You Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, your host, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how was trouser shopping in M&S? Stressful, because I’m pushing at the limits of what their trousers can offer me, I think, which is very embarrassing, but I’m a tall, tall and round fellow these days, and trying to get a combination of those things is very, very difficult. And this is nothing worse than putting on clothes that are too small for you, because you just feel like an absolute clown and just giant and terrible. I mean, I guess I hope that would yield a more amusing anecdote rather than a bit of despair, but as someone who has also bought trousers in his 30s, I understand, you know? Yeah, I mean, I went to a shop and put on trousers. There’s not a lot of zany stuff that can happen in that scenario. That’s fair enough. So Matthew, we’re recording this on a rainy Sunday morning. We are going to talk about the PlayStation 2, something we haven’t discussed that much on this podcast before, actually. I don’t know how we haven’t really, that hasn’t really come up in 38 episodes, but here we are. So the premise of this one is quite simple. So obviously it’s been a while since we’ve done another of these draft episodes. The first one we did was the game developer draft. People got quite into that. We had more than 300 votes on the end result, which we really appreciated. So we thought another kind of competitive episode would be fun. We’ve themed this one around the PS2, because we thought that constructing a hypothetical PS2 mini would be a fun exercise to audit the massive library of that console. And also, it seems like with the launch of the next generation consoles, the brief spate of miniature versions of retro hardware seems to be at end. And they arguably stopped doing them before they got to any of the actual good ones. That is a salty statement that I don’t really stand by. So, obviously, Sony made its own PlayStation Classic Mini. It was actually considered quite disappointing in terms of the lineup. Sony themselves clearly struggled to build something that represented the sort of like broad library of that system and missed out on some pretty major stuff, like it crash-banded coops and such, which I’m sure Matthew would be happy not to see in circulation again. But yeah, so what we’re going to do in this episode is, we’re going to basically compete across 10 categories to pick the best PS2 games. So we’ll each have a list of 10 games at the end of this, so broken down by genre. We’ll talk a bit more about what those genres are when we get to the next section. And that’s basically the thing that you’re going to be voting on, is who picked the best 10 games. So very straightforward. But Matthew, I was curious, how have you found this process of trying to kind of like swat up for this episode? It’s been fun. Like I always, you know, like going back and reading kind of, you know, list features and sort of, particularly, you know, now there’s a bit of distance and like, you know, the console is complete, for want of a better word, and people can kind of like have a definitive list, you know, because you always have evolving lists while you’re working on a platform. And that’s always interesting. But there’s always something nice about reaching the end and being able to just lay everything out and say, this is it, this is what I think. So it’s interesting reading like other people’s thoughts on it. I don’t have the same background with PlayStation that you do. So some of it is, you know, I’ve played enough and I’ve filled in like enough gaps over the years, but some of my picks aren’t necessarily like lived in, I guess, which is a bit sort of shaky territory. There’s been a lot of debate in my head over the need to create the best 10 games so that I win this draft, which is important to me as a competitive person. But also, you know, should I be true to my personal experience or do I cynically pick stuff that I know will play to the masses? Do I pick stuff that I know means a lot to you that has like no meaning to me? Would that be shitty? Lots of questions. Yeah, I think when we discussed this like a few days ago, you said to me, a lot of this for me is about taking nice things from you, which I thought was a great sort of like attitude towards this process. I very much enjoyed that. I must say for me, the list is primarily composed of stuff I have played. You’re right, I have got more PS2 experience than you. I first got a PS2 in 2001. I’ve probably played about 250 to 300 PS2 games, which is just like a fraction of the library still. But that’s across demos as well as full games. So I have lived in experiences on the console for sure to draw upon. There’s a couple of games in my selection that I haven’t played as much or I have picked because I needed an alternative for a genre in case you pick another game. So that’s weighing on me a little bit. But the primary list of games is all stuff I’ve played comprehensively. So we’ll see what wins out. Yeah. I was wondering if you had any broad observations about the PS2’s library, Matthew, just from going through this process. I mean, it’s pretty amazing. I’d say, and also just such an exciting time, particularly in Japanese game development. It still feels like they’re firing all cylinders. There’s just so much weird genre stuff and so much effort being pumped into genre stuff that now it feels like it’s been