Oh boy, 1998, the best year in gaming ever.
I'll start of with Dune 2000, a remake basically of my early favorite Dune 2
It was awesome to play Dune 2 again with all the enhancements of the remake. It captured everything from the original with lots of QoL stuff added. It looked amazing as well at the time. Still does actually.
Thief: The Dark Project also launched in 1998, (re)defining the stealth genre.
It set the bar for stealth games, a bar that still hasn't been passed. Sneaking in the shadows, listening in on conversations, learning their patrol routes, knocking out enemies at the right time and then carefully hide their bodies out of sight. It was a different game experience to everything before it. Slower paced, methodical, with tons of atmosphere.
1998 launched another experimental game Trespasser
Nowadays it's remember as the game with the worst controls. It was basically a motion control game without motion controls. You had 6 or 8 keys to control your right hand and equipping a weapon meant carefully adjusting your arm, wrist and hand to sort of figure out how to hold the gun. Revolutionary at the time and a giant pita. The game itself was pretty cool though, Jurassic park the game. Looked good as well and the first game where you could look down and admirer your own cleavage lol. Which you got to see plenty after dying again from shooting in random directions with the fun control scheme.
Heart of Darkness is another great cinematic platformer I played many times from start to finish
This is one of my most wanted remakes. A forgotten gem, great from start to finish.
Another big surprise was Unreal, which led to Unreal Tournament and the Unreal engine which is still the most important engine in game development today.
It looked amazing at the time and the opening level was sublime. You crash on an alien planet find a ship, go in to explore and then you get locked in a hallway. The lights turn off, noises everywhere, I'll never forget that sequence. So well done. The game was pretty hard. I got stuck at one point and used the level editor to figure out where the connected button was hidden for a door I couldn't get through. Retrace the path in the map editor lol. It was hidden in a dark spot under some stairs ugh. The aliens were adorable, great design.
Colin McRae Rally started that year as well, which became my all time favorite rally series
The driving physics felt so good which the perfect risk-reward balance. It was a big disappointment when Dirt came out, the end of an era.
Starship Titanic was also one of my favorites that year
A retro game in a sense that it brought typing back to adventures with the Spookitalk engine, allowing you to have conversations with all the characters. There were tons of pre-recorded answers and you could have whole conversations like with Eliza's natural language parsing engine. I studied AI in university so thuis was right up my alley having had to make my own SQL based language parser in university. It was fun chatting with the elevator lol.
The game didn't catch on though, point&click ruled the genre, typing was forgotten and considered a chore. The story and puzzles were good but nothing revolutionary. As a big Douglas Adams fan at the time and having read the book, I enjoyed the game a lot. But it's a particular style of dry humor that's not always that effective in games.
On to the heavy hitters, OOT was amazing when I play it in 1998
It was my first Zelda game, the earlier ones I only played as remakes. It did the job getting me into Zelda yet I don't think OOT has aged well. My favorite Zelda game is Windwaker by far and have been enjoying BotW and TotK a lot as well. OOT was great in 1998 but could also be frustrating. It's mostly all fond memories though and I did enjoy the water temple a lot. It was one of the better ones imo. It later came as a surprise to me that many found it so difficult:
https://www.thegamer.com/legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-water-temple-research-difficulty/
I always loved water temples since Tombraider introduced the raising and lowering of water levels as a puzzle mechanic.
Metal Gear Solid was another awesome transition into 3D which aged better
The game was so good we brought the Playstation to work to the break room to play on lunch break. So cool the AI noticed your foot prints in the snow and see your breath in the cold. Amazing gameplay as well with the best 4th wall breaking mechanic ever. (Psycho Mantis)
1998 also gave birth to the best adventure game ever, Grim Fandango, travel agent of the land of the dead
The art direction, cut scenes, humor and use of the source material are all sublime. I played the game again on PS4 which was just as good if not better as it was playing it in 1998. (It frequently crashed on me in 1998 in the 3rd part ugh) The added retrospective commentary from the original developers is amazing, I wish more games would do that. Great puzzles as well. People bounced against the tank controls which I actually still prefer over the new control style on PS4 (you can switch back to the original one). I always find it easier to control characters from their perspective instead of the camera's perspective which became the standard and still often leaves me wondering why my character is going the wrong way lol. (And gets really confusing when games mix it up like TotK where the glider works based on camera orientation, yet control sticks work based on character orientation)
Baldur's gate was another instant hit
It was hard yet so rewarding. The first game I bought DLC for (Sword coast) as soon as it came out. I couldn't get enough of it. BG2 delivered as well, as well as Icewind Dale. Planescape Torment I bought as well but never made time to actually play it. Still in my backlog. Currently I'm greatly enjoying BG3, although a bit disappointed that the party size has been reduced to 4 instead of 6.
Baldur's gate was perfection at the time, beautiful, challenging, great stories, great characters, awesome.
So much competition for 1998 but in the end Half-Life wins it for me for changing the way FPS were made, both in story delivery and multiplayer.
I had just gotten a new surround system when Half-Life came out and Half-Life had amazing surround sound for the time. I 'replayed' the intro sequence 3 times before actually starting the game. That tram ride is still the best preview of what's to come for any game. And then you get to explore the facility before things go wrong, best intro ever. Also briefly getting teleported to the alien planet and back when the generator malfunctions was mind blowing at the time.
So many great things in the game, believable AI that actually worked to flush you out. Fun puzzles and 'cut scenes' that play out around you, not locking or slowing down the player. So many movie references throughout the game, so many exciting moments like holes getting shot into ducts while you crawl through letting light through or escaping a fire ball through vents.
Then there was also Half-Life Death match which we played to death at work.
I remember these levels like a played them yesterday. For years HL Death match was the game we played at work after work. With tons of great user made levels and mods available online it never got old. The included levels were amazing as well and that beam weapon you could use to launch yourself or shoot people through walls, one of the most coveted guns to go for.
One of use had made an accurate recreation of our office at the time, including window ledges you could hide on. You could use the beam weapon to launch yourself straight onto the roof from the parking lot or shoot people hiding out in the bathrooms straight through the wall. Shotgun battles were awesome with all the carnage and blood they left behind. We frequently turned the office into a blood bath :)
Half-Life cemented Valve as basically the owners of the PC platform. Counter Strike is still played today and HL2 was so anticipated that it had no trouble getting people into Steam at the time. Sadly for me that rung in the end of physical games for PC, yet at the same time, Steam made sure PC gaming got bigger than ever. Now where is HL3 and HL2 episode 3, come on Valve!
Half-Life is not just my GotY, it's my GotD.
