JULY

7/3: Blizzard and America go to Warcraft III
Blizzard, the guys who click their computer mice and build franchises out of it, are on top of the game with the third installment of their massively and frighteningly popular Warcraft series. People who just want a game with their games can go for the normal edition, but the obedient ones knew that the Collector's Edition was where the real deal was at, which among a lot of things, included a DVD of all the movie-quality FMVs. Though Warcraft III reached over 1 million pre-orders and rode the top of the charts for over a month, the employees at Blizzard will have to live with the fact that they've stunted Korea's current generations' productivity for years to come.

AUGUST

8/27: GameCube catches a little Super Mario Sunshine
Well, chalk up the 2002 release date as being one big coincidence with the other revived franchise releases since Mario has only been one to be fashionably late (he is a plumber after all). A pre-release party was held up in San Francisco where people had to dive into a giant bowl filled with pasta, but things got a bit disappointing when it was revealed that the meatballs in the bowl were actually just gigantic spheres of Styrofoam painted brown and Nintendo closed up shop well before they said the event would end. (Still, I suppose it would've been neat to take one home and carve trendy, avant-garde chairs out of them.) As for the actual game itself, I'm not sure what really happened; a big cosmic cog somewhere out there twisted and turned the wrong way and made Super Mario Sunshine one of the more disappointing games of 2002 for a lot of people. Don't worry, Miyamoto, I still liked it, even if the things Yoshi can do throw me for a loop.

8/27: The PlayStation 2 goes online
Just a scant few days after the Kingdom Hearts pre-release party at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco, Sony held another party - this time to celebrate the PlayStation 2's online commencement. Of course, when it turned out Sony was only prizing off one of the network adapters, it was then and there things were certainly amiss. During the early online times, Bigfoot sightings were more common than seeing an actual adapter in stores (and in some instances, the adapter was mistaken for Bigfoot). But now that things have settled down, we can all bask in the laggy glory of SOCOM, Madden NFL 2003, and the (free, if you were grabby and quick) Twisted Metal: Black Online. Of course, some days, it's just more fun to put the system up in its vertical position and yell, "The year we make online contact!"

SEPTEMBER

9/16: Nintendo releases the E-Reader
After sitting pretty and alone in Japan for nearly a year, Nintendo finally sees it fit to release the E-Reader and several E-Card series, in a new toy that is nerdy, fun, collectible, and cute all at once. After buying the $39.99 E-Reader and attaching it to your Game Boy Advance, you can run a card through the reader and reap the various benefits. There are the Animal Crossing cards (which technically weren't out yet), which can unlock new items and music for you game. There are the vintage NES games - Clu Clu Land, Excitebike, Balloon Fight, and so on - which go for $4.99 a pop. And there are the Pokemon cards which do . . . um, something I probably wouldn't understand. Interestingly enough, while you get flashing screens of primary colors when you try to load up the old NES, with the E-Reader, you get error messages. Vintage, indeed.

9/17: Welcome to Animal Crossing's town: it's a strange world
You're a lone human in an animal's world with Animal Crossing, Nintendo's brilliant simulation of the high life in a small hick town, where you can run or ruin odd jobs, go fish, catch bugs, or do a bunch of other things. Over a dozen faithfully emulated NES's can be bought, given to you, or found in the dirt, of all places. An ingenious password system allows you to pass your items to other real-life people in their next-to-nowhere towns. But there's three things that hold the game back: 1) it puts a crimp in my day seeing people fast-forward the clock, 2) seeing all of those universal codes on the Internet, 3) and then there was that one time I found this ear in a field . . .

9/24: Rare jumps ship to Microsoft
Regain one friend, lose another. Way back when, around the same time those ties between Nintendo and Square were broken, Rare picked up the slack with a countless entourage of racers, first-person shooters, and platforming adventures for the Nintendo 64 and almost single-handedly kept that console from becoming the next Master System. But now with Square back in the picture, I guess the town simply wasn't big enough for the three of them. So Nintendo let the Rare relationship slide away and Microsoft promptly picked up the pieces (and it only cost Gates a couple hundred million dollars to bend over and reach for them).

OCTOBER

10/23: Good things come in Toe Jam & Earl IIIs
It's been nearly a decade since the last Toe Jam & Earl (and over a decade if we're talking about the last good one), but the creators are still up to their usual tricks. The third installment retains the type of gameplay found in the original, but expands on it by adding a new character, deeper platforming mechanics, RPG elements, and . . . third leg jokes. Proof that some American programmers do have an original sense of humor (however skittish and completely skewed it may be).

