Your favourite games from the dark age of pure shit (2005 - 2009)

[General Disarray]

It was rts genres last brilliance before fading away. We still got lots of new games and new IPs in the rts genre. And also some other good games.

2005:
Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars ( an underrated gem, formation fighting with units only moving fast on roads)
Battlefield 2 (Project Reality mod is still going forward adding new features to the game, better than Squad in content and mechanics)
Hearts Of Iron 2
Rome: Total War - Barbarian Invasion
Civ 4
Star Wars: Republic Commando
Dawn of War: Winter Assault

2006:
Final Fantasy XII
Medieval II: Total War
Arma: Armed Assault
Company of Heroes

2007:
World in Conflict
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer
Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms
Europa Universalis III

2008:
GTA 4
Left 4 Dead

2009:
Demon's Souls
Empire: Total War
Risen 1
Dawn of War II
Dragon Age: Origins
Hearts of Iron III
Men of War

 

[Darkozric]

2006
Okami (PS2, ported to Wii and PS3)
God Hand (PS2)
TES IV: Oblivion for people who really, really enjoy Open World RPGs
The Shivah

Seriously, The Shivah? You have terrible taste in adventures my sand nigga, but it's never too late to cultivate it.

 

[Lucumo]

Ah, the time when PC gaming went down the drain and I mostly switched towards online gaming.

SWAT 4
Call of Duty 2 (LAN and online)
Company of Heroes (via Hamachi with friends)
Ys: The Oath in Felghana
Ys Origin
Call of Duty 4 (LAN and online)
Battle for Wesnoth (mostly online with friends)

 

[Sibelius]

2005

FEAR
Shadow of the Colossus
Star Wars: Republic Commando

2006

Nothing, only game I played from this year was Oblivion, and it is shit

2007

The Witcher
Mass Effect
STALKER
Bioshock
Crysis

2008

Ninja Gaiden 2
Dead Space

2009

Arkham Asylum
Demon's Souls
Dragon Age: Origins

 

[deama]

Does fable count? It was released for consoles in 2004 but on PC was 2005.

Farcry 2?

OG mount and blade was released in 2008 if that counts.

The best need for speed game was released in 2005.

Neverwinter nights 2 got released in that period, along with it's exp packs.

Witcher 1 was released in 2007 and I prefered it over any of the other installments later on.

Crysis 1.

Borderlands 1 was released in 2009.

Can't forget about Dark Messiah of Might and Magic!

Dungeon Siege 2.

Jade Empire

Overlord game was released in 2007, was alright.

I decently liked Heroes of Annihilated Empires

Devil may cry 3 AND Devil may cry 4.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The idea that 2005 to 2009 is some kind of dark age is fucking stupid. Maybe if someone was to say it was a dark age for CRPGs I could get that. But all of gaming? It’s like one of the best periods for action games in gaming.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Meh. You should've put this in Gen RPG, then you'd probably have a pretty good case for the dark ages of shit, but if you didn't care about playing CRPGs, there was some good stuff.

2005:
Resident Evil 4
God of War
MGS 3: Subsistence (basically just Snake Eater though which was 2004)
Psychonauts
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction
F.E.A.R.
Civ IV
World of Warcraft (back when it was arguably good)
Freedom Force vs the Third Reich
KOTOR II
Dawn of War: Winter Assault

2006:
Company of Heroes
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
Medieval II: Total War
Half-Life 2: Episode One
Neverwinter Nights 2

2007:
Mass Effect
Bioshock
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
God of War II
Portal
Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
NWN 2: Mask of the Betrayer

2008:
Grand Theft Auto IV
Saints Row 2
Dead Space
Street Fighter IV
Drakensang: The Dark Eye (RPG drought, ugh)
NWN 2: Storm of Zehir

2009:
Borderlands
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Dragon Age: Origins (RPG drought, ugh)
Demon's Souls
Red Faction: Guerilla
Risen
Dawn of War II
Drakensang: The Dark Eye
Knights of the Chalice

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

During that time you’ve also got

Ninja Gaiden Black
Ninja Gaiden 2
Dead Rising
Pac-Man Championship Edition
BlazBlue (and the updated Continuum Shift)
Virtua Fighter 5 Online
Virtua Tennis 3
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2
Space Invaders Extreme
Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition
Devil May Cry 4
Bayonetta
Urban Reign
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (Xbox version)
Burnout Revenge
Dead or Alive 4
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (and later Colonies Edition)
Earth Defense Force 2017
Star Wars: Battlefront 2
I Made a Game with Zombies in It!
Operation Darkness
Armored Core: For Answer
The Club
Castle Crashers
Prototype
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

I only ever played it a tiny bit over at a friend’s place, but there was this Speed Racer game on Wii I played that was a lot of fun.

