in my opinion, '98 was the best year for game releases. What's yours?
98 has some of my favorite games to ever come out, like:
And many more
Did a quick search because I don't remember what year games came out. Lol.
Turns out IMDB had a decent list and 2004 was a fantastic year.
1.Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
2.Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
3.Yume Nikki
4.Half-Life 2
5.Silent Hill 4
6.Cave Story
7.Katamari Damacy
8.Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
2008 for me.
Fallout 3 GTA IV Burnout Paradise FarCry 2 Little Big Planet Dead Space Smash Bros Brawl Left 4 Dead Fable 2 Gears of War 2 Mario Kart Wii Star Wars: Force Unleashed Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Rock Band 2 Civilization Revolution Tomb Raider: Underworld Call of Duty: World at War
98 was incredible, besides all the ones OP mentioned they missed:
Surely one of the best years, only possibly beaten by 2004:
So many amazing games!
Not going to lie, it feels like games have just gotten significantly worse, and less frequent, since then. I don't think we've seen 2004's quantity of good games since 2004. The best games since then, in my opinion, would be:
So...yeah 2004 had in one year more high quality games than have released since then.
I think expectations have grown astronomically since 2004, budgets have ballooned, graphical fidelity and animation quality has skyrocketed, development team headcounts have gone through the roof and many games just have more systems than they did before.
Games are less frequent because they take a lot longer to make, I read the other day that Halo 2 was apparently churned out in 10 months, these days even games building on other games foundations such as Tears of the Kingdom can take 5 years to come out.
2001 - SSX Tricky was released. I played the hell out of that game. Still would today honestly, it had such satisfying trick mechanics.
The actually best year is always a personal point of view not because the titles but because the age. It is usual relate the best year of gaming to when younger you pick up the controller for the first times, and even some malicious titles are remember as good ones. Like Jurassick Park for PS1 I will remember it as epic even if isn't a big deal compared. As adult I feel time for gaming have stopped, gaming now is mostly behind microtransation and high prices.
2011 hits hard.
Parasite Eve, Unreal, Shogo, RE2, SiN, Thief: The Dark Project, etc. Certainly an amazing year in gaming.
Ooh I forgot about SiN! I've played that demo a million times when I was a kid haha