Strange line of thinking. And I already thought so in the previous thread where you said something similar. Why would someone have to vote for Call of Duty just because a bunch of sequels sold great? It was a great game like I said, one of my favourite fps's, but "in hindsight", Knights of the Old Republic (in my case) is better. I vote for what I think is the 'best' game, not for what its sales potential is (or turned out to be a generation later). I wonder, did you, by this logic, vote for Fifa back in 1993 then? Or will you vote for Candy Crush come 2012, that was a big catalyst in the rise of mobile ftp games after all?

I didn't much like KotOR, the second was bit better.
Couple other nice ones I've played are Unreal II and Myst's interesting spinoff Uru.

Ones I have tough time choosing between:
Max Payne 2: but I did like the first more and I already voted that.
XIII: visually stunning and there are lots of cool and interesting elements, but occasionally bit clumsy gameplay.
Beyond Good & Evil: beautiful game, but I didn't like the ending, in number of ways.
So that leaves me to go with Rachet & Clank: Going Commando; the second best PS2 game I've played.

Poor FFX-2. Had a nice battle system but everything else about it was just... ugh.

KOTOR was for sure GOTY in 2003, though KOTOR 2 was better, bugs aside. However KOTOR 2 is up against tougher competition as a 2004 release, 2004 had highly rated games such as GTA San Andreas, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, Burnout 3, Metroid Prime 2, Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, and MGS 3 for KOTOR 2 to contend with, so it has no chance of winning 2004 GOTY in spite of being the better of the two KOTOR games. 

True, KOTOR 2 is better game, but not only it is up against a lot of great games from other genres, but it's up against Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines in its own genre - and VtMB is better RPG than KOTOR 2...no matter how much I love Darth Traya.

This belongs more to next year, but KotOR 2 is also excellent of course, however it does suffer from a lot of cut content. Especially towards the end. It’s because they were rushed to release, so much so that the enemies in the final area just look like common citizens instead of Sith warriors. Because of these issues the first one feels much more rounded and polished to me making it easily superior. KotOR 2 could have been better though, and I recommend everyone who would play the second game to install the ‘Restored Content Mod’. It does a great job restoring a lot of content that was left in the game files and should’ve been part of the official release.

It was better than X, tho.

This is like saying the shit I took today felt better than the shit I took yesterday lol. Both suck.

I would have said The Wind Waker, but it was released in Japan in 2002 so it doesn't qualify. Also, I actually didn't play that game until the HD remaster that came out on the Wii U. I don't think I bought a single game that year, though I did rent F-Zero GX and and I played Burnout 2, Brute Force, and Soul Calibur II over at a friend's house.

Yeah, it does have its faults due to being rushed out the door, but being narrative driven RPG, KOTOR 2 benefits a lot from being done by Obsidian instead of Bioware (we'll see that again with Obsidian and Bethesda few years later).