CCIV: Game of the Year 1999 Round Three

[Neon Ignition]

The match of the millennium continues as we shift into the third round of our search for the years best games


Which of the above games are amongst the best of 1999 and why?

[Colin]

Everybody's Golf 2 for me there. I couldn't even hazard a guess as to haw many hours I lost to that game.

[Hirst]

Driver - for all the quirks and bugs and the deeply unfair last mission - is easily one of my top ten games. I absolutely love it. The handling model was just perfect, few games really got across the wallowy/imprecise feel of big American cars and truly felt like it was done by people obsessed with old films of that era. Really, the entire thing is a tribute to The Driver - the car park proving ground bit is straight out of it. As are a bunch of the sound effects (they clearly ripped the crash noises off the opening chase). Roughly once a year I'll dig it out and play it to completion. Love it.

[wakka]

I've voted for Driver here. I haven't played it since it was contemporary, and to be honest I don't think it would stand up today. But I played it for hours and hours at the time. Just being able to drive around a free roaming city was compelling in itself, and there were loads of great little touches - the cardboard boxes you could smash through, the hubcaps spinning off as you screeched around a corner.

The gameplay itself was probably overly dependent on bashing into other cars repeatedly to deplete their health bar as the solution to everything, but I do remember some other cool ideas in there too. There was a memorable level where you had to drive safely so your passenger didn't get too scared. That was cool.

Overall the game felt really fresh at the time, and was simply fun to play.

Special mention to the 'tutorial' level which should burn in hell for all eternity for its ridiculous, pad-smashing difficulty.

[Neon Ignition]

So, none for me but the list does have notable moments:

Donkey Kong 64 - I was hyped. I mean ready, proper ready for this after the DKC trilogy and Banjo. But I think very early on in the game it just... killed me. Somehow it didn't click at all and to this day it's the only entry I've never gone through.

Doshin the Giant - This will be the 64DD version but after playing the GC version for a fair length... I struggle to recall much fun about it.

Final Fantasy VIII - The controversial one. I enjoyed this much more than FFVII, the presentation and story was just better handled largely because I think Square was a bit more confident this time out. But... I just can't consider turn based RPGs to broadly be good games full stop, there's so little gameplay to them commonly

[Cepp]

Driver for me also although Dungeon Keeper 2 is close.

Driver is still really fun to just drive around the city in.

[Asura]

Bit of fun (not really) trivia for all of you from this year.

One of the games up there is the PC game Drakan. This was a game in which you could ride a dragon, and was part of the wave of "Tomb Raider but x" things that were big back then.

It's notable because it was the demonstration title for s3TC, s3's texture compression technology which hugely improved the way textures were handled in videogames using 3D hardware, so games could have more, richer, detailed textures... If you had an s3 card, which no-one did. Fortunately, Microsoft saw the potential in the tech and bought it, renaming it DXTC, or DirectX Texture Compression, versions of which are now used in practically every videogame, or at least, as common as JPEG compression is on websites.

[Asura]

Went for Front Mission 3, as I bought that game at the time and loved it. Though I tried to play it recently and found it a bit of a slog.

[QualityChimp]

I loved Final Fantasy VII, it blew my mind, so Final Fantasy VIII was a must-play.

However, the lead is an emo-fringed dullard and I found out that there was no point in levelling up as every enemy levels up respectively, so you may as well stay at Lvl. 1 and run away from every battle.
So I did. That was boring. I gave up.

Driver, however, was fried gold.
How they got that all onto a PS1 disc, I'll never know.
I've always loved vehicular-based entertainment growing up, from the Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider onwards.

I saw Bullitt after hearing the great Lalo Schifrin theme on the Ford Puma advert in '97 and loved those American Muscle cars sliding around corner on spongy suspension and Driver totally captured that vibe.
Launching your car over the hills or losing a hubcap on a tight corner.

It was cool how they used the "energy" bar to do several things like intimidate a witness or not get spotted.

That last level with the CIA limos was some major grade-A bull****, though.