 

[Nutmeg]

Dang I forgot to add AC games on my list.

 

[Goldschmidt]

At least we got games completely tailored to pc.

2005:
F.E.A.R.
SWAT 4

2006:
Condemned Criminal Origins (only exception but good console port)
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
F.E.A.R. Extraction Point
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Prey

2007:
Crysis 1
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Stalker
The Witcher 1

2009:
Dragon Age Origins

 

[Lemming42]

The idea that 2005 to 2009 is some kind of dark age is fucking stupid. Maybe if someone was to say it was a dark age for CRPGs I could get that. But all of gaming? It’s like one of the best periods for action games in gaming.

It's a pretty dry period for FPS games as well. FEAR is probably the best entry in the whole genre from that era.

My impression of many big-name games from that time period is that they're overwhelmingly average. Dead Space is a great example; it was fine, I didn't mind walking slowly forward and dismembering things for a few hours, but my desire to play it again is somewhere near zero. Same for stuff like GUN or Bayonetta or Red Faction Guerilla or God of War or Dead Rising - it's all just sort of alright and rarely leaves me with a desire to come back to it.

I think there's a very good argument to be made that it's a dry period, especially when compared with, say, 1995 - 1999, 2000 - 2004, 2019 - 2023, or just about any other random four year period from 1990 onward. FPS and RPGs were both pretty dead, the indie scene hadn't properly started yet and consisted of shit like fucking FEZ and Braid or whatever (and Plants vs Zombies I guess, which was fun), consoles were still kind of shit and games had to limit themselves in order to be multiplatform, etc.

 

[SlamDunk]

2006 Gothic 3 (with Community Patch)
2007 Crysis
2009 Minecraft
2009 Risen

For me, that's plenty of great games "from the Dark Age of Pure Shit", as you so incorrectly put it. DAOPS is actually right now; has been going on for years.

 

[Goldschmidt]

The idea that 2005 to 2009 is some kind of dark age is fucking stupid. Maybe if someone was to say it was a dark age for CRPGs I could get that. But all of gaming? It’s like one of the best periods for action games in gaming.

It's a pretty dry period for FPS games as well. FEAR is probably the best entry in the whole genre from that era.

WTF are you spewing nonsense. The early-mid 2000's were known for FPS to push the pc engine limits. There were made significant leaps in graphics, physics, ai and gameplay elements on the pc. Ironically in the same timeline the cod franchise was spawn on the consoles hallmarking the fps decline that started to effect the FPS on pc late 2000s with its popamole gameplay. Also people who grew up with DOOM, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein, Quake, ..., have yet to put off their nostalgia goggles.

 

[Lemming42]

WTF are you spewing nonsense.The early-mid 2000's were known for FPS to push the pc engine limits.

The thread's about the late 2000s. It's in the title, at the top of your screen, in big font.

 

[Goldschmidt]

WTF are you spewing nonsense.The early-mid 2000's were known for FPS to push the pc engine limits.

The thread's about the late 2000s. It's in the title, at the top of your screen, in big font.

Fair enough but 2005-2007 is mid 2000's.

 

[Lemming42]

If you know any good FPS games from those years I'd love to hear them. I really like FEAR and SWAT 4, both from 2005, but other than that all I can remember is stuff like Call of Juarez, Crysis, BioShock, Quake 4, and 2009 Wolfenstein, all of which are pretty middling IMO. You can really feel the console limitations coming into a lot of those games, along with the effects of Call of Duty's popularity.

 

[Goldschmidt]

"Crysis" "console limitations" "pretty middling". If Crysis is pretty middling, what does that make original Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem?

And yes I mentioned the COD influence on all the sequels in 2008-2015. The only decent fps we got there was Hard Reset (which is imo a lot better than their later game Shadow Warrior).

That was really a dark age of pure shit for FPS.

 

[Butter]

Nobody named Spore (2008). It was okay.

Is that Stones of Arnhem leak?

 

[Jvegi]

Fahrenheit.

 

[Silva]

Just complementing what was cited...


