(Sony Computer Entertainment America $50 PlayStation 2 13 and older) Ico is such a compelling work of art that one can rhapsodize about it for hours without mentioning the most important thing of all: it's a lot of fun to play. While there is almost no musical score, the sounds of Ico's feet echoing on the stairs, his heavy breathing and the wind whistling through the castle are magnificent. It is visually stunning yet its faded colors seem almost austere. ICO - I'm so in love with the action game Ico, I feel like telling people to spend $300 for a PlayStation 2 just so they can play this game. Alive! uses standard AVI format video, so if you have a digital camera that takes movies you can create your own living jigsaw puzzles.
(Remedy Entertainment $50 for PC and Xbox 17 and older)ĪLIVE! JIGSAW - This year's most interesting little game is Yavsoft's Alive! Jigsaw, a puzzle in which you put together a moving image. With a great story, some cool dream sequences and a neat gimmick that has Max seeing the world in slow motion, Max Payne doesn't just raise the bar on action games, he blows it to pieces. Max is a tough guy: most games allow the player to restore health through medical kits Max just takes painkillers to keep from passing out. MAX PAYNE - More and more often the language of film is being appropriated by games, but no game has ever done it quite as well as the first-person shooter Max Payne. (Sony Computer Entertainment America $50 PlayStation 2 everyone) Perhaps there is another driving game that emulates the feel and movement of a racing car as beautifully as this one, but unless I'm going down a shady road with the sun glimmering through the trees like diamonds, I don't even want to find out. GRAN TURISMO 3 A-SPEC - The gorgeous, almost photo-realistic graphics of Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec have ruined every other racing game for me. (Intelligent Systems $30 for Gameboy Advance everyone) It may seem like a good idea to send your battle copter to take out that transport ship, but by the time you realize that it's now in range of the enemy's antiaircraft missiles, it's history and you're in the Bronx.
Advance Wars puts you in command of soldiers, tanks, battleships and other dangerous things and asks you to win a series of tricky battles.
(Ion Storm $40 for PC 13 and older)ĪDVANCE WARS - I know the strategy game Advance Wars is great because I keep missing my subway stop. What would you pay for a role-playing game that doesn't force the player to wade through endless forests of annoying monsters? What if it also had a luckless private eye? What if we throw in wildly imaginative science fiction? What if it's the funniest game of the year? A Ginsu knife I can resist, but with a deal like this I want operators standing by. (Sega $40 Dreamcast everyone)ĪNACHRONOX - Anachronox is like one of those television ads in which they keep offering more stuff. It's the perfect game for anyone who wants to play tennis in a skirt. The women grunt in a higher pitch but play just as the men do.
This year Sega rectifies the situation, releasing Tennis 2K2 with a full roster of women, including Monica Seles and the Williams sisters. TENNIS 2K2 - Last year, Sega's great sports game Virtua Tennis was a hit with women, but they had to play as men. The PC game is great, but what I really love is the included mini-version for Palm hand-helds. In The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions, the player must do something straightforward - drop a ball through a hoop, fire a rocket - in the most convoluted way possible.
THE INCREDIBLE MACHINE: EVEN MORE CONTRAPTIONS - Any schoolchild knows the basic laws of cause and effect: if you dangle a mouse in front of a cat, it will run toward the bowling ball and knock it off the ledge onto a switch that will turn on a light bulb - but it's still wonderful to see this simple law of physics in action. Here are a reviewer's choices of the year's best videogames: