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4y ago

What is the best game from the 00s?

Part one: What is the best game to come out of the 80s?

Part two: What is the best game to come out of the 90s

This is the third part of the series. This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other decades (10s and 70s) and consoles will come in sporadic subsequent threads.

Expanding on your choice is definitely a plus. I don't think we're gonna get Doom the post this time around.

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Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007 and it still slaps. Great balance between twitch-aiming and tactical thinking depending on what class you play. Matchmaking is fine but there's a special place in my heart for joining furry servers and just vibing.

IDK that I could pick a game, but I want to nominate the 00's as possibly the golden age of modding, and the point where gamedev started to become almost democratized and available to the masses.
WC3 has ludicrous amounts of content and spawned multiple whole-ass genres on its own, HL2 and UT2004/3 have plenty of descendants. Dev tools were regularly included with games, PCs and internet becoming ubiquitous made sharing this bounty incredibly easy, but the internet was young enough that we didn't have the always-online shit and DMCA yet that make it so easy for companies to step on us today. This was also about the time that accessible tools started to appear for hacking older console roms (think Lunar Magic), Game Maker and Unity came from this era and have had obvious impacts on the medium (profit model aside, I'm just listing these for the sheer ease they added to making games over the last 20 years)

GTA San Andreas for sure
- vice city is the GOAT
- Does the Pope shit in the woods?
  
  Where the holiness does his business, is his business

Max Payne and it's sequel.
Slow motion shooting is now a power up in most shooting games now, both third and first person. It all started here.
Before that game came out, we had never had a real proper third person shooter. Max Payne revolutionized the entire genre. I believe it was also the first shooting game to move away from hitscan style bullets and every weapon had full bullets and tracers. The "bullet time" slow motion effect had you actually dodging bullets and you could see the full buckshot of a shotgun blast with all the bullets firing directly at you.
Max Payne 1 is notable for it's relentless difficulty and can be brutalizing to first time players. Even a veteran player can have a hard time on the lowest difficulty. They don't make games like this where your every move counts and all it takes is one mistake to get killed.
The arsenal of weapons in that game is similar to Doom/Doom II where every weapon has a purpose (even the crappy pistol you start with) and the combat is kinda like a puzzle where it comes down to micromanaging ammo and using the right weapon for certain situations. The Colt Commando however, is the equivalent of Doom's plasma gun and you'll be using it for most of part 3.
I might do a long post on it one day. Been replaying the first game lately and it truly aged well. Max Payne 2 took everything from the first game and expanded upon it, truly polishing up the bullet time combat. The only down side is how easy that game is. Even on Dead On Arrival difficulty, MP2 is such a breeze and the only hard spot is the silly escort mission.
I think Max Payne also was one of the first games that had a fun story to it and proved video games could have story and it work. They mixed Film Noir with Kung Fu action movies. Max himself is just an interesting and fun character. He cracks jokes , he makes funny faces that are memorable (thanks to Sam Lake and the graphic novel panels) and he had a great voice actor who delivered on lines that made it all work. This is everything that Rockstar got wrong with Max Payne 3 and why I will never accept that game as a proper sequel, cause it's not. The 3D Realms Max Payne is the real one.
- TFW you're in a computer game, Max.

Minecraft and WoW changed gaming and I'd have to give it to one of them probably.
- As much as I love WoW, Minecraft is the biggest reason that we have streaming as it currently exists.
  
  Tragically, yes.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- …and a large soda.

Shadow of the Colossus
Morrowind
Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal
Persona 4
Mother 3
Half-Life 2
Portal
Oblivion
Wind Waker
Cave Story
Fallout: New Vegas
- Wind Waker? Really? You mean LoZ ?

I'd say Half-Life 2. To me it is, for better or worse, the game that pushed the trend to make games more cinematic/immersive. It was also a technical milestone, having much more realistic animations than other games of its time (and even compared to some today) and one of the first where in-game physics is always in play and feels realistic.
I'd also throw in Runescape for its more general cultural impact. Sure, there were more sophisticated MMOs like WoW, EQ, and FFXI, but Runescape introduced a lot of people to MMO games just because of it's barebones barrier to entry. You didn't need to have a "gaming PC" or go to a store to buy it or pay for a monthly subscription, so for a lot of people that was their first experience with MMOs.
- Half Life 2 was one of the first games to ever use speech recognition to rig facial animations for NPCs. It was both a minor detail and a revolutionary step forward. All of a sudden, as long as you have a voice actor record a character's dialog, you could see the character speak it with automatic lip syncing. It made everything seem a lot more realistic, and made the characters you bump into seem a lot more like real people instead of just decorations.