given over to indie or smaller developers anyway. I think looking at that library and looking at what it has, I can better understand the tastes of my peers a bit, I guess. I was a Nintendo gamer when this stuff was happening, and so all my formative experiences are with Nintendo games, but I can better understand where PlayStation heads are coming from for sure. Yeah, it’s really interesting to dig into this by genre. In doing this list, I observed that some genres really did thrive more than others. There aren’t many good first-person shooters on PS2, for example, whereas obviously if you get to the 360 PS3 era, the first-person shooter becomes the most important genre basically. It’s quite interesting to see that that doesn’t really exist so much. Or there are some genres where there are only two or three truly essential games in that genre, and then a bunch of also rants. So, yeah, very, very interesting times. Yeah, the shooter thing is interesting. I guess that’s just because this is still a Japanese-centric console, even though it’s massive around the world. That takes the lead, definitely impacts that. I think also back then, just tech-wise, you had a much bigger gulf between what consoles were doing, PC was the home of first-person shooters. First-person shooters, I still associate with cutting edge of graphics at that point then, anyway. So there’s maybe a sense of what works on PC is probably too much for what’s going on on console. Definitely that balance changes when you get to the next gen. That’s a really hard category, that one. I think I’ve got quite unsatisfying answers for it. Yeah, okay, we’ll get to that. I observed one other thing about the PS2 catalog. Obviously it is incredible. I have a lot of affection for so many of these games. So when I look to Metacritic’s top 100 games, I should stop talking about Metacritic on these episodes because I think that people are going to think that that’s the only thing I pay attention to. I don’t. They just happen to be a really easy way to look at a long list of games on one format. Yeah, it’s very convenient. Yeah, exactly. So shout out to Metacritic. But yeah, I think that you could, with the PS2, this was like the last console where you could have a truly subjective experience of what the console is because the library was so vast, so much bigger than that of its competitors. And there was such a variety of stuff that your PS2 experience could be completely different from another person’s PS2 experience. Whereas we’re at a, I don’t want to say we’re necessarily in a monocultural age. We have indie games and like there’s a lot of different ways your, your gaming life will, you know, alter from someone else’s experiences. But it feels like in terms of big games, you could basically play about, you know, 20 amazing games and another person could play 20 amazing games. And they might not be the same games. Whereas these days, I feel like it’s more likely that people, everyone who owns a PS4 would have played, you know, Horizon Zero Dawn or God of War. And, you know, notably I think the rise of kind of like mega selling games sort of happens this generation, but then in the next two generations, the numbers push even higher, which suggests to me that a lot more people are playing the same games, whereas it’s a bit more spread out on PS2. That was something else I kind of observed. Do you think there’s anything in there? Yeah, I think so. I think that feels true. I also wondered like what role things like PlayStation 2 demo discs played in that, in just giving a lot of people, you know, because this is a time when magazines are selling like mega, mega numbers. So, you know, definitely in the UK, at least, you know, you’re talking about like a lot of people of this generation have memories of buying those bags and playing those demo discs, and it just acts as a taster menu for, like you say, this absolutely mammoth library. So there’s like a, I don’t know, almost sort of, does that lead to like better discoverability, I guess? And maybe that leads to this, this slightly like, you know, weirder kind of niche stuff, being able to sort of survive around the edges? Yeah, for sure. I think that, like you say, the PS2 demo discs, I have really fond memories of the, of the PS2 mag around this time, the official mag, I thought it was excellent in its early days. And I was exposed to so much stuff that I wouldn’t have played otherwise. Like I say, I’ve mentioned in previous episodes that Dinnies 2 or 3 is something I got exposed to via a demo disc, that I bought it and then failed my AS levels, you know, that was like a vintage Sammy Roberts anecdote, that one. But that was on the same demo disc as Hurdy Gurdy and Ico, for example. So just in that month, like that’s, I’m not saying, Hurdy Gurdy was obviously bad, but that was the cover game that month. Imagine failing your AS levels because of Hurdy Gurdy. Yeah, that didn’t make any… That anecdote’s not as cool. