PS2 GAME RECOMMENDATIONS |

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I really consider the PS2 to be my favorite console. It's the one with the biggest pile of games I can spend months on end playing. Like the other console pages, this is my little way of recommending you stuff to play. My focus is on stuff I either have history with or smaller, more obscure titles I've enjoyed or found curious.

[#] Amplitude (Sony, , 2003)

A perpetually underrated music game masterpiece.

FreQuency might've given Harmonix a lot of good press, but it didn't make them millionaires. Its sequel, Amplitude, improved every single aspect of FreQuency and hasn't dated a day in 18 years...and still didn't make them millionaires. This may be the single best game in history no one bought. To date, I still staunchly shill it to everyone I know, because it deserves it. And that, my reader, means you now.

Amplitude plays roughly the same as FreQuency, juggling instruments track-by-track to rebuild a song's mix, except it's now on sonic highways rather than through tunnels. Compared to FreQuency, Amplitude features a gentler difficulty curve over four difficulties, Mellow, Normal, Brutal, and Insane. The latter two are apt names--you'll be chasing good scores on them for a long while. The timing window is much relaxed, similar to the first Guitar Hero, and Amplitude is still as playable as it's ever been, especially given the absolutely fantastic soundtrack that spans everything from blink-182 to Slipknot to P!nk to David fucking Bowie.

The graphics are much improved from FreQuency, featuring dizzying cityscapes and bubbling reactor cores you'll fly your Beat Blaster through, and the FreQs, formerly just icons, are now customizable 3D models that play along to the track you're on and whose bodies and heads you'll unlock as you play. You get ranked in songs by your score (1-4 bars), and there's nothing better than nailing the right path through a song and earning all four. While you can still get local multiplayer and even online going for extra fun, even solo, this game is bonkers fun. You need to play it.

Recommended for... DualShock DJs and the rhythm gaming faithful.

[#] FreQuency (Sony, , 2001)

Where the Guitar Hero train started, with mixed results.

FreQuency carries the distinction of being the first game legendary rhythm game developer Harmonix tackled. Here's the gist: You're a "FreQ" flying through a tunnel of music. Each side of the tunnel is plastered with gems that sync up roughly to the rhythm of one instrument in the song, the difficulty determining the note density. Press the corresponding shoulder buttons as each of these gems pass the target, and if you can keep up successfully for two bars, that instrument will play itself for a few. Spin the tunnel, move to another instrument, and repeat the process until the end of the song.

At its best, FreQuency is a hypnotic game. Your goal, ultimately, is to play well enough to rebuild the mix of the song. The "arenas" outside the tunnel can be chosen, and they're quite the neon light show, for better or worse. Powerups help you capture tracks, double your score, and keep your multiplier going in case you screw up. The soundtrack is also fairly good, though how much you'll like it depends on if you've ever heard of The Crystal Method, Curve, or Powerman 5000. (And some of the quirkier and harder tracks are outright HMX inventions!)

Those things also massively limit its appeal though; it can be hard on the eyes, and you won't see or hear much that's terribly human during gameplay. It doesn't help that the timing window per note is extremely small, and with emulator lag, the game is nearly unplayable on the harder difficulties. Paired with all tracks muting at the start of each section, thus killing your groove, and I can see some people finding this game downright frustrating. I like it, though. It's flawed, and the sequel works far better in every way, but there's a lot of personality here and not a whole lot like this.

Recommended for... hardcore rhythm gaming fans and bassheads.

[#] Guitar Hero (RedOctane, , 2005)

The start of something great--but only the start.

Probably the most impressive thing about Guitar Hero is how much Harmonix had figured out right from the beginning. Anyone who started with any later game in the series can sit down with GH1 and play it--at least in theory. GH1 has gained a reputation among five-fret rhythm game enthusiasts for being a lot more difficult to play than later entries, and I'd say it depends on how you look at it. Technically, there are many little details about GH1 that make it more annoying than it needs to be, but the songs and charts are actually a lot easier than later entries--and no matter what, this is still Guitar Hero, and that's still wonderful.

