1st Place – Combat Mission
This game is an important entry for two reasons. It is innovative within the wargame genre, and it is a champion for the independent way of doing business in an industry that's been overrun by corporate control.
2nd Place – Enemy Engaged: Comanche vs. Hokum
Like Combat Mission, this game adds some important new features to a genre often victimized by cookie cutter syndrome. The dynamic campaign is really fun and adds meaningful strategic elements to the game.
3rd Place – Tie between No One Lives Forever and Heavy Metal:FAKK2
Picking a shooter is tough because we had some good ones. But both of these, though short, introduced some great things, with FAKK2 really sporting fine graphics and the new melee and two-handed weapons system and NOLF offering creative situations for the user to enjoy. On a side note, Elite Force and The Fallen did a great job bringing Star Trek to life and were some of the best Star Trek games made (finally some good ones!).
1st Place – Thief II: The Metal Age
No other game of 2000 so successfully immersed me in another world. The grim atmosphere and eerie story and settings captivated me so much that I played through the game twice in succession...and then went back to the original Thief and online missions for more!
2nd Place – No One Lives Forever
The return of the thoughtful first-person shooter. Escaping the shopworn cliches of KISS: Psycho Circus and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force was nice enough; escaping to an entertaining and intriguing James Bond/Austin Powers alternate reality was even better.
3rd Choice – NHL 2001
EA Sports finally came up with a hockey game that both arcade action and sim fans could appreciate. The ability to customize the AI to your personal preference with slider bars made NHL 2001 the best sports game of the year, and provided a template for other sports game designers to follow. All games should be this configurable.
Best Console Title – Virtua Tennis
Yeah, it's tennis at the speed of light, but it's still one of the most addictive experiences since Pong trapped people on their naugahyde barcaloungers in 1974. Virtua Tennis is the perfect modern expression of what good videogames used to be about when we were all a lot
younger than we are today.