjoyment of a pretty fun game from everyone else that knew better.
Fable was not a hugely life-changing experience, but it was a unique role-playing game amidst Bioware‘s pages of text per screen and Bethesda‘s plot-less world wanderers. The universe has a particular flavor to it, the combat flowed well and the execution of good vs. evil was at least unique and colorful. If anything, Fable makes its mark for trying to play different and feel different. A more casual action-oriented role-playing game.
As it is, it’s merely a fun game that is only so noteworthy because Molyneux didn’t know how to shut up about features that weren’t even confirmed.
Dead or Alive Ultimate
With the exception of Rival Schools, I had traditionally been a hater of 3D fighting games. Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Bloody Roar, they all seemed way too slow-paced for me. Not to mention they felt clunky as well.
So I spontaneously asked for Dead or Alive Ultimate that holiday, hearing so many good things about it, and what do you know but I received it for Christmas. What I found was a 3D fighter that had a fast pace to it and heavy-hitting style.
I couldn’t believe I actually liked this ridiculous showcase of polygonal breasts.
It technically is not a major release at all, but Dead or Alive Ultimate actually got me interested in a fighting game for the first time since I played, well, Rival Schools. I wanted to learn some of the counters and abilities. I became addicted to the survival mode. I wanted to unlock all the characters. I was having fun. Trying to go back to play Dead or Alive 3 proved to be impossible, as the game was way too slow. It was more like every other 3D fighter I hated.
Yet Dead or Alive Ultimate was fast-paced, provided quick and powerful characters with a focus on chain-combos, and also had a variety of fun environments that allowed me to pummel and throw my foes into submission. It was, without a doubt, awesome.
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay
Talk about a game that caught everyone off guard. Games based on film franchises are still notoriously bad, being rushed into production and with little time to be truly polished. Yet Vin Diesel founded his own publishing company, and when work began on a new Riddick film he went out to try and get a studio involved in making a game.
Perhaps the best move was making the game its very own being, taking place at a different time than the film had. This allowed Starbreeze Studios to take their own approach instead of trying to recreate scenes from the movie, a decision proved to be a good one. Players were able to use both stealth and action to progress through a variety of levels, sneaking in the shadows to take out heavily armed guards only to later find sniping positions to headshot them from afar.
It was good. It was fun. And it caught everyone by surprise. As it is, the games have gained more popularity and notoriety than either the Pitch Black film or Riddick movie that the game was intended to help promote. Instead, the excellent gameplay has marked Escape From Butcher Bay into minds of gamers everywhere, many of whom were simply stunned by how much fun they had playing the game.
World of Warcraft
There’s no way to leave the juggernaut out. Let’s face it, I would be criminal to keep this game off the list. It’s only competitors are the Nintendo DS and Wii hardware systems. Not the software on said systems, just the hardware. The game is a never-ending printing press of cash for Blizzard, allowing the members of the studio to fatten their wallets annually.
Yet I will never understand why everyone loves playing it so much. It’s worse than my frustrations about Fallout 3. It takes forever just to do anything, to make any sort of progress. To level up and complete missions requires real effort and work. You may get dozens of people together to go in and tackle a single monster only to be wiped in five minutes after spending over an hour preparing.
I’ve watched friends play the game, spoken with them as they play, trying to figure out what draws them into it. In the end, I can only imagine some cyberpunk style of virus is being transferred via binary encoding in the pixels on screen. There’s no other explanation.
Yet every day millions sign on so they can gain one tenth of a level.
Other noteworthy titles of 2004:
Release of the PSP, Ninja Gaiden, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Far Cry, Final Fantasy XI, Painkiller, City of Heroes, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Tales of Symphonia, Silent Hill 4, Pikmin 2, Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green, The Sims 2, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, Star Wars: Battlefront, Katamari Damacy, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Killzone, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Jak 3, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
2004 in video gaming on Wikipedia
What do you remember from 2004?
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