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, obviously Ico is that kind of game where it sort of hits you out of nowhere. And I almost think that a demo disc, probably playing that demo, just set me up to be obsessed with Ueda’s games down the line and stuff like that. It’s just being exposed to the experience is enough to kind of plant the seed. And you wonder how much impact that has down the line because probably many more people played that Ico demo on that demo disc than actually bought Ico at the time. But obviously his games have persisted as in popularity. So, yeah, I don’t know. It’s definitely a big part of the culture that no longer exists now. I mean, this is the last generation where demo discs really are sort of like, you know, game changing in terms of how people sort of absorb games. So that was interesting, yeah. Entire genres this generation that like no longer exist after this. Light gun shooters, this is pretty much their last. Hurrah. I really enjoy going through this library of games, Matthew. It did make me think this console was rad as fuck. There will never be another console like this as dominant that has as much exclusive stuff just because people didn’t need to put it on every format at the time, you know. It was just, this is where all the people are playing games. We’ll put it here and it’s fine. And that’s, you know, respect. Definitely. I mean, there’s, you know, something we’ve talked about like a little bit in the Discord and maybe I’ve mentioned it in previous episodes, I can’t remember as well, is trying to like hone in on games which like feel sort of pierced to their bones in terms of someone asked on Twitter whether we could have multi-format games. And I think we can, but there are definitely multi-format games which feel like they really lived on PS2 and they were part of that console’s identity. And, you know, maybe that’s slightly skewed just because it was a massive console. So, you know, it could like dominate and even so I’d say there are other games whose like narrative is intertwined with another machine. So even if it ended up on PlayStation 2, I think it would be a bit bogus to make it part of the PS2 experience. Look, we get it Matthew, you played Resident Evil 4 on GameCube, okay? You had the better fire effects. Resident Evil 4 is a GameCube game. You know, like that is the perfect example. In fact, a lot of those Capcom games which like lived on GameCube first, yes, they’re on PS2, but they aren’t PS2 games. They just aren’t. They’re not part of that machine’s identity and feel. So, yeah, there’s lots of stuff that I love, which I’ve kind of deliberately avoided for that reason. But, you know, we can probably get into some of those when we’re talking through these genres. Yeah, for sure. I think that’s a very good point there. Like there is an essential PS2-osity, I guess, to a PS2-ness that you have to sort of tap into with these games. So I do have a few, you know, I’m hoping to land a few multi-format games. But I’ve been quite selective in what I’ve picked. And it is stuff that either appeared on PS2 first or I, at least to me, as somebody who owned a PS2, is synonymous with that console. So, yeah, I very much enjoyed that. I will say to the listeners, I hope this doesn’t necessarily rule us out doing a best PS2 games list down the line that’s a bit more comprehensive. But we’ll only do that if we hit an anniversary and we’ve got a little while to one of those. So this will be a fun exercise that we might replicate with some other consoles if it proves popular. So Matthew, people I feel like have a good grip of what the PS2 is at this point. So should we take a quick break then just get down to it? Welcome back to the podcast. So, the PS2 Mini draft, we’re gonna do it. So, it’s simple. We each pick 10 games to go on a prospective PS2 Mini, capturing the breadth of the hardware in some small way. We will pick by genre. All you have to do is go vote on it at Back Page Pod in our week-long poll. We’ll discuss the winner in a future episode. I suppose, like, to set a criteria, Matthew, I mean, I’ll just make sure that you, this is what you’ve adhered to before we go ahead. It’s about who picked the best games, but also who picked the best games with a kind of PS2 identity. It’s a mix of those two things combined. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. I think it’s like, if you saw these two PS Minis on a shop shelf and you felt like that is the PS2 experience as I know it, or I recognise that as a PS2 experience and not something that’s just pandering as just a general games collection, it sort of makes sense in my head. Yeah, I think so. And a fun exercise at the end of this is when you look at the two lists combined, when these Minis are actually released, they have about 20 games on them. So in a way, together we are building a PS2 Mini, but all you have to do at home is vote on who picked the best 10 games. So it’s pretty straightforward. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. So let’s get down to the categories, Matthew, and we’ll talk a bit more about how we selected those. So, or rather how I did and then asked you, is this okay? I did sign off on them. Yeah, that’s true. I’ve got your people to okay. Okay, so category one, shooter or fighting game. Category two, survival horror. Category three, sports or racing. Category four, RPG. Category five, action or stealth game. Category six, platformer. Category seven, open world game. Category eight, licensed game. Category nine, wild card. Something weird and culty from the PS2 back catalog. Category 10, free pick. Literally any PS2 game to represent the breadth of the library. So for the listener’s benefit, I will repeat those before we get into it, Matthew. But why don’t you tell me your thoughts on these genres in a kind of broad way? Yeah, so I think there are some genres which are, it feels like in my head