I forgot about God Hand. I have the game and barely played it. I want to fix that this year.
Video Games of My Life: Part Nine – 2000-2005
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 On 03/13/2014 at 03:56 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
My buddy Mark and I have been playing video games for a long, long time. What we play together are mainly run-and-gun style FPSes, action movie stuff with over-the-top attitude to the point of the ridiculous. Comedy is a big part of our collective gaming. Our games have to have a big boom, wild crashes, explosions, or any game that has in its description “destructible environments”. I often think of the SCTV skit Farm Film Celebrity Blow-Up in relation to our gaming.
That’s me like John Candy on the left and Mark like Joe Flaherty
on the right. We like it blown-up real good!
"Go! Go! Go!" Beach landing on The Silent Cartographer
Our favorite run-and-gunner of the early aughts was Halo: Combat Evolved; that also made our go-to machine the Xbox - to which it was exclusively tied. We played campaign co-op through the levels Silent Cartographer and Assault on the Control Room every weekend until Halo 2 came out three years later. Frequently it would devolve into a kind of death-match with each of us trying to trip up the other in our race to the end of the levels. It was the warm-up to every gaming session, and I ended up getting a larger TV just so we could see more of the screen when playing it split/screen. It was the center of our gaming world.
Dual-wielding? Oh my yes!
Halo 2 was the first game I followed the development of, squealing with nerdy delight over the addition of dual wielding. I bought it on day one, waiting in line with many other people. It was fun but won-and-done. The replay value was almost nil for us since we didn’t play the new online multiplayer mode at all, and none of the levels in the campaign matched the awesomeness of that island of The Silent Cartographer in Halo 1. Halo remains an important game for us, but it’s not longer the weekend ritual it used to be (except for the few months we played Halo Reach Firefight matches and daily challenges).
"Spicy combo!"
Total Overdose was a third person shooter with all the right comedic over-the-top action of a Rodriguez movie. I still remember running from a collapsing tower I’d just blown up, wheeling the camera around, and seeing it come down right behind me. It was a big blockbuster movie moment. It made me jump from my seat like no movie has ever done.
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Burnout was a game series that fit the bill of games-that-go-boom. The third game Burnout 3: Takedown especially hit the right mark with great crash junctions and races that required you to knock other cars off the road to gain speed boosts. And no boring arenas! I keep looking for similar games like Split/Second and Bugbear’s Totaled! series (including their Ridge Racer: Unbounded), but none of these have reached that high peak of Burnout 3.
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I always kept my eye out for other games we could play campaign co-op. It was a pretty rare feature then, and even when you found one, you had to play split-screen or system link (an even rarer feature). Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and several games like it, fitted that request. Isometric action RPGs always recalled Gauntlet to my mind and they were always a blast to play especially since all players shared the same screen. This could be annoying too as one of us always interfered with the other in some way but ultimately it was a blast.
I remember thinking of the PS2 as the GTA machine. I wasn’t a big GTA fan but soon a few PC shooters started getting ported exclusively to PS2 like Red Faction and Half-Life that made me get one used several years later. It was only very late in the PS2’s life that a few games made it into our gaming sessions. God Hand fit all the criteria with its insane over-the-top fighting action and humor.
We hardly ever played the Gamecube. I saw it as the cell-shaded game system. I got it mainly for the Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, but I didn’t get too far in that game as I remember. We played Geist, one of the few exclusive FPSes. Viewtiful Joe was a fighting game with a cartoony art style we both played for a while. It was full of big attitude, had the cell-shaded art style, and big punches. I became a Clover Games fan after that which lead to God Hand and Okami on PS2.
I always had the opinion that you couldn’t have a good gaming experience on the tiny screen of the GBA, but when the GameBoy Player came out for the GameCube, I got it and started collecting a few GBA games to play on the big screen like Advance Wars. I was cured of this prejudice when the DS came out and I rented Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time and loved it.
These years were mighty for the fun I had with video games. I played more games than ever before, Halo turning me into a super fan of the medium. I became a subscriber to several magazines like Official Xbox, Official Playstation and GameInformer; and I got into comics through The Halo Graphic Novel. Video gaming in the first years of the 21st century was now my favorite hobby.
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