2001 – 2009: The Ones That Got Away

Not every best-seller is a great game, and not every great game becomes a best-seller. Originally posted as part of SavyGamer’s retrospective on the decade, these games represent some of what I consider forgotten gems of the past few years.

Sled Storm, PS1 – July 2000
By my memory, Sled Storm was the first game in which I ever felt competitive. When I was watching the Matrix for the first time (well after its release, mind), Rob Zombie in the background of the club scene made me nostalgic for playing Sled Storm with my brother. We’d make up what we thought were the lyrics to the song as we blasted through the snowy tracks.

It was the first racer of its kind that we played that allowed customisation of vehicles, and I still remember several of the tracks vividly. One of us would find a shortcut and keep it secret from the other until the one race where we really needed to use it, and we’d reappear later on in the course laughing all the way. There were shortcuts available that were only useful if you had a certain tread and weight, because the snow was deeper, or some that were blocked off by an ice wall that could only be accessed if you were going a certain speed. I remember snowmen, and rabbits, that were worth points if you ran them over.

For us, long before Motorstorm or Pure, Sled Storm built the niche they would fall into so comfortably.

Vib-Ribbon, PS1 – September 2000
For a long time, whenever I bought a new album, I would listen to it first through Vib-Ribbon. There’s something about interacting with the music that really grabbed me – perhaps that’s the reason I’m such a fan of music rhythm games today. Vib-Ribbon took any music CD you owned and turned it into progressively harder 2D levels to traverse, matching the mood of the track perfectly while still providing a superbly engineered and natural difficulty curve.

Tsurugi (Blade of Honor), Arcade – 2001
I don’t remember when, but at one point, my mother took us on a trip to Scotland. Partly, it was to see my father’s family, but mostly because she was doing research into our family tree and wanted to go hunting around graveyards. My brother and I would have been more than a little bitter about trudging around churchyards after a long car journey at the best of times, but for this particular break we managed to catch Scotland in the most blustery, wettest, coldest period we could have done. In one particular camp we stayed in, we were pitched directly on the coast, and the side of the tent bowed inward so dramatically that I could barely move without the rain soaking through onto my face. I probably would have complained a lot more, if it weren’t for Tsurugi.

The camp we were staying in had a small arcade, far too overpriced for what it was, but for me at the time, the only decent gaming I could get. After a few rounds of Silent Scope, Tsurugi caught my eye – it was, to me at the time, the epitome of technological advancement. This thing is still, in my mind, the precursor to the Wii – you held a sword hilt that positioned itself with a pair of accelerometers and an IR camera. It had one button, used to initiate a special move, and a pedal to step on in order to lunge forward. In every other respect, it was an on-rails slash-em-up, and I absolutely adored it. It was a level of interactivity I’d not before seen, and I put pound coin after pound coin into its slot until my money for the day was exhausted. It’s a crime that there has not been a Wii port of this. I would buy it immediately.

Go! Go! Beckham! Adventure on Soccer Island, GBA – August 2002
This is possibly the weirdest licenced property ever. David Beckham is stranded on a desert island; an island whose inhabitants happen to use balls for every purpose imaginable. The evil Mister Woe has stolen all the balls and turned animals into monsters to form his own football league – monsters known by such names as the Strika, the Winga, or the Keepa. Yes, really.

Behind all this ridiculousness, though, lies a really solid and unique platformer by Denki. Essentially, you are useless without the various balls in every level, which allow you different powers – whether it’s the standard ball that you use to knock out enemies, the cannonball that’s much heavier and more powerful, the rubber ball that bounces, and so on. Each level plays like a puzzle to be solved, along with the twitch response and preparation that you’d expect from a platformer. A really solid title that’s unfortunately difficult to find right now.

