I have! It’s certified kusoge (by me). Monsters can fly indefinitely, can land on rest points where you can’t reach, the overall action is slower, it’s incredibly easy to get knocked out of an attack. It is a testament to the game’s overall concept that it sold as well as it did.
Like, few games make me re-evaluate my life out of pure exasperation, and this did it.
Freedom Unite is a gift from god.
tbh I think the PS1 has a more diverse library overall and represents a more interesting period in game design with fewer codified traps, overall more consistent graphics work, and it was much more successful in terms of hardware design for its era
but the PS2’s definitely hits greater heights
oh I totally agree, if anything PS1 is the weirdest in that PS1/PS2/Famicom triad of weird I suggested
let’s get weird
I’m gonna be the one weirdo who says that if I have to pick a classic horizontal shoot 'em up franchise finale that took place on a PS2, give me R-Type Final instead. C’mon, fight me!
(plz don’t fight me)
On a system with several Tony Hawk games on it, the best extreme sports game on the console might be Aggressive Inline. Tony Hawk 4 might edge it out, that’s about it.
Beyond Good & Evil may be a bit overpraised in certain circles, but as a game it has a very good heart.
Firepro Wrestling Returns is the best wrestling game of its generation and only has the Aki games as competition in the best wrestling game of all time arena.
The King Kong game isn’t great, but feels better than it should be. It is a bit too limited to soar, yet they tried as hard as they could with what they had. In that way it is almost a cousin of Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, another game with a mediocre base elevated by a team that put as much as they could into it.
That is a whole list of games I’ve never played.
gitaroo man and parappa 2 also.
oh man
10,000 Bullets (Tsukiyo ni Saraba) was a swell, Matrix-inspired bullet time fun time.
PS2 had two original Contra games; Contra Shattered Soldier, and Neo Contra.
crimson tears is a cool game no-one seems to have played
dark native apostle is a better dark edgy bomberman reboot than bomberman zero was (it’s still not very good though)
super dragonball z is probably the best dragonball z game
dqviii/ffxii/smt3 is like my personal jrpg trinity
and then there’s also p4 and dragon quarter, damn
i mean that’s a whole bunch of the best levelin up there is
and man sotc/mgs3/katamari/sh2, there’s a very good chance i’ll never play anything better than any of those games
Game rules, no doubt. I am glad I picked it up. It’s probably the closest a DBZ game gets to actually being a decent-ish fighting thing.
True highlight is that stage that just has people gettin’ it on as the background, acknowledging so much of what we know R Type has always been about.
I unlocked every ship in that damn game. It was a Good Time.
Does the PS4 version support the vibrator though?
Let me visit this lovey-dovey PS2 thread to spread some hate.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is a messy mix of third and first person action that beats even Other M in terms of clunkyness. This should’ve been a TPS or an FPS but not whatever weird thing it is.
Neo Contra is a perfectly fine game (with a perfectly perfect intro) ruined by an awkward control scheme that makes zero sense considering its controller. (Neo Contra has no right not to be a twin-stick shooter.)
oh man, R-TYPE FINAL. I’ve finished getting all 101 ships on the yuropean version, and for the heck of it, started doing the same thing all over again when I got the japanese version … because it has a different ending. I was such a fanboy of that game, yes. And easiest difficulty level in J|NTSC version (BABY iirc) was harder than western/yuropean-BABY mode. Such pussies we’ve been …
other titles mentioned already include Ace Combat 4,5+Zero, Katamari 1 (oh yes). SotC, REZ. GT3 is more arcade/fun-racer than GT4, the latter tried too hard to play grown-up and it just never came together. Still 100% the A-SPEC on both …
titles that are missing so far:
ENTHUSIA Professional Racing, because it dared to do things differently. No credits in the game whatsoever, interesting mix of arcade-tracks + Nürburgring, best curated car-roster for years to come.
Valkyrie Profile 2, because it managed to take a 2D battle system to 3D and yet somehow bridge the gap by being 2.5D. And it was a beautiful tri-Ace swansong to the PS2. Just don’t get the PAL version, I imported the US-version for a good reason …
WRC Rally-games - 4 sticks out because of first-time-I-played-sth-like-that bonus, though I’ve played a lot of Evolved, the last one on the PS2. Newer rally games on the 360 and even Seb Loeb Rally on the PS4 are basically prettier versions of 4, with newer cars, cooler GFX and stuff like headlamps etc., but WRC4 on the PS2 just managed to nail it, just felt right.
other titles were improved upon in later gens, be it lumines, ESPgaluda, Sylpheed, Magna Carta, Star Ocean …
MGS2 + using the R1 button more than L1 is definitely a “playing it wrong” entrant
mgs2/3 have a very high mechanical skill ceiling because of the “awkward” controls, if they were streamlined this burden would fall upon the level design only
but I love weird controls because i have fun with kinaesthetic learning
The controls are not what is awkward.
honestly the controls and how they intersect with objectives is what makes me want to play MGS2 far more than what it’s doing narratively
It’s been years since I played Neo Contra but I don’t remember struggling with the controls at all. I found it a much more enjoyable and replayable game than Shattered Soldier which really did have too many bosses for my liking
35% of my MGS3 experience was figuring out if I was about to go into a crouch/crawl position or if I was in fact about to right Snake
