Ah yes, the super chad of its console generation, tons of great games, dvd playback, and PS1 compatibility! What’s not to love about this legendary system?
What are your experiences with the PS2, what were your cherished games on the console?
Despite it being the weakest of its generation, you cannot deny they managed to craft some excellent games out of it with work arounds.
What are your thoughts?
Burnout 3, Midnight Club 3, and NFS Underground 2 were the best games to play on PS2. Such nostalgia.
Bought a Steam Deck, first thing I did was put a PS2 emulator on it. Loving every second.
Same here. I find it isn’t powerful enough for a lot of modern PC games unless your drop the settings, but it’s amazing for retro and emulation. I’m living in 2004 again.
I can’t help but hear this post in John Linneman voice.
DF Retro is so good.
Bought a PS 2, Gran Turismo 4 and the GT4 Logitech steering wheel and pedals when I graduated college.
Just dug it all out to show my 6 year old how fun driving can be. Looked better than I expected even with component cables.
I still have my slim PS2 and Magic Swap discs. It had the best library of that era IMO.
It was my go to console and my DVD player for years. Played so many JRPGs on there and made me a lifelong fan of ratchet and clank and one of the few games that my now wife could play (she’s terrible with video games). Still lamenting that Dark Cloud series never got the success o thought it should have.
Still have my PS2, still boots and all of it, including the mad catz controller, still works.
The ps2 had THE BEST library of any console, even to this day. I am still learning about random hiddem gems ive never heard of on it, and I’ve been gaming for 25 years
What’s not to love about this legendary system?
It was incredibly underpowered and dev kits were made more powerful to entice devs. Leading to a lot of poorly optimized games
It wasn’t as underpowered as many people think. I know it’s easy to go like “yeah the cpus clockspeed is like 50% lower than the gamecubes and half as slow as the one in the xbox”, but really that’s just half of the story. The Emotion Engine was quite powerful in the right hands, you just needed to know how to fully use it, including the 2 vector units. There are enough games out there that show the PS2s full potential. The problem is that a lot of the earlier games didn’t really fully utilize the EE.
So you just ignored the 2nd half of the problem
That dev kits were more powerful? I looked it up and wasn’t able to find anything about that. Besides that, things like having more RAM is not uncommon on devkits if you mean that.
things like having more RAM is not uncommon on devkits if you mean that.
But you usually let devs know
Were you a dev back in the day that’s still mad at sony for not telling you by any chance? Just curious, because you seem like you have quite the problem with Sony not telling devs about the differences of a devkit.
I wouldn’t say mad, I was just saying something not to love about it
Kingdom Hearts I & 2, Final Fantasy X, Jak trilogy, the Ratchet games, GTA 3D trilogy. So many games I still go back to this day.
Persona 3 and 4 I found out at the back end of the PS3 era and dusted off my PS2 just play them as well.
Me and my friends used to play a lot this shooter game called Time Splitters. It had some wacky characters and crazy guns. Good memories
Man, TimeSplitters 2 is the goat. Still play it every now and then. Some levels weren’t that great, but the characters, multiplayer aspect and just the overall “goofyness” of the game really make it stand out
SSX Tricky will forever hold a special place in my heart.
I never played Tricky but love SSX3 and On Tour. A lot of people fondly talk about Tricky, so is there anything about it that the later games lack?
It’s more over-the-top and arcade-y. Things like volcanos exploding as you ride down the slopes and an indoor mall-like mountain in Tokyo with an air-lift you use to do laps. Note that it’s not free-ride, so there are pluses and minuses to it.
My brother used to be able to get like 2,000,000 points with Mac at Tokyo Megaplex. That course was the best for tricks!
I love the PS2. Many great games, played a lot of Lego Star Wars II on it. I still play on mine every few days, it’s a great system. Games today aren’t like this anymore.
I like to play playstation and also playstation 2
In terms of games, Kingdom Hearts and Guitar Hero were highlights of my childhood.
I thought the Dreamcast had the weakest technical specs of that generation? PS2 was also earlier than other consoles in that generation, so slightly lower specs makes sense.
Guitar hero for me was a 360 thing. I’ve always wanted to go back and try out the PS2 ones though, just not had the hardware.
Dreamcast was killed off so early and didn’t run alongside the others for most of the generation, so a lot of people consider it as more of an in-between system. Maybe not to someone who actually owned one, but given how poorly it sold the majority probably didn’t.
I didn’t own a PS2 until about 2006 when I lived with my girlfriend (now wife!) but even then it was replaced with an Xbox 360 the next year.
I’m a Dreamcast and GameCube kid and I do love the PS1 but just haven’t got any nostalgia for PS2.
