Man, when you factor in Japanese release dates, 2000 was a spectacular year for N64: Perfect Dark, Majora's Mask, Banjo-Tooie, Sin & Punishment, Excitebike 64, WWF No Mercy, Paper Mario, etc.

Also, I wanted to highlight one 2000 game that has gone unmentioned: Dragon Blaze for arcades. Probably the best Psikyo shooter.

Perfect Dark, by a wide margin. It's one of only two games from the first half of the 00s that I'd put in my all-time Top 30. It was a better game than GoldenEye 007 in every way, Rare taking what they learned from that game and improving upon it. I've spent countless hours in the Combat Simulator, which had a crazy amount of customization for its time.

You know, when I read that it finally clicked that the title was a reference to "deus ex machina".  For some reason I never realized that before, LOL.

I kind of wrote off the Dreamcast at the time, but then several years ago I got interested in what happened, and it kind of shocked me.  The Dreamcast actually produced a fairly impressive library of games in roughly 2 years worth of time.  I think if Sega could have stayed in the console business (i.e. their business side wasn't stupid), then the Dreamcast would have ended up the #2 console of Generation 6 (but still way behind the PS2).

Basically their development side was doing some really impressive stuff (Shenmue, Phantasy Star Online, all of their arcade ports, etc...), and I think it was because the Saturn was such a flop.  If you think of Nintendo's two biggest failures, the GameCube and Wii U, they were followed by Nintendo's two biggest successes, the Wii and the Switch.  I think this sort of thing was happening with the Saturn and the Dreamcast, at least on the development side. 

The business side, on the other hand, had lost a ton of money on the Saturn and was majorly in the hole.  The only thing keeping Sega going is that their arcade business through most of the 90's was making them good money.  But by the end of the 90's the arcades had ended everywhere outside of Japan.  And then launching a new console is also very expensive, so the Dreamcast cost them a lot on the front end.  But they never made it to the back end.  They exited the console market so they couldn't make their money back.  Even the PS2 lost money it's first year, but that is fairly normal.  The PS2 made all of that money back over time.  The Dreamcast didn't have the time to stick it out and make its money back.  If the Dreamcast was able to last a normal amount of years, I think it would have made them good money, and it would have had a library better than the XBox or GameCube.  That's how I see it anyway.

Perfect Dark, and TimeSplitters after it, really spoiled me when it came to local offline multiplayer options. I still expect support for offline bots in every competitive first person shooter  

Pretty tight race so far for this year

Deus Ex. When I finally started Baldur's Gate II, it didn't quite suck me in like I expected (probably due to fatigue from the first game and my studies), and Deus Ex is clearly the better game in my opinion. No One Lives Forever might be a strong candidate, but I haven't played it. That's the competition for me at the moment, so Deus Ex it is - what a great game (which reminds me that I should finish it some time but backlog...).

You alright?

Perfect Dark still does things better than most shooters today. Only reason that held PD back long term was the lack of Online Play, something that didn't exist on the N64. PD was the last and best Retro shooter ever made, in all categories.

Respect to both Halo and PD, they also both scored a legendary 97. Something rarely achieved in the history of the industry.

For me it’s gotta be Majoras Mask. It held the title of my favorite game in my favorites series for quite a long time until BotW came along, now I’m torn between which one I like better.
I even made a video talking about the genius of the game here: https://youtu.be/zncM_caGKVo?si=6LIqzrOka1aA4mJX

I completely forgot Perfect Dark was this year; shame on me.
It's easy to judge it harshly today, but when it came out, PD was one of the best FPS ever made. Tons of content, addictive gameplay, great in both single and multiplayer.
It has a 97 on Metacritic for a reason.

Spent so much time on the Sims and my brother spent so much time on Diablo 2 lol. Back then I probably was still playing Deer Avenger and of course Spider-Man PS1