PixlBit

 Okay, here's the deal. I like doing top 10 lists. For some reason I got it into my head to do a series of top 10s about each year in the 2000's – because hey, that's when I truly became a gamer. I mean, I gamed before then, sure, but this was when I went from kid who plays games sometimes to kid who religiously buys Playstation magazines. And then reads them at school in his lunch break.

This time around it's 2001 – or the year I inadvertently offended a whole bunch of grown ups for getting pissed off that pokemon didn't air on september 12^th (it was the 11^th where most of you live. Us Aussies are from the future). Hey, I was nine, I didn't understand the implications. A plane flew into a building in a country half the world a way. It didn't involve me in any way other than that I didn't get to watch pokemon, Card Captors, or Dragon Ball Z.

It's funny how your world outlook changes, huh? Because nowadays we have the internet! Even if there is another 9/11ey thing, I can just stream pokemon online. Crisis averted!

Anyway... 2001 for gaming. HOLY SHIT! You know it was a good year when I had to omit games like Halo, Clive Barker's Undying (try it folks, it's awesome), Klonoa 2, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Black and White, Twisted Metal: Black, Pikmin, Pokemon: Crystal, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, two Mega Man games, and motherfucking Devil May Cry! That last one really hurt to be honest.

Also, since this was such a huge year, I decided not to add THPS 3. You know I loved 2, so I loved that one too, though not quite as much. Also, to put it on would mean I'd have to put another game on, and it hurt me enough already to cut it down to what it is now.

10. Conker's Bad Fur Day

 This game is number 10. This game is number fucking 10. Yeah. 2001 was that awesome.

Anyway, this is that guilty pleasure we all had as a kid. No, not the same type of guilty pleasure fastforwarding through our copies of American Pie was. No, this is that game that our parents bought us because it looked cute and lovable, but we never played in front of our parents, stayed up late, and invited all of our friends over to watch us play.

This game is crass. It's dumb. It's vulgar. I mean, one of the bosses is literally a singing piece of shit. This game shouldn't work. As a grown ass man I shouldn't still giggle at this game as much as I do.

But damn it, it's funny.

9. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

 I have a tremendous amount of respect for the artistic vision here. Reading into why a lot of these choices were made does make me respect Hideo Kojima on this project much more than I originally did, and in a time when game developers weren't considered “artists” or “auteur” we weren't used to having marketing stunts and tricks that tied in with the message of the game.

Sure, putting making it seem like this was another Solid Snake game and then making Raiden the hero might have seemed like a dick move, but that was on purpose. This is a game that deceived us through technology, which is exactly what this game was all about.

You see, this game is post modern art. Were it not packaged as entertainment for the masses, it might have been cemented as a piece of meta commentary – and we need that in gaming!

Unfortunately, the risks taken with this game make it the least enjoyable in the series. It is overly pretentious and it's simply not as fun as it could have been were this not the case.

Gaming needs stunts like this, and I feel like Hideo Kojima is a fucking genius. However, it does not make for the most compelling game on this list unfortunately. It's a bit of a slog to get through now, and the plot is so complicated that most of the time I just skip to number 3.

Still, it's amazing and well worth experiencing.

8. Final Fantasy X

This is where many people say that Final Fantasy started to go downhill. Fuck that. This is where I say they got fat and depressed and started hating everything. Put simply, Final Fantasy X is fucking phenomenal. No. It's not as good as VI, VII, or IX. It is better than VIII though in my opinion. I mean apart from Squall being all kinds of awesome with his awesome gunblade and his awesome scar – who didn't want a kickass scar like that when they first played?

Anyway, Final Fantasy is still a magical experience. It has a lovable cast of characters, it looked mindblowingly fantasgasmical when it first came out, and it was the first game in the series with voice acting! Sure, not all of that was good *awkwardly chuckles* but it was charming nonetheless.

This is a game I pretended to lose when a friend brought it over to my house because he wouldn't let me borrow it. Yeah. I finished it in a week and then “magically found it.”

Don't look at me like that. I was 10, and this game was fucking awesome!

And Blitzball was awesome!

7. Max Payne

 This is one of the most depressing games of all time. Seriously, this game is fucked up. Your wife gets raped and murdered. Your newborn daughter also gets butchered. And you get framed for it. This leads you into downward spiral of depression, angst, and violence that culminates in a character losing everything, and knowing he will never again find happiness.

Well, until the next game, but that's only so it can get snatched from him again. Seriously, these devs hate Max.

Truth is, this is one of the games that really helped push gaming narratives in more in depth and adult territory. Sure, games like Planescape: Torment, and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream had some seriously adult themes in them as well, but they far more obscure than this game was. This pushed games towards a narrative focus whilst also showing we don't have to sacrifice fun gameplay for a compelling narrative.

Because no, slow mo diving through a door whilst ripping a dude apart with duel pistols will never not be fucking awesome.

6. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

 Why is this higher than Conker's Bad Fur Day? Because it's my fucking list, that's why. Also, this was a huge game in my childhood, and I have rather fond memories of playing this game with my grandmother – something I can't say about Conker's Bad Fur Day.

