released March 2001, purchased March 2001
click here for my review written in April 2001!
You remember this game for exactly one reason: it came with a demo of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. As I'm sure was the case with most people, I played that demo more than I played Z.O.E.
Not that it was a terrible game - I recall lots of explosions - just a stupidly short one. I was also bitterly let down by the cliffhanger ending, which was either intended to spark a sequel or to get me to buy whatever anime/manga that the Z.O.E. franchise came from/vanished into. Not something I'd play today, just because the flashy graphics have been surpassed and there wasn't enough level or enemy variety.
I bought this for the MGS2 demo. So did you. And that's a game I actually would play today.
Memory Score: really, there was a game included with that demo?
| Adventures of Cookie and Cream |
released May 2001, purchased May 2001
click here for my review written in June 2001!
Here's one you didn't buy. To your everlasting shame.
This game shook the foundations here at fourhman.home. A game like this hitting so early in the PS2 lifecycle gave me high hopes for the future: two-player simultaneous cooperative play that was more than just Final Fight-esque street thug bashing. Five years later, they still don't make enough games like this.
The gimmick was that each player travelled vertically on half of the playing field, flipping switches and pressing buttons that would help the other player continue. Screw around or work against each other and it was game over. The two-player co-op led to some inventive boss fights, and the crazy level design required some serious platforming chops by the game's final stages. It also had great music and some really nice, sharp cutscenes. The only downside was some less-than-accurate controls.
This was such a happy, unique little game, and it remains criminally overlooked. With so many splitscreen deathmatches on the racks, Cookie and Cream was a blast of fresh air.
Memory Score: yes, it was about rabbits
released May 2001, purchased May 2001
I was moderately excited to pick up Crazy Taxi mainly because it was the first Sega game on my PS2. This seems all so quaint now, but for a while there it was 500% weird to see the Sega logo showing up on non-Sega hardware. Crazy Taxi was also the last arcade game I can remember lusting after, and it was a big Dreamcast game... so it was sorta cathartic to finally own it.
And it was still super fun. It was fast and silly and had more advertising than the Today Show. You could play it over and over again, each time pushing it just a little further into that gigantic, circuitous gamemap. That Crazy Box mode sucked ass though.
Crazy Taxi was in arcades since 1999 (and it's probably still in many of them) and enjoyed a brief moment in the spotlight as a Major Games Franchise. There were toys and sequels and releases on every gaming system known to man. And then the clones arrived... but even worse than that, games like GTA started including Crazy Taxi-esque modes as optional sidebar mini-games. The sun has set on Crazy Taxi.
Memory Score: at one time, we thought this was enough for one entire game
released May 2001, purchased May 2001
There's this one part in this oddball FPS where there's a prison breakout and you see revolutionaries running around yelling "Rrrrreeeeed Faction!" It's just stupid enough that I occasionally still quote it today.
It's hard to believe that the world had seen enough FPSs by mid-2001 that Red Faction had to hype itself as "the one with destructible environments." I mean, here we are still drowning in them today, and we don't often hear many good reasons to separate them from one another. That "geo-mod technology" was the main reason I bought Red Faction. It worked sometimes. If you were in a cave, you could blast chunks out of the walls. That's about it.
The theme? Underclass uprising! The motif? Lots of caves, then lots of space stations! The setting? Sci-fi! Red Faction didn't do much differently than other FPSs, but at the time, it was enough. I think it ended with the Death Star exploding.
Memory Score: it majored in Half-Life with a minor in Wood Carving
Next week: a forgotten PS1 hero, another Dreamcast port, the only sport I'll ever buy, and that game that everybody still refers to as a major work of art!
