2004 in review

[lord of the mark]

Gaming highlights from 2004. can be best games, but also anything else memorable - what genres were successful, sequels vs new games, hardware, publishers, whatever trends interest you.

[Tassadar500]

Halo 2
World of Warcraft
Half-Life 2
Doom III

I think FPSs did well this year, but RPGs will well in 2005, with TES IV, Jade Empire, and World of Warcaft.

[Adagio]

2004 was a year for fps games, so not my favorite year for gaming...

Of the games from 2004 I have on my computer now is:

NFSU2 - Not that great. I'm not a fan of arcade style racing games, and the game was designed so you had to spend more than 50% of the time playing the boring missions (street X, URL, etc) before you could play the fun missions. Also the MP code for drafting failed too much

RCT3 - After the release of the first patch the game becomes playable. It's not that great compared to the first RCT game, but better than expected

UT2k4 - More fun than the other fps games released, because when playing fps games I prefer to have a huge fight with lots of bots (or human players if possible), and not just the campaigns (I kinda hate campaigns unless they have something to offer, which Doom3 nor HL2 had)

[General Ludd]

Rome Total War and Silent Storm: Sentinels are the only gems that I can think of right at the moment.

And Hearts of Iron 2, if you don't mind it being released a week into 2005.

[Solver]

Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 . Two excellent FPS games each in their own style, and Half-Life 2 showing the most beautiful environments/sights and continuing the great story, and Doom 3 being the most graphically amazing thing up to date together with being the best classic-style SP shooter....

[Grumbold]

Not being a FPS player it was not a great year, but
Rome: Total War,
Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines,
City of Heroes,
Everquest II
and others I've forgotten all helped to pass the time.

[Sandman]

I bought a Gamecube this year.

Metroid Prime: Nice, different FPS incorporating classic metroid features.

Eternal Darkness: An excellent, grown-up, RPG-type thing.

Viewtiful Joe: Utterly beguiling 2D platform beat-em-up.

Ikaragu: Ultra-retro shooter. Entertaining, but limited.

Beyond Good and Evil: Easy, but polished Zelda-esque RPG.

Skies of Arcadia Legends: I fancied a console-style RPG, and got this. Lots to do, and the ship battles are really quite cool. Gets a bit easy towards the end though.

On the PC front, I got Dominions 2, a fantastically complex fantasy war game. And loads of DVDs.

[DrSpike]

City of Heroes
Half life 2

Couple possibles yet to play yet.

[General Ludd]

When was city of heroes released? For some reason, it seems like it's been out longer than a year to me.

[General Ludd]

Since my sense of time is so off, vanilla silent storm would probably do. And there's probably tons of other games that I don't even think of as being a 2004 game.

[DrSpike]

From memory it was around March '04.

[Dis]

I was unimpressed.

Bought Doom 3. got bored of it in a few days (never even finished). I still have it on my hard drive. I may finish one of these days...

Everquest 2. I got bored of this one in a couple of weeks. Never got my character past level 12. I found the newbie island to be the most fun part of the game.

Silent Storm. Not sure if this is 2004. I got a copy from my brother. I really still haven't played it. I tried loading it up, and couldn't figure it out. Maybe I'll try reading the instructions. But it didn't seem to interest me enough to get me to read the instructions.

I played mostly older games such as NWN and Civ3. And Morrowind. Maybe you could include the premium modules of NWN in the 2004 list. they were pretty good, but nothing groundbreaking.

[Jamski]

Heh, the German release of Hordes of the Underdark was 2004. Rome Total War, Warhammer 40K : Dawn of War, Thief 3

Umm... What else came out last year that I played more than 2 minutes of?

-Jam

[Standup]

Having decided to concentrate mainly on budget and/or fully patched games i'm now probably approaching 2003. Current highlight is Gothic2.

[lord of the mark]

So the consensus is that 2004 was the year of FPS and MMORPGS, with a steady flow of console titles.