Almost definitely JANUARY

After the most boring Christmas line-up in living memory, the granny-money market was desperate for a few exciting releases to relieve the tedium of the shelfloads of "threequels" that had swamped December. Sadly, the software industry had a massive hangover all month, and eager consumers were left with nothing to spend their money on except the worst version of Sensible Soccer of all time (on Playstation) and dull Star Wars shoot-‘em-up Rogue Squadron (PC). N64 owners came off best of a very bad bunch, with the machine’s finest driving game to date in the criminally under-rated Top Gear Overdrive and the knockabout arcade fun of NFL Blitz (the world’s least awful American Football game), but that was as good as it got.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Top Gear Overdrive (Nintendo/Boss)

FEBRUARY or thereabouts

As the industry woke up and groggily wiped the sick off the front of its shirt, it suddenly realised it was supposed to be releasing some games, and February saw some pretty triple-A names making an appearance. A pair of top-pedigree god sims showed up on PC, in the shapes of Sim City 3000 (a lot like Sim City 2000, except much friendlier and more fun) and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (much like every other Sid Meier game, but in space). The Playstation saw the Premier Manager franchise make its big-time console debut, and Virgin had a game attempt at breaking the FIFA/ISS duopoly of football games with the well-meaning but flawed Viva Football. On the Nintendo front there was the hastily tarted-up Game Boy Color version of the lovely and blockbusting Zelda (basically the same game but in colour and with about two extra rooms), and little else, the big N having apparently decided in advance to take 1999 off.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Sim City 3000 (Maxis)

MARCH, more or less

Some more big names arrived this month, as the industry toyed with the novel idea of not releasing everything at Christmas and hoping everyone had been saving their money up for the whole year. An old brand made a comeback with Ridge Racer Type 4 on Playstation, an absolutely gorgeous game whose moment sadly seems to have passed in the search for ever more "realistic" driving experiences in the wake of the stupendously successful yet trainspottingly-dull Gran Turismo. Arcade-style racing was also the theme of the much-hyped Rollcage from Psygnosis, a near-unplayable mess of badly-realised good ideas which sank without trace despite hysterical reviews from the ever-excitable gaming press, but the really big news on PS was the long-awaited release of Konami’s glorious Metal Gear Solid. Despite months of grey import sales, the game rocketed to the top of the charts and sold bucketloads, proving that people WERE, after all, prepared to buy original games in big numbers. Elsewhere, though, the tried-and-trusted still ruled, with Championship Manager 3 flying off shelves and into the nylon arms of anoraks everywhere and, along with another addition to the Civilisation series (Call To Power), dominating the PC market. Similarly, the latest outings from the FIFA and Castlevania stables took most of the N64 honours. Oh well.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Metal Gear Solid (Konami)

Roughly APRIL

Business as usual after all the excitement of the previous month. Licenced rubbish largely held sway in April, with awful Playstation games based on Rugrats and A Bug’s Life accounting for a huge chunk of April gaming revenue. The only interesting PS game of the month was R-Type Delta, a splendid 3D update of the classic shoot-‘em-up which remained true to the spirit of the original but added flashy 90s aesthetics and sold around 12 copies. UEFA Champions League made a tilt at the footy crown, but no-one much cared. Only fun Theme-Park-alike Rollercoaster Tycoon and the atmospheric and brutally hard Alien Vs Predator enlivened a dull PC market, as Infogrames’ much-touted RPG Silver fell flat, and the N64 fared no better, with only 3DO’s Battletanx providing some short-lived thrills.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Alien Vs Predator (Fox)

