A long time ago on an Ars far, far away, video game coverage operated quite differently. In our first ten years of existence, games coverage often blended into a format that revolved around our emphasis on busy, passionate forum posts. Ars authors' biggest posts could drive commentary, but more often than not, the most bustling threads were the ones started by readers themselves.
It's interesting, then, to examine the concept of history's "best Ars games" through the unique prism of forum-driven hindsight. I went into this project of sorting our game-review history with a list of personal favorites that I thought might be borne out by at least some of our readers. I soon found that it was more important to look at the games that enjoyed both instant and lasting acclaim from our picky and obsessive regulars.
The result is a pretty solid list of must-play video games from around the turn of the century, though this list combines some unsurprising trends with a few surprise blips along the way. Thus, let's go back to 1998, the year ArsTechnica.com was officially registered in late December, and leap from forum post to forum post for the next ten years in this Ars Gaming Week retrospective.
1998: StarCraft & StarCraft: Brood War
We begin this list with an absolute beast of a year in terms of viable game-of-the-year contenders. But if we’re being true to Ars Technica’s founding vision as a destination for PC enthusiasts, then the year’s best console games—Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, etc.—are disqualified by default. (Please let this ruling serve as a stern reminder that this is not a certifiable “best game of every year” list. The bias runs strong with this one. But don't fret—console games will emerge before long.)
Even with that restriction, the choice is still difficult. Windows 95 (and, soon, W98) had solidified its dominance as a gaming platform. As DirectX tools matured, dedicated video cards became more attractive to purchase. The result was a year full of 3D action and adventure games that anyone around Ars could argue was the PC game of 1998, both in terms of immediate sales and lifetime accolades.
You may still argue that the no-brainer choice is 1998's Half-Life, but we picked another game for a few reasons. In 1998, not every PC gamer had a Voodoo card ready to unlock its full potential (and people were still using Ars' forums to determine the game's system requirements in 2001). Whereas the 486 and Pentium systems of the world were primed to crank one game’s 2D, 480p brilliance upon first boot: StarCraft. What’s more, Blizzard turned this game from a sci-fi reskin of WarCraft II into a three-faction explosion of RTS brilliance. This happened in the face of incredible levels of strategy-gaming scrutiny, both as a highly anticipated hit from the beloved Blizzard and as a salvo in that era’s increasingly crowded tactical-military fray.
Yes, Half-Life inspired and redefined first-person gaming as we knew it, paving the way for years of future brilliance—and for significant games elsewhere on this list. But StarCraft arguably did the opposite: it stopped would-be contenders for the RTS crown for a very long time. Hence, game fans are still watching, and raving about, high-level StarCraft professional play. Two decades later, readers still come to Ars Technica to keep up on the game.
Though StarCraft gets the honors for 1998, readers didn't really come to Ars to discuss it—or, really, any RTS—until the following year. By then, at least one user was bold enough to declare StarCraft “the best RTS game ever,” and they were joined by others who were already charmed by what both it and its Brood War expansion brought to the RTS table. Still, more than a few others argued that 1997’s Total Annihilation was a better entry. Neither side could agree whether StarCraft’s unit balance and unit-grouping limitations were masterful or “StarCrap.”
Lucky us, we’re not here to pick the better RTS—we’re just singling out our pick for 1998. (And let's not forget, both the default game and its massive, must-have Brood War expansion pack launched in the same year, which was only somewhat common in the expansion-pack era.)
If you’re wondering: hell yes Half-Life gets the year’s runner-up slot... even if early Ars readers waited until 1999 to argue for its inclusion in any "best of" list.
1999: System Shock 2
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Things on board the Von Braun are not awesome. In fact, they are very bad.Electronic Arts
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Your former crewmates are looking a little...mutated.Electronic Arts
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The robots are as unfriendly as the mutants. And ammo is scarce.Electronic Arts
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Though the graphics are outdated, SS2 manages to still be creepy.Electronic Arts
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It's not just a scary starship—it's a scary haunted starship!Electronic Arts
1999 was another classic year for PC gaming, and while online multiplayer shooters began dominating retail, the year’s nod has to go to the game that Ars’ forum users couldn’t get enough of: System Shock 2.
In great news, the game has persisted as a stark, terrifying, and timeless entry in PC gaming’s “second” FPS era. By the time the game reached the modern digital-download sphere by way of a GOG re-release, fans had spent years rebuilding and optimizing its bits for newer players. As my Ars colleague Lee Hutchinson wrote in 2013:
The greatest thing about System Shock 2 is that it doesn't need modernizing. When you're crawling through the tunnels beneath the botanical garden on deck 5, grimly searching through hastily buried bodies because you need the crew section access card, it doesn't matter that the graphics are low-poly and the textures are a bit blurry, because it's bloody terrifying. The air is thick with the clanking of the horribly disfigured cyber-midwife automatons, cooing their awful cooing to the bloated eggs which fill the crawlspaces. The dulcet tones of the mad artificial intelligence SHODAN echo in your ears, taunting and goading at the same time. You don't hear the parasite-infested crewman sneak up behind you until it screams "I'M SORRY!" and begins bludgeoning you with a wrench.
Meanwhile, for a decidedly “forums in 1999” take on the game, here’s something from our best-of-1999 thread:
System Shock 2 may not win everybody's game of the year (it won in some places like Looney Games), but it's the best computer game I've played in a long time (I like it better than Half Life). So, if you enjoy games, and want to play a game that is way cool, complex, and addictive try SS2. Of course, prepare for frustration with some of the complicated puzzles... $#@!@ multi-pictures...
Our runner-up race ends in a tie: Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. Picking a favorite is difficult, if only because we know what flame wars that can lead to, but it’s hard to understate their combined impact at retail. Both games came with pesky single-player modes, but they were two huge salvos in a new world of “online required” gaming, and it’s fair to say that each needed the other in order to make their case at big-box retailers. (Plus, they paved the way for that year’s biggest mod release, Counter-Strike, to make waves with its own standalone retail launch one year later.)
2000: Deus Ex
The rhetoric applied to 1999’s System Shock 2 counts doubly here, and Deus Ex even earns a few more nuggets of gushing praise that still apply nearly 20 years later. Up until Deus Ex’s launch, you could make a good argument for another favorite “second era” FPS game: either SS2, Half-Life, or Thief: The Dark Age. Deus Ex may not count as your absolute favorite compared to those, but objectively, it was the first great game to synthesize the best bits of the previous three.
It really was the pinnacle of the smart-and-sneaky first-person wave of video games, and it came packed with complex RPG systems, tricky traversal puzzles, branching narrative paths, compelling stealth mechanics, and a memorable cyberpunk story full of solid writing and voice acting. One amazing thing is that this game somehow emerged from the same combined company that brought us Daikatana. Give credit to Ion Storm’s chief, John Romero; when he wasn’t trying to make us his bitch, he apparently left Ion Storm Austin alone—and made sure that its assembled staff, led by Warren Spector, could carry forward its experience on series like Ultima and Thief.
The game’s arrival on Ars’ forums was decidedly mixed, with one thread lauding its impressive free demo, downloadable ahead of the game’s retail launch. Another thread decried the retail version primarily because it didn’t run in optimized fashion. (The latter discussion prompted at least one reader to demand that OP update their PC and “drown in the toilet.” How’s that for year-2000 forum culture?)
But ultimately, Deus Ex won out as readers’ most favorably received game of the year. As one commenter put it:
it's been awhile since i've played a single player fps that was so immersive. the only thing missing from making deusex perfect is the fact that dead bodies don't alert the guards that somehting [sic] is up.
Diablo II earns the 2000 runner-up spot, if only because its clincher of an expansion pack, Lords of Destruction, didn’t launch for another year. At the time of the game's initial release, Diablo II didn’t land as neatly as we may all want to remember; Ars’ forums lit up during the game’s June launch window with complaints about performance (not to mention anger over a two-day retail launch delay, egads!).