there’s kind of a clear winner. And if you don’t get it, everything else is going to be a little bit disappointing. Yeah. So that’s kind of fun because obviously we can pick the categories in any order. So we’re trying to prioritise the genres to get what we want up top. So I feel like there are a couple which I know are going to be very competitive. I think there’s definitely one category which I’d argue kind of has no good games in it, which makes it very, very difficult. I imagine people already know which one that’s going to be. I think there’s some categories which are just an embarrassment of riches, and it makes me happy that we’ve got that total free pick where we can basically cram something in. Yeah, there’s just a couple of categories here where like this machine and particularly like the Japanese game development scene was just absolutely flying during this period. And you know, you could probably make a great machine just out of that genre. So that’s, that’s, it’s, yeah, some, some are, some are really generous. Some are super mean. A couple of them I genuinely struggled with. Yeah, so this is a tough exercise, because the PS2, I mean, according to GamesRadar in 2011, has over 1850 games. So boiling that down is tough. Obviously a lot of that is going to be like FIFA’s and WWE games and stuff. But you know, a lot of it isn’t. So, in suggesting these 10 categories, I was quite calculated in the sense that I wanted the drama of like, this genre, you have to pick this one game, or it’s basically going to be a struggle, because that adds to the competition. So yeah, I mean, here’s how it works. Me and Matthew will take it in terms to pick from these genres. Once you’ve picked a game for that category, the other person can’t pick it. So you know, as we kind of go one by one, games will come off the board. And that’s where the competitive aspect lies. So it’s going to be quite interesting, I think. I also left some categories wide open because I did want to, I don’t know, have a bit of like, I guess, artist’s interpretation of what this thing is, or what, you know, what is important on the PS2 relative to this genre. And I think the genre you’re speaking about, where there’s no good games, is that licensed game, Matthew? Oh, no, no, I actually think platformer. Oh, OK, right. Yeah. I mean, I think that people will disagree with you on that. But I mean, that’s the Matt Castle. There are no good games in the genre. So actually, there are, I’ve got a couple of things that I’d be quite happy with that. But I will say they are not exclusive games, because PlayStation is not really the home of good exclusive platformers, in my opinion. So you’ve got quite a free run at that one. Yeah, for sure. And I think that there are some categories where, like I say, because it’s left to you to sort of interpret, you can’t necessarily lose. There are definitely more than like two good picks for each one, so… I really… Fighting shooter, I really struggle with, because I have no eye for fighting games, I will say, up front. So I will annoy some people with some like real dud pick in that one. I shouldn’t really be giving this away. I need to keep you kind of like in the dark, so you don’t know, kind of, you can’t lean on any of this sort of full knowledge. Okay. Well, I think let’s crack on with it, Matthew. I’ll read out the categories one more time for the listeners. So category one, shooter or fighting game. Two, survival horror. Three, sports or racing game. Four, RPG. Five, action or stealth game. Six, platformer. Seven, open world game. Eight, licensed game. Nine, wild card. Something weird and culty from the PS2 back catalogue. And ten, free pick, literally any PS2 game to represent the breadth of the library. So, right, Matthew, do you want to do the coin flip on your end? Didn’t you do an internet coin flip last time you did a draft? So you go first. Right, what do you want? I’ll go with Tales. Tales it is. Oh, what a relief. Okay, so to kick off with them, Matthew, I’m going for survival horror. Oh, fuck it, I knew it. What a great start. This is like, this is literally the only game I knew I needed, because I think there is only one game you can pick to win this category. And then there’s quite some quite good also rants, but there is only one game that, you know, really tops out here. And that is of course Silent Hill 2. So, are you okay, buddy, you all right? Yeah, that’s the second we came up with this draft categories. That was the one I was like, it has to be Silent Hill 2 or Bust. Yeah, I’m really sorry. And I was like really sweating it. Like if I don’t win the coin toss, I know I’ll lose out on this game. And yeah, so Silent Hill 2 then, obviously a survival horror game with a massive reputation, I would say its reputation is almost disproportionate to the number of people who have played it at this point. It’s like, it’s, you know, it was a big selling and acclaimed game at the time, but its themes and its imagery, obviously the kind of like imagery representing the themes of the story in some of the kind of monsters that you find in the game. That stuff is like really far exceeded, I think, the actual game itself. It’s a really, it’s got quite a mythical reputation, I think. But it’s a really good, straightforward, eight hour survival horror game that’s quite simple in its settings and stuff. You are in Silent Hill. It is a real feeling town. A lot of this game is spent just