MAYish

Nintendo suddenly awoke from their slumbers with the release of Mario Party. The first N64 Mario game to be developed out-of-house, it was a highly original mix of board game and dozens of short, simple arcade mini-game sections, specifically designed for multi-player play. Mario Party was tremendously entertaining in itself (even in one-player mode), but it also set out a blueprint that would be copied several times by other developers during the course of the year (including Acclaim with yet another shoddy South Park licence). The burgeoning "remakes" market saw one of its best titles in the N64’s superb (but entirely neglected) modern update of 20-year-old platform puzzler Lode Runner. The really big news, however, was GT’s Driver. Essentially Starsky And Hutch – The Game, the title captured gamer’s imaginations and sold by the shovelful, helped by a Playstation retail price war that saw the game going out at a prophetic £29.99. Despite not having had to cut their own margins any and hence deriving huge financial benefit from the significant increase in sales the low price brought about, GT whined and moaned and bitched loudly about the pricing situation until everyone was heartily sick of them and the company was put up for sale. Meanwhile, all PC owners had to get excited about was the 23^rd near-identical game in the X-Wing series (X-Wing Alliance). Poor old PC owners, eh?

GAME OF THE MONTH: Driver (GT)

Sort of JUNE

Sport was king as the sun came out, although unusually there were no big football games for the summer, save Infogrames’ dire Puma Street Soccer on Playstation. Snowboarding (obviously) was on the agenda again with the dreadful Big Air ("Hey, I know," they must have thought at EA, "We’ve got a really crappy snowboarding game here – let’s release it in June!"), and lecherous hacks trapped in oven-like magazine offices drooled all over Anna Kournikova Smash Court Tennis, in which naïve old Namco finally realised it was no use having the world’s best tennis game if you didn’t get some short-skirted nubile draped all over the box as well. Meanwhile, Eidos confused the hell out of everyone by capturing the official F1 licence on PC (and then releasing the exact same game everyone else had). Also on PC, DMA Design had a couple of rare flops in two very different tank-based titles (Wild Metal Country and Tanktics), and Westwood wasted everyone’s time not with the increasingly-late Tiberian Sun but the pointlessly pedestrian Lands Of Lore 3. Oddly, the big names were concentrated on the N64 again, with the console being the flagship for the new Star Wars movie with Episode One: Racer, and also seeing the rather splendid Duke Nukem: Zero Hour.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Anna Kournikova Smash Court Tennis (Namco)

JULY, give or take a couple of weeks

Sony’s in-house designers sprang to life after a very quiet half-year with the quirky and well-received Ape Escape, but it failed to set the public aflame. Slightly more successful was Lucasarts’ confused, rushed and generally dreadful Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which sold well despite a fairly round kicking in the games press (and 9/10 from Official Playstation Magazine, obviously). Further cynical cashing-in showed in the face of Fox’s Croc 2, but the smart money all went on the clumsily-titled Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver, a rather formulaic but engaging fantasy Tomb Raider clone from Eidos. With absolutely nothing whatsoever happening on N64, game lovers turned to the PC more in hope than expectation, but were rewarded with Take 2’s hugely atmospheric WW2 stealth shoot-‘em-up Hidden And Dangerous and the riotous street-racing mayhem of Midtown Madness from, of all people, Microsoft. MM crossed the car-chase thrills of Driver with the traffic-packed living streets of Sega’s arcade hit Crazy Taxi to tremendously entertaining effect, and frightened the life out of everyone who fears a future world totally owned by Bill Gates. Brrr.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Midtown Madness (Microsoft)

AUGUST (Probably.)

A month of sequels, with V-Rally, Dungeon Keeper, Quake (on N64) and F1 World Grand Prix all getting new versions (though only the first stood out as a noticeable improvement on its predecessor), but a few original titles of note appeared too. Shiny’s much-delayed RC Stunt Copter finally made it to the shelves, delighting pun-loving sub-editors everywhere and pretty much no-one else, so absurdly hard and unforgiving was the game’s control system. And the controversial Kingpin swore and bludgeoned its way to some small-time notoriety which acted as a smokescreen behind which to hide a rather dull game. Pick of a particularly poor crop this month was Konami’s Silent Hill, a blood-and-guts horror effort in the Resident Evil mould only nastier, with THQ’s unusually arcadey PC race game Breakneck taking runners-up spot purely on account of having some colour and energy.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Silent Hill (Konami)

