CCIV: Game of the Year 2001 - Round Eleven

[Neon Ignition]

We're in the final run now for 2001, falling just shy of the number of rounds the previous year took to complete.


Are any of the above games amongst the best of 2001 and if so, why?

[QualityChimp]

Zero Gunner 2.
Bit of a cheat as I didn't play it BITD, but I've since played it on Dreamcast and bought it on Switch.

You're flying across the 3D rooftops of a city, shooting helicopters and mech on the motorways.
You reach the coast and a submarine appears.
It opens up to reveal a bank of missile tubes.
Then the front rolls open and fires from a rotating turret.
It then explodes and parks between two skyscrapers.
Then it transforms into a robot.
Finally, it starts climbing between the towers like a crazed Kong.
It takes a chunk of damage and falls a bit.
Then the main section rotates to attack with some different cannons.
Finally, it plummets into the sea, defeated.

That's one boss.

Such an inventive and thrilling game with some of the coolest shmup bosses ever, IMHO.

[Solar]

Worms world Party is the game that kicked off my PC gaming addiction, my first real online game and it had such a great community.
Of course that gets my vote.

[Neon Ignition]

VF4 is my vote on this one, I was steering into the VF side of things over Tekken during this era and VF4 is about as far as I went with it before veering back.

[Asura]

Two here.

Virtua Fighter 4 is, well, VF4. 3 was fine and technically fantastic for the time, but its slightly weird release at home (with the Dreamcast version coming a fair while after the game's launch) meant that it's probably the game I've played the least, as I only ever saw it once in a UK arcade. VF4, especially its revised version, was just amazing and felt like a real triumph for the series.

World War 2 Online is another. It's a strange one, in that it wasn't an amazing game in and of itself, but it did something genuinely bold, where the game is played across a half-scale map of Western Europe. It would be years (2 years, but years ) before something else tried to do something similar, and it's an idea I wish had caught on.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Was VF4 on console in 2001? I played that a lot.