BEST-USE-OF-HARDWARE GAME OF 2000

Typing Of The Dead (PC, Sega)

Sneaking out almost unheralded right at the end of the year, Sega’s Typing Of The Dead offered an extremely unlikely blend of humour, sickening zombie gore and genuine educational value. As hordes of decomposing undead lurched towards you to eat your brains, your only hope was to swiftly and accurately bash "Touching zombies is disgusting" out on your PC keyboard. For motivation, it beats a pat on the back from Mavis Beacon hands down, and it’s the first PC game I can remember to ever turn the keyboard from an annoying obstacle to intuitive control into an indispensable tool.

RUNNERS-UP: Pokemon Red, Blue, Yellow (Game Boy, Nintendo)

BEST GAMEPLAY-FREE GAME OF 2000

Shenmue (Dreamcast, Sega)

At first glance, this category title might seem at best like a backhanded compliment, but in fact the opposite is true. It’s almost impossible NOT to finish Shenmue – the game is extremely linear, and leads you by the hand from start to end – but compared to similar titles like Final Fantasy, Shenmue’s world is so utterly convincing and entrancing that it creates an **illusion** of total freedom that makes playing it feel more like taking a holiday than trudging through an endless series of random battles and reading hours and hours of scrolling text. There can’t ever have been a title offering more things to do that have no bearing whatsoever on the outcome of the game, yet which you found yourself wasting hours on doing anyway. Shenmue is in fact barely a "game" in any real sense at all, but it’s a masterpiece all the same.

RUNNERS-UP: The Sims (PC, Maxis), Zelda – Majora’s Mask (N64, Nintendo)

MOST PREDICTABLY-OVERLOOKED GAME OF 2000

Bangai-O (Dreamcast, Virgin)

Despite a raft of good reviews, it didn’t take Einstein to predict that this colossally fantastic 2D shooter from cult developers Treasure would sell like hot bacon rolls at a Jewish funeral. Untouched by hype (or, indeed, any apparent marketing budget at all, given that after several fruitless calls to the PR outfit even your correspondent had to go out and buy his own copy), this tour-de-force of ultra-accomplished old-skool gameplay combined with stunning – but 2D – aesthetics stiffed like Paul Daniels at an Amish witch trial. That Treasure’s equally-stunning new N64 title Sin & Punishment is unlikely to even get the chance of a UK release from Nintendo only makes it worse.

RUNNERS-UP: Bishi Bashi Special (Playstaion, Konami), Jet Set Radio (Dreamcast, Sega)

TICKY TICKY TIMEBOMB GAME OF 2000

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (PC/Playstation/Dreamcast, Eidos)

It’s not, of course, the first time that a lazy, shoddy lump of cynical cash-in crap has sold a bucketload, though WWTBAM’s takings last year represent the biggest bucket to date. But the game that single-handedly propped up the Christmas sales season may yet come back to bite both Eidos and the industry on the backside. Rise Of The Robots and Tomorrow Never Dies both flew off the shelves, but Mirage went down the toilet shortly afterwards, the Amiga market never recovered, and EA didn’t achieve anything like the same success this year despite a vastly superior Bond game in The World Is Not Enough. In this business, companies rarely get the chance to burn punters’ fingers twice.

RUNNERS-UP: Ridge Racer V (PS2, Namco), Driver 2 (Playstation, Infogrames)

MOST UNDER-APPRECIATED SUCCESS OF 2000

Perfect Dark (N64, Rare/Nintendo)

The subject of endless hype before it came out, and almost completely forgotten after it did, the critical apathy around Rare’s long-awaited Goldeneye follow-up bemused the heck out of this reporter. With Goldeneye many people’s choice as the best game of all time on any format, you’d imagine a title that took the big G as a template, improved it vastly and tacked on the equivalent of a whole Quake 3 just for fun (and more besides) would have been the talk of the town all year, scooping awards by the truckful and plaudits in abundance. But a strange sniping mentality surrounded Perfect Dark, with critics carping about the irrelevant nonsense like the quality of the voice acting and the fact that it wasn’t as immediately new and stunning as Goldeneye (obviously, since Goldeneye all but started the entire "stealth" genre by itself), and the game struggled to make more than a footnote in most end-of-year reviews.

RUNNERS-UP: Super Mario Brothers (Game Boy Color, Nintendo), Medal Of Honour (Playstation, EA)

LOOK-WHAT-A-BIT-OF-ADVERTISING-CAN-DO GAME OF 2000

Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast, Sega)

As far as your correspondent’s exhaustive research (namely, thinking about it for a minute) can ascertain, Crazy Taxi was the only Dreamcast game to top the All-Formats chart in the whole of 2000, a fact almost certainly attributable to the fact that it was the only one anyone can remember having any sort of noticeable advertising campaign attached to it at all. Even though the game is a simple and limited (but still fantastic) arcade port, it’s brought in more cash for Sega than any other title since the DC’s launch games. Coincidence or magic? Let’s hope the Sega marketing boys manage to work out the answer this year, eh?