"In Since the Beginning" - A Potted History of a lifelong obsession with Videogames. Part 4: The Noughties

The noughties! Seems crazy to think that they began 20 years ago, and that most of the games that are well-established franchises now barely even made a dent in the gaming scene back then. 

Two decades is, of course, a lifetime in gaming but also a very long time in real-life terms - and those two decades saw huge personal change. I met "The One", we got married, we had a beautiful daughter, and lots of other non-gaming-related exciting stuff as well as a fair amount of horrible stuff to have to deal with too. 

The noughties were something of a gaming 'lull' for me, mostly propped up at the beginning of the decade by the console in the header image. Sega's last gasp in hardware, the Sega Dreamcast. Again it was the lure of being able to play arcade quality games at home that sold this console to me. Arcade perfect conversions of Sega's "Crazy Taxi" and a whole slew of innovative console exclusives such as Jet Set Radio and Metropolis Street Racer won me over. 

The latter game arrived around the same time as Coldplay's "Parachutes" album, and I'd just moved out into my own place after living with my Nan for a number of years. I'd stick on the CD (yeah, back then that's what folks listened to, how quaint) and shove on MSR and try for those perfect Kudos scores. It's a crying shame that Bizarre Creations no longer exist, I don't think any company has nailed that perfect blend of arcade racing and cool tracks, and it's inextricably linked to that Coldplay album (I went right off the band around their 2nd album release but never went off that game). 

Waiting in the wings was the console that put Sega's Dreamcast in the ground. Ironically, it was a console with one of the worst launch line-ups ever. The Playstation 2. A console I ignored completely at launch but one game begged, nay demanded to be played and it was eventually the game I bought the console for.

 

Grand Theft Auto 3. Yes indeed there had been 2 games before, and a superb London-based add-on pack for the original GTA (A game that I remember refusing to sell to kids who came into Electronics Boutique to buy it when I worked there, only for them to send their unwitting adults along to get it for them along with a load of lip and discourteousness which came with the territory). 

GTA 3 might not have been the first 'true' sandbox game but it was the first "3D" world where you felt like the whole place had a pulse, and was getting along just fine with or without your interaction. The nameless voiceless hero of the game aimed to work his way up to the higher echelons of gang life, stealing cars, maiming and killing anything that got in his way. 

I remember the initial reviews being a bit 'down' on the game but that was no reflection on what a game-changer this game was, and how it inspired any number of rip-offs (and sadly still does). 

GTA 3 was followed up by GTA Vice City. Everything about that game was perfect. The setting (80s Miami-alike), the music (the soundtrack actually ended up nailed into my car stereo at the time and I don't think anyone could've possibly picked a better selection of music, or a funnier selection of talk radio stations to underpin the game). Both games thrashed the PS2 to its limits. I remember a bunch of us all trying to fly the Dodo in GTA3, not as easy as it sounds - it flew just like its counterpart in nature but some of us managed to get quite a distance in the thing. 

I got married in 2004, and (hilariously enough) my Stag "Do" was actually a gaming / LAN party for a bunch of awesome folk from the website Eurogamer. I used to hang around annoying the piss out of everyone on their forums before it all got a bit too 'bantsy' - and made a lot of good friends through that place. We were all similarly games obsessed, and spent a good few hours on that weird weekend playing Battlefield: Vietnam on the PC (I'd upgraded my gaming PC several times, usually to make Battlefield games run just that little bit sweeter). 

We were facing off against another clan who'd 'invited themselves' along to the do (the organiser brought them along, we didn't really get a say in it). We toasted them good and proper, one friend managing to stealthily get into their base and decimate it with a tank. Good times!

Around Christmas 2006, gaming took another odd turn as an underpowered games console revolutionised the game scene at the time. Nintendo, always the innovators and always less obsessed with power and graphical capability, unleashed the Nintendo Wii on an unsuspecting world. 

I was lucky enough to somehow end up attending the launch event for the Nintendo Wii in the UK, even appearing on gamer.tv looking somewhat bemused (somewhere I still have the rather posh looking (but probably ludicrously cheap) Nintendo watch that was doled out to folk at the launch), and also a couple of exclusive events planned around the launch. There was a huge buzz in gaming about that controller. No one had ever seen anything like it before, and though your opinion may differ depending on what you thought of the thing, the chance to get out of your gaming chair and physically interact with the controller to sway the course of a game had people going out of their minds to get hold of one of these (like 2020 and the inevitable shortages of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, the Christmas launch didn't do Nintendo any harm at all, you could not get one of these for love nor money so I've no idea how I actually did get one just in time for the big day, but it made the family christmas a bit more interesting than playing Charades or "The Game of Life", that's for sure). 

