Digging in the Crates: 2005

King of Posters
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This thread is for discussing and discovering games released in 2005.

Here are the rules

  1. You are encouraged to talk about whatever games released in 2005 that you wish.
  2. I will also keep a list of 6 Works for Posterity. You can add to the list by voting.
    I ask that you use the term vote explicitly if you want a game added to the list. There are stipulations for what you can vote for!

2.a. To vote for a game, you must have played it less than a month ago.
2.b. You can only vote for one game at a time. You have to wait until someone else votes for a game to add another.
2.c. There is no limit to how many games you can vote for over time.
2.d. More votes for a game will solidify its status as a Work for Posterity.
2.e. The list will be limited to 6. If there are ties for votes, the most recently added games will kick older ones off.

And those are all the rules! Please let me know if anything is too confusing and I’ll try to fix how I wrote it.

Just because the 1996 thread exists, does not mean the previous threads are closed. You can add to those whenever the fancy strikes you. Search the tag cratedigging to see the other threads.

Games for Posterity

  1. Shadow of the Colossus
  2. Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!
  3. Wizardry: Prisoner of the Battles
  4. Ninja Gaiden Black
  5. F.E.A.R.
  6. Chibi-Robo
Honorable Mentions

Ooga Booga
Cave Story

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Crave Story!

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Ooooohhhh, 2005 is a hard year, many great titles released there… thankfully i was wrong about God Hand and Okami, those were 2006. Killer7 otoh… aaaaanyway!

Let’s focus on the single game that comes to mind when i think 2005, and that is

Shadow of The Colossus

Unfortunately, we yuropeans got it officially in 2006, but thanks to chipped ps2s, that wasn’t a huge issue back then :tarothink:
So for the sake of this post, gonna consider it a 2005 game.

Where to start then — maybe the most important aspect of all, you rarely need to explain anything about SotC, because it has reached a certain critical mass/level that people recognize it even if they aren’t hardcore gamer-nerds. Wander, Mono, Agro, Colossi, that’s it.

Game got remastered and remade on PS3 and PS4 level, and we’re really missing a PS5 HD 4K Remaster Re-Re-Release imho, so that i can buy it for the fourth time. I’d call it one of the cornerstones of the PS2 and modern games in general, because it felt like a proper next gen game back then (including the

This SHOULDN’T BE POSSIBLE on this HW platform, period! :tronyell:

discussions we had multiple times) and managed to become one of the few games i’ve played and finished multiple times over three decades, i.e. in the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s.

It starred next to Adam Sandler in a movie, I did a speedrun topic to finish it in sub 5 hours on SB1.0 (accompanied by blurry 4:3 ratio screenshots) and it is a game i would probably nominate for a top-5 spot in a GoAT list.

In short, :zeldaheart: SotC.

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I’d play that parody game. The triangles are explicitly doritos in this one.

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voting for kimberly kubus’ Ooga Booga (epilepsy warning) which i just booted up again today. exemplifies the “broken” quality of kubus’ games imo, i.e. the extent to which he’d let what came out of the game engine guide him w/out exerting authorial control (at least that’s how it feels to me). i like that half the time you can’t finish the game at all owing to a random enemy behavior on the second screen, i like the extremely slow moving spiders in the maze levels where depending on what direction they start in you have to wait like a straight minute for one of them to pass by before you can walk down a just-too-narrow corridor. i’ve decompiled the game and i’m still not entirely sure what’s going on with the collision in the platforming levels. the title is the sound your brain makes when you try to play.

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You may be wondering why I selected 2005. There’s a game I’ve been thinking about since I first rented it in 2006. It left a strong impression even though I’m not sure if I finished it. That game is skip ltd.'s Chibi-Robo.

Since I first encountered it, I’ve had the chance to play through its family members, Chu :heart: Lip and Moon. Those games affected me with their clockwork towns populated by neurotics and wistful dreamers. Playing Chibi-Robo again, I see the same ingredients. Your life as a robot servant is split in two. During the day, you visit the family members: an unemployed father who spends his funds on toys and gadgets, a daughter who pretends she is a frog, and a lonely mother who cannot speak to either of them. At night, the toys come to life and mirror human emotions. A dog’s chew toy longs to be noticed by an heroic action figure. Egg soldiers patrol the kitchen.

Thrust into this world, you have only one reason for being: to spread happiness. You do this by picking up trash. You do this by scrubbing stains off the floor. You do this by simply being there.

Something big has happened in the story that I’ll talk about later, but it has me thinking about deeper themes that this simple game is playing at. I vote for Chibi-Robo.

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I am learning some extremely sweet tech through pure stubbornness. We might need to start cross-posting with Hi-Scores.

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i vote for Monolith Productions’ (rip) F.E.A.R. which i beat for the second time last semester (basically by accident/inertia) and which i’m still playing the expansion of right now! it rips! it’s like what if DooM 3 had guns that felt good and enemies that did more than jump out of closets. it has an astounding amount of level variety for a game with such a limited palette. its pacing is incredibly good. its shadows are razor sharp. its plot is complete nonsense. i love it.

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I gotta apologize because I thought Cave Story was released in 2004 so I left it off the list, but it looks like the first English translation patch came out in 2005 so it counts!

