I never made it through to the end without using cheats as a kid. Having played through it for Twitch recently, I understand why. This game is brutally hard at times. Enemies can drain your health with one burst of their smg, and you can't effectively dodge because of clunky PS1 collision detection. It's unfortunate, as this game's high points are very high. The catacomb level, Morocco, and the entire Crete section are incredibly atmospheric. Being able to play as a woman French resistance fighter is a nice touch, too, adding a bit of variety to the World War II first-person shooter genre. On top of that, this game has some of the best graphics the PS1 ever had. This could have been a better game than the first one, but its relentless, unfair difficulty and poor collision detection hold it back. This game is worth at least a look, but as far as first-person shooters from 2000 go, you'd be better off playing Perfect Dark, preferably the remake of it they did for the Xbox consoles, though the Nintendo 64 version works just fine, too.

What can I say about Sonic Adventure 2 that hasn't already been said? If you didn't own a Sega Genesis, there's a good chance that, until Sonic Frontiers came out, this was your first Sonic game. I know it was mine. That being said, I didn't own it until recently so I think I don't have any nostalgia blindness for it. This was probably the most bang for your buck you could get out of a lot of platformers back then. Six playable characters across three campaigns, tons of side missions to try, a surprisingly robust multiplayer, and a whole game of raising animals that in all honesty is better than the main game in a lot of ways.

It tried something different with the story at the time, and while it didn't succeed in some ways, it also was doing more than Mario was at the time. While I think I prefer Sonic Adventure 1's aesthetic and laid back nature, I can't deny that this is probably the most important Sonic game. Not the best Sonic game and incredibly flawed and hinted at Sonic's wasting illness that he would develop in the 2000s, but still a fun diversion. This game was the end of one era and the beginning of another. What a way to go out and enter at the same time.