2005

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
• Condemned: Criminal Origins

2006

• Hitman: Blood Money

2007

• STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl

2008

• Dead Space

2009

• ARMA 2

 

[ds]

Knights of the Old Republic II (2005)
Psychonauts (2005)
Prey (2006)
Oblivion (2006)
Tomb Raider: Legend (2006)
The Shivah (2006)
The Blackwell Legacy (2006)
BioShock (2007)
Portal (2007)
The Witcher (2007)
Penumbra: Overture (2007)
Penumbra: Black Plague (2008)
Tomb Raider: Underworld (2008)
Saints Row 2 (2008)
Edna & Harvey: The Breakout (2008)
The Whispered World (2009)
The Book of Unwritten Tales (2009)
Brütal Legend (2009)

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

WTF are you spewing nonsense.The early-mid 2000's were known for FPS to push the pc engine limits.

The thread's about the late 2000s. It's in the title, at the top of your screen, in big font.

Fair enough but 2005-2007 is mid 2000's.

2007 isn’t the mid 2000s.

Although 2005 isn’t the late 2000s either. It’s the latter half of the 2000. But when people talk about the late part of a decade, the decade is being divided into threes and not twos. 2005 - 2009 specifically is kind of a weird way of looking at a period in video games. I can get looking at the whole decade. And I can get looking at a specific period like the years of some console generation. Decades are easier, since they’ve got clean beginnings and ends. But this thing of chopping it up into half a decade just feels like trying to construct a scenario where you can say it was a bad time for CRPGs because it just leaves out something like Troika Games’ output from the 2000s.

 

[Lemming42]

Like I said in the OP, I'm making a big list of games for every year and I noticed that these specific years were shockingly light on games I could remember enjoying, when compared with every other year (from 1990 to 2023). I have a substantial number of games in my list for 2004, and for 2010; I'm asking about 2005 - 2009 specifically because for some reason they're by far the ones I could find the least enjoyable games in.

What interested me is that they're all bunched together - I don't have many games for 2015 either, but I do for 2014 and 2016, so in that case it's just one dud year rather than a sign of some larger trend. But when I noticed I had so few games for every year in the 2005 - 2009 period - and that the games I did have often weren't ones I considered high quality - I thought it'd be interesting to see how many people felt the same and what reasons people thought there might be for any trends that emerged in that era.

It mirrors how I felt at the time, I remember despairing quite a bit at the state of things back then (and also quitting gaming for a while to go drink round the back of supermarkets). It also makes sense when you think about wider trends - 2006 was a particularly brutal year in terms of unfortunate design trends, with Tomb Raider: Legend and TES IV: Oblivion offering very simplified and dumbed down versions of existing franchises. When you consider that it was a bad period for RPGs and, perhaps, a bad period for FPS games (with the influence of CoD being of particular interest), plus "consolisation", there's a lot to talk about.

 

[Ash]

Jesus christ, feeling nostalgic and this I what I stumble upon? This thread is utterly full of shit. The Dark Ages the OP lambasts, his "faves" is full of those same games, but lets not single out OP when 75% of the thread is pathetic. There has been multiple votes for Bioshock, Oblivion & Mass Effect, the triumvirate of action RPG decline that only a midwit can enjoy. Multiple votes for Shadow of the Colossus, Batman: Retard Asylum, Tomb Raider: Legend. Utter retard-tier action-adventure gaming, the death of that genre. Shit-tier style over substance FPS like FEAR, Hard Reset and Prey. Though FPS was dead long before this era. It died in substance pretty much as soon as Y2K rolled around. We've even got a vote for Fable and Fahrenheit in there.

So much for the most prestigious gaming website. It's not worth staying for the dwindling number of members that have standards and know their vidja. According to vote count, Bioshock is the best game of that era. What a shame.

there's a lot to talk about

No thanks.

 

[Lemming42]

The Dark Ages the OP lambasts, his "faves" is full of those same games

That was the point! From the OP:

That's it. For a full four-year stretch. 17 games I could think of. And a lot of these games aren't even good - Quake IV is the definition of mediocre, Mass Effect is overall very boring, Oblivion sucks and is only there because it's part of the TES series, BioShock isn't up to much, and then there's shit like Stolen and Titan Quest which are just knockoffs of pre-existing, generally better games. I don't like AssCreed much, I just think it's an interesting experiment/tech demo/whatever. Tomb Raider: Legend fucking sucks and it's only "worth" playing to see the destruction of a once-beloved franchise happen before your eyes.

Of the few games from that era I could even remember (or stomach), most of them were still dodgy. I thought it'd be a pretty safe bet to say it was a gloomy period for videogames, I'm kind of surprised how much pushback people gave me in the thread on the idea. Though people have suggested a couple of good games I forgot about.