PlayStation 2 Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] 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.

[#] NFL Street 2 (Electronic Arts, 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.

[#] Pac-Man World 2 (Namco, 2002)

Cute, kinda frustrating, needed more ice skating.

Pac-Man World 2 is one of those games I've owned forever but only just got around to beating, on stream with some friends the week I write this. Before the series took the amusingly testy tone of the third entry, they were whimsical, quick 3D platformers featuring bright locales and plenty of certain death for a nevertheless cheerful looking Pac-Man. In 2, a villain named Spooky swipes the golden fruit from Pac-Village's tree, and who else is sprung into action to retrieve them? There's also lots of arcade tokens around, and Pac-Man can return home from saving the world to play Pac-Attack with them as a lil treat.

Before we get underway, I have to warn you. Whether or not you'll hate this game depends partially on what version you play. We discovered late in the campaign, after getting our asses kicked an astounding number of times for such a cutesy game, that there's actually two revisions, and I'd been playing the first one! The second revision rebalances the frankly assaholic level designs, makes touching ghosts non-fatal, slows the bosses down, and adds more checkpoints to the levels. All of these are necessary additions, as the first revision (which I still beat) is annoyingly unfair really all throughout the campaign. (Alas, regardless of revision, the camera always sucks.)

Assuming you're playing the nicer version, however, what you'll find is a decently well-built, zippy (like 5-6 hours to complete) 3D platformer that takes Pac-Man through foggy forests, snowy mountains, volcanoes, and even down in a submarine for a beat. The snow portion of the game is the best, for one level and one level alone—Blade Mountain. Yes, friends, Pac-Man ice skates, and the speed is exhilarating and the level design lets you glide around with the grace of a violent swan. It's a shame only that one level comes anywhere close to memorable greatness, and the rest is just alright. Cute. Often frustrating. I'd recommend 3 over it.

[#] 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.

[#] Pitfall: The Lost Expedition (Activision, 2004)

Harry, what have they done to you?

You really expect these later Pitfall games to feel like Indiana Jones, but they're actually a lot closer to Paddington in Peru: things break, bad ideas aplenty, you're soaked and tired, and then you hit a wall at the end. The Browns at least found bears and marmalade behind that wall. You will only find the least satisfying end to possibly any PS2 platformer out there. It's not completely meritless, but I'm not about to replay it, and maybe even less about to recommend it. Indeed, let me save you the trouble: hold L1 and R1 on the title screen, put in left-right-left-right-triangle-triangle-triangle, and play through Pitfall II instead.

Harry isn't bad to control when he's running around, though combat can be a chore with the lack of i-frames. The vine physics and breakables (courtesy of the Half-Life 2 favorite Havok physics engine) actually feel really good, so the core platforming is fluid enough. Edge of Reality evidently thought the right analog stick just wasn't used enough in PS2 games, because you will use it to throw rocks, grab items, and hold a gasmask to your face. It's fidgety and not really all that great in practice. While Harry is maneuverable, he also has to do an obscene amount of backtracking through old areas, as the game sends you from one corner of the map to the next to progress a single story beat. This could've been half the length and it would've been better for it.

And of that story! Pitfall Harry goes from a fearless Harrison Ford type (in your mind, it's an Atari game) trying to save his niece from the ravages of the jungle in II to an unfunny, bug-eyed wannabe casanova murderer (those poor penguins). Seriously, just about everyone in this game acts and looks like aliens, which undercuts how attractive the lush locales and cool as fuck temples really are. Pair that with the, mmm, mildly insensitive depictions of the natives (matched only by the cultural blender of the recent Pokémon games), and you have a world that's incomprehensible, awfully laid out, and easily forgotten outside of your time being wasted. Pitfall II playable from the title screen, though? That still feels like home.

[#] Ratchet and Clank (Sony, 2002)

Kick alien ass.

The Holy Ghost of the trinity of Sony sixth-gen platformers, Ratchet and Clank devs Insomniac Games took their previous Spyro's lush and varied 3D worlds, turned them into planets, and made you an alien cat with a lot of really cool big guns. Ratchet is joined by an exacting and slightly socially clueless robotic operating buddy named Clank as they galavant around the galaxy to stop a greaseball alien executive from making a superplanet out of the resources of the others. For the first game of each trilogy, I think Ratchet makes the best impression, being briskly paced, easy to explore, the controls feeling nimble, the guns satisfying, and the graphics excellent. It ain't perfect, but few things are.