James Bond 007: NightFire, GCN – November 2002
Another entry that defines itself, for me, by the multiplayer. Long into the night, my friends and I would set up randomised weapon matches on Skyrail, grappling to buildings halfway across the map and flying over each others’ heads, and controlling Sentinel missiles into each others’ faces. One of our favourite modes was one of indirect kills on Snow Blind – through trip mines, remote detonation, and when all else failed, a pistol. I can’t tell you exactly what held us so much about Nightfire – it wasn’t the most balanced game, although it did better than Goldeneye with the characters having different stats – Oddjob was impossible to hit, of course, with his homing hat as a secondary weapon that got far more kills than it should have. Jaws, though, had more health than others. Some of the standard soldiers were extremely well-camouflaged for different levels, giving an advantage that was far too significant, and of course whoever was wielding the Golden Gun would streak ahead without any recourse. There was no real reason we should have loved it so much, but the first time I flew a remote-control helicopter into a friend, I was hooked.

Nightfire’s also worth mentioning just for the territory it broached with the single-player campaign. For the first time, a Bond game tried to survive on its own merits and story without just a film licence and Pierce Brosnan to back it up. For the most part, it worked, with all the cheesiness and considerably more action than a film, and set a very respectable stage for 2004’s Everything or Nothing.

The Chzo Mythos, PC – 2003-2007
When Yahtzee rose to internet fame with Zero Punctuation a few years ago, it was long-deserved. Having been introduced to Fully Ramblomatic in Sixth Form by a friend, I’d been following his ridiculous brand of wit for quite a while. His breakdown of how Wind Waker is about a young boy struggling with issues of homosexuality and incest and the imagery therein is still an article I recommend whenever I get the opportunity, and the Silent Hill sketch ‘A Big Red Shiny Helmet’ is still one I would like to see produced. However, the reason I loved Yahtzee was that he was a competent game designer as a team of one.

Using Adventure Game Studio, Yahtzee built a point-and-click adventure with his own pixel art and script to accompany it, called 5 Days a Stranger. Over the next few years, he released three more games – 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby’s Notes, and 6 Days a Sacrifice, all of which combined top-tier puzzle gameplay that was never frustrating, with his brand of gallows humour and sardonic wit slipping perfectly into the guise of the main character, Trilby. The Days games have legitimately been some of the most creepy and exhilarating games I have ever played, especially Trilby’s Notes, a text parser game that very rarely misunderstands the input, the final act of which is simply superb.

Special mention also goes to the non-Days game Teddy Murder, an alphabet shooter which unfortunately seems to have been removed from the internet entirely.

Rockstar Presents: Table Tennis, 360 – May 2006
Table Tennis is famous for being the test-bed for Rockstar’s RAGE engine before it reappeared in GTA IV, but it was a decent game in its own right. It was also hard as nails.

Table Tennis was the game that I was playing when my first 360 started to crash out of games. Maybe I associate it with it being difficult because when I was doing well, it would crash and make me redo the tournament all over again, but it was worth replaying the tournament and risking more damage to the console because it was just that good. It tapped into that annoying part of the gamer brain that will suffer defeat and frustration over and over again just in search of that elusive win. it was so simple, but it enthralled me for months.

Super Rub-A-Dub, PS3 – September 2007
Super Rub-A-Dub was the first PS3 downloadable game that I bought when I got my PS3. For me, it was the first game that really sold the idea of motion control for the system.

I originally played it at a friend’s, it having been his first downloadable title for the system as well, and the idea of competition with him drove me through the game to get gold medals on every stage and every duck available. It’s still a shame that there’s never been any DLC for it – I’d buy it in an instant.

Afrika/Hakuna Matata, PS3 – August 2008
Afrika was promised for the PS3 since before launch, and when it arrived in China in 2008 with full English support I jumped on the cheapest import copy I could find. While it’s oddly inconsistent – the animations of the animals polished to near-perfection, but the vehicle physics barely extant – it’s one of the most unique titles available for the system. Perhaps it was a little romanticised by how hard it was to obtain and how long it had been promised, but for me, it was Pokémon Snap, a game I adored, with more freedom and much more grounded. It’s rumoured to arrive in the West at some point soon, but I recommend picking up a copy from anywhere you can if you are able.