the sony playstation 2

[lynnedrum]

I finally played Castlevania: Curse of Darkness to completion this year and it was awesome. I had the other PS2 Castlevania game as a kid and it was very clunky, so I never gave Curse a fair shake at the time. It's super fun and has a devil-raising system.

i was DEEPLY unaware of the heeho simulator in this game......... i've only played a little bit of Lament of Innocence, it has jank charm enough for me to wanna push thru it first, but now i REALLY want to get to the sequel

also OH NO i didn't mean to bump your recs off the page arbhor, these sound dope! here:

I might put forward Kinetica and Stretch Panic:

Kinetica is a racing game. The player controls a kind of cyborg, bike-human fusion. The distinctive mechanic of the game is performing stunts to gain boost, with some more typical combat-racing devices. As the design sensibility of Wip3out looms large in my mind (carried out by The Designer's Republic), I really was mesmerized by Kinetica. The environmental design is really fantastic and the gameplay is compelling. I strongly associate a PlayStation 2 "style" with this game (or like, Zone of the Enders). The character art tries for a kind of collision between sexy pinup art and airbrushed automotive design that makes me think of Sony's stranger and provocative advertising campaigns at the time. (?)

Stretch Panic is an adventure game where the protagonist, Linda (?), is gifted a scarf with the power to stretch objects out of proportion. The game is formatted as a boss rush against Linda's sisters who have all been fantastically transformed by their "gifts" into monstrous versions of their strongest desires (e.g. Demonica loved horror movies. Her boss fight involves keeping her out of a room because her appearance is too terrible to look at)(the game is sometimes circulated for the grunt enemies who have grotesquely exaggerated busts, that I feel obligated to mention) The game is a bit tricky to control, as you control both Linda and the scarf separately and some of the mechanics are a bit obscure. I think the premise and design is pretty neat, and I had a blast in the boss fight against Fay Soff. I feel like it's notable in some way because it was a different way of using the analog sticks that felt like, say, Ape Escape when they were still being figured out.

I feel like I did a poor job at crystallizing what I enjoy about the games, but offer them nonetheless.

[ogre_battle]

I really want to play the PS2 Monster Hunters soon... hearing that there were private servers up for them and seeing friends play together makes me really want to dig up those crusty roots.

MH1 is a fascinating piece of RPG design. Some hardcore inventory systems that were panned at the time, but would be welcomed by the modern indie roguelike audience, Tarkov fans etc. The action got a lot more fun in MH2 though. I have high rank characters in 1, G, 2, and 3 (Wii) but I'm deep in the Dos swamp right now.

[margo]

i love the ps2...the more i explore catalogues of older games i find myself getting really emotionally invested in the ps1 and dreamcast but the ps2 will always be very special to me just because it taught me what video games have the capacity to be. getting to play katamari as a kid altered my brain forever along with randomly deciding to buy the shitty ps2 port of killer7 for $9 in high school. siren and flower sun & rain are ps2 games i discovered a lot more recently that really influenced what i think games are capable of.


in terms of less talked about stuff i super recommend Magic Pengel. it's a turn-based rock paper scissors sorta arena battler where the gimmick is that you can draw the creatures that fight for you. you have to use like a weird, janky paint2d canvas lol. but its literally some of the most fun i have ever had. i can tangibly feel it in my memory when i think about it. the art style is to die for too. the cutscenes and textures are done by some studio ghibli staff members and it even features characters from their short films Ghiblies. also ZUN worked on this game?? you can fight a shrine maiden Reimu as a secret boss??? have i sold you on this game yet


cinematic masterpiece 10,000 Bullets. this game has really fun cutscenes that for some reason can't run on emulator very well?? i've never encountered a fussier ps2 game than this one. it has a strangely demanding learning curve involving the witch time and every boss fight wants you to pretty much play it perfectly if you want to advance. it reminded me of Devil May Cry in both structure and tone. also this is like an iceberg game of content. after every mission you get to decide where to go on a giant visual novel style map and your choices unlock certain characters and reveal specific dialogue, and the ending even changes depending on what character you level up the most. i love a mysterious quality like this.


Raw Danger!!! as much as i love kusoge and play offbeat games to make fun of them, the sort of bare bones philosophic approach that needed to be taken with overambitious games with mid budgets always reveals what i think is important to me in games. the conversation surrounding 'do your choices really matter in games' is funny to me because in every instance where it is advertised, it never seems to really affect anything meaningful. you'll always end up experiencing the narrative the director wanted you to because it's already so much work just to write one scenario. i wouldn't say Raw Danger exactly succeeds in giving you a lot of different outcomes, but managed to surprise me with the detail and level of role play i got to take on as the player. i find this mostly impressive considering the slapstick breakneck pacing of this game. lots of anvils falling on you mid conversation and slipping on banana peels.


Shadow of Destiny perfectly captures what i love about this era of games. just a lot of moving parts that tickle my brain. there's a big town you have to explore and take note of while preventing your constant and imminent death through time travel shenanigans. it's kind of shenmue core now that i'm ruminating on it. also has yaoi.

i really want to play drakengard and bumpy trot soon......i can always sense when a game is going to rock my world so i always put off playing them until it feels "right" lol

[Ghirga]

okage: shadow king is among my favorite games, particularly because of its art style. (my cousin owned it, i didn't have a ps2 but i visited her every weekend growing up.)





unfortunately, it isn't terribly fun to play. it isn't the worst but it can be quite repetitive with its long dungeons. that being said, i'm always very happy when i see people mention it

[Tristi]

Raw Danger!!! as much as i love kusoge and play offbeat games to make fun of them, the sort of bare bones philosophic approach that needed to be taken with overambitious games with mid budgets always reveals what i think is important to me in games. the conversation surrounding 'do your choices really matter in games' is funny to me because in every instance where it is advertised, it never seems to really affect anything meaningful. you'll always end up experiencing the narrative the director wanted you to because it's already so much work just to write one scenario. i wouldn't say Raw Danger exactly succeeds in giving you a lot of different outcomes, but managed to surprise me with the detail and level of role play i got to take on as the player. i find this mostly impressive considering the slapstick breakneck pacing of this game. lots of anvils falling on you mid conversation and slipping on banana peels.