going through some apartments or a hospital and encountering some fucked up shit and it just gets darker and darker. Every character you meet is really strung out, has really simple combat, doesn’t really have much of a sort of HUD. I don’t think it’s got any HUD at all, actually, which again makes it feel quite timeless. It doesn’t look like an ancient game necessarily. Really really nice fog effects, obviously, but blown up with an emulator, this game looks fantastic still and I really hope that they find a way to re-release it in its original form but I’m not holding my breath because it’s Konami. Matthew, any thoughts on this one? Yeah, I mean, just a game with incredible texture. You know, I think actually the difficulty of playing this game, it’s available in many forms, but you know, none of those forms kind of have that right texture and you know, there’s been quite a prolonged effort to restore like the PC version and kind of mod the PC version into something kind of closer to what people remember or wanted from the PS2 version. I think that’s just because it has such a kind of impact and sort of embeds itself so kind of clearly that, you know, the fear, like something that sounds a bit wanky like the feel of the mist is kind of super important to this game and I think it shows that, you know, how much all these tiny things really matter. Yeah, I mean, kind of sort of spoils some survival horror in a way as well because I feel like ever since this game, there’s been a lot of like poor imitators. I think like psychological horror is quite weak, there’s something people don’t get and I can’t really put my finger on what it is, but I think a lot of people try and emulate Silent Hill, you know, specifically, I’d say the general series, but probably specifically too. Maybe in the storytelling more than anything else and it’s never quite right and there’s like nothing worse than playing the poor imitators. So people are very lucky that they get to play the original and best on your PS2 Mini. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, that’s I’m very happy with that pick. Obviously, I’m sure we’ll talk about that game again down the line. In fact, it comes up on our next episode, which we recorded before this one. So that’ll be good. So Matthew, why don’t you go with your first pick? Oh, I feel like do I try and like wound you in some way? Or do I just take something which is? I actually think from here, it’s like it’s a bit karma waters. Like it. Yeah, I think I’ve got like, I need to guarantee a couple of winners. So probably for action or stealth, go Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake Eater. Good pick. Very good pick. Well, here’s a question or a technical rule I wanted to raise. Where do we stand on versions of Snake? Does that mean you can you can you pick subsistence? Or is that bullshit? No, that would be an absolute prickish thing to do. Right. In which case, I’ll probably put subsistence in as it’s the fullest version. Yeah, it’s the same thing but with extra stuff. So yeah. Yeah. Why wouldn’t you? Yeah, I mean, it’s a game I kind of took a while to click with. I remember renting it on PS2 when I was at university, just reading about it in the mags and reading like all the little tricks and weird gizmos and want to see it for myself. And I found it quite awkward to begin with because it’s a game with like what I would have called back then a lot of like faff, you know, with things like the camouflage and the healing yourself. I just remember spending a lot of time fucking around in menu screens, which seemed not particularly fun. But I sort of appreciate a lot of that stuff more now as the kind of like unique character of the game. It’s like a fantastic James Bondy adventure. I mean, it’s probably Kojima’s most like traditionally cinematic game. For someone who is so obsessed with cinema, this is the closest he comes to making a big interactive movie. Like if you were to make a movie of any of them, this is the one I’d watch and would be most enjoyable. I think it’s very easy for it to become in your mind just a series of these incredible boss encounters, which is true in a lot of Metal Gears, but there’s just a lot more going on in between. The stealth just feels a lot more complete in this. I love that prequel element. I’m not a big Kojima Metal Gear lore person, but I like it enough that I liked seeing young Revolver Ocelot I thought was just such an awesome creation. That’s my ideal fan service, I think this is before the series goes off the deep end with that kind of lore. It’s just the right balance of it. Yeah, just an incredibly stylish, idea-packed game. It’s mechanically between… Five I think is the better game mechanically, but it’s between five and three for my favourite Metal Gear, so come on, it’s not a bad pick. No, not at all. I mean, this is a game where we touched upon this in the episode that’s coming out next week as well, but where its reputation really grew over time, I feel like. I think that it arrived without the hype that MGS2 did, and yeah, it was a far superior game to MGS2. Really kind of benefits from the fact that it’s uncoupled from the law of the main series in a lot of ways. It does have some ties back to the Patriots and stuff, and Metal Gear Solid 4 will bring quite a lot of the themes in this back and some characters and stuff, but generally speaking it’s very standalone. They’re making a Metal Gear Solid