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.