Age of Empires II, no question. As much as I like Pokemon GSC, there's no doubt AoEII was the bigger game. It is unreal how well it has aged compared to anything else in here.

1995-2005 is the golden age of gaming. I didn't expect this year to sort of be even more packed than 1999.

I would have voted for either Chrono Cross or Crash Team Racing (which is the only game I ever played that I considered "flawless"), but since they're not in the main poll, I'm torn between Silent Hill, FF8, and Shenmue.

I'll go ahead and give it to FF8 which was my first full RPG and a mindblowing experience. People often like to shit on in, and I can too, but instead I'm going to praise it for the sick atompshere and music. It and FF4 had the creepiest atmopsheres in the series.

I'm going by earliest release date in every sense of the term (i.e. region, platform, etc...).  Pokemon Crystal is really an enhanced version of Pokemon Gold and Silver, so it gets lumped in with them.  This is a person's only shot to vote for Pokemon Crystal.

I believe I already said that compilations like Super Mario All-Stars are not eligible since it's just a compilation and all of the games in it already had their shot in earlier years.  Basically each game only gets one year where it's eligible for votes.  It can't be repackaged in some way to get another shot, and graphical improvements and added DLC (or content equivalent) are not enough of a difference to give a game another opportunity.  The only exceptions to this are "remakes" which are really an entirely different game from the original like Metroid Zero Mission or Final Fantasy 7 Remake.  Those games are actually significantly different experiences from the "original", and can be treated as brand new games.

Yeah makes sense.

Half-Life: Opposing Force came out this year as well, but is just an expansion to Half-Life (and not as good), just like Blue Shift in 2001. It's basically the same while playing as a different protagonist and much shorter.

Well maybe not just any old expansion if Wikipedia is to be believed:

Half-Life was followed by an expansion pack, Opposing Force, on November 1, 1999,^[6] developed by Gearbox Software.^[7] Players control US Marine corporal Adrian Shephard, who fights a new group of aliens and black operations units.

Opposing Force was received favorably by critics,^[8] many citing the game as being as influential on setting expansion pack standards as the original game had been in influencing the overall genre.^[9][10][11] The game won the Computer Game of the Year Interactive Achievement Award of 2000 from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.^[12]

It definitely lacked the impact the original game had on me, I was more interested in replaying the original campaign instead.

Still waiting on a modern remake of half-life, but there's Black Mesa which I think is actually finished. Lol how did I miss that releasing 3 years ago after following the project for years. 16 years in the making, now it's in my Steam library :)

Nice of Valve to allow selling it on Steam (I guess they have no plans for a remake themselves). Although probably why I didn't notice the release:
"This game doesn't look like other things you've played in the past. As such we don't have much information on whether or not you might be interested in it" while it's recommending Half-Life: Alyx to me based on my library lol.

Edit: Damn that makes me all emotional playing the fan made remake, goose bumps all over again. I'm going to take my time with this, awesome. It's pretty much exactly as how I envisioned a remake. Worth the wait (and forgetting about it haha)

Age of Empires 2

Dude I re-played this remake like 5 times during lockdown. This game looks the way I pictured Half-Life looked all those years ago. Loved every second of it. I know there's that RTX remix of Half-Life 2, which looks amazing, but I would love if this fan run studio can work on a remake of HL2. 

For me, it was Homeworld. Always dreamt of a Sci-fi game where you had an army of ships fighting in huge space battles. Homeworld did not disappoint. One of my all time favourite series.

What a year! Packed full with classics. But for me? I gotta go with Final Fantasy VIII. I get why people often look down on it and why it's not as highly regarded as VII but for me, it's one of the greatest games I've ever played. The characters, the scale of the story, the world that you get to explore from top to bottom. Everything, I fell in love with everything.

I got to play Metal Gear Solid after this one so VIII was the first time I truly loved a videogame. As a kid, it was (and remains) a magical experience that can't be replicated. Oh and did I mention the music? Best damn OST in any game I've ever played. It covers so many types of mood from battles to romance, to creepy, lonely, peaceful, majestic, etc etc.

Final Fantasy 8, and it’s not even close.
1999 isn’t a year that didn’t have as much software that appealed to me when compared to 1998. FF8 is the shining exception. But I also really liked Ogre Battle 64, Chrono Cross would be third on my favourites - Ogre Battle 64 is really underrated, and probably the VC game I put the most hours into.

Chrono Cross was good, but it wasn’t Chrono Trigger. The game design was not as good as Chrono Trigger, the story was also written by Masato Kato alone - so, Chrono Trigger’s stronger structure has to do with the fact that Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest writer) outlined the story, Kato wrote, and Takashi Tokita (the writer of FF4) and Yasonori Kitase (Director of FF6, 7, 8, and X) acted as editor/producers - but with Chrono Cross Kitase was kind of on his own… and if it feels a bit like Xenogears at times, it’s because Kato was also working on that game, as were several of the other staff - and I think he was trying to emulate Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga a bit. With all the mess Square was in at the time (Chrono Cross is basically the game that broke composer Mitsuda), it’s amazing how good it turned out in the end.

Perhaps it’s recency bias given I played FF8 through this summer, and Ogre Battle 64 not long ago (last generation, right after Xenoblade Chronocles X), and Chrono Cross not in a very very long time. I’m probably going to get the remaster, and I’m looking forward to seeing how I like it now.

Super Smash Bros. The rest is history.