Ratchet starts out with a piddly bomb-throwing glove and his OmniWrench (a legitimately useful melee weapon and multi-tool), but his arsenal soon grows to include flamethrowers, automatic handguns, lightning weapons, uh, more explosives of various types. There's a sheep gun! As in, it makes enemies into sheep. There's also the Suck Cannon for those lonely nights on the Blarg station. The locales prove similarly varied, with Pokitaru's lush tropics, Aridia's nighttime scrublands, Kerwan's foggy skyscrapers, even a planet or two you can only visit as Clank initially! (Yes, Clank is playable, but nothing about his brief segments where you command an army of smaller robots proves very combustible, sadly.)

Where people tend to have issue with the first Ratchet is in the writing. Ratchet is a quick-to-anger moody teenager, and Clank surprisingly not much more mature. I didn't mind, as like Spyro, you're playing this more for the mechanical satisfaction than the story anyway. Similarly, people gripe about the lack of strafing, which I'm used to, but coming from the later games, you might miss it terribly. I'd also like to say, spoilers, that the final boss is nuts cheap and I'm glad you get to murder him horribly. Those minor gripes aside, with lots to unlock, weapons to upgrade for even greater chaos, a New Game Plus mode, Ratchet and Clank is as explosive as a Visibomb rocket and just as spectacular.

[#] Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando (Sony, 2003)

Upping the ante, upping the firepower.

The single most genius sequel issue Insomniac sidestepped for Going Commando is "why, if I had it before, do I have to get it again?". Your old guns? Give the game an old save and you'll have 'em free of charge again (though they might be a little weaker next to the big new guns). Your O2 mask and Hydro Pack? You start the game with it, go diving as ya please. This is no retread—Going Commando takes you to a new galaxy, with new weapons, higher stakes, some space dogfighting and now hoverbike races, and plenty of other little minigames, battle arenas, and post-game content to get distracted by. Ratchet grew up a bit! There's even progressive scan! Oh, it's a crackin' good time.

Ratchet and Clank, now galaxy-wide heroes for stopping Chairman Drek's dastardly plans, are transported to a new galaxy and recruited to retrieve a cute little stolen prototype gremlin called a Protopet for the appropriately-named Megacorp. They soon learn the situation isn't quite what it looked like, and it's up to them to fix what they'd inadvertently broken. Again, not a deep story, but a highly amusing one, and a great excuse to take you to a new set of space stations, muddy backwater planets, and vast deserts and tundras to retrieve crystals for strange shaman types (great for zoning out with your chat over!).

For difficulty, the game keeps it fair with weapons and your health that scale the more destruction you dish out. Your vast arsenal this time includes the satisfying crunchy Blitz Gun, the sniper-friendly Pulse Rifle, the, er, suggestive Lava Gun (and its disappointing upgrade), and the absolutely overpowered, playfield-leveling Bouncer cannon. If I can advise you on anything, it's to learn them all, because boy does the right gun come in handy sometimes! If anything, I feel Going Commando is slightly shorter than the first game, and almost to make up for the obnoxious difficulty of the Drek fight, this one's final boss goes down really quick. I don't mind a game you can breeze through, though. You want more? Get a lot more of it here, and quick.

[#] Rock Band (MTV Games, 2007)

A slimmed-down, yet still highly enjoyable, experience.

The transition to a new console generation always presents a challenge for developers. Their ideas can be realized in IMAX at long last, sure, but the old hardware is still selling great, and you can't just leave it behind, can you? Credit the always-inventive Harmonix for coming up with a compromise for Rock Band: rather than risk playability getting the four-player madness of the next-gen versions going on the aging PS2, this version uses pre-rendered video backgrounds that ensure the game plays silky smooth no matter what's happening on stage. It does mean a loss of a lot of the next-gen features, but it was absolutely the right move.

If you don't know what Rock Band adds over Harmonix's previous Guitar Hero, you get to play with a band of up to three other people, adding a drummer and vocalist into the mix of guitar and bass. There really is something infectious about the co-op music game experience, especially when you get such a great library of iconic classic bands (The Who, Kiss, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Boston, The Clash, Bon Jovi) and more modern ones (Radiohead, Garbage, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Killers, Nirvana, Soundgarden) to go through with your friends. Sadly, I've gotten to experience it very seldom in my life, but highly recommended if you can get a band together.

