Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

• Release Date: 2004
• Platform(s): PlayStation 2, PC, Xbox
• Developer: Rockstar
• Genre: Action

With sales of more than 20 million copies since ts launch in 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the biggest-selling PlayStation 2 game of all time, and not without reason. Though initially a game about gang bangers and turf wars in a fictional Los Angeles (Los Santos), channeling scenes from Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood, it blossoms into an ode to the entire West Coast. Three whole cities -- the others being San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas) -- create a game four times bigger than Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, home to just about every idea from Rockstar's whiteboards. Weight gain, pimping missions, robberies, drive-bys, swimming, clothes shopping, martial arts, casino games, horse racing -- the list goes on and on.

The hero this time is Carl "CJ" Johnson, a Los Santos native who returns for his mother's funeral after five years in Liberty City. Chaos greets him, his neighbourhood falling to gang violence while rivalries and suspicions break up his family. Blackmailed by the crooked Officer Tenpenny (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) and distracted by girlfriends, hippies, and everyone in between, he gradually unearths the secrets behind his mother's murder, following the clues to the far ends of the map.

Just as important as the urban centers of San Andreas are the spaces in between: the rural
retreats and vast open roads that turn the game into a road movie. No Grand Theft Auto before or since has let you point toward a random horizon and just keep on driving, capturing that post-Woodstock spirit of movies like Easy Rider and Vanishing Point. None has featured a more star-studded cast, either, or so many ways of getting from point A to B via X, Y and Z. Though it lacks an occasional dab of polish, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is an embarrassment of riches.

Read More

The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Ages

• Release Date: 2001
• Platform: Game Boy Colour
• Developer: Capcom
• Genre: Action / Adventure

The follow-up to the Game Boy's brilliant The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was always going to have its work cut out, even before you consider that, for the first time, third-party developers were handling the most delicate of Nintendo's children. And although Capcom can't compete with the master company's own designers, it does a pretty decent job of playing babysitter to greatness, with a couple of games that certainly cover very suitable territory and repeat all the right moves.

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Oracle of Ages are a pair of complementary interconnected games. The two games, released simultaneously, interact via a Nintendo Game Link Cable, enabling the two titles to be played on two different Game Boys at the same time. Each game transports our hero Link to a different magical land, where a powerful oracle has been kidnapped. While the larger story can only be understood when both games are completed, each title can still be enjoyed as a standalone adventure in it's own right. And, helpfully Capcom has been taking notes, with adventures that unfold in a familiar progression of item-gathering, over-world exploration, and dungeon crawling. It's not a bad copy of the previous games, and the development team manages to throw in enough new magical twists and ideas to keep you chugging along on a series of journeys that only just fall short of what Zelda fans traditionally expect.

With visuals and controls almost identical to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, the Oracle games never quite reach the heights of Nintendo's own work, though they still do a decent job. Heartfelt, varied and often clever, they serve as a reminder that the right property has the power to lift everyone associated with it.

Read More

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

• Release Date: 2001
• Platform: PlayStation 2
• Developer: Naughty Dog
• Genre: Platformer

Jak and Daxter's own precursor was Crash Bandicoot, a character who became something of a mascot for the original PlayStation and an example of Naughty Dog's technical skills. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is similarly demonstrative of the developer's talents when it comes to character design and the manipulation of Sony's hardware: players are treated to a high level of detail, charismatic animation, and a streaming world with no loading screen in sight. The game also paved the way for Nolan North's later proliferation of vocal appearances by caster Max Casella (an actor who nowadays also has The Sopranos and Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony on his resume) as the voice of Daxter.

As 3-D graphics had been well exploited for the previous generation of consoles, standing out from the crowd in the 128-bit landscape required new tactics. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy's main innovation is the aforementioned lack of loading. Before this, games were predominantly discrete experiences lacking in holistic permanence, but here players could travel to locations visible in the distance, and challenges begun would remain in the state they were left, rather than requiring restarts. The stage props used by preceding platform games had been transformed into a living, breathing world.

That the mechanics of the game are heavily evocative of classics like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie is simply another reason to recommend it; the polished, fluid controls ensure that simply moving Jak around is a joy. Thought is also put into the reinvention of genre cliches: The collectibles here aren't as abstract tokens but energy orbs, which make sense in the context of the plot, setting a new bar for consistency and motivation.

Read More

Battlefield 1942

• Release Date: 2002
• Platform: PC, Mac
• Developer: Digital Illusions CE
• Genre: First-Person Shooter

Battlefield 1942 puts intelligence into multiplayer team-based shooters. PC players had been ganging up since Half-Life Team Fortress, and limited coordination was hinted at as early as Starsiege: Tribes. But by placing multiclassed team combatants within cunningly designed Word War II arenas, Battlefield 1942 forced the issue, making for an epic multiplayer behemoth that rolled over and crushed the opposition.

The core action takes place in loosely authentic theatres of war in the game's "Conquest" mode, which pits two historically appropriate armies against each other: the British versus the Germans in Europe, or the Japanese versus the United States Of America in the Pacific. Each team is assigned control points, typically villages or islands, where action begins, from which fallen soldiers can re-spawn as one of several specialized character classes. Fighting side-by-side with other players -- up to thirty-two in total -- you battle to seize control of these strategic points, forcing back the enemy and depleting the tickets that end the game at zero. Every death reduces tickets too, nearly forcing players to fight for their lives rather than go on suicide missions or camp at home.

