1. Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies
When I first took my PS2 out of the box in 2000, I had 2 games to choose from, and admittedly when I first saw the cover of Ace Combat 4 I was not impressed. I had seen countless flight sim games on the original playstation that were mediocre at best, and given the choice between MGS:2 and this, I went with solid snake. Three months later when I literally had nothing else in the MGS world to do and was tired of picking fights with emergency response teams in the big shell, I threw in AC04 just to see what it looked like. Oh was I ever surprised. This is one of those games that just gets it. Its incredibly simple in presentation, not trying to wow you with crazy graphics or intense music or cut-scenes. What it does is create a fictional world through the masterful telling of a story, giving you just enough information to know whats going on, but leaving that little bit out that makes you desperate for more. As soon as the screen lights up you feel like youre actually a part of the AC04 universe. The menus are designed to look like a computer, and theres even an ingenious touch of overhead light reflections showing in the menu to make you feel like youre looking at a computer in some briefing room. The story is told through a series of drawings with a voice actor narrating what the drawings help illustrate, with the help of sound effects of course. What this does is give your imagination a base of understanding, and then cut it loose to fill in all the details yourself and create your own idea of what things are like in this world. Basically its like reading the best book youve ever read, except you get to control what happens in the action scenes.
In terms of gameplay, graphics, presentation, pretty much every category assignable to any game, its flawless. The graphics are absurdly realistic to the point that when youre flying around at 20,000 feet looking at the ground, it feels like youre looking at the ground from 20,000 feet. The terrain is simply perfect. Other games since have made vast improvements and very much outshine the graphics here, but for the first game of its kind produced on a new system, this was simply astounding. Nobody had ever seen graphics like this, and this was just the view. The aircraft looked perfect, the missiles drew smoketrails across the sky, vapor formed on your wings during certain maneuvers, the sun glinted off of your instruments, and the water, and the buildings, rain spattered on your canopy, streetlights on the ground during night missions looked like streetlights, I could go on and on. Ultimately where this game shined though was not in its optical beauty or ingenious presentation, but in the story itself. You actually felt like the Mobius 1 character, and the game presents the story in such a way that you see the actions of Mobius 1 through the eyes of the enemy, watching their reactions as you become more and more infamous, gradually becoming their biggest threat. Your notoriety grows with each mission, and as you push your way through the campaign the occupied civilians behind enemy lines start looking to you as their last hope. The whole experience is, if you let it, one of extreme immersion and brilliant fun. The final mission says it all. You lead an entire squadron of planes under your callsign against the most formidable opponents the enemy has left, not to mention a super fortress that requires flying through a tunnel in typical Ace Combat style to destroy. The very end of the game, when youve just flown through the tunnel of the shadow of death and turned the last missile into swiss cheese, it cuts to your wingmen and the ever faithful Skyeye, all looking desperately to see if youll come out of that massive explosion. A game has done its job when it inspires you to physically react to your digital triumph, and thats exactly what AC04 does. I jumped out of my chair, fist pumping and high fiveing when Mobius came out of the tunnel. The war was over and the good guys triumphant. I know I can tend to get too worked up about some things, and maybe I was more excited about this game than I should have been, but to be fair theres not many games that make me jump out of my chair, and a game that can do that with pretty much every level is absolutely worthy of the number 1 spot, in my opinion. Oer all those skies and all those plains, where freedom and justice prevail