The pill of choice for many people in 2000 was one that had no taste, and absolutely no effect on their digestive system: the Combat Boost. Other gamers will fondly remember the year as the one that first let them set up a love triangle in a virtual household, skate along the tops of bus shelters and deface police cars with aerosol paint, or - most bizarrely of all - get a job in an imaginary world.

It was also the year that saw much-hyped games failing to deliver on their promises. Jon Romero's Daikatana (PC) turned out to be a fat, stinking dog, while the laudably creative ideas in Shiny's Messiah (PC) or Sega's Shenmue (DC) never gelled into outstanding games. Shenmue (the game where you had to get a job) created a jaw-droppingly beautiful and detailed environment, but in it you spent most of your time walking up to people and pressing A, or hanging around looking at your watch. It's very clever to simulate the tedium of everyday life, but in the end it's still tedious.

Perfect Dark (N64), meanwhile, the long-awaited "spiritual sequel" to Goldeneye that finally hit the shelves in the summer, was fascinating and horribly flawed in equal measure. Its great achievement was an astonishing array of beautifully designed gadgetry. Here were the Combat Boost (a pill that slowed down time to enable you to rescue hostages with John Woo-style headshots to kidnappers), the Farsight (a weapon that could aim and shoot through walls), and the superb Laptop Gun, a rapid-fire weapon that could be deployed on walls as a friendly comrade.

But the attempt to characterise the game's heroine, Joanna Dark, as a post-Lara Croft cyberbabe fell laughably flat, and the gruesomely bad cut-scenes attempted to tell an increasingly absurd and incoherent pulp sci-fi story. What was most galling was the framerate problem: the screen update slowed to a jerky crawl at higher difficulty levels, and all the time in the co-operative and counter-operative mission modes, thus rendering some interesting ideas thoroughly unplayable.

Elsewhere, other developers were also asking current videogame hardware to do more than was strictly possible, and gameplay always suffered as a result. Vastly hyped for its pre-Christmas appearance, for example, was 1970s mission-driving sequel Driver 2, a pig-ugly product crippled by laughable pop-ups (with scenery winking into existence about 30 feet away) and a framerate that would have disgraced the original arcade Pole Position.

Driver 2 is also a symptom of the burgeoning "sequelitis" of the industry. Game done well? OK, just iron out the bugs and slap a few more features in, and call it a sequel.

Trouble is, it's usually only ever what the first game should have been. Stand up and be counted: Ready to Rumble 2, Syphon Filter 2, Medal of Honor Underground.

The glowing exception to that rule this year was Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: a game that matches the depth and variety of ideas in its illustrious predecessor (Ocarina of Time: the Best Game Ever) while being in some ways more tightly focused, and adding an intriguing Groundhog Day-style temporal scenario. Inevitably, it didn't seem quite as fresh or ground-breaking this time round, but the game is still a masterpiece.

Also offering an impressive menu of action, but in a very different style of unreality, was Ion Storm's Deus Ex, a dark sci-fi shooter that offered the player unparalleled freedom in her approach to combat situations. Run in, all guns blazing, confuse them with a gas grenade, or pick 'em off at a distance? Train yourself in lock-picking, sniping, or explosives? Nearly anything you could think of would work. Deus Ex wore its influences very heavily on its sleeve - hello, The Matrix; hello, Half-Life - and if it wasn't a particularly original game, it was a masterful compendium of well-executed ideas.

Real conceptual originality was, as always, thin on the ground. The Sims (PC) was an amusing if limited "people simulator" in which little artificially intelligent denizens of chintzy households relied upon you for the success or otherwise of their love lives and their careers. The one spark of creativity in an otherwise terminally dull year for PlayStation, meanwhile, was Sony's own budget oddity Vib Ribbon, which dusted off black-and-white vector graphics (ah, Asteroids_) and had you controlling a cartoon rabbit who had to negotiate obstacles in time to a joyfully eccentric Japanese soundtrack, in order to avoid turning into a worm.

For sheer aesthetic origi nality, on the other hand, the best game of the year was undoubtedly Sega's Jet Set Radio. Its "cel-shaded" graphics combined traditional 3D rendering with a fresh, cartoony look, and - this is the magic touch of Sega's in-house developers - the skating 'n' spraying gameplay was simple to pick up but enjoyably challenging to master. Dreamcast was also blessed with a lovely conversion of Crazy Taxi (barking arcade gameplay soaked in American alt-rock), a brace of extremely good-looking driving games (Ferrari 335 Challenge and Metropolis Street Racer), and a very fine conversion of Quake III: Arena. And even though Soul Calibur came out last year, I'm going to mention it here again, because the visual and mechanical genius of Namco's fighter remains thoroughly undimmed.

It was also, eventually, the year of PlayStation2, although the sleek super- console almost failed to turn up to its own party owing to chip shortages. Its one early success, Timesplitters, offers a four-way console deathmatch that is unrivalled in the sheer ultraviolent joy of its speedy and fabulously smooth rocket-propelled m lées. I'll be playing a lot of that well into the new year.

Despite a few stand-out games, 2000 hasn't been a particularly vintage 12 months in the digital arts. In fact, almost the single most exciting videogame moment was the first glimpse of footage from Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2 - which is still about nine months away from release. Will it live up to the hype? That's a question for the Ghost of Christmas Future.

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, £12)

My top five Steven Poole
1 Jet Set Radio (DC)

2 Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)

3 Timesplitters (PS2)
4 Crazy Taxi (DC)

5 Deus Ex (PC/Mac)

My top fiveGreg Howson
1 Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)

2 ISS Pro Evolution (PSX)

3 Perfect Dark (N64)

4 Resident Evil: Code Veronica (DC)

5 Metropolis Street Racer (DC)

My top five Jack Schofield
1 Championship Manager Season 00/01 (PC)

2 The Sims (PC)

3 Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)

4 SSX Snowboarding (PS2)

5 Gran Turismo 2 (PSX)

My top five Andy Bodle

1 Vib Ribbon (PSX)

2 Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (PC)

3 Messiah (PC)

4 Micro Maniacs (PSX)

5 Shenmue (DC)