Game of the Month: May 2003

May 30, 2003

With all the videogames that come out 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 games in search of something that scored high or low, but what if you had somewhere else to turn to?

Rather than wait until the end of the year like we normally do, 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 in the past month, and tell you exactly the reason why. And not only are we going to do it on the last Friday of each and every month in 2003, we'll be speaking in unison instead of individually.

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. We get all of the editors on a particular channel to vote in our Game of the Month feature, so you get a well-rounded view of what we all think deserves the highest accolade of the best game in the past 30 days.

But 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 every game to come 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 simple, don't you think?

Now that we have the guidelines out of the way, let's move on and congratulate this month's winner...

IGNPC's Game of the Month

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Developer: Rockstar North
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Released: May 15, 2003

Buy it at the IGN Gamestore

Why We Picked It: Discounting Grand Theft Auto 3, there's no other game that offers anything like the experience you'll have with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (aside from perhaps Mafia). The game of fast cars and ruthless criminals packs more action and excitement into the first few hours than can be found in the entirety of most games. Released almost a full year after the previous version (and right during E3 -- thanks, Rockstar), there are a number of compelling, albeit minor, changes to the model that captivated us so much last year.

In the end, any criticism we can offer on this game is merely nitpicking. The occasional weaknesses of the game are few and far between and the overall momentum of the game propels you past the dull spots so quickly that you'll only begin to notice them once you start looking for things to criticize.

While Vice City is a better title than its predecessor, it does lack a lot of the surprise and discovery of the first title, at least in terms of design. We won't hold that against Rockstar too much. After all, there's not much incentive to innovate when the previous game is still selling like crazy. Still, the few additions they've made make Vice City a better (if not as unexpected) a treat.

Runner-Up: Rise of Nations
Developer: Big Huge Games
Publisher: Microsoft
Released: May 15, 2003

Buy it at the IGN Gamestore

Why We Liked It: Rise of Nations is a sort of halfway house in many respects between the RTS and TBS genres: while all players (whether AI or human-controlled) move at the same time, the ability to pause and issue commands before restarting time/actions effectively creates a turn in two discrete phases. Raise a nation, kick ass, etcetera. Now that you know what it is...

Rise of Nations is incredibly rich in optional gaming conditions. Multiplayer is fun, standalone is a challenge, the AI is among the best we've seen in an RTS, and the learning curve is surprisingly slight. A part of us thinks BHG did an excellent job on this one, while another part believes a chance was missed to move more than cautiously beyond Age of Empires and design something strikingly fresh and imaginative.

In the end, though, we can't fault BHG for delivering anything less than a professional product that will strongly please RTS players. Thus, you should probably go out and purchase it.

And so there you have it. Four months down, eight to go. We'd like to extend our thanks once again to Rockstar North, Rockstar Games, Big Huge Games, Microsoft and all those involved with this month's excellent games. Without you guys, we wouldn't be having any fun with these expensive hunks of junk sitting on our desks. See you next month!