Most of Nintendo's competitors flirted with motion controls throughout the rest of the noughties to no avail. Microsoft's Kinect system was flawed, the lack of a physical controller to interact with seriously hampered the gaming experience though there were one or two novelty games that actually did make pretty good use of the thing (notably Dance Central and Kinectimals). Sony followed up with its weird sex-toy-like motion controllers, which ironically can still be used today with their VR system though the controllers actually debuted on the PS3 with games like Motion Sports and...er....nope I've gone a complete blank - such was the impact they had on the PS3 (probably just as well that the things came in useful later on for the PS4, PSVR and the glorious "Dreams"). 

The Wii had quite a respectable amount of decent games for it - some of which still get played on a daily basis by us (Wii Fit and the Wii Fit Board for example, still a very good way to keep in trim and who doesn't fancy their Wii Fit trainer?)

As the noughties progressed, my daughter arrived some years later and again gaming took a firm back seat for a number of years. In this decade I also owned an Xbox (and won a crystal one from Eurogamer), a playstation 3, a Gameboy Advance, a Playstation Portable and a Nintendo DS but in retrospect the most important console of the decade for me was undoubtedly this sucker...

Microsoft (of all people) finally got it right with the Xbox's successor. The Xbox 360 is, to this day, the console I own the most games for (and that's not counting the many that got traded in). It was powerful enough to boast decent graphics, noisy as hell (if you think modern consoles are noisy, try firing up an original Xbox and listen to the damned thing's fans whirring away, its optical drive chunking along like some steam-powered behemoth). Looking across the room I can still see a stack of games in the shelves for this beast. I didn't get one till late 2006, and picked it up purely because of Project Gotham Racing 3.

The Xbox 360 was the perfect all-rounder, boasting a catalogue of amazing titles in just about every genre you can name. It was also a fantastic console for online gaming, arguably popularising the concept of playing with total strangers over the internet (though obviously PC gaming had 'been there, done that' many years before). Your gaming profile became your online persona and it meant that Xbox Live-enabled titles dominated the 360, somewhat annoyingly for me as I still preferred solo gaming and hated the fact that we began to see multiplayer-only titles sneaking onto the market, as well as 'hollowed out' games that relied heavily on DLC to make you spend over the odds for a boxed game and all its add-ons. 

As with the Wii, I still regularly use the Xbox 360 but feel I ought to also mention the PS3 respectfully. It may not have been a massive seller but still had a whole crop of console exclusives that were utterly brilliant. 

"Motorstorm" was the first game I ever saw on the PS3. After seeing target renders of it on the internet (and realising that Sony did an amazing job on selling a console off the back of a look and feel for the games that just didn't exist at all), I was initially sceptical but managed to get the chance to go and play on a PS3 at Broadcasting House (later Wogan House) in London as part of a Radio 1 Newsbeat thing. 

Back then I had grand ideas about becoming a games journalist, and used to somehow blag my way into these things, mostly through being on the Eurogamer forums too much but mostly at the right time it seems. 

The PS3 was wheeled out along with a couple of its launch titles. One was a mindless first person shooter which I can't even remember the name of, the other was Motorstorm. Hewn by uber-talented Evolution Studios (R.I.P to one of the best arcade racer developers - why are they all gone now?), they somehow managed to figure out the intricate insides of the PS3's much vaunted cell technology to put together an offroad racer that was seriously impressive. Gloopy mud, sand-blown deserts and roaring engines all combined to make this a killer title (and d'ya know what? It still plays brilliantly even today). The two sequels (Motorstorm: Pacific Rift and Motorstorm: Apocalypse) were also mesmerisingly good and I still feel a bit sad that we've never seen that series updated for the PS4 or PS5. Undoubtedly tied up in some legal mess, I doubt we ever will. 

As the noughties drew to a close, I began to drift away from gaming. Work got busier, home and family life did too, and bringing up my daughter I fell in love with being a dad and spending as much time with her as I could. But the story isn't quite over yet. There's still one more gaming chapter for the Twenteens so tune in for one last gaming gouranga as we pick through 2010 onwards!