2001: Halo Combat Evolved
Talk about a year for console gaming: Xbox arrived. Dreamcast hung on for dear life. Nintendo launched two systems (Gamecube, Game Boy Advance). And PlayStation 2 finally established its footing as a dominant console, largely due to Grand Theft Auto 3 and a bunch of EA Sports games storming the sales charts. Meanwhile, Ars readers at the time conceded that it wasn’t a killer PC-gaming year, with the likes of Max Payne, Civilization III, and Operation Flashpoint topping their lists.
While our readers at the time weren’t all buying themselves a new Xbox console, the ones who did made no bones about what a blast they had with Halo:
Halo is mind blowing. The AI and people you play with in single player mode is amazing. My friends watch me play, it's that neat. They realy[sic] don't even wanna play. The depth of story and mission is amazing. Nothing like it.
That thread also includes shout-outs to the LAN potential of multiple Xbox consoles, which our readers were savvy enough to dub “Xboxen” that early on. Points to the Ars faithful.
2002: Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Let’s sum this one up with a 2002 Ars forum thread simply titled, “The Official Morrowind made my jaw fall off thread.”
I wasted 30 minutes just looking at heads for christsake. There is so much to do just with customizing your character that it is overwhelming. What do I want to do? I ask myself. I have already stepped a tad past character creation and already I am flabbergasted.
Do I give Agrille back his ring that I found in the bucket? Do I try to pick that lock? Do I look into these bandits that I hear people whining about? WHAT THE HELL DO I DO FIRST!!!???!!!???
Morrowind’s massive, open-ended, first-person quest proceeded to persist as a top year-end pick for Ars readers, with Metroid Prime landing as a surprisingly unanimous runner-up pick among readers. In one commenter’s words:
This game is ####ing awesome. I can't even describe how satisfying it is. Like any good game, it has its gotchas, but compared to the rest of this amazing experience, they're nothing. All the praise like 'so immersive', 'like I'm really samus', 'amazingly real world', etc do not even a hint of how good this is. Dear god, sometimes the rooms and areas are just so tactile; it's like when I think back I remember *being*there*, not playing some game there.
2003: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Ars’ readers voted loudly for KOTOR as the best game of 2003 (helped largely in part by its Windows port landing in the same year, mere months after its Xbox version), and nothing about that popular vote has looked foolish in hindsight.
The love began with impressions arriving shortly after the game’s Xbox version launched:
I'm beginning to like this game. I turned on all pauses so I could track my moves during combat; having a wookiee with a bowcaster, a hyperactive Twi'lek with a blaster rifle and a soldier with dual vibroswords is a sweet thing to behold.
I think it's worth it to buy an xbox for this game. I played through twice (once light, once dark) and I would play through it again if there were a third side :|
...and continued with year-end praise for the game, with an unsurprising fondness for its PC port.
It's from the SW-universe. It's from 4000 years before the SW-movies. It's a good RPG. It's got great voice-acting. It gave me a lot of new info about the SW-universe, and where it comes from. I'm no SW-fanatic, but this game gave me a lot of what I expect from a SW-game, and then some.
2004: Half-Life 2
After snubbing Half-Life as the choice for Ars’ first year of operation, I wouldn’t dream of doing the same thing to its sequel. There was no way this game would land in quiet or subtle fashion. Between hype, delays, and a bonkers data leak, all eyes were on Valve’s long-awaited FPS follow-up. But boy, did it deliver. A new facial animation system pumped heart into the series’ increased focus on narrative and stellar acting, while the new Source Engine’s robust physics system made this the most compelling physics-driven video game since 2001’s Halo. Try to remember a time when a weapon like the gravity gun was the most mind-bending new thing we’d seen in years.
Ars critic Julian Marcone acknowledged his status as the site's "Ebeneezer Scrooge" of game reviews, yet even he was still charmed enough to give the sequel a near-perfect score. As Marcone wrote:
The environment, the game world itself, could be simply summed as this: nothing short of a work of art. The sense of a rundown environment, of an oppressive social order and the grittiness of an abandoned place (both physically and mentally) is perfectly conveyed to the player.
You can't help but to be drawn into that post-war world. A world painted in the browns and grays of dirty streets, broken buildings, apathy and oppression. A police state in which you are watched at every turn, and the control from the authorities towards the population can be seen, heard and felt.