If you're somehow unaware, you use either a plastic guitar or the DualShock (which doesn't require you to strum) to "play" the guitar part of each song, and it really is twitchy score attack ambrosia as you try to do better at each song and increase your scores. On the surface, the engine is fairly similar to GH2, but there's definitely enough differences (the notoriously complex HO/POs that basically require you to strum each note, the lack of feedback on combo break) that I would not call GH1 my favorite to play. There's also plenty of undercharted songs, even on Expert, and Hard difficulty is a meme that you might as well skip entirely.

Aside from the bonus tracks, all songs are soundalike covers, and assuming that doesn't turn you off on the spot, they really do a great job on 90% of these covers, especially in imitating more distinctive vocalists like Ozzy Osbourne. It's the songs that are the strongest part here, everything from Joan Jett, Deep Purple, White Zombie, Helmet, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Queens of the Stone Age, and the bonus tracks from Harmonix's own bands and Boston's finest are especially fun if you're an indie head like I am. A great beginning was charted here, but playing GH1 is as much a reminder of how many improvements the sequel made as anything else.

Recommended for... plastic guitar enthusiasts who want to appreciate where it began.

[#] Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s (Activision, , 2007)

A cash-in, but a very fine one nonetheless.

I've described Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s before as the best Guitar Hero II custom disc ever made. I can definitely see why people felt short-changed about this at the time. This was Harmonix's contractual obligation game, and after GH2 took off, their heart was in it for Rock Band instead, which expanded plastic guitars into the whole band. 80s was produced by about the same B-team that worked on GH2 DLC for the Xbox 360 version, with a lot of the same (admittedly mostly unnoticeable) chart glitches and broken lighting events that plague that batch of songs as well (and a few similarly obscure engine bugs fixed, in fairness). Yet, even still--it's GH2 with a new batch of songs, and that's more than good enough for me.

As the name implies, all thirty of these songs come from the 80s--sorta. There's two 80s 70s covers (White Lion's cover of "Radar Love" and Krokus' of "Ballroom Blitz"), and the requisite Homestar Runner joke track. You can imagine the hair is huge and heads are banging, with songs from Quiet Riot, Accept, Twisted Sister, Anthrax, and Winger, though you do get plenty of power ballads from Scandal, Eddie Money, and A Flock of Seagulls and thankfully some more oddball tracks as well (.38 Special! "Hold on Loosely"!) There's also an increase in master tracks this time, though most are still covers. I really would've liked to see more college rock in the mix, maybe some early R.E.M. or Pixies or The Replacements, but that's my 90s bias talking. It's a fine setlist.

I mean, what more is there to say? The characters have all been given leopard print and neon hair extension makeovers, the venues are recolored, and aside from a few obscure bugs, 80s effectively plays the same as II. That's a really good thing, to be clear--still the best-feeling rhythm game engine I've ever played, still same great practice mode, same great co-op play, and again aside from some chart oddities (ask any Guitar Hero diehard about "Ballroom Blitz"'s bridge and they'll cough up a lung in front of you), it still plays great. At the time, I can imagine wanting more, but these days, taken as it is, 80s is still a ton of fun to breeze through.

Recommended for... all good rocker dudes and dudettes.

[#] Guitar Hero II (Activision, , 2006)

Possibly the best rhythm game ever made?

Yeah, this is the good stuff. Guitar Hero II cemented itself as one of the finest rhythm games ever made, taking the already solid base of the first game, fixing all the annoyances with it and adding more songs, more things to unlock, and bass and rhythm guitar parts into the mix. Like the first game, you're the guitarist in a cover band, going from the dingiest bars to Stonehenge itself on your quest to become rock royalty. Press the fret buttons, flick the strum bar, and get good at that, because this game gets hard! Absolutely habit-forming, any trait of it, the graphics, the music, the gameplay, I could rave about all day. And I will.

Fixing the many quirks and relaxing the timing window from GH1 results in a near-perfect feeling game engine that never feels unfair to play, even if it's still a lot stricter than later games. Practice Mode lets you slow down songs to as much as half speed so you can learn the ins and outs of each song, section by section, and if you're going for perfection, it's the best addition to the whole game. Each song has a second player part, either of the bass part or a second guitar, so if you happen to have a buddy along, you can smash through GH2's 64 songs (!) together as more of a band than you ever could before.