10/23: To the contrary: Contra: Shattered Soldier actually sees release
Everybody hoped, everybody prayed, and everybody ritualistically smashed copies of C: The Contra Adventure and Contra: Legacy of War, but even when Shattered Soldier was officially announced, no one knew what to say. A 2D sequel to one of our favorite series on a full-fledged console being worked on by the same guys who made the best ones in the series is almost enough to make a grown man cry, or at least get him to lock himself in the bathroom and think for a while. Though reaction to the game has been split down the middle, one thing remains true: that art is damn cool.

10/29: Vice City and the Amazing Technicolor Coat of Noise and Controversy
Sure, Grand Theft Auto III may have come before this one, but the complaints didn't really start until a few months after its release when parents finally did their bi-annual routine check to see what their kids were up to. But then Vice City got released, positive and negative publicity and all, and with the pubic ready and waiting, everybody braced for impact as guilty-pleasure entertainment and fun-time wholesome hearth collided in a riotous upheaval for dominancy. Of course, any publicity is good publicity and Vice City naturally rocketed to grand sales, much to the chagrin of upstanding citizens. But the most scary thing of all? Some parents were still thinking that this was a racing game when they bought it, while others were probably hoping to see a cameo by Don Johnson's chest.

NOVEMBER

11/12: "Shinobi's back" on PlayStation 2
In a Tate stealth mode for seven years, the Shinobi series returned in 2002 with the aptly-titled Shinobi, developed by Overworks and starring Hotsuma of the Oboro Clan. After creating a gameplay template that every 3D ninja game should use - intuitive ways of attacking, accurate shuriken throwing, seamless wall climbing - and an exotically cool and creepy atmosphere, it seems like everyone fell asleep at the wheel and forgot how to design a non-repetitive level. Unfortunate. Let's hope the next one fares better. But enough about Hotsuma. How about that Ageha, eh, guys?

11/13: Acclaim's not so BMX XXXcellent release
But honestly, what was Acclaim really thinking with this one? With the deplorable "jokes," pixel nudity, the contests that sound like they were created because of Acclaim's bitterness and resentment towards their dipping stock prices, and the lying claim of consumer anticipation reaching "feverish levels," can you blame us when we didn't believe Acclaim (and the occasional person that defended it) when it said there's an actual game beneath it all? A rather sad moment for video games: BMX XXX continued the widely-accepted stigma that games are created by sullen boys who've been watching too much Skinemax; it sold poorly so the people who worked on this sunk deeper into debt; and anyone caught playing it, for "reviewing" purposes or otherwise, all got divorced, dumped, and banned from fashionable social functions.

11/14: Capcom announces five new GameCube games
With this one, Capcom essentially took their already altruistic GameCube support and stuck it in some cement shoes. A playfully aggressive epigram on the website of the newly formed 4th Production Studio reads: "In a market that has become prosaic with character dependent games and sequel games, we, the 4th Production Studio of CAPCOM, would like to take this opportunity to announce 5 new and exciting games for the GameCube." Strangely enough, one of the five new games was Resident Evil 4. The other four were Product Number 03 (aka P.N. 03), Dead Phoenix, Killer 7, and Viewtiful Joe, the quirkiest Japanese game with the highest possibility of actually being released in America.

11/15: The Xbox goes online
Two consoles going online in the same year? It's almost too much! After paying the $49.99 for the Xbox Live Starter Kit, players get to go online for an entire year, sign up for a specified "Gamertag" and duke it out in Live enabled games such as Unreal Championship and the surprise hit, Mech Assault. For once, things actually went through with few kinks, except for the ones Microsoft deliberately put up (modded consoles had their serial numbers recorded and were barred from ever going online). But look on the bright side: Once you get online, you can finally use your Xbox Communicator headset and hear how some kid 2,000 miles away believes Eminem is so great.

11/19: Prime time for GameCube Metroid
Now Metroid Prime is one game that has been a long time coming. After a rocky chronicle of sneers and insults deriving from the fact that the game was being created by an American developer, and a beleaguered one at that, critical and commercial acclaim was the reward for stalwart Retro Studios, while we all got a highly playable and immersive adventure. Seeing Samus in glorious 3D may take a little while to get used to, but nonetheless (and in the immortal words of Guardian Heroes' Valgar): "Big shoulder pads rule!"

11/19: Consoles engage in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
The game with the grossest amount of wordplay made by replacing all words beginning with a "C" to a "K," it's a big irony the former and previous poster bad boys of video gaming have become just that; everybody was too busy blowing capillaries over Vice City and BMX XXX. Although sales were quite brisk and reviews remained positive, so I presume that this one actually shipped with a playable game. And if there aren't any ugly mugs popping up to give us a friendly "Toasty!" in Deadly Alliance, everything is truly fine.

11/20: Tallarico decides to set up a musical show after E3
Tommy Tallarico, everybody's favorite video game composer with a name that just slips and slides off the tongue, and Mystical Stone announced a two and a half hour, 90-piece symphonic orchestra that will take place on May 16th, the final day of E3 2003, pulling songs from the most popular video game soundtracks ever recorded. Including a 40-person choir and a stage show and a rock concert, the 18 musical segments will also be released on CD and DVD and aired on pay-per-view, with Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Sting, Madonna, and Aerosmith all scheduled to appear. Sure, sure, mainstream video game exposure and acceptance is all good and great, but I'm really hoping for McCartney to do a Victor Ireland cover.

11/21: Is that a walking Xbox? No! It's a vertical tank and you're playing Steel Battalion!
Talk about a gutsy maneuver. The pictures were transmitted from Japan of the 40-button controller setup with its own gravitational pull and the near-photo realistic graphics were mandible dropping. But what a service to fans when Capcom brought Steel Battalion over the Pacific. It turned out to be a pretty good move. The game has been a fairly big success thus far, regularly selling out before Capcom even has a chance to ship it. Regarding the item specifically: the fancy, ornamented box it comes in looks like it holds rounds of ammunition and rods of plutonium, and I think the Cliff's Notes for the instruction manual has been on the New York Bestsellers lists for several months now. But for all the missile launching, lateral jumping, and machine gun firing I can do, I can't for the life of me find the button that pours the coffee into a cup or the one that starts up the J-Pop.

11/26: Square and Enix tie the knot
I think we all knew these two crazy kids would eventually get together, right? Enix, the creators of the religion-creating Dragon Warrior, and Square, creators of the most internationally popular RPG series ever, announced that they would merge on April 1, 2003 (the beginning of the new fiscal year) to become SquareEnix, Inc. For the most part, things will continue to be business as usual with the exception of Final Fantasy XI, which is finally starting to show some legs so Enix will have to put away whatever online plans they had and pitch in with that one first. With Enix now in the bag, and with Quest (creators of the Ogre Battle series) having already been purchased on June 19th, Square should just as well put a sign in front of their building that reads, "We think you can stop caring about RPGs coming from other companies now."

11/27: Zane-y good fun: Tecmo releases Rygar: The Legendary Adventure
Bombastic dialogue, boxing plants, and the same sort of camera angles they use on Candid Camera or naughty live feeds via the Internet. Hey, when you're hero, it's just the sort of stuff you battle on a typical day. But if you're Rygar, you'll look really marvelous while doing it. The game isn't completely serious, however; Tecmo shows they know how to knead in a little humor by adding the Pizzarmor mode, where your Diskarmors turns into doughy ellipsoids of pain and death. And of course, the line where Rygar pledges revenge to a feather is also very, very funny.

DECEMBER

12/16: Nintendo confirms Zelda pre-order bonus is two games
Not so high and mighty now, are you, Japan? In a fantastic move to equalize human worth, Nintendo of America announced that those who pre-order Zelda: The Wind Waker will, as a bonus that also occurred in Japan, get the complete version of Ocarina of Time on a GameCube disk, along with URA Zelda, a remix of OoT, thereby effectively topping . . . well, themselves in the best giveaway ever. (The previous, universally accepted titleholder was also Nintendo, when it gave away copies of Dragon Warrior with a subscription to Nintendo Power.) No word yet on how the bonus games will be packaged but, since this is America, it'll probably weigh a lot more than the Japanese package.

12/19: MediaWise's report card and the "F"
MediaWise, the leading analysts in pointing out all of video game management's foibles, issued their seventh annual report card, detailing what can be improved and inveighing on what should've been done. The subjects included "Accuracy of Ratings" (in which video games got a D), "Ratings Education" (C), and "Retail Enforcement of Ratings" (F). But the biggest wet fish to the face was the F in the "Overall Grade," a first ever since the report cards introduction. Says MediaWise: "...the overall grade is intended as a wake-up call to the industry, retailers, and parents about very disturbing trends that accelerated during 2002." That can't be good for the video games' self-esteem.

12/19: TNN awards show announced
TNN, hoping to take advantage of their new-found cred with the young'uns thanks to some new edgy programming, announced that they will be holding the first nationally-televised video games award show, known as the Video Games Awards (hopefully, that's a tentative title), set for the fourth quarter of 2003. With plans to rake in talents from the movie, music, and sports industries, the show will reward exemplary examples in well-planned categories such as Coolest Villain, Hottest Heroine, Hottest Graphics, [Best] Pro Sports Game, and [Best] Celebrity Actor. Wait, aren't they forgetting something? No, not rewarding and recognizing the people that actually worked on the games, silly. I know! Best Sales award, that'll be the ticket!

··· (Part One) / Introduction