movie, in some ways I think this will be the best one to pick because it’s got a great character arc for its main character but also its main antagonist, your mentor, the boss, in the game, but at the same time it’s not weighed down with lots and lots of explanation and boring cutscenes and stuff, so there’s not as much baggage with it. It’s just that it’s, along with the first Metal Gear Solid, it’s the Metal Gear Solid you can just pick up and play and enjoy by itself without having to worry about continuity and stuff. So I really adore this game and I think you made a great pick. Obviously this was going to be my second pick if you for some reason didn’t pick it, but I thought you would, so a good choice Matthew. I’m sure we will talk about Metal Gear Solid 3 in a future episode again, because maybe when we have Rich Stanton on, but yes. So, my second pick then Matthew. This is tough, but I think I’m going to go with open world game. No I’m not, I’m going to pick something else. I’m going to pick sports or racing and I’m going to pick Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. Yep, so this is a tough category. There’s like a lot of stuff you could pick. I thought about Pro Evolution Soccer, I thought about Burnout, but I think that this is like a quintessential PS2 classic and if I’m going to pick something that represents sports or racing on the console, I feel pretty good about this one. Obviously it’s when Tony Hawk was getting bigger, but not so big that it became kind of incoherent and messy, which it would do in the waning days of the PS2, but it’s still considered the best in the series. Obviously there’s like a remake of 1 and 2 and such, but I feel like to a lot of people just playing this over and over again, this is a sort of like a massive early PS2 game. It’s the highest rated PS2 game on Metacritic as well, which is interesting. Yeah, yeah. This was, you know, this was enormous. It was just, yeah, just massive. So yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, people know what Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is. It’s like, it’s a series of sort of like score attack, pulling off skateboarding tricks and completing sort of secondary objectives to try and unlock new levels. And the levels in this were, were vast and quite exciting. And so, yeah, I feel, I feel good about this. It’s not like a sort of mega heart pick, but I feel like to a lot of people, this was just a PS2 game that they just played for like years and years afterwards. So yeah, I bet you probably thought I’d pick another category, didn’t you, Matthew? I thought you might. I’m kind of glad. I’m glad you didn’t. I think like, yeah, there’s like, there’s one category I’m kind of fine to lose. And I think that’s the one you think I was going to pick. So it’s mind games, this whole thing, you know. Yeah, it’s tricky. So, yeah, this is a multi format game, Matthew, but this is one I actually care about. So yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right. Like I played, I actually played Pro Skater 4. I didn’t play three at the time. Four was the first Tony Hawk I really got into. I always think you kind of, you have particular affection for like the one where you like learn the game with. I did play it on GameCube, but this is a, this is a PlayStation series, definitely, I feel. I think it’s kind of mad that this was as big as it was and as popular as it was as like a big score attack game, where that style of game is so not out of favour, but out of vogue, I guess. It just doesn’t, you know, people don’t make deep skill, kind of narrow focus games like this anymore. Or when people have tried to do it, you know, there was a few attempts in the generation after this with like, I guess things like the club and things like that. You know, the idea of like the three minute game that you played a million times. Yeah. Or like Trials HD is kind of a successor to this. Yeah, I guess there’s yeah, I guess there’s a bit of it there. Yeah. But it’s just, yeah, I always thought that this was mainstream. And then that idea kind of sort of vanished. And it was quite heartening to see one and two, the HD versions recently so well received. And you think, well, maybe there is an appetite for this. I’d love it if they did three and four, you know, I’d love to replay four for sure. I think that’s a really good pit. It’s a great game. Yeah. And good luck getting the music licensing all these years on. Well, I’ll let my lawyers worry about that. But yeah, I agree with you. Like, I really loved the HD remakes they did of the first two games. They were terrific. Like, what? That’s exactly I think that Crash Bandicoot collection they did sort of like alerted them to the idea that you can’t just throw these out and hope they’ll do well because they already did that with Tony Hawk HD in like 2011 or 2012 or something. And it was just such a cheap feeling package that you’ve got to give it some real love. So yeah. What’s your next pick, Matthew? So my next pick, again, I’m just going to go for a big crowd pleaser for open world game. I’m going to do Grand Theft Auto Vice City. That was the one I thought about picking. Yeah, I’ve got some thoughts on this category, but I think you’ve probably won this one. Like it’s probably that’s quite a very good pick. It’s a good like affectionate pick, but there are good alternatives to this one as well. Yeah, there definitely are. And I think there’s