It felt like SEPTEMBER

The Dreamcast unexpectedly (no sniggering at the back there) failed to make its planned appearance this month, leaving a huge gap in the release schedules as all the games publishers had held back to avoid them getting swamped in the DC launch missed a shot at a near-empty market. What was left was very little – the fun Speed Freaks was the first of several Mario Kart clones on the Playstation; the crap FA Premier League Stars was the latest half-baked challenger for the football crown; the overblown Shadowman was like Soul Reaver, but on the N64; the worthless Superman was the most successful totally appalling game since Rise Of The Robots; the gory Braveheart was Command & Conquer in kilts, and the ace fairground light-gun blaster Point Blank 2 was even better and even less successful than its predecessor.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Point Blank 2 (Namco)

OCTOBER, in the broader sense

The Dreamcast finally made it out, boasting the biggest if not the best launch line-up of any console. After loudly urging all developers to make full-screen 60Hz options available in all DC games, Sega boldly led the way with two of the shabbiest 50Hz bordered conversions of all time in Virtua Fighter 3tb and Sega Rally 2. The one game they bothered to do properly (Sonic Adventure) rocketed to the top of the charts for a week before everyone realised it was a bit pants, and most of the plaudits ended up going to Capcom’s shallow but tremendously entertaining knockabout arcade brawler Powerstone. (Despite another crummy 50Hz conversion.) Plenty of other games previously intended to avoid the DC launch hype appeared too, not least the years-late Tiberian Sun, which turned out to be essentially completely identical to the previous C&C games and left everyone a bit bewildered as to exactly what it was that had taken so long. Wipeout 3 (if you think I’m calling it "Wip3out", you can paint my shed) provided a stirring last hurrah for the veteran franchise, and football management games suddenly got a whole lot less trainspottery (disappointing fans of the genre everywhere) with Code Masters’ lively and enjoyable PS effort LMA Manager. And Eidos absolutely smashed the World Shameless Cashing-In Record by releasing Michael Owen’s World League Soccer just five months after the original, non-licensed, version of game. EA’s FIFA team were said to be gutted, though sadly not literally.

GAME OF THE MONTH: Powerstone (Eidos/Capcom)

May well have been NOVEMBER

A pretty big month all round, except for PC owners who had nothing much to entertain them other than GTA2. On N64, Rare released their first new game in over a year in the shape of spiffing space shoot-‘em-up Jet Force Gemini, while Nintendo’s second and third out-of-house Mario games (the glorious Mario Golf and the bizarre four-player fighter Smash Brothers) provided at least the illusion that Nintendo still cared about the flagging console, and Rainbow Six proved that it could do cerebral stealth games every bit as well as the PC and PS. European Game Boy fans finally got their own version of cockfighting simulation Pokemon, a mere fifteen years or so behind the rest of the world. Dreamcast owners (or at least those who could find shops with any stock) enjoyed a smile-filled month with the excellent comedy boxing game Ready 2 Rumble, the laugh-a-minute zombie frolics of House Of The Dead 2 and the quirky, funny, and totally commercially disastrous race game Pen Pen (the explanatory but unpronounceable TriIceLon having been brutally chopped out of its name). And they could just snigger at Rage’s awful UEFA Striker. Luckiest of all, though, were Playstation owners. Final Fantasy VIII provided hours of enjoyment for gamers who didn’t actually like games very much, Dino Crisis added dinosaurs to Resident Evil (the only thing it had been missing, frankly), and Metal Gear Solid Special Missions brought a fix of overdue relief to everyone who’d finished the original MGS in a day and a half (that is, everyone). The best-kept secret of the month, though (if not the year) was Hasbro’s remake of the game that started it all, Nolan Bushnell’s Pong. Totally ignored by the games press, Pong took the simplest idea in the history of games and turned it, Mario Party-style, into dozens of tiny mini-games, all radically different from each other but always true to the spirit of the original. Superbly original, weeping-into-the-carpet challenging, utterly addictive, and with a four-player mode bordering on genius, Pong was, without a shadow of a doubt, the game of 1999. Everything else would be an anti-climax.

GAME OF THE MONTH, AND YEAR: Pong (Hasbro)

DECEMBER. Definitely.

