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Game of the Month: March 2004
We finally got some worthy games!
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With all the videogames that are released each and every month, it can be quite a difficult task to decide which title to spend your hard-earned money on. Granted you could go by our review scores alone and weed through the long list of names to find something that scored high or low, but what if you had somewhere else to turn?
Rather than wait until the end of the year like for our big award blowout, your incredibly masculine friends at IGN.com have decided to employ a monthly tribute to the weeks that were. We're resolved to illustrate to our readers what we thought was the very best game for each system over the past month, and tell you the reason why.
While some of us often chime in with our comments at the end of reviews, for the most part, the reviews on IGN are primarily written by one editor; in this feature we get all of the editors on a particular channel to vote for our Game of the Month. What better way to represent your channel than to speak your mind all at once?
How does it work? Simple. Any game released in the past month is eligible for the award and is taken through a battery of tests by every editor on that particular channel. After we've finished evaluating each game that comes down the pipeline, we put our heads together and decide on a single "best of" winner that's worthy of the title "IGN Game of the Month". Pretty straightforward, don't you think?
Now that we have the guidelines out of the way, let's move on and "congratulate" this month's winner...
Why we picked it: Seriously, have you played this one yet? Reflex-oriented first-person shooters don't get any better than this. Hell, even people who usually prefer more thoughtful, ruminative shooters will still have a blast with the awesomely ambitious Onslaught mode. Bringing a new level of sophistication to the mix without ever abandoning its twitchy roots, Unreal Tournament 2004 is a smarter alternative for action gamers. That it brings back the much-loved Assault mode makes it even sweeter.
It's the rare game that has us forgoing lunch just so we can spend more time playing but Unreal Tournament 2004 did just that. The instant the demo hit the web, we were hooked. The instant the final copies arrived in our hot little hands, we were hopelessly and permanently addicted to the high-speed action, the brilliant level design, and the jaw-dropping visuals.
Why we picked it: Oh , cruel, cruel Fate! Why must you torment us so? Why must you make us wait through two months of absolute garbage and then present us with not one, but two fantastic games in the same month. Far Cry offers gamers some of the best visuals seen to date and puts the player smack dab in the middle of a lush, tropical paradise also inhabited by some surprisingly intelligent enemies. For those who think PC games have no more room to surprise you, you owe it to yourself to pick up this game.
Though the recent Splinter Cell sequel also offered stiff competition, in the end it was Far Cry's engine and AI work that put it over its brother. And now that that pesky save problem is fixed, there's not much of anything we can say bad about this title.
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12:00 am PST March 31, 2004