some I think there are some other in like maybe like more interesting open world games. Like I will say San Andreas was never in contention for me. If anything, I think the bloat somewhat of San Andreas focused my mind on how good and tight Vice City is in terms of like what it’s aiming to do and how well it delivers it. I thought I thought as a step up from GTA 3, you know, it’s it felt like the biggest step the series has probably made in a single game. Maybe? Is that dumb? I think I think that holds up. Like 3 had a lot of the magic of, you know, what Grand Theft Auto was going to be about and like the core experience of like, yes, it’s a whole city and it’s 3D and isn’t that amazing? But I think the like comedic tone, the bigger focus on story, like, you know, actually having characters, I can remember, as far as I’m concerned, 3 doesn’t have a story. I go, like, you could put a gun to my head and I couldn’t tell you anything that actually happens in that game. But this one, I think, the modern rockstar formula is kind of basically created in an instant. They have so much fun in that time period, particularly with the music, I mean, like, regardless of whether you like the game, this is just a great, I love the 80s soundtrack. You could just treat this entry as a music player rather than anything else and still have a pretty good time with it. It’s the game that let you hit people with hammers and golf clubs. That stuff seemed absolutely incredible when I was, whatever, 15, 16, like, wow, you can go to a hardware store and buy a hammer and hit someone with it. That seemed like next level to me back then and there’s still a dumb part of my brain which reacts well to that. So yeah, again, it’s totally mainstream but rock solid. I mean, maybe it does raise the question of, should these minis, do they have a duty to introduce you to more interesting things, potentially, or, you know. Well, you might argue that some of the other categories are there for that, right? Yeah. But there is something a little bit like, when you look at the SNES mini, it’s almost too conservative. You know, you look at it and go, yeah, of course, all of this, sure, you know, link to the past, sure, okay, it’s amazing, we all know it. But hopefully, I’ll create a wider mix around my two very mainstream picks so far. Yeah, I mean, you know, that’s open world game, I think has to be here because this is a genre that emerges on PS2. It’s a very, you know, it’s PS2 was the home of it for a long time. I mean, Xbox managed to get the three GTA games onto their hardware eventually, but always at least a year after Sony had it on theirs. So you know, GTA was the big thing. If you wanted to be in on it, you had to have a PS2. It’s a massive part of why it had like a big lead this generation along with having a DVD player, of course. So yeah, yeah, a good pick, Matthew, a good pick. The reason I didn’t hit full steam ahead on that pick is I think I’ve got a good strategy for how I’m going to unmoor you on that one. So I can, I think I’m probably going to make that my last pick after this, but yeah. So it’s my number three, isn’t it? My third pick. Okay, I’m going to go with free pick literally any game, PS2 game, to represent the breadth of the library. I’m going to go with Shadow of the Colossus. Ah, Jesus, that’s literally what I wrote for mine. I thought about Ico, I thought about Akami, but Akami is not a game I love as we discussed. I just love the way it looks and I’m sure everyone does. But yes, Shadow of the Colossus, I think that this represents first of all what the hardware can actually do. I mean, it really pushed it to its limits in terms of this game where, you know, you play this mysterious young man who has taken this mysterious woman who is like in some kind of coma, probably, to this mysterious land, puts her down on this pedestal and invokes these old gods, basically, which say you have to go and kill all these nice monsters roaming this weird land in order to restore life to this mystery lady. And then you go out there and you do this and the combat encounters take place in the form of elaborate puzzles where you use the environment to figure out how you bring each of these monsters down. The spectacle is extraordinary, of course. The soundtrack is fantastic. It is one of the most ethereal and magical feeling games on the console. I think that no PS2 mini can be complete without it. Thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this game is just PS2 to its bones, you know, like, just you look at a screenshot of it and just where that machine was technically and the art style of it, everything about it just, I don’t know, just screams PS2 to me. It’s like probably like the definitive PS2 exclusive, which is why I wanted it. So that’s annoying. Yeah, that’s a tough break for Matt Castle. But yeah, lots of affection for this game. And obviously there were kind of remakes of it and stuff. But I think that you’ve got to have that as part of the sort of content mix on one of these things. So what’s your third pick, Matthew? Oh, God. This is kind of throwing me a bit because that was going to be my next thing. I think I’m also going to go free pick for just because I’ve already nuked the category elsewhere. Oh, God. This is super mainstream. I think I go free pick God of War 2. Oh, that’s a good choice. That’s a good choice. Yeah, I mean, for me, the kind of the God of War 1 versus God of War 