For what the PS2 version specifically loses, your World Tour mode effectively consists of the same tiered Career mode as Guitar Hero II, just without earning money. (And no playable bass!) The only thing to unlock here are more songs, hardly a bad thing, though I did have to use a downloaded copy when my childhood one froze up during a bonus track and I couldn't unlock the rest. The Practice Mode, due to using its own audio, is also severely limited and only provides you one slower speed (!) and no way to practice sections full speed (???). They did what they could to fit this on a dual-layer DVD, I guess. It's not the ideal way to experience Rock Band at all, but even cut down, it's still a good time.

[#] Rock Band 2 (MTV Games, 2008)

Going out on the console that birthed them with a bang.

The original Rock Band for PS2, while still fun, was definitely a cut down experience from its seventh gen variants. It seems Harmonix and Pi Studios were determined to give the ancient PS2 a farewell tour worth paying for, though, because Rock Band 2 is truly excellent. Really, all that you lose are the character creation, DLC, and online play, a shame indeed, but completely understandable. Everything else though, the improvements to the Tour modes, no fail and hyperspeed modifiers, even a drum trainer and freestyle mode to give you beats to practice outside of songs and just plain jam on your plastic kit with, respectively, are all here and all very nice.

The original game's campaign was rather inflexible, either a solo tour for a single instrument or a band tour for multiple (and no bass in Solo Tour! what the fuck), but here, you make a band and change instruments and difficulty at any time. Yes, if you've got friends who are only around some of the time, your save isn't locked to their availability. And you can play bass by yourself now! (Given how difficult these songs get on guitar, thank you. Also, I just love bass.) You're also not limited to a tiered setlist; instead, you get to "tour the world" playing sets in major cities, not just adding a cheeky bit of nonlinearity to the formula, but also decreasing the odds you get stuck on any one song.

Between World Tour and the Play Challenges (themed setlists for "2000s hits", "prog", "challenging basslines", and so on), this is not the kind of game a seasoned rocker can just blow through. The songs also get bonkers more difficult than the first game, almost exhaustingly so, and those marathon setlists, the longest of which lasts six hours in all, are no joke. Thankfully, you can save during most of them, and play each one on any difficulty you feel up to. With all its improvements and maybe the most legendary lineup of bands ever compiled, Metallica, The Who, Talking Heads, Bon Jovi, Soundgarden, Linkin Park, Blondie, Testament, all the way down to my weirdo indie favorites like Lush and Silversun Pickups, even on PS2, Rock Band 2...uh, rocks.

[#] Rock Band Track Pack Volume 1 (MTV Games, 2008)

Twenty all-new epic rock tracks as performed by the original artists!

These Rock Band Track Packs were a real joy to have as a young marf, stuck on last gen hardware with no way to play all those tons of cool DLC songs the 360 and PS3 kids were getting. Each one is a set of twenty DLC tracks, wrapped up in a quick standalone setlist that doesn't require the original game to play. This first Track Pack was actually exclusively released for the Wii and PS2 (later ones would be released for all four systems, with the songs exportable to the full game for the 360 and PS3), demonstrating the concept.

The setlist is mostly wall-to-wall huge tunes, an eclectic mix of tracks from pop punk (blink-182's "All the Small Things", Paramore's "crushcrushcrush") to 90s alt (Oasis' "Live Forever", Stone Temple Pilots' "Interstate Love Song") to some golden oldies (David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream", Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Gimme Three Steps") to much more recent rock (Queens of the Stone Age's "Little Sister"—not to mention Wolfmother's notoriously difficult "Joker and the Thief"). It's a fun set! The only real letdown is the Grateful Dead track "Truckin'"—overly long, like a lot of the Dead's tunes are, I wish we got "Casey Jones" from the same pack instead.

This disc is built on the same last-gen engine as the main game on PS2, so do know you're still getting the video backgrounds, shitty Practice Mode, and limited Guitar Hero II-like tier progression system with no ability to play singleplayer bass as it. What I find most interesting were the minor graphical and technical improvements Pi Studios made to this port over Rock Band PS2, notably in the instant song restarts over that game's loading-delayed ones. Very nice. This is a highly playable set (I gold-starred most songs basically first try) of really good tunes, and that's all there is to say about it.

(This review equally applies to each successive Track Pack. Check out the setlist, and if the songs appeal to you, give it a go. They were on autopilot for these, understandably so.)