For songs, GH2 leans a lot harder on the metal end of things, (Megadeth, Lamb of God, Suicidal Tendencies, All That Remains, Spinal Tap, even), though there's still tons of classic rockers (The Police, Rolling Stones, Heart) and 90s and 2000s rock favorites (Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots, Butthole Surfers), so everyone's got something they'll love here. The sense of musical exploration is what I adore the most, where bands I know nothing about like The Living End or Harmonix's own bands leave the biggest impression. Seriously, this game has given me so many hours of playing, modding it, meeting people, arguing with people, and listening to its songs on buses wistfully that it's basically a part of my DNA now. This is the Guitar Hero you want. Not 3.

Recommended for... rock music fans, PS2 fans, the rhythmically inclined--everybody who likes fun, basically.

[#] Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (Sony, , 2001)

A world to get lost in, quite literally.

Part of the trifecta of PS2 mascot platformers, Jak was possibly the most anticipated and impressive due to coming from Crash Bandicoot devs Naughty Dog. I don't want to put it like this because I do genuinely respect their work, but sometimes, it feels Naughty Dog does it differently just to do it differently, and The Precursor Legacy is a pretty prime example. This is a lush, sprawling game without load times, naturalistically built without much in the way of "game" identifiers like informational popups or maps. It's impressive, and I got lost all the time, and it just didn't click for me like Sly and Ratchet.

Jak is an elf teenager on a quest to return his friend Daxter back to human form. He sets out to collect precursor orbs and power cells to progress, channeling five different colors of "eco" energy to give himself extra powers. A lot of it is pretty standard collectathon material, but it's definitely satisfying to get a rush of blue eco and collect a ton of precursor orbs at once. Jak controls okay, but you'll need the manual to learn all his moves (which I don't own), and his double jump has a really irritating delay that gets in the way of the platforming.

All of this said, Jak and Daxter is short and sweet. Visually, it's gorgeous--you can practically feel the warm sand of Sentinel Beach underfoot as you rush around collecting green eco and orbs and defeating monsters, and the vehicle sections were genuinely quite fun and break things up. There is a story, but it's pretty thin and just an excuse to get you to collect more things, not to mention how hugely irritating Daxter is, especially when he mocks you on death. Like I said, this is my last place of the PS2 mascot platformers, but I also liked it enough to 100% it. What does that say, about me or the game? You decide.

Recommended for... platformer fans with good navigational skills.

[#] Jimmy Neutron: Jet Fusion (THQ, , 2003)

Like one of Jimmy's inventions, not very well thought out.

Kids, take this lesson from nostalgia: it lies to you! One of two Jimmy Neutron (a show I liked a whole lot) games I grew up with, the other being the so-bad-it's-very-good PC movie tie-in game, Jet Fusion is the one I remember less of, and now I know why. It's hard, and not for the best reasons! When an invention to project books into real life goes awry, Jimmy's favorite action movie star secret agent Jet Fusion is captured by the notorious Professor Calamitous and Jimmy's gotta go through several culturally sensitive stages to save him and collect a set of all-powerful idols before Calamitous does.

Each stage (which aren't altogether very memorable, despite the potential stages based on feudal Japan, dangerous jungles, and pirate ships might have) has you build two items from scavenged parts, one to clear the stage and one to give Jimmy a new weapon. The tutorial stage in the school equips you with the main one you'll use throughout the game, the Pulse Light Ray--aka a gun. Jimmy Neutron has a gun. Game of the year. And while, yes, it is fucking hilarious to spend much of the game ventilating dudes (including the school bullies), I admittedly could not finish Jet Fusion.

Most of the problem is with the controls. Jimmy is stiff and has an absurd amount of weight to him, which isn't a great trait when you have to platform everywhere! There's also a lot of instant death traps, including any water. Now imagine how a platforming bit involving floating logs and cannibals with dart guns goes. One specific jump in the volcano level saw me use up a whole continue's worth of lives and never once making it--kinda sucks! The collectibles are fun enough and there is charm here, but the most enjoyable part was for sure checking out the trailers for all the other Nickelodeon media on the disc.

Recommended for... kids game platforming faithful (but no, just watch it online).

[#] Namcomuseum (Namco, , 2001)

A collection of arcade classics without much thought put into it.

