My brothers and I had loved Dark Forces, but been a little disappointed by Jedi Knight (outside of the wacky LAN multiplayer we enjoyed). When my oldest brother got ahold of this though, he and I had an absolute blast with it. The gameplay felt extremely refined, and for a long time it had our favorite lightsaber combat ever. The story was interesting, and I loved seeing a post-ROTJ Luke as a Jedi master. The force powers felt great to use, and platforming around levels as a Jedi was terrific. Lots of fond memories, probably the high point for the series. Jedi Academy has equally fun gameplay, but was never as memorable to me as this one.

I only played bits and pieces of this at friends' houses when it first came out, and it always seemed cool but intimidating as someone so much more used to Link's Awakening on the Gameboy. After we bought Majora's Mask at its launch though, my brother decided we should go back and play OoT proper and picked up a cartridge. I still prefer Majora's Mask by a good margin, but I can't deny what an incredible game this is especially for Nintendo's first 3D Zelda game. It keeps to the Link to the Past formula pretty closely, but the time travel storyline is a terrific twist on it. Seeing how the world falls to pieces in different ways in Link's seven year absence was a real trip when first experiencing it. The dungeon designs are mostly great (I even don't mind the Water temple, although it was very confusing on first playthrough), and the world felt huge to explore even if now it seems pretty quaint. The day and night cycle was also really impressive to me, and the lock-on targeting made the adjustment to 3D combat so much smoother than many contemporaries. It's definitely aged a fair bit, but it is absolutely still one of the great games of all time, and a pivotal point for the medium as a whole

Master Quest seemed like a dope idea to me when I first heard about it coming out, and I had to try it since I felt like I'd really mastered OoT at that point. The child dungeons went fine, and even the forest temple, but I hit a real wall in the fire temple. Tried it for quite a while before giving up and moving on. I finally came back and beat the whole game on a fresh file years later, and it was a fun time. I'd enjoy seeing this done with other games in the series too.

I'd really loved the original Star Wars Racer on N64, so my parents got us this one when they saw it at the store. It was a big improvement on the technical side, but it didn't grab me quite as hard as the first one. I may have seen Attack of The Clones (the first time I realized as a child that movies could be not good) before we got this game that cooled me on Star Wars a little, or maybe I'd just fallen off racing games by the PS2 era. Anyway, still played it for a while, podracing is still a pretty novel type of racing and all. And I liked getting to whiz by stuff on various Star Wars planets.

This was probably the first Sonic game I'd played since Sonic 3 & Knuckles, so I was thrilled to see it make the jump to 3D. The 3 different gameplay styles were really interesting, as was the splitting of the story into the Hero and Dark halves. Shadow's edginess was very funny to me even as a kid, and I liked the attitude in Sonic's voice-acting. The story is pretty bananas, but I like Sonic games that way. I think the gameplay hasn't held up too great today, but I still have a lot of fond memories. Music is pretty great too, the hip-hop tracks on several of Knuckles's levels are wild.

I think this was the first Silent Hill game I actually beat (I went back to play SH1 proper after), and what an unforgettable experience it was! It's truly amazing what Team Silent were able to do in the early days of the PS2 here, with such an incredible atmosphere and look to the game. The few characters we have are all fascinating in different ways, and the game rewards multiple playthroughs (especially if aiming for different endings) to really absorb the story. The gameplay is pretty classic survival horror stuff, but I was pleasantly surprised how easy I found the melee combat to work with. Boss fights are far between but incredibly memorable. Never before had a game scared me so much but had me absolutely compelled to keep playing. An all-time masterpiece, I don't expect the remake to improve things all that much but I'll check it out.

As a Spyro-loving kid, getting this with our new PS2 for Christmas was a dream come true. After Final Fantasy X this was probably my most played those first few months. A 3D platformer collectathon with PS2 graphics was just the coolest thing to me. Learning how to do rolls into long jumps, or punching off ledges then spin-jumping to gain height was super fun. The game was pretty charming too, I found Daxter really funny and all the colorful characters you meet were neat. The fisherman saying "OOH, here comes a big one!" has been burned into my head since 2001. Definitely got a little confused and lost in the later levels, I thought the game started stronger than it finished. But I still had a darn good time.