The game also plays smart by dumbing down, enabling you to drive, pilot, or plunge to your death in dozens of vehicles -- from jeeps and tanks to aircraft carriers and airplanes -- but it rids fussy control variations in favour of a cartoon-like equivalence. The graphics engine copes well, with ceaseless cinematic moments emerging from the random actions of you and your comrades.

It all conspires to unite far-flung and (often idiotic) online gamers to give the illusion of a cohesive fighting force locked into battle. Think Wacky Races meets Medal Of Honor -- and don't get too snooty, because the result is a blast, and it spawned a true masterpiece.

Read More

Age Of Mythology

• Release Date: 2002
• Platform: PC, Mac
• Developer: Ensemble Studios
• Genre: Strategy

Ensemble didn't take risks. It didn't have to. From the moment the historical strategy game Age Of Empires launched in 1997, its course was set: It would be king of real-time strategy, absurdly successful, regardless of whatever naysayers might claim about the PC and Mac platforms. The studios owner Microsoft closed the studio in 2009, and it didn't seem to add up. No developer knew how to be a reliable money-factory quite as well as Ensemble.

Age Of Mythology, the studio's first game for Microsoft, doesn't take risks either. It does quite the opposite, dragging the fantastical elements that less successful rivals tend toward into its own straitlaced but highly polished strategy structure: harvesting wood and stone, building bases in exact order, deftly making every unit a precise rock to some other soldier's paper or scissor. Ensemble took someone else's risk and made it into the most sensible thing in the world. It has Minotaur and sphinx and Valkyrie, but somehow they arn't an outlandish pretense among the more familiar cavalry, swordsmen and archers. Instead, they're smart, strategic high-end units, vital to tipping the game's mathematically precise balance into your favour. Age Of Mythology knows exactly what it's doing, and being in the company of mythical beasts doesn't change the solid formula one bit.

Age Of Mythology may have played it safe, but it did suggest Ensemble might be a little more playful from thereon in. That didn't happen. Next in line came the button-downed Age Of Empires III, and then Halo Wars as the studio's last dying breath. That leaves Age Of Mythology as an aberration; perhaps the only game where this one-time king of studios allowed its own character to appear alongside its unsullied strategy-design skill.

The Trojan Horse

Read More

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

• Release Date: 2002
• Platform: PC, Xbox
• Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
• Genre: Action/Role-Playing

The Elder Scrolls games are best known for the fourth chapter in the series, Oblivion, released in 2006. In comparison,The Elder Scroll's Morrowind is altogether more of a curate's egg, neither as commercially successful nor critically applauded as it's successor. Perhaps because of that, however, it's also a much more interesting game. This isn't the traditional fantasy of the later version; instead it is a weird blend of traditional fantasy with people and places that are characterized by an almost eerie other-worldliness.

One thing that is true of both games is the unparalleled freedom that their creators have blessed upon the players. More than many other similar games, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind contains entire societies and cultures that are completely convincing (and, by including the Elder Scrolls construction set, even allowed players to create their own).

In one inspired piece of design, the tutorial contains the entire character creation process as part of the narrative, with attributes and skills generated by the choices the player makes while describing their character's background to a prison bureaucrat. In another, character skills advance as players use them. If you want to become good at say, sword-fighting, you simply keep sword-fighting.

For a set of rules designed to let gamers play without worrying about the numbers, the latter system is easy to exploit by anyone who wants to artificially inflate their abilities. In this, however, it is also a well-intentioned, albeit a bit flawed piece of design -- but flawed in such a way that it enriches the experience. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind grants players the freedom to play it as an experience, absorbing the story and forging their own, or as a set of rules, to be ransacked with an obsessive-compulsive eye for exploits in a bid to "beat" the game.

Read More

Baldur's Gate II

Release Date: 2000
Platform: PC
Developer: BioWare
Genre: Role-Playing

In 1988, SSI's Gold Box series redefined the Western idea of the RPG genre. They took the single most important set of pen-and-paper rules -- Advanced Dungeons & Dragons -- and tied them to an epic series of campaigns that spanned entire continents and several games, breathing life into Gary Galax's legendary creation. Running out of steam in the early 1990s, however, the D&D franchise was left to languish. Until, that is, BioWare created Baldur's Gate. The effect was like stepping through the rainbow, like moving from black-and-white to colour.

Baldur's Gate was teaming with life in a way that no other RPG had ever been. Where the Gold Box games had provided hack-and-slash gaming supported by blocky graphics, Baldur's Gate offered would-be adventurers an abundance of quests and meaningful interactions across huge playing fields;across intricately detailed, beautifully rendered isometric recreations of a completely convincing fantasy medieval world.

The transition between Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn was every bit as pronounced. The sequel may have streamlined the interface, but it bulked out the playing experience. Like the Gold Box games, players could import their characters and items from a previous game, and as those characters grew in power, so the game changed to reflect their newfound influence. Building up their own strongholds and followers, they were free to lead their own way through a labyrinthine plot that weaved together divergent and mutually exclusive subplots and quests -- indeed, some subquests were as weighty and complex as the entire first game.

As far as gaming goes, it's a satisfying complexity that has yet to be eclipsed. Indeed, Baldur's Gate II is probably still the pinnacle of the Western RPG.

Read More