PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

It's no secret I've been abandoning the current game scene to catch up on some older titles I missed. Want to use this thread to highlight and/or discuss some older titles that I feel have aged well-



Crimson Tears-

been playing this recently. For a dungeon-crawler, it's got the goods. Lots of variety to the combat system and weapon creation. Great presentation and music. Well worth picking up from the bargain bin. :cool:

Add your own suggestions to this thread!

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Flipnic ultimate pinball-

Great, trippy pinball game that takes place on impossible, oversized tables :cool:

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Ar Tonelico 2

some of the best music and art I've ever seen in a jrpg. Love this game, love it. :cool:

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Ghosthunter-

barely heard a peep about this game when it came out, and it is so much fun! Still looks great in hi-def.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Beyond Good & Evil, obviously. There has been a HD version on consoles, but the PC version always supported higher resolutions. The graphics style has aged well and it's still a great game that many never played because it looks fairly childish with the anthropomorphous pig and all that. It also doesn't feature guns. Most of the shooting is with a camera here.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

That GhostHunter game looks very good indeed. Are any of these available on PSN I wonder?

I have Beyond Good and Evil somewhere but have only played 5 mins of it :o

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Ghosthunter is surprisingly good

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine

PS3's don't have the EMOTION chip anymore, so I don't think there will be many, if any, PS2 titles on PSN.. unless they reverse engineer and re-write them from the top down, and that can take a long time.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Pirates: the Legend of Black Kat

ordered this today- it's a nice, streamlined pirate arcade adventure game. I remember this game had solid controls, pretty artwork, and the sea battles were alot of fun. Exploration was a little on the quiet side, but I liked that.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Stolen

Another late, quality title. Stealth and theft with lockpicks, EMPs, sonar goggles and other hi-tech tools. Refreshingly non-combative in design. Guards are a little stupid, but it doesn't take too much away from the fun of sneaking around.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

You been away from the PS3 way too long. There are around 40 PS2 titles on PSN now. I downloaded Persona 3 Fez and Odin Sphere for $5 a few weeks ago.

None of these titles (except Beyond Good & Evil HD) is on PSN. I thought I was near completion with my PS2 collection. I guess not.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

that's cool- looking now! I would definitely download Ring of Red if you've never tried it, it's great.

I wonder if these titles on PSN use the Emotion engine, I'm betting they don't..? Otherwise I would expect to see Final Fantasy X, Ridge Racer, Okami, etc as downloads. Why have PS2 downloads but skip the flagship properties if you didn't have to?

Of course, this IS Sony we're talking about :p


**a word about 'Stolen' - it took me 2.5 hours to finish the first mission, and I got a D rating, lol. The game really expects you to make full use of it's tools. I may have another go at it today to see if I can do better. It's really a good looking game.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Okami is on PSN as Okami HD. FF X HD was announced awhile ago, but has not been released yet. Probably takes a lot of work in the back end to get it to work.

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

from the Emotion Engine wiki-

The primary use of the Emotion Engine was to serve as the PlayStation 2's CPU. The first SKUs of the PlayStation 3 also featured an Emotion Engine on the motherboard to achieve backwards compatibility with PlayStation 2 games. However, the second revision of the PlayStation 3 lacked a physical Emotion Engine in order to lower costs, performing all of its functions using software emulation performed by the Cell Broadband Processor, coupled with a hardware Graphics Synthesizer still present to achieve PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility. In all subsequent revisions, the Graphics Synthesizer was removed, with no software emulation to replace it.

I guess if this is true, it means any title that specifically used the Emotion Engine would have to be decompiled and then recompiled for the Cell processor. Seems like a major coding headache-

Re: PS2 hidden gems & underrated games
 

Stolen looks interesting.

The PS2 has a nice port of the Japanese Dreamcast game, Culdcept. It's a pretty cool board game.