PixlBit

Jazz Jackrabbit headed to GBA this year, but I still remember playing it on PC at the neighbors'. 

So ummm ... yeah, Wind Waker actually came out in the U.S. in 2003, around my birthday (it's March 23; the game came out March 24). Since I already discussed the game itself, here's an April Fool I fell for in EGM that made me buy the pre-order copy (which actually came with a GCN edition of Ocarina of Time and its Master Quest variation, so not a bad deal anyway):

Midnight Club II was a game I again played mostly at the neighbors'. Basically it was Rockstar's version of NFS Underground before that was really a thing. It was a decent series, but one I always had issues with the controls for some reason. 

F-Zero GX was probably my favorite game to come out this year. The sense of speed and the variety of tracks was simply amazing. My only issue with it was that not all my friends could follow along on splitscreen because of how fast everything was and the Story mode was too damn hard. Like, you had to be pixel-perfect in some of those scenarios, I swear. 

I kinda loved the cheeseball cutscenes though.

Soul Calibur II was one of the few games where I heard a lot of people say they preferred the Gamecube version. This was because Link was a playable character in a non-party fighting game, and probably one of the more well-rounded characters on the roster. 

This quickly became one of my favorite 3D fighting games, alongside Tekken 3. 

P.N.03 is one I didn't end up playing due to the atrocious reviews, but the concept of an action-platformer relying on ryhtm-action mechanics is something I've always wanted to be fully-realized. Sort of like those music stages in Rayman Legends, but with a 3D action game and have that be the whole thing. It was disappointing to here they couldn't execute something like that. 

The Simpsons: Hit and Run was a fun rental. Basically, GTA but with Simpsons. Or was this the one that was basically Crazy Taxi with the Simpsons? I played both. They weren't as fully realized as the games they were copying, but they were decent enough and I still like the Simpsons enough at the time. 

Viewtiful Joe was one I rented a handful of times, because it appealed to three of my favorite things: my vanity, the use of cel-shading, and a unique style of gameplay. I loved fast-forwarding and slowing down to take on all the enemies in this stylish beat-em-up. Plus, I'd always been more of a movie buff than anything (although lately I'm more into gaming), so the fact the plot revolved around a guy named Joe who loves movies spoke to me on a cosmic level.

This is the game that got me interested in Clover Studios, who later became Platinum Games. 

Jak II is probably a really good sequel to Jak and Daxter. My issue with it upon renting was I didn't like this weird darkening-what-were-kid's-games trend at the time.

I was pissed off by a sequel to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time that had the main character calling a woman a bitch in the first ten minutes, muddy visuals replacing the bright and colorful ones fro the first game, and Godsmack music in place of the orchestral-sounding music in the previous entry. When I saw the Jak series seeming to do the same thing, I was immediately turned off just enough not to rent it again. 

Now that I've separated the awful taste of the "teen boys marketing trends" of the early 2000s from the game itself, I'm interested in giving Jak II another shot, because it did seem like a decent open-world game with enough weapon and vehicle variety to keep it interesting. 

Tony Hawk's Underground was where the series started to lose me. I remember there being a bigger focus on the world you were in, because games were starting to compete with the open-world genre GTA had made such huge sellers of. But for me, the appeal of these games was always the music and stunts they had you pull. I think I liked Underground, but the switch in focus would hurt the series for me down the line.

I was a big fan of playing as Ben Franklin as well. 

Ratchet & Clank was my introduction to the series and ... I wasn't mad about my rental, but I wasn't really all that intrigued by it either. I don't think I really got all that far. I probably wanted to play it just for the sheep gun and was disappointed when that didn't happen early enough in the game.

Mario Kart: Double Dash was a fun Mario Kart, even if I never really understood what was such a big deal about having two players on one kart? For single player, it didn't change a whole lot and I'm not really sure who wants to be the "item guy" on two-player, but I did play it often enough to get first place in all difficulties and get the timing exactly right for a starting boost in every race.

Speaking of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, it appeared on Gamecube late in the year, and I blasted through the whole thing with one rental. For whatever reason, even after beating it, I wasn't able to unlock the original game. Not sure why. 

Did anyone else run back up that giant stairwell near the end, thinking it couldn't possibly be the developer's intention to have that sequence last that long? Anyway, it was a really fun game with some hardcore save point placements and a lot of cinematic slow-motion and really fun parkour platforming. I loved this game.

The (EDIT: Second-to-)last game I remember from this year is XIII, which is  one I never played but wanted to really badly because of how much I loved cel shading at the time. 

Oh, and does anyone remember Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand? Again, I never played it, but that was an interesting concept: Going outdoors in order to succeed in a game. Well, more likely opening a window, but still. Never really heard of something like that before or since.