It was the summer of '97 - we were on a family vacation in Montreal and went to La Ronde Amusement Park for the day. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I was there; a Nintendo Megadome, right inside the park. It was like a dream come true. Even better, it was right before the release of GoldenEye 007, so I got my first look at what would soon become one of my favorite games ever. We played everything we could and left, VHS in hand, promoting some of the upcoming releases, including GoldenEye. There were some other promotional materials too, a dossier that would be thumbed through hundreds of times before we were graced with a copy of the game that Christmas.
The first thing that comes to mind is changing my Xbox gamertag. I got one in 2004 when Xbox Live Arcade dropped but a mini-game on an Official Xbox Magazine demo disc was giving me trouble in '07, and I thought a new gamertag would solve it. Well, it did solve it, but I lost touch with my old gamertag over time, and now it's probably been deactivated along with the few games I bought under it. It'll be 20 years on my current gamertag next year. It could've been 23 years if I'd stuck with my original one.
I'm on vacation this week for the most part. LJ and I went to Washington D.C. to visit the Smithsonian Zoo and Museum of the American Indian (also, accidently - 'cause we parked beneath it - the Bible Museum and saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit), but I manged to squeeze in some gaming on a few days here and there and last week, which I couldn't report on 'cause Pixlbit was down.
I've chosen ten games from the Metacritic best of list to start my OG Xbox journey. Here they are.
Alongside my PS2 gaming is also me trying to play the handheld out at the time, GBA. I've had trouble getting to it, but this week I got super sidetracked on GBA games. I also touched on PS4 and XSS and bought a bunch of stuff both digitally and at my game stores.
I dove through a bunch of my PS2 games in chonological order. I'm in the 2003 games now. Then I played a lot of my rental game, Mario & Luigi Brotherhood and took another stab at Ys Origin on Xbox. Also a few digital purchases.
It's fun to go down the list of best of all time on Metacritic and make a personal list of favorites. Here are mine for the original Xbox.
What I played this week and the various stuff I picked up on the cheap from the soon to be closed Xbox 360 store, some from Game 'n' DVD Exchange and from a new store I discovered called Just Press Play in Lancaster Pa.
A list of games I'd like to revisit in order of Metacritic score for the years 2004-2006 with some notes.
Shifting gears again this month. Now I've decided to focus on the best games of the years 2004-2006. I went through the Metacritic list and picked out what I liked.
I can't resist looking ahead to the games I'm going to try and play for my retro gaming in June. This will cover the years 2000-2005, which is the Xbox/PS2/GameCube/Dreamcast/GBA generation roughly speaking. This also becomes a sort of shopping list when I'm out at the game stores. I like to make some notes along the way too, so here is the greatest games of all time list from Metacritic, 1-16, for those years.
I can finally source Metacritic on a complete list of games across all systems. '95 seems to be the start of where they have enough reviews to use. I thought I'd post their list of top 14 games and then my current list of May retro plays picked for very different reasons. I do this just for fun and hopefully a little conversation.
I remember this year mostly for the being disappointed with the World of Warcaft MMO. I wanted another another strategy WoW. But there was also the release of the DS, which got me back into handheld gaming, and cueing up for my first midnight release for Halo 2. The rest of the world was buying GTA: San Andreas and Pokemon FireRed/Leaf Green, numbers 1 and 2 in sales respectively. Half-Life 2 was a notable winner on Metacritic. Here's some stuff I played and want to play.
GameCube, GBA and Xbox were all released. Pokemon games won all sales awards across the board, again. Amongst the highest critically were: Halo, GTA III, Grand Turismo 3 and Final Fantasy X. Dreamcast was discontinued this year, which was probably when I got one on the cheap as GameStop started shipping them all back to their warehouses. I probably got a Xbox on the strength of Halo, Gamecube for the Rogue Squadron sequel, and a PS2 for the Red Faction port. Here's a bunch of games I played around that time, then alter, and then ones I'd like to play now.
1995, I remember it well. . . Not so well, actually, so that's why I go through the list of video games on wiki again. The biggest US games of '95 were Daytona USA and Mortal Kombat 3, but I got other ideas, a bunch of them:
This is a list of the games I played the most in the 90s. There are plenty of ties and a shortlist of games I really want to play still.
I had an unexpected afternoon to play on Sunday since my work schedule suddenly switched to Saturday. I was in a casual mood and so, to the tunes of bucolic flute music, managed a crew of Gnomes around a pre-industrial town of mines, mills and mage towers.
This time I found a list of Wikipedia. This one takes 45 different all-time greatest game lists and notes the ones mentioned the most. From this I made a list of games I’d like to enter my personal library. Here are they: