With so few good new titles being released these days, especially by major studios, I figured I'd make a thread for everyone to share your favourite classic or older games, especially if they're lesser-known titles that others might have missed at the time.
I'll open with The Saboteur (2009), Mercenaries (2005) and Saints Row 2 ( The 2008 original)
IMO gaming peaked with PS2. That was when there was enough budget to give creative people the freedom to make their visions real, but not enough that the industry caught the attention of the MBAs, marketing drones, and HR nags.
There are enough games from that era to fill any adults free time.
Ratchet and Clank 2/3 are kind of amazing.
Ratchet and Clank 2 really changed the game by just adding a strafing movement, evolving weapons and health is all good but just being able to move and jump out of the way of incoming fire while shooting REALLY helped.
7th gen was also really good for handheld Japanese games. The jump to HD was a major hurdle that affected Japanese developers more, since they tended to be smaller companies in comparison to big AAA Western developers. So most Japanese companies chose to just make games for the handheld systems (DS and PSP, and later 3DS and Vita) with a lot of great titles.
The Jak series, timesplitters, god of war 1+2, ico, gran turismo 3-4, silent hill 2, ace combat 4, mgs2+3, dark cloud, tekken. The PS2 was stacked with exclusives that completely dominated the market. Game writing definitely peaked in the early 2000s.
I never had a PS2 but the Gamecube was really great when it came to Nintendo games. Technically they stopped looking like blocky messes, and were still small enough that they can have a real vision behind them. Paper Mario TTYD, Animal Crossing (even though that was an N64 game first), Mario Sunshine, Kirby Air Ride, etc.
I’d argue 360 and PS3 was probably my favorite and it’s all right before everything started going to shit