halo 3

My three favorite non-Bloodborne games are all from this decade: Patapon 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, and Shadow of the Colossus. Since MGS3 and SOTC are already widely beloved and revered, I'd like to talk about Patapon 2.
If you're not an ignorant wretch, you should be broadly familiar with the premise: you play as the god of a tribe of violent little eyeballs called Patapons. It's three things in one: rhythm, RTS, and RPG, along with some Monster Hunter vibes. You hit the face buttons to play drum commands to the beat of the Pons singing, which is how you issue commands. Meanwhile, your horrible little guys wield spears, swords, clubs, and magic, and ride horses and birds in the pursuit of defeating enemy tribes, monsters, and demons.
You level up, equip, and specialize each individual Patapon, so you get very attached to all of them. Against certain enemies, they can even get permakilled, which will cause you to destroy your PSP (oh yeah, this is a PSP game). Patapon 2 improves upon the first with better RPG elements, boss design, and an excrement co-op multiplayer mode.
I love it very much. It's fun, cute, deep, and endlessly replayable. If you say anything bad about Patapon, I will Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon you to death.
There's a remastered version on PS4/PS5 for $15. It unfortunately removes the multiplayer, but the game is still exceptionally good.
- I gotta hit you on SotC. Half the game is nearly unplayable because of the horse controls. Everything is merely a suggestion as opposed to a command. Perhaps I should be more specific, but I feel like that's keeping in the spirit of the game.
  
  Not every game is meant to control like Devil May Cry. When you're on Agro, you're not controlling him - you're controlling Wander, the person riding the horse. That serves a huge thematic and narrative purpose, because the horse is its own being.

I still regularly go back to Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2. The sequel has some of my favorite sci-fi writing out there, especially compared to some of the dreck that comes out of Star Wars.
- Yes! Also that random update that officially included the content restoration a few years ago was a great surprise.

Runescape 2
- Most addictive anyways. I sank about 180 days of play time into this shit

Mario Galaxy is still a lot of fun
Mother 3
Persona 3. It'd be 4 if golden had come out in this time frame, but 3 with FES is better than base P4
Portal
Ace Attorney

Katamari Damacy is just a delight to play in a way that few games are.
RE4, Kotor, Diablo 2, Wind Waker and Advance Wars as honorable mentions for me.
- Katamari is the best casual game to ever come out.

STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl

Star wars battlefront II
Left 4 Dead 2

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

Resident Evil 4

If you read my post in the last thread, you already know what I'm about to say: Sonic Adventure 2. I can't justify this one either but it's my first game ever and probably my favorite game ever so I have to give it the spot. It was if nothing else imo Peak Sonic, and it's the thing that ignited my long-running obsession with the setting (alongside the old SatAM tapes my house had, of course).
One important thing I will give it from a semi-objective standpoint: I have never found a game that is as skilled at making you feel like the coolest most goodest-at-video-games person on the planet as SA2 is. Even when you're doing objectively badly, which I usually am, you still feel like you're doing great and imo that's a rare and excellent thing for a game to be able to pull off.
- Sonic 2 is hella fun. The Dreamcast gets snubbed all the time.
  
  Ah.. the Dreamcast...
  :xi-lib-tears:

I'm never making another one of these again

F.E.A.R. it has the best FPS AI ever and you can go slo mo and the bad guys go bwwoooooooo all over the place when you shoot em

Dark Souls
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Super Mario Galaxy
Okami
- Dark Souls is from 2011, wrong decade

Seeing a distinct lack of racing games so I'm going to say Gran Turismo 4 and the original Need for Speed Most Wanted. Most Wanted was the first racing game to have the open world + cops + excessive car modification and literally every subsequent arcade racing game or need for speed game has tried to copy it in a way and it always comes up short. Most wanted really nailed the police chases with their heat levels, arcade car handling model and open world in a way pretty much no game in the genre has since. Gran Turismo 4 had 700 cars, tons of tracks and events and was the most realistic racing game you could get on consoles at the time. Nothing came close on the PS2 during the 2000s
- I'm going to counter with Burnout 3.
  
