Sonic Adventure 2.
Sonic was on Nintendo. And in 3D. And speaking. I don't know if people nowadays really understand how amazing that was back in the day. Criticize the game all you want, but you're a fool if you don't think the game was beloved.
You were a bit late to the party. But I guess a lot of people were... my understanding is that the SA games performed quite well on GC.
Speaking of Dreamcast... the fact that the games on that platform didn't look jagged and blurry was mind blowing to me. PS1 and N64 blew me away with their 3D graphics as well, but I definitely saw flaws with them. As far as I was concerned, DC was basically perfect.
A few things somewhat more recently:
- The collapsing building in Uncharted 2.
- "Would you kindly?" reveal in BioShock
- The abundance of content (not just items, but text and stuff to do) in Animal Crossing: New Leaf
- The first main quest I completed in Dragon Age: Origins. The series has continued on the same bent, but I was honestly surprised when I was presented with a twist that gave me two story choices that could both be considered moral from one perspective and amoral from another. My expectation of BioWare at that point was "obviously good" and "obviously evil".
And to be a bit more non-specific, whenever a game has pure mechanical game design or balance or controls or level design that just
work I get chills. That shit is why I play games. Fuck graphics, fuck story, fuck everything. If I can pick up the controller (or whatever) and it's just
fun and I just want to play for the sheer joy of it... that's why I video games.
A recent example is obviously Super Mario 3D World, but another less-obvious example I played recently is ZombiU. I'm not that far into it so it might fall apart eventually, but it has such a clear rule set and the mechanics are balanced so well that it almost feels like a board game. That might break immersion for some people, but to me it just clicks and feels nice. The game has other flaws, but the whole "go out and do as well as you can until you die" loop and risk/reward aspect of what items you want to keep with you (and therefore lose eventually, either temporarily or permanently) is brilliant. The scarcity of resources and focus on survival is brilliant. I look forward to digging into it a bit more, warts and all, and seeing where it goes.