I adore this entire series. This was Naughty Dog before they made interactive Joss Whedon fan fiction. This was Naughty Dog before the staff turned into neo nazis and decided everyone who wasn't American was worthy of death, and that it's okay to steal shit as long as you're handsome.

Okay, they also made The Last of Us which was pretty darn awesome, but Uncharted kind of sucks. Seriously, the weapons feel like shit, the platforming is non existent, the puzzles require less thought than an episode of Baywatch, and this GAME is more obsessed with being cinematic then most films are.

Sorry. Anyway before that, they made awesome games, like Crash Bandicoot, Crash Team Racing (AKA the game that is still better than Mario Kart and fuck your opinions) and the Jak and Daxter series. Jak and Daxter isn't really original. It's a collect-a-thon along the lines of Banjo Kazooie or Mario 64. The difference is a) NO LOAD SCREENS! That was seriously a big deal when this came out. It was a huge world that you could explore at your own pace. Oh, and B) It was really well executed. It felt fun to play. It was challenging, charming, and everything a game like this should be.

5. Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec

This game holds a special place in my hearts. I was raised a Jehovah's Witness, so for a lot of my childhood, violent video games were as big a crime as, say, individuality and intelligence. So, I had very few games I could actually play. Of them all, this is probably the one I played the most.

Whoever decided to make a racing game where you could grind for cash and spend hours trying to get the optimal performance out of your car was a genius. Seriously, this felt like I was playing a JRPG. I'd do a couple of races to “level up” my car in order to beat the “final boss” or championships. Then me and my friends tried to make cars that could outdo each other on the test track. I got my car to 1400 km/h (869 miles for you idiots in America). It couldn't turn corners at all and it was constantly on it's back wheel, but who the fuck cared? I was like a less racist speedy gonzalis!

4. Ico

Minimalism is a key element to Team Ico's artistic design. They are games that use simplicity to evoke depth. On the surface, everything is simple. Free a girl from a castle. Everyone understands that – it's Mario: The Teen Years.

However, this game is more than that. It's a subtle exploration of relationships and dependence, it's a visual and auditory tour de force that still holds up today. While it is incredibly artistic in its endeavours, it never verges on pretension. It still wants you to enjoy your experience with it from a mechanical sense, and its outward simplicity means that if you thought that this paragraph was nothing but arbitrary dribble from a dickhead who reads too much into things, you'll probably still enjoy the hell out of it.

Also, I swear the art student in me will shut the fuck up for the rest of this list. Well, mostly.

3. Serious Sam: The First Encounter

I haven never played another shooter like Serious Sam. I have never played another game that is this tense, this adrenaline inducing, this chaotic, or, hell, this much fun! You can say old school shooters are dumb or whatever, but I've had to think harder when playing Serious Sam then I ever did whilst playing Bioshock.

You see, this is a game that's entirely about shooting lots of things. I mean, hundreds of enemies will be on the screen at the same time, and they all have specific weaknesses, strengths, attacks, and weapons that take them down easier. You're constantly switching weapons, dodging attacks, figuring out which enemies to take down, and hitting quick load because you died for the seventeen millionth time.

Still, you're clicking it. Serious Sam is fucking amazing.

2. Grand Theft Auto III

 If you've never heard of Grand Theft Auto... just kill yourself, because you're fucking retarded. Seriously, people who have never played a game before in their life have played Grand Theft Auto. ISIS uses Grand Theft Auto to train their troops.

This is the game that caused 9/11. Seriously, after trying to pilot a dodo, the guy was like fuck it, I need to fly a real plane into a building. This is even more shocking, since this game came out in October. So this game is so evil it caused time travelling terrorism.

Look, you might think that last joke was offensive, but that's nothing compared to the game. You can masturbate on school children. You can kill people, and then have sex with their corpses. You can commit homosexuality, and – perhaps most shockingly of all – this game allows you to vote liberal.

Despite all of this – or perhaps because of it – this game is amazing. No other game at the time offered this kind of freedom. Sure, some CRPGs were bigger and gave you more areas to explore and narrative branching and all that good stuff, but they didn't allow you to just murder random civillians!

Okay, actually a lot of them did. But few made it as fun as GTA III!

1. Silent Hill 2

 Silent Hill 2 is in my top 3 favourite games of all time, and for good reason: This is the best horror game ever made. It's not the scariest, as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Fatal Frame, and even Silent Hill 3 manage to be more unnerving, disturbing, and generally creepy.

Silent Hill 2 is still scary, but it's fear is much more personal in nature. This is a game that wants to bum you out. It's horrors don't come from its monsters, but from its themes. Sexuality, masculinity, suicide, love, euphenasia – all of these are explored in the most disturbing way imaginable, and for the time – hell, even now! - these were rarely touched upon themes for a game. They were taboo, and outside of “I have no eyes and I must scream” and “Song of Saya” I haven't seen a game come close to the dizzying heights of Silent Hill 2's story in terms of complexity, intelligence, and downright disturbingness.  

 For 2000's list, click here