Namco had a brilliant run on the PS1, not only building some of its best-known titles, but helping usher in the age of the arcade compilation in their Namcomuseum five-volume set. Featuring a clearinghouse of both their best titles and deeper cuts on each volume, the compilations lived up to their name with a full 3D museum players could wander around in, peeking at promotional material and taking in the architecture along the way. When it came time for graphics to get a major boost with the next generation, Namco decided to...cut out the museum portion entirely. Great.

Yeah, it's unfortunate! There is no museum to this Namcomuseum, only a set of 12 games that mostly consist entirely of Namco's biggest titles. Of course, this does mean you're getting your favorites: there's both Pac- and Ms. involved, Galaga and Galaxian, both Pole Position titles, and two unlockable Pac-Man titles in Pac-Attack (Columns with ghosts and Pacs) and Pac-Mania (Pac-Man, but it's in 3D and you can jump). More tellingly is that the games here are still not emulations, but the exact same recreations found on the PS1 Namcomuseum games! Not like the PS2 couldn't emulate these games!

There are three "Arrangement" titles in the mix the PS1 games don't have, for Pac-Man, Galaga, and Dig Dug. These up the graphics, add soundtracks, twist the gameplay of each subtly, and give more of a sense of progression with levels, worlds, and endings, and I'm pretty fond of these. Overall though, given it takes up a mere 80MB of its nice, blue-bottomed CD, Namco clearly didn't put too much effort in here. What you get is all well and good, but after playing the PS1 titles, I'm just not sure this really does the concept justice.

Recommended for... arcade collection completionists.

[#] NFL Street 2 (EA Sports BIG, , 2005)

A glammy, roided-out game of gridiron, absolutely kino.

Unlike most geeky types, in the fall months, I get a craving for sports games. The 2000s were a time of great competition and innovation in them before EA bought the NFL and FIFA licenses and proceeded to print money making the same buggy game over and over. In the midst of the more realistic titles were those from EA Sports BIG, who specialized in making ridiculously over-the-top, simplified sports games that prized fun over accuracy. NFL Street 2 is my favorite of the lot, and one that still kicks ass today.

Whereas traditional football (Caby: "American football") is played 11-on-11 with penalties and a play clock and all that garbage, Street 2 is 7-vs-7 where the same team plays both sides of the ball. No field goals, no special teams, no injuries, and play interference is frankly encouraged. Playbooks are simplified. The special sauce comes in Gamebreakers; showboat enough with the L1 button and eventually you'll be able to, well, cheat. You'll break every tackle, you'll run faster, and if you wait a bit longer for the imaginatively-titled Gamebreaker 2, you're guaranteed a free touchdown. This game is speedy as hell and a blast coming from the sluggish Madden series.

A lot of the flavor in Street 2 comes from the fact that this was the mid-2000s and everything was either glam or metal. Expect a lot of Diddy, Xzibit, and Drowning Pool on the soundtrack. Xzibit himself shows you through the tutorials and campaign, and all the (real!) NFL players are 'roided out, wearing gold chains, and flamboyant as all hell with their popoffs and creative insults. Add in some hilariously stupid cheat codes, and I think this'd win over even some of the people who hate sports games. It's that much of a good time.

Recommended for... anyone who misses NFL Blitz and also 2005.

[#] Pac-Man World 3 (Namco, , 2005)

Marvel hero Pac-Man? In MY PS2 game?

This is the only one of the cult favorite Pac-Man World trilogy to not be produced (or released) in Japan. Yeah, this was actually a Blitz Games special, Britisher developers of none other than Sneak King fame. Why do I bring up their nationality? Because I want you to expect a very...unique tone going in. If you've ever thought to yourself "hot damn, I wish Pac-Man was quippy", you're in luck! Better yet, it's somehow not a disaster! It plays pretty well, it's very short, and the quippy, bizarrely testy tone of the writing kept me and my stream chat amused as we worked through it.

On Pac-Man's 25th birthday celebration, a dweeb ghost named Orson kidnap teleports Pac-Man to a variety of incredibly not-Pac locales (cliff faces with windmills, rotting cities, and even his home world of the Spectral Realm) to defeat the chocolate-hating, kitten-detesting little person Erwin. Erwin threatens the Spectral Realm with his gigantic energy siphons, and dangerous ghouls named Spectral Monsters are stirred up to the outside world by the collapse of the realm. It's up to a confused and bemused Pac-Man, always with that stupid grin on his face, to team up with his ghost adversaries (!), save the Spectral Realm, and the less-spectral one as well.

