The PS1 GTA series was pretty hit or miss in the minds of critics before October 2001. I considered myself a fan... enough to have actually bought the London 1969 expansion disk. So I was already interested by the time those first few screenshots and details started hitting the press. We simply had no idea how huge this game was going to be.

When I played the MGS2 demo back in ZOE, that was the first time I thought "This is what a next-gen game looks like." When I played GTA3 for the first time, I thought "This is what a next-gen game plays like."

It really was astonishing. The size of the world, the open-ended mission structure, the sidequests and Hidden Packages, the voice cast, the mix of crazy driving and hand-to-hand action, the radio stations. The sense of being in a living world.

Sure, some will see nothing more than a reprehensible crime simulator, with cop-killing and hookers and drugs and gangsters. But with a moral decay standard that ranges from MTV to HBO, it just doesn't strike me as the kind of thing to worry about. Society at large is fine with Grand Theft Auto.

GTA has earned every bit of praise, and very little of those accolades are overly concerned with content. This is a damn fine game, and it reinvented a franchise that only got better.

Memory Score: I know more about Liberty City than I do about my own hometown

The one big drag to every GTA game is that it means I don't play much of anything else for a couple months. Although I was there for launch day for the much-anticipated MGS2, I didn't get into playing it until January.

It was the ZOE demo that sold me, because I never had a very high opinion of the PS1 Metal Gear Solid. But that demo sold me hard. It looked amazing, it was a hoot to play, and it revealed the edge of a storyline that you just had to experience.

And right from the beginning, you knew it was going to be a ride... with that uberlong movie showing Snake ruining his inviso-suit bungeeing off the bridge, spying on soldiers and Russians and who knows what else, and getting the annual cigarette lecture from Otacon. Right there, the game was telling you what was about to happen: you're getting kickass action, long movie interludes, and a bunch of heavy plot points that may or may not make any sense. If you were still surprised/annoyed by the Raiden switch, the Crazy Colonel sequence, Fission Mailed, the mind-warping finale, and all the other weirdo junk Kojima threw in there... well, you just weren't paying attention when the game started.

This is one of the few storyline-driven games that I've played through multiple times. It's that good.

Memory Score: are you people still going on about Raiden? get over it

I initially heard about Fatal Frame through some brief previews in OPM (which is my main defense of print gaming mags: you're more likely to see info on games you wouldn't normally consider yourself interested in, especially little games like Fatal Frame, simply because you're physically turning pages and you're forced to see everything they cover. Online gaming sites are great, but it's too easy to limit your reading habits to what you already know you're going to like, rather than taking a chance and clicking on info that you've already pre-judged and rejected.) The description mentioned that it was to be a survival horror game with a camera as your only weapon.

A camera? That's exactly the kind of oddball mission statements I look for in my gaming.

I had been burned by Code: Veronica and largely turned off on Silent Hill by this point. So I was looking for a new horror franchise... and the camera hook was all the impetus I needed.

Despite some cosmically bad box art, Fatal Frame became a continual talking point in my PS2 life. I've been back and forth over Resident Evil and Silent Hill (and others) since, and I still haven't found anything that comes close to the Fatal Frame series for genuine terror. It's the camera that does it: you're accustomed to the third-person viewpoint for exploration, but when the game forces you to stare into the eyes of a killer spirit, in first-person, so you can take its picture... well, it's brown trousers time.

And the story? Haunting. It's Alfred Hitchcock telling a love story from beyond the grave, set amid the gory rural legends of traditionalist Japan. And the way it unfolds, in little awful bits and pieces... spectral flashbacks here, lost audiotapes to play there, so much more interactive and engaging that all those diary entries found in RE.

Memory Score: Kirie, poor girl... why did she have to become so attached to this world?

Another off-center choice. Mr. Mosquito was part of the Fresh Games label, which was supposed to kickoff a line of alternative, budget-priced niche games. To my recollection, Fresh Games lasted through exactly two releases: Mr. Mosquito and Mad Maestro (a music conductor rhythm game). You see, games like this come out in Japan all the time. Usually, nobody even considers a US/UK release because they're "too Japanese." But the surge of anime hits in the US around this time (Pokemon, Digimon, Dragon Ball Z, etc) opened the doors just a crack to allow some of this stuff to sneak through and hit that thirst for Domo-Kun style weirdness from the Land of the Rising Sun.

And, yes, Mr. Mosquito is quite definitely Japanese. You can't miss it: the whole game takes place inside one very typical Japanese family's house. As the titular mosquito, you have to fly around the dwelling sucking blood from the family members. It's more or less to scale - although the mosquito is highly cartoonized - so each level (focusing on one room and usually one person to attack) has plenty of space to fly around. Generally you have to do something to distract the person, say, by turning on the television, and then position yourself to dive in on the blinking blood points on any exposed skin. Once in injection mode, you twirl the sticks like mad, trying to get as much blood as possible without getting smacked to death once the human figures out what's going on.

Today, you might be able to do this as a 2D website Flash game in the States. But a full-on 3D video game? Never. Only in Japan.

The flying controls were pretty wonky (you'd think an insect would be more maneuverable) and there was lots of trial and error before you hit the blood spot just right... but on sheer concept alone, this was a game worth buying.

And although the Fresh Games concept didn't live to see another fiscal year, there's more than a little of this pro-Japan movement behind the firestorm success of a certain rolling ball title we'll get to in 2004...

Memory Score: everybody needs a few games in their library to dig out just to watch the room go WTF?!

Next week: it's going to be impossible to follow this batch. We'll take a stab at it with a military game, two cartoon games, and the inter-company crossover nobody expected. Are u still rappin' cool?