Dance Dance Revolution is such an important game for the rythm/dance genre. Plus, it is one of the games that one can still find consistently in arcades and other public spaces.

Ocarina of Time is the best game of 1998 because it is also the best game of all time.

And there it is, 1998, also known as the peak of gaming. This year is like 1997, but with a peak even higher. This year has a whole lot of my all-time favourite and my absolute all-time favourite. Sadly it'll all be downhill from here, but there's still a bunch of amazing years yet to come, the Golden Age isn't over yet.

From the lists above, my favourites are;
- Banjo-Kazooie
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- Anno 1602
- Crash Bandicoot Warped
Besides those, I've also spent plenty of time with Mario Party, F-Zero X and Star Wars Rogue Squadron. All great games. Then, I also played Need for Speed III, 1080* Snowboarding and Sonic Adventure and probably Tomb Raider 3 and Spyro the Dragon though all these wouldn't win their spot in my hall of fame. It's funny I barely played anything from the main poll, but a lot from the secondary list.

Things don't end here though, on the contrary. Many of my absolute favourites, which Anno 1602 and Ocarina of Time also are, aren't even mentioned here. This year is also the year of MediEvil. A HUGE omission from the poll if you asked me, and one of the greatest games ever. I'd say it certainly is the greatest PlayStation game. Next another of my favourites PlayStation games released in 1998, though admittedly obscure, is Kula World. Besides these I personally won't forget Motocross Madness, Railroad Tycoon II, Caesar III and it was the year of Link's Awakening DX. A multitude of these games are featured in my Top 50 list, and I played a whole bunch more besides those that would all just fade under the weight of all these heavyweights.

However, a bit like 1996, the winner is still very clear to me. Even Anno 1602 and MediEvil, who on their own would win almost any other year, aren't enough to challenge the all-time greatest video-game. My vote of course is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

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.

It's not going to win because this is an increadibly stacked year with games like MGS, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil 2, Xenogears and Banjo.

But Suikoden 2 remains my favorite game of all time.

(Listen to this music please.)

It is no overstatement to say that the game changed my life. It is the game that got me to sign up for a forum similar to this one, many years ago. And due to the people I met there, many of whom are still in my life today, it notably changed the trajectory of my life.
School, career path, personal relationships, etc would all have been very different if not for that time in my life, and as I mentioned in Frogger's thread VGChartz taught me how to think, I learned and grew a lot a lot as a person thanks to that.

I probably wouldn't have signed up for VGChartz if not because of my passion for Suikoden 2 motivating me to sign up for a forum like this back in the day, so that I could talk to other people about the game. Share artwork, wallpapers, music, etc.

And I almost didn't play the game, after putting it down after a few hours of gameplay.
A mistake I almost repeated again with Nier: Automata after completing the tutorial section and thinking it wasn't the type of game I was looking for at the moment.

I only gave Suikoden 2 a second chance after going to dinner with a friend, where one of his friend's joined us, who was also a big fan of Jrpgs and games in general.
We chatted for hours about games while at a chinese buffet. And I noticed that me and this new person had essentially identical taste in games. Our Top 10 list had the exact same games.  Chrono Trigger, Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, FF7, etc.
With one single, but glaring exception.

He had Suikoden 2 on his list. As #1, no less.
While it wasn't even on my Top 100, because I stopped playing it after a few hours. So I decided to give it another shot, and I'm very happy that I did.

What I found was the most interestingly written story I had experienced at the time. With a cast of 108+ recruitable characters who all brought something interesting to the table. Whether it was due to their story, how they functioned in the various different combat systems and modes;

Regular combat

Duels

Army wars

Or what those characters added to the every expanding headquarters mechanic.
When you first get your headquarters, it may only have a ground floor and a basement. But once you recruit a farmer, they'll add fields of grown vegetables outside. When you recruit a cheff, a kitchen is added, where you can create dishes to bring with you in battle, or engage in cook-off mini games. A gambling hall. A bar. A Theatre stage. A Dojo. Etc.

New floors are added and the castle gets bigger and bigger, and feels more and more personal and alive as you bring in more people fighting for the same cause.

Characters (aside from some story VIP's) can actually die permanently in the Duels and War modes, if you're not careful.
Which affects your chances of getting the true ending.

Another interesting mechanic was the ability to transfer your save data from old games to new ones. Which would allow you to do things like recruit the main characters from old Suikoden games, in the new ones. The nations you've formed in a previous game will keep whatever name you gave it in future games as well.

Suikoden 2 also sports one of my favorite gaming soundtracks ever (an example in the video abobe).
The composer (Miki Higashino) chose a wide array of various ethnic themes, that gave the world a lot of character, and are all very memorable for me.

Unfortunately she did not work in the industry for long, as the very demanding work culture in Japan at the time forced her to chose between being able to start a family, or continue her career. She chose the former, and left Konami shortly after Suikoden 2 released.

Here is an interview with her for those who are interested: Miki Higashino Interview: Retired Fan Favourite Speaks

I very much hoped that she would return for Eiyuuden Chronicles (due to release in 2024), which is the spiritual successor of Suikoden (like Bloodstained is to Castlevania) and has gathered most of the key members from the original games. But unfortunately Miki declined the offer to work on it, for unknown reasons.

Suikoden 2's story is one of political intrigue, with a strong cast of main characters, and a very surprising and interesting twist that I had not seen in any other game until Nier: Automata did something similar, but not quite.

The main antagonist, Luca Blight, is one of my favorite gaming villains. Here's a famous scene that takes place within the first few hours. (You can start at 00:45) It's not much of a spoiler, but if you want to go into the game fully blind, then don't click the video.

Despite the main protagonist being a 'silent' one, other cast members do an excellent job of fleshing out his character through exposition.

The world building in Suikoden is nothing short of masterful.
A nation you hear a lot about about in Suikoden 1 isn't shown to the player until Suikoden 3.
In Suikoden 1 and 2 an event is often referenced that took place in the past, and caused animosity between several recruitable characters, who don't get along. But we don't properly understand what happened until Suikoden 5. Because that game takes place before Suikoden 1. And some of those optional characters in Suikoden 1 & 2 are now main characters here.

I have heard that the Trails in the Sky/Cold Steel series has similar world building, so that has me very intrigued to play the series.

There is a Suikoden 1 & 2 Remaster on the way, with very improved visuals.

So for anyone who is curious, but has not checked out the game yet, that's going to be the best chance.

DDR got me into rhythm games. I went through 3 or 4 dance mats and still have all the PS2 DDR games. Without DDR I wouldn't have tried Beat Saber, there would be no Pistol Whip and currently I'm into Synthriders. Last time I visited an arcade (couple months ago) they had both DDR and Synthriders on offer. DDR still got the most attention between the two (who wants to wear a headset in an arcade for a rhythm game...)

Never played suikoden, might need to grab the remakes.

Banjo-Kazooie, nuff said.

Ocarina of Time is the easy winner for me.

Banjo-Kazooie, Resident Evil 2, Tomb Raider III, and Metal Gear Solid are all fantastic, but they don't come close to OoT. That's how good it is.

As much as I love Metal Gear Solid, I've got to give this one to Half-Life for reasons oft cited (i.e. mostly the way it handled story in an FPS game). What a great year though.