Raw Danger is such a blast. I can't stop thinking about this anecdote that I heard about how the game's performance dropped progressively as it moved westward, from 30 fps in the NTSC-J release, to 25 in PAL, finally to 20 in NTSC-U, each iteration introducing new glitches. It feels fitting on some level that the game itself fell apart on its journey across the world. But it also makes me wish so much for a fresh port without all the added wear and tear (or the deranged whitewashing the localization did).

[margo]

Raw Danger is such a blast. I can't stop thinking about this anecdote that I heard about how the game's performance dropped progressively as it moved westward, from 30 fps in the NTSC-J release, to 25 in PAL, finally to 20 in NTSC-U, each iteration introducing new glitches. It feels fitting on some level that the game itself fell apart on its journey across the world. But it also makes me wish so much for a fresh port without all the added wear and tear (or the deranged whitewashing the localization did).

i didn't know that....that is so beautiful. if i recall there's still disaster report games that never got localized so they've probably given up on us TT_TT

i cant help but have wrapped around to feeling a sort of crazed fondness for bizarre video game whitewashing just because it was SO high effort. like they could have just left it normal but some executive made people on the team cobble together new assets cause they thought for some reason westerners couldn't conceptualize the idea of having an adventure in a foreign country. raw danger, persona 1 and ace attorney are definitely the most dramatic examples though.

[evanonline]

i bought a PS2 on the cheap as a teen, exclusively to play the katamaris and the metal gears and shadow of the colossus. i also picked up god hand at some point but i don't think i got far.

i've been relistening a stream of robot alchemic drive at work and it's making me want to play that. i would kind of love to get a physical copy of it, but, well... i doubt i need to tell anyone how nutso used retro game prices are these days

[nullnug]

I never owned a ps2 in the past and only had a ps1 very briefly so I'm also only just getting around to some titles. I highly recommend the gen 2 and gen 3 mainline Armored Core games. Armored Core has very quickly become one of my favorite series and having played them in current year I think they hold up.


Though I think you might as well start with the gen 1 games if you're willing (they're ps1).


It's been mentioned elsewhere but MH Dos could be neat to check out too, especially if you have a group. One of the best things about MH fans is their dedication to preserving online functionality for games. This game is really charming.

[AtomicRunner]

The PS2 sits in an interesting place for me. It may most surely be my favorite console of all time, even if I did not had one when it was current, I bought one during the PS3 era. But at this point it also feels like a known entity. The PS1 and Saturn tend to have more experimental surprised in its catalog, and finding truly surprising games for the PS2 becomes more of a rarity as time goes.

It is still the perfect console for "perfect mid budget games" and still holds the crown over all consoles in that regard. The PS1 may have more oddities, sure, but they tend to have rougher edges and be more bare bones. The PS2 is where you could find the kind of game you could buy second hand for five euros that felt polished just enough and with just the right amount of extra bells and whistles added. I am not sure how to explain it, sometimes the PS1 era games feel like they are trying to reach for higher than they can (and bless them for that!) while PS3 era games have too much?

Anyway, who cares... have you people ever heard of Firefighter F.D. 18?


The conversation about Raw Danger made me remember this one. And yeah, it's a firefighter third person action game where you navigate buildings in flames, trying to reach civilians before time run out for them. You have limited time, but also you can't rush it because there's constant fire around you, so it becomes this tense slow race to reach every single civilian. Like Human's The Firemen it has level bosses that are actually specially mean fires, which I always found funny. It always got middling reviews, but I do like how it both tries to have some cinematographic ambition for its story but also as a game it has a more humble scope.

It will never make it to anyone's Top 100 list, but I always liked it as the quintessential PS2 game you could buy second hand. The kind of thing that existed under the shadow of FIFA or the prestige heavy hitters of the console. But were always there for you as long as you payed the 5 dollars they used to go for.

[Josephs]

My favorite ps2 games are well known perfect pseudo-hidden gems -- Shadow Tower:Abyss and Kings Field 4.

A couple of not-perfect games which nobody ever talks about but I like a lot are:



Left: I love this B-FPS called "Cold Winter". It doesn't quite work and can be pretty clunky, but does an incredible job communicating sense of place while still feeling like... Maybe kind of a "gritty war on terror Timesplitters". It has a bunch of immersive-sim style inventory and world interaction mechanics which have nothing to do with the game that actually shipped.


Right: A legit hidden(ish) gem with a cool history is Shadow Of Rome. This is an awkwardly paced, awkwardly themed game from Capcom in an era where every single thing they put out was 10/10. SOR is kinda two games in one, but one of them is an instant fail stealth thing which mostly sucks to play. Based loosely on the story of augustus ceaser and his bf(f)? Shadow of Rome 2 was cancelled, but the engine and basically the exact same core mechanics and character controller as the gladiator portions of SOR1 made their way into Dead Rising 1 and 2. If you haven't played this you should watch the trailer