I can't possibly commend HL2's art direction enough in achieving such a constant and well-executed environment, which is powerful because of its insidious ever-presence. You will feel it as soon as the game begins when a flying sentry snaps a picture of you, to the very end inside the massive symbol of the Combine's authority, the Citadel. You will see it as the police patrol the streets, in the wrecked homes of City 17's citizens, in the cryptic posters on the walls, in the destroyed buildings left to decay.
Of course, picking HL2 as this year’s winner leaves a megaton of game in the runner-up slot: World of Warcraft. We didn’t get around to “reviewing” the game until early 2005, perhaps in part because it took so long for WoW’s players to log in. (Are you still a member of 2004’s Ars WoW Guild?)
2005: Shadow of the Colossus
In one of Ars Technica’s first official year-end gaming lists, longtime Ars contrarian Ben Kuchera took the opportunity to give the year 2005’s honors to a console game, not a PC one. In retrospect, I’m certainly not arguing with his choice of Shadow of the Colossus. As he wrote:
The things this game showed you and the world it took you to will haunt you. I still find it creeping back into my thoughts, somewhere behind my eyes. When I finally killed my first Colossus, I didn't feel proud or elated. Instead, I just felt saddened and guilty that I had destroyed a beautiful thing.
While the quest begins with trying to save a loved one, you have to ask yourself how far someone should go for that sort of thing, and what price their actions will require everyone else to pay. Forget what you know about heroes, or boss battles, or how a game should tell a story: this is something so far beyond your average game it makes everyone else look like they're making black-and-white silent movies.
My runner-up pick is a funky one, and one that wasn’t borne out by rabid Ars forum posts at the time: Geometry Wars on Xbox 360. Another way of describing this pick is "the beginning of the Xbox Live Arcade era." We needed a full two years as a staff to appreciate the game in article form, but there’s no denying its success paved the way for quirky, independent games to find lower-priced paths to retail, long before showdowns between digital download services became hot-button topics at Ars. (In my eyes, this pick pairs well with Shadow of the Colossus, which also did a lot to pave the way for “artistic” games as a viable product.)
2006: Wii Sports
How big a deal was the Nintendo Wii at the PC-centric Ars Technica? Go back to our first official "the Wii is out" forum thread (not to be confused with zillions of others, including one where people pleaded for a name change) and take a look at a staggering 127 pages of comments. It's easy to forget how captivating the Wii was in its first year among its haters and its converted alike.
And our comments thread for a year-end “what are you playing” discussion surprisingly revolved around people praising Wii Sports. As one commenter put it: "I learned that depth in execution can match depth in features when it comes to sheer fun.” Meanwhile, our pre-launch Wii Sports review was a bit hand-wavey about the game’s appeal, poo-pooing the visuals while calling Wii Tennis “uneven.” But the review ultimately scored the game a 9/10 (back when we issued numbered reviews!), saying:
The game is a great introduction to the Wii, and it's a blast with a friend. It also demonstrates how versatile the Wiimote is—you can hold it like a baseball bat, like a golf club, or you can underhand it like a bowling ball. You can put up your dukes and box with it. The controller can handle anything you throw at it, and there are a lot of neat ideas already present in Wii Sports.
Our own Ben Kuchera followed that line of logic by giving the "official" Ars nod to another mass-market Nintendo breakout: Brain Age for the Nintendo DS. As he wrote:
This is the "game" that made me relearn my multiplication tables and became a huge hit among a demographic that barely thought about gaming before. Touch-screen Sudoku was also a massive selling point, even though it almost seemed like an afterthought to the main game. Brain Age made the great-selling DS into a powerhouse among casual and non-gamers and it hasn't fallen back to Earth yet. It was a good present for gamers, non-gamers, and it made a lot of people pick up a portable for the first time. Nintendo's strategy of making games easier to get into and play paid off with the DS, and it looks like that idea is also giving the Wii a large boost.
Unsurprisingly, readers showed up to ask where the PC games were on our lists, but they could've answered that by looking at their own quiet reception to that year's PC games. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion didn't quite reach the level of "truly better than Morrowind" that fans were hoping for, in spite of racking up its own massive, years-long Ars thread. The eagerly awaited Battlefield 2142 drew criticism for a draconian EULA and packed-in spyware. (Oblivion, like most other Bethesda games in recent memory, only got better once modders got their hands on it.)
