PlayStation 2 Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] Snoopy vs. the Red Baron (Namco, 2006)

It just needs a bigger gun.

From the "God I'm glad this exists" department, Snoopy vs. the Red Baron lets you take to the skies and shoot down actual Germans or the rest of the Peanuts cast with machine guns and explosives. Yeah! Anyone who knows Peanuts knows about Snoopy's nemesis Manfred von Richthofen, and this is an entire alternate reality game where the Peanuts cast, in uniform and all, are cast as WW1 Allies to recover the stolen plans for a war-ending ICBM called the Doodlebug and save Charlie Brown, who's been taken as a prisoner of war. Snoopy is the man of the hour here, top dog, flying ace—and Woodstock's always beside him for logistical support (read: more dakka).

Each mission is about ten minutes long and takes place over five different battlefields, from green islands to the blistering cold of the Matterhorn. Snoopy handles great, my own stupidity getting him occasionally tangled in scenery aside, and with upgrades, he can put out an impressive amount of firepower as he bombs power stations and U-boats and dogfights (was the pun intended all along?) the other fighter planes. Some of the switchable secondary weapons might be silly, like bees and potato guns, but there's still wholeass fireworks, rockets, and high voltage blast guns in the mix too. Snoopy will fuck you up.

This game has a way of making war adorable though. Orders are given by a fatigues-clad combination of Linus and Lucy, Marcie is your side's dweeby top scientist, Rerun and Peppermint Patty back you up in bombing Axis bases and pillboxes, and funny little 3D cutscenes show the kids are still kids, bombs or not. It's a compelling, fun, short little package—probably for the best given the general one-dimensional nature of the combat and occasional frustration of the game unavoidably raining shit on you. Nothing's perfect, but this game could make a pinko commie join the war effort, and I think that's wonderful.

[#] 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.

[#] TimeSplitters (Eidos, 2000)

Heir to the GoldenEye throne, with a lovely level editor in tow.

If you've never heard of TimeSplitters, you might know its spiritual predecessor: GoldenEye. Yeah, the one on N64. GoldenEye's been talked to death, but what's lesser known is that a lot of the Rare staff who worked on it went on to form Free Radical Design and produce the TimeSplitters series in the 2000s. TimeSplitters itself is better known for the story-based later entries in the series, but how's the first? I can't say no to any game with a level editor, man. It's a bit lightweight, the loading times are egregious (half a minute per level!), but if you're looking for a fast-paced four-player arena shooter for your PS2, it's got the guns and the funs.

For the story mode, you play a rather grotesquely designed guy or gal in various time periods seeking to retrieve an item from each (an ankh in a tomb in the 1930s, a briefcase in a chinese restaurant in the 1970s). When you do so, time-traveling ghouls called the TimeSplitters flood the level to try to kill you. The shooting mechanics and autoaim are very good, and the framerate is silky no matter the carnage. You're timed for each mission (and yes, there are target times that unlock cheats), but while GoldenEye had the objectives and locales from the Bond film to hang on, these levels are fun but repetitive, not much going on except a speedrun shooting gallery.

It's really in the multiplayer and level editor that TimeSplitters holds great appeal. There's various deathmatch and capture the flag modes you can play either with bots or with up to three other humans, and the matches are highly customizable and the bot AI is actually surprisingly good. MapMaker is another nicely intricate addition: you're able to put together tiles of hallways, ramps, and rooms in up to five layers, choosing where you want spawn points, gun places, flags, health and armor pickups, even per-tile lighting and color effects. It's highly engaging stuff, and provided you can get over the long load times, TimeSplitters's gunplay and MapMaker might just prove habit forming.

[#] 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.