2, you know, I think that the consensus is 2 is the bigger, better, shiny and more confident game. You know, I maybe have a bigger emotional connection such that it is to God of War 1 just because I think it arrived so fully formed and it just had such a kind of oomph to it. Like, I really remember that, you know, the opening on the ship with the kind of hydra-y thing and the sea serpent-y thing and just that huge, you know, quick time takedown button cue appearing for the first time and being like, wow, this game is, you know, this is like big and ballsy and it’s so obnoxious and confident. Like it’s a great first impression. Like that series is so born in its opening ten minutes and it’s basically those opening ten minutes writ large again and again and again. But I think 2’s probably got the more iconic moments with the Colossus of Rhodes and all that jazz. Grander scale to it. Yeah, I mean, like, I always feel a bit… I’m on slightly shakier grounds talking about God of War 2 as an actual, like, where it sits in the kind of hack and slash kind of character, you know, mascot action game kind of pantheon, you know, like, you know, it’s not as sophisticated as what, like, Platinum are doing. It’s not, like, got the kind of cameo, kind of tightness to it, but it’s pretty spectacular and fundamentally I can play it. Shit, I should have probably picked Devil May Cry 3. Oh well. Well, I’ll have to live with that. God of War 2, yeah. Let’s stick with that. Yeah, I think this is a great pick. I mean, God of War is a series that is utterly synonymous with PlayStation and these games have dated really well, I think, apart from the aforementioned sex minigames, which make it embarrassing and, like, the occasional just, like, you know, poorly rendered boob where you’ve got to be like, yeah, that’s, you know, it was the noughties. We didn’t know any better. The people who made this were in their thirties and forties, what were they to do? But, you know, the games themselves, like, in terms of the set piece design and, like, the sort of theatre of it and, like, Kratos is a great character out of nowhere and if you think about it, this generation, Sony does, Sony in, like, America, they have stuff that does quite well and reviews quite well, like Mark of Cree and such, and I think that was kind of a predecessor to this. But, you know, God of War just, yeah, it’s like a beefy, fun, exciting action game with puzzles, great bosses, good pick, Matthew. Second one probably is the best one of those three. Good for you. Yeah, I like that. I’m just, I think I’m just trying to make you feel better. I just, I just, it’s a little, don’t worry, I’ve got some, like, more, I’ve got some weirder stuff, I think. Currently, I’m just trying to, I’m just making sure that, like, I went too weird with the studio draft from the office. I need, like, a foundation of big hitters to build my weirder stuff on. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Okay, so, this is tough, there’s two categories I really want now. Okay, I think I’m gonna have to go, platformer, and pick Jack and Daxter the Precursor Legacy. So, this was Naughty Dog’s first game after they had to give up the rights to Crash Bandicoot, which I think was a condition of them being sold to Sony, I think the rights stayed with Universal who then sold it to Activision or some such, I don’t really remember how that panned out, but, you know, we’re not a Crash Bandicoot podcast here, so that doesn’t matter. Jack and Daxter is a far better game than Crash Bandicoot, if you ask me. It’s much more in the kind of Banjo-Kazooie Super Mario 64 mould, where you’re going around collecting basically its version of stars. It’s an open world game with no loading screens, which is very impressive for the time. They were just like, I think Andy Gavin at Naughty Dog was just kind of like a bit of a sort of genius when it came to hardware, so that was a big deal for them. Just have this big seamless world you can go explore. Yeah, I think it’s a game I’ve played like four or five times. There’s no other PS2 platformer I really like. I don’t like the sequels to this game. I think Jak 2, which introduces guns and open world play, you know, its ambition exceeds its grasp and the main character becomes moody and it’s just, it doesn’t work. This is just a really fun throwaway sort of like fun platformer with a quite a nice moveset. Very annoying characters. I don’t vouch for the script or anything like that at all, but I do think the world is very colorful and fun to explore and the sort of different objectives they give you in each area can be quite novel. It’s a good exploration game. So, yeah, I think as platformers go, this is the only one I could pick, which is why I picked this ahead of some of the other categories, Matthew. I know you have no affection for any platformers on PS2, so I’m curious to hear what you think. Some of it’s just playing out a bit. I did play Jak and Daxter. My brother had a PS2. I didn’t have a PS2 and he got this and I think we played it all the way through. It’s definitely the Sony platformer I’ve played the most of, I don’t know, the look of it isn’t quite for me. I don’t think I necessarily felt that at the time, but I was looking at some little clips of it for this and I was like, oh, I don’t really remember. The art style isn’t quite my cup of tea, but yeah, you’re right. As a big grand scale platformer, the jump isn’t horrible. I wasn’