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Ninja Gaiden Black! As far as action games go, especially in the 6th generation, it’s cool to have a completely contiguous world to explore (at least after chapter 3), and truly adds to a realized sense of place. This is in addition to how good the combat feels thanks to the attention to weight, animation, hitstop. Performing an izuna drop feels so fucking good. And sure the combat isn’t nearly as freeform as its contemporary DMC3, but NGB’s encounters are much more engaging as the standard enemy CPU feels much more aggressive.

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I went back to our forum-wide poll years ago and it’s pulled up some lovely looking releases for the year:

2005 Releases

Kingdom Hearts II
MegaMan Maverick Hunter X
Tales of the Abyss
Work Time Fun
Rocket Slime
Homura
Pursuit Force
Super Mario Strikers
Under Defeat
King of Fighters XI
Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth
Shadow of the Colossus
F.E.A.R.
The Warriors
Gunstar Super Heroes
Myst V: End of Ages
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
Osu Tatakae Ouendan
Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift 2
Ape Escape 3
We :heart: Katamari
Ys: Oath in Felghana
Steambot Chronicles
Xanadu Next
Fantastic Children
Trauma Center: Under the Knife
Killer7
Pathologic
Haunting Ground
Psychonauts
Kirby: Canvas Curse
Tekken 5
10,000 Bullets
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath
Resident Evil 4

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Moi must have been asleep at the wheel, there’s no ENTHUSIA PROFESSIONAL RACING on this list?!?!

… Yes, sometimes IT HAPPENS. But still, :tronyell:

I had one job … gotta hand in my badge :servbotsalute:

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Because I am me…

Wizardry: Prisoner of the Battles

Though not released in English until like 2022 or whatever (as DLC for the Five Ordeals), the original came out in 2005 and is just a great Wizardry game. Well balanced progression with multiple dungeons that get more and more devious as you go, and a pretty good revision in terms of the guy who will get your party’s corpses for you, sometimes. It rules.

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Certainly not nominating the game, but I did pull out my DS and a flashcart I had loaded up then immediately put away.

Which is to say I played the first level of Goldeneye 007 until my DS died. Also my L-button was barely working, which made shooting difficult. You get Judi Dench giving your mission orders with her real voice. Then you have a balding man that is not Sean Bean as 006. Then I shot constantly respawniny guys in a very pore facsimile of N64’s Dam level. Then my DS battery died. But I did say “what a thankless task making this game.” No matter how hard you worked you are making a 3D FPS on hardware barely capable of rendering 3D in software, and then either using digital or touch controls. And then you are adapting a well beloved game but can’t make it the same game. You don’t even get Sean Bean! I already said that.

Wait why the hell did Nintendo Life say this was a 2005 game?? 2010 please disregard post.

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Goldeneye Rogue Agent is a 2005 though

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What a great subtitle. This is me whenever I play RPGs.

If you jump into this game again, you can vote for it too! I’d love to hear more about what still sings after 21 years.

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I’ve been thinking about this thread a lot, and shame I just put away my PS2! Gonna look through the PS2 Mook which lists 430 games for 2005, wow!

Did find a PC Engine game with a title like Pup Breeder and 6 Inch My Darling:

image
image569Ă—800 101 KB

Comes with 3 trading cards! A comedic adventure game!

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I completed Chibi-Robo several weeks ago. I’ve been meaning to talk more about it.

This is a Nintendo published game where divorce and corporate layoffs are discussed. There is a teddy bear that battles addiction. The animism presented in the game reminds you that everything discarded contains a soul. That is, memories inhabit objects.

Progression is far less obtuse than Moon and Chu :heart: Lip. I did not look anything up to complete the stories for the toys and their families.

Playing this game reminds me of how a JRPG is one of the few formata where you can sneak in a domestic plotline, to tell a story about a family or someone’s private aspirations. Chibi-Robo does a beautiful job with it.

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I have maybe successfully de-stinked my DSi LL and definitely broke my DS Lite.

Either way I played Aka-chan wa doko kara kuru no? Which is the sequel to Feel The Magic, released in the same year. Sega saw success and said “crank another one out purely on the cute title.” That title is “Where do babies come from?”

Where the first one was a weird whismical game where men in rabbit ears gave you challenges to woo a girl’s heart, this one has you do boring challenges to woo a girl’s heart, and then a spurned girl builds robot bulls to attack you and I decided it was real boring and quit.

It keeps the musical stings from the first game which between each game are showing the escalation of how strange the situation is. Here its like “these other guys want the hot girl’s attention too.” Thrilling and hilarious.

I feel like the big 2005 DS releases are Kirby Canvas Curse (which SB/IC looooovvveeeeeeed) and Ouendan a game that I’ve also never really connected but it is outrageous and “hilarious” in a way this game isn’t. I do like they localized it as a completely different game.

Ouendan was also the number 1 game for Japanese-illiterate Americans to pull every DS game off the shelf trying to find while their girlfriendwife’s patience was increasingly tested on their Japan vacation.

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I wrote that post then remembered Professor Kawashima’s first success in psuedo science (Brain Training) which was also the answer to my own question of “when did the tide turn from PSP to DS?” Well it was when 3 million Japanese people bought Brain Training and every exchange student bought the Kanji dictionary instead of the expensive electronic dictionaries.

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