In a surprise development for 1999, the industry decided to release six times as many games in December as in the rest of the year added together, so I’ll have to be selective and brief. Dreamcast flagship title Soul Calibur looked astonishing and had games journalists everywhere dampening their pants in boyish excitement, but with gameplay so unchallenging it could be finished in four minutes flat by a 9-year-old with his eyes closed (no, literally) the game left the mass market thoroughly unconvinced. DC owners were also showered with mediocre racing games (including two F1 efforts utterly indistinguishable not only from one another but from every other F1 game ever) and one really good one, Ubi Soft’s idiot-titled but fast and characterful motorbiker Suzuki Alstare Extreme Racing. On PS, Tomb Raider 4 was Tomb Raider again, FIFA 2000 was FIFA 99, 98 and 97 again and Crash Team Racing was Mario Kart again. While the N64 saw its worst game of this or any other year in the shape of a breathtakingly diabolical conversion of Carmageddon, with the mighty Donkey Kong 64 flying the flag at the other end of the quality scale. As for the PC, Mucky Foot’s Urban Chaos looked like it was probably fantastic, but when I installed it (three times) on my PC my character flatly refused to walk forwards under any circumstances, or recognise any keyboard controls at all. Still, the first 50 feet of the first training level was good - well done, Eidos’ QA team. Quake 3 provided all the excitement of playing Quake against your friends without all that tedious business of actually having any friends, and took computer AI to revolutionary new lengths – now, enemies could now run both towards AND away from you! Championship Manager Season 99-00 helped keep the streets free of fat smelly people with beards during the hectic Christmas shopping period, for which the rest of us were eternally grateful. 1,453 other games came out too, but they were all shit. Goodnight everybody!

DREAMCAST GAMES OF THE YEAR

1. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Midway)

2. Soul Calibur (Namco)

3. Suzuki Alstare Extreme Racing (Ubi Soft)

4. Powerstone (Eidos/Capcom)

5. House Of The Dead 2 (Sega)

6. Hydro Thunder (Midway)

7. Pen Pen (Infogrames)

8. NFL Blitz (Midway)

9. Toy Commander (Sega)

PLAYSTATION GAMES OF THE YEAR

1. Pong (Hasbro)

2. Metal Gear Solid (Konami)

3. Driver (GT)

4. Ridge Racer Type 4 (Namco)

5. Point Blank 2 (Namco)

6. LMA Manager (Code Masters)

7. Silent Hill (Konami)

8. Crash Team Racing (Sony)

9. Wipeout 3 (Psygnosis)

N64 GAMES OF THE YEAR

1. Donkey Kong 64 (Rare/Nintendo)

2. Mario Party (Nintendo)

3. Jet Force Gemini (Rare/Nintendo)

4. Lode Runner 3D (Infogrames)

5. Top Gear Overdrive (Nintendo/Boss)

6. Mario Golf (Nintendo)

7. Rainbow Six (Take 2)

8. Duke Nukem: Zero Hour (GT)

9. Super Smash Bros (Nintendo)

PC GAMES OF THE YEAR

1. Midtown Madness (Microsoft)

2. Hidden & Dangerous (Take 2)

3. Alien vs Predator (Fox)

4. Sim City 3000 (Maxis)

5. Braveheart (Eidos)

6. Homeworld (Sierra)

7. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (EA)

8. FIFA 2000 (EA)

9. Pro Pinball: Big Race USA (Empire)

WORST OF THE YEAR

While recent years have seen plenty of pretty dull and formulaic games released, it was beginning to seem that at least the days of the truly shockingly inept and terrible game making it to market were all but over. 1999, though, saw something of a revival for the true stinker. People really ought to be fired for this wretched team of travesties. And then clubbed to death with iron bars.

1. Carmageddon (N64, SCi)

2. Superman (N64, Titus)

3. Live Wire (Playstation, SCi)

4. Tomorrow Never Dies (Playstation, EA)

5. The X-Files (Playstation, Sony)

6. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (PS/PC, Lucasarts)

7. Milo’s Astro Lanes (N64, Interplay)

8. Street Skater (Playstation, EA)

9. Snow Surfers (Dreamcast, Sega)

10. UEFA Striker (Dreamcast, Infogrames)