  Yeah that's a great game and it's probably the best traditional arcade racer ever made (no open world, car modification, cops, etc) but it didn't fundamentally change the arcade racing game the way Need for Speed Underground 2 and Most Wanted did. Burnout 3 is more a perfection of the traditional formula. After most wanted every arcade racer pretty much had to be open world, hell even the burnout series went in that direction with burnout paradise. It just changed the landscape for arcade racers in a similar way that Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 changed the first person shooter.

Shadow of The Colossus for being one of the first games to really create the illusion of scale. Like damn, you feel small in that game.

Half Life 2, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Club Penguin.

Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening SE, Bayonetta, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 3 games i only played until 2019 but they were great

Destroy All Humans 1 & 2 imho
- I can't call them "best" but damn those were some big dumb fun

Shadow of the Colossus

THPS2
- THPS2
  Did that really come out in the 00s?
  
  Yup

Ninja Gaiden: Black.
- I remember X Play telling me that it's really hard
  
  The camera you have to fight with, but it's not that hard until Master Ninja. It's a very solid game, despite the "dial a combo" system. Easily abusable on Normal.

It has to be demon's souls or dota. Great, well polished games are released every year, but genre defining stuff like that is rarer. I wonder what kind of cool shit people will think of this decade.
Also, shoutout to the first indies to become popular, like super meat boy, braid and limbo. They might not be the best (I think limbo sucks major ass), but I couldn't imagine still being interested in gaming if it wasn't for the indie stuff.
- (I think limbo sucks major ass)
  Now you fucked up

Resident Evil 4. Easily.

Demon Souls

Civ 4. Hands down. Favorite game of all time. 15 years old and 2 sequels later is still has a somewhat active community and playerbase with a plethora of excellent mods.

Mario Party 3

imma go with the likes of:
Arcanum
KOTOR2
Deus Ex
The Void
Undying
Mask of the Bretayer

The difference in tech between 2001 and 2009 is huge, might need to be subdivided lol

Bioshock had the best story of any game of the 00s. CMV

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite: it's the one that got me hooked. I played a translation of the Japanese version until it came out over here and it's the only PSP game I have a physical copy of. Extremely janky hitboxes and sparse movesets for weapons compared to modern MH but it's still fun to go back and do a few hunts every so often.
Final Fantasy IX: My favorite FF. The only real problem was the glacial pace of battles but emulation and modern rereleases fix that.

Counter Strike and civ5
- Civ4 because it doesn't incentivize genocide as the main win condition.

Amazed no one mentioned Warcraft 3 and its expansion.

Spore lmao no
Sims 2 was pretty major

The 00s is the decade I've been waiting for. World of Warcraft + it's two subsequent expansions are easily the best game to be released in this decade. Probably ever. I literally spent a full month in WoW over the span of a couple years and then quit.
This fucking game brought me so much joy when I was younger. I got my first friends off it. I did my first dungeons off it, I saw my first open world off it. (unfortunately I saw my first charity disbursal through this method). I don't play it anymore but Lich King WoW is the best game to ever be made
- Never got into WoW but I played the hell out of Warcraft 3 and it's expansion. Those games had probably the most fun RTS campaigns ever.
  
  Find a Lich King server and game it out

A Mind Forever Voyaging

I've got to say mmorpgs. From everquest (99) to world of warcraft, dark age of camelot, lineage 2, ragnarok online and shadowbane this decade was the golden age of mmorpgs.
- No Runescape?
  
  Right my bad I wrote that post on the fly and forgot it. Never played that or WoW but cant ignore how they defined a genre

Any who gives an answer that isn't "Armored Core: Silent Line", "Ace Combat Zero", or "Gran Turismo 4" are all libs.

Gothic and especially Gothic 2: The Night of the Raven. The addon to the second game is crucial: it adds so much content that it should be a lesson to all gamedevs on how to do addons/DLCs the right way.
Gothic 2 is a nice RPG, but The Night of the Raven is probably the best gaming experience I've ever had: it improved the existing content, added completely new content, but most importantly it made the game extremely challenging without making it frustrating. Suddenly you start caring about every single shitty magical scroll that ends up in your inventory, because there is this deadly boar that prevents you from getting into Khorinis via a detour, but you really want to get that detour, because Lares will give you 500 XP. The game suddenly becomes strategic, you start caring about every decision you make.

the adaptation of the tv series ALIAS

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