And then there were four. Welcome back to our Best Year in Gaming March Madness bracket competition! If you’re just joining us, we’ve been slowly working our way through the past 50 years of games, voting on head-to-head matchups between each year, deciding which was the best year in gaming based on the games released that year and any other relevant developments. Yesterday we finished off our Elite Eight with a pair of tough matchups and now it’s on to the Final Four.
Results: 1998 and 1995 win
As we move into the Final Four we’re faced with three years from the 90s and one year from the early 2000s squaring off for the final matchup. Let’s look at each pair:
1997 vs. 2004
VS.
1997 continues to push along in the competition, bolstered primarily by Final Fantasy VII but supported as well by some amazing releases like Diablo, Goldeneye, Symphony of the Night, Ultima Online, Gran Turismo, and Fallout. That’s a set of very formative games for a lot of people, and those have helped power 1997 past years I thought were much stronger in terms of volume and quality. Where 1997 falters a bit is on the tabletop – Mississippi Queen is a Spiel des Jahres winner but the 2nd edition Codex: Sisters of Battle is hardly a milestone moment in tabletop gaming.
2004 is the 2-seed in our competition, and with good reason. 2004 was an amazing year for games – All-timers on the roster like Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, FarCry, Doom 3, The Sims 2, and Unreal Tournament 2004 headline an unreal lineup of games, and that’s before you get to the handhelds – both the Sony PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS released in 2004, kicking off the best era in handheld gaming to-date and giving us Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time. And if you want to talk about important games? 2004 was the year World of WarCraft debuted, kicking off one of the biggest games of all time and spearheading a worldwide phenomenon. You want more games than that? How about KotoR II? Katamari Damacy. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Red Dead Revolver. Monster Hunter. Pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Rome: Total War. Ok, but what about the tabletop games? On that front you have the fourth edition release of Warhammer 40,000, Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Ticket to Ride, and Power Grid. It doesn’t matter what metric you’re looking at, 2004 smashes it and then some.
1995 vs. 1998
I’m mildly surprised 1995 made it this far; I expected it to fall to 2011 and the Dark Souls perverts. But it keeps on chugging and now it’s fighting for its life against 1998.
VS.
Look, 1995 is no slouch here, boasting some of the best SNES games ever made (Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 3, Yoshi’s Island), some strong early PC releases (WarCraft II and Command and Conquer combined to basically create the modern RTS genre), and both Necromunda and Settlers of Catan on the tabletop, plus Warhammer Quest. Another underrated aspect of 1995? The CCG craze. While many of those games didn’t survive to modern day like Magic, the Star Wars, Middle Earth, and Legends of the Five Rings CCGs were all pretty great and innovative games, and I’ll fight anyone who says Overpower wasn’t worth playing.
Some Patrons pretended to agonize over 1998 vs. 1993 but it was never much of a competition. 1998 is our one-seed for a reason, widely regarded as the best year in video games – though it’ll face some tough competition in the Final Four, especially when it comes to the combined tabletop + video game discussion. It’s just hard to compete with the combined might of Half-Life, Resident Evil 2, Ocarina of Time, StarCraft, Fallout 2 and Baldur’s Gate. On the tabletop, you’ve got Warhammer 40,000 third edition, revolutionizing the game as we knew it.
If you’re interested in voting on the outcome, head over to our
Patreon and join our Discord server to vote. Otherwise, check back tomorrow for the winners and the Final Four matchups.
This article is part of a larger series on the best year in gaming. For more years, click this link. Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.
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