I really liked Ramp N’ Roll in '95, but thats partially because its the first time I ever saw a robot in action and I thought it was really cool. But besides that my favorite year was '99 I loved the floppies, the puck and the game in general! That was such a sweet game, defense and offense and strategy , and those floppies make sweet pillows 
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Either 99 or 00 are my 2 favorite. I guess i just like the battles over getting on somthing. I really like watching 4 robots pile up on the ramp in 00 specially when you had one hanging and 3 all squished under it. 99 was kool when you had 4 robots fighting over the movealbe puck, then seeing all of thoes big lifts go up at the end, very kool.
Andrew
Well, out of my years (though not many) in FIRST, I think I would have to say my favorite year was my first, '99. I like the whole 2 vs 2 thing, and I guess it didn’t help that my team sucked in 200.
~Christina
I’ve been doing this since '97 and don’t know much about the earlier games, but I do know that '99 was my favorite. When I evaluate a certain year’s game, I look at two different factors, how fun it was to design and build the robots, and how fun it was to watch.
In '97 there was one goal, to place inner tubes on a goal. Inner tubes had never been used before, so this was a small “problem” when designing the robot, but other then that, there was one task and the best robots all did exactly the same thing. To me, this makes both building and watching fairly boring.
In '98, the goal was to place very large balls either in a large tube, or horizontally. The biggest design decision was whether to use rollers or grabbers, and IIRC, the technokats (national champions) used a pretty cool combination of both. Watching the matches was a little more interesting, but there still was basically one task.
In '99, the goal was to raise floppies into the air. The floppies were totally unlike any other object used before and posed quite a design challenge to both to pick up and keep from fouling drive trains. The other goal was to get on the puck. Both of these were completely different and either required two different manipulators or a manipulator and a complicated drive train. When watching the matches there was enough to keep all 4 teams busy for most of the time, and there was always the last minute rush for supremecy of the puck.
In 2000, it was back to balls to manipulate. This time the goals were to place the balls in the goal and hang. In this respect it was similar to '99, except it didn’t have the added design challenge of the floppies.
2001 had the most design challenges of all. The limboing, ballancing, big balls … In this way, 2001 was easily the most interesting competition to design for and I can easily see why it was some people’s favorite. On the other hand, the gameplay was the worst yet and I can easily why it was many people’s least favorite.
In my opinion, 1999 had the right combination of gameplay and design challenges and was my favorite.