2007: Mass Effect
What a touchstone year for lasting, revolutionary video games, but there’s no way I’m picking any of 2007’s games—even arguably better ones—over Mass Effect as the best Ars game of that year.
Looking back, even picking a single runner-up would be insulting. This was a year where we saw WoW’s Burning Crusade expansion earn its $50 price tag on top of $15/mo subscription fees. Valve launched three games at once as its own $50 “Orange Box” SKU: Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. (I’m not sure the gaming world ever saw that much value in a $50 box again.) Our hopes for a System Shock 2 successor were finally borne out in the form of Bioshock. (As one reader put it, "The polish on this one is thicker than a loaf of bread, and the atmosphere is unparalleled. Probably the most involving game I've played since Deus Ex.") Elsewhere, Super Mario Galaxy confirmed that 3D Mario games were not dead, and Call of Duty entered its dominant Modern Warfare phase. Assassin’s Creed revolutionized the idea that when you jumped toward a wall in a 3D-traversal game, it just… worked. Even Supreme Commander briefly rekindled the debate over the ultimate RTS game on PC.
Meanwhile, Mass Effect launched on Xbox 360 with so many glitches, so much loading time, and so much slowdown that our own review was smothered in asterisks and caveats. But as one reader put it, “Warts and all, I'm more engrossed by Mass Effect than anything else I've played this year.” Hot tip to video game publishers: a compelling plot, punctuated by important choices, big-stakes action, and alien sex, has proven to be a winning formula among Ars readers for over 20 years.
2008: Fallout 3
Our forum’s near-unanimous choice for 2008 was Fallout 3, though this is the year where we saw more community members picking console games—and, egads, console exclusives—as some of their top picks. (Heck, some iOS games began contending for mindshare in 2008.) What's more, the game's dedicated Ars Technica forum thread, full of tips, complaints, and idle banter, went on for seven years and 143 pages before getting locked.
That's mostly a wonderful thread to frolic through, full of anecdotes like the following:
Not much new to report on my playthrough. Picked up the quest from Moira to check out the RobCo plant and got sidetracked with other dungeons on the way there. I love how one little diversion soon turns into a handful of hours and all of a sudden it's time to quit without even really progressing any quests.
One very intense gaffe I made last night was fast-traveling to Kaelynn's Bed and Breakfast or whatever it's called... It's just a bombed-out building south of Arefu, I'm not even sure why it's a named location on the map (guessing it's just meant to be a fast-travel 'bookmark' or what have you) but it is a Raider haven. They were none too happy when a plasma rifle wielding chick wearing Talon combat armor and a motorcycle helmet teleported right into the middle of their party.
(I won the battle, for the record. The Raider with the flamer almost did me in.)
Meanwhile, 2008 proves to be another tough year to pick a clear choice for a runner-up. By sheer votes, Burnout Paradise may have eked out our readers' number-two slot, while downloadable gems World of Goo and Braid received some of the most passionate reader accolades. We also saw a ton of votes for Rock Band 2, right when the plastic-instruments genre was at its peak.
But if you force me to make a pick, I'd have to go with Left 4 Dead, Valve's ambitious entry to the world of repeatable co-op shooting experiences. (That call is fueled in part by similar shouts from 2008's forum posters about games like Gears of War 2.) As one poster wrote in Ars' official L4D thread:
What a promising game so far - the gameplay's tight and polished, the audio's solid, and I can tell that the designers learned a lot of good lessons from classic horror movies. Major, major kudos to the AI implementation too. There's nothing like rampaging through the first half of a level, then inexplicably getting swamped by four-dozen zombies from NOWHERE who brought Hunter / Tank / Boomer backup. It also scales startlingly well: the game hauls ass on a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with a 256 MB x800 XL All-in-Wonder, and only chugged when massive hordes of zombies appeared on a friggin' Athlon XP 2400+ with a 128 MB 6800 AGP.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/the-best-ars-technica-video-games-1998-2008/
2019-08-20 11:30:00Z
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