All this story, and it is a pretty oddball but thankfully rather light story, justifies what's admittedly a pretty average 3D platformer with a nice Pac-Man skin. There are elements of the earlier Pac-Man World games here, notably the Pac-dot chains that send Pac-Man flying and unlockable mazes (along with pseudo-mazes worked into the level designs). Occasionally, you'll control the ghosts instead of Pac-Man, or pilot a giant fighting robot, but these are over as confusingly quickly as they come. Definitely one of the most bizarre games that's ever bore the Pac name, I heartily recommend this one to adventurous types.

Recommended for... aficionados of highly amusing tonal clashes.

[#] SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (THQ, , 2003)

Who would win, a million robots with stun guns or one spongey boy?

Not many old-school Nicktoons games get modern remakes, so what does that say about Battle for Bikini Bottom? Says it's pretty good! Plankton's evil scheme to mass-manufacture robots to break him into the Krusty Krab goes haywire, and now every inch of Bikini Bottom is crawling with a surprisingly imaginative array of goo bots, stun bots (kinky), fire-breathing bots, sleepy bots, Texas bots, a lot of robots, okay. It's up to SpongeBob, Patrick, and Sandy to take turns kicking ass and eventually taking on themselves in giant robot form--how meta.

Bikini Bottom takes you everywhere, from the relative scenic peace of Jellyfish Fields and Goo Lagoon (go find the Atari controller sandcastle) to the eerie depths of Rock Bottom, the Mermalair, and the Flying Dutchman's graveyard, and even some slightly stranger spots in between. You ever wanted to see what Patrick dreams of? You ever wanted to race down Sand Mountain? Actually, those sliding areas are easily the most fun part of the game, whether you're taking it fast or exploring the branching slopes, it's a good-ass time.

The platforming is pretty beyond reproach, and while not every stage hits (I never liked the Kelp Forest or the Mermalair, truth be told), there's more than plenty that do. SpongeBob also gains abilities over the course of the game, and they're all pretty killer. Seriously, the Bubble Bowling move is so much fun, there's a gigantic playable skii-ball machine in Goo Lagoon. How fun is that? And that's my biggest takeaway from Battle for Bikini Bottom--there's so many little side areas, changes of pace, and fun little extras to find in each level that 100%ing it is a pleasure, not a pain, no small feat for Heavy Iron Studios.

Recommended for... platformer fans and anyone who misses golden age Nickelodeon.

[#] Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (Activision, , 2001)

The pinnacle of skating games, bar none.

Tony Hawk's was an institution on the PS1. These games took a sport and culture everyone's fascinated by and merged them with dead simple controls that even people who aren't gamers can glom onto. I can only guess just how next-gen Pro Skater 3 felt when it dropped back in the day. I mean, this game is next-level in terms of its graphics, the scope of its levels, the objectives, and just how cinematic it can be at times. With a slicker engine, better physics, and cleaner graphics, I don't begrudge anyone calling this their favorite Tony Hawk game.

Like the manuals in the second game, Pro Skater 3 introduces a new mechanic in reverts, which lets you keep your combo exiting a ramp by pressing R2 at just the right time. Also like manuals, it's a little hard to go back to the earlier games that didn't have reverts after making use of it for so long. Seriously, it just feels natural once you've gotten used to it, and it's key for the scores this game asks you to get. If you thought 250,000 for Philly was a tall order, try the 500,000 you'll need to get top marks on the Cruise Ship!

While previous games gave objectives that involved tricking over obstacles and collecting items, Pro Skater 3's objectives oftentimes involve a little thinking. Sometimes, you have to defeat criminals by causing an earthquake. Sometimes, you have to help a man get back into his haunted mansion using an axe stolen from a construction site. It's a nice change of pace, and makes great use of each locale. This game really incentivizes you to 100% each skater, given all the bizarre unlock characters and hidden goodies that await you. And trust me, you'll want to.

Recommended for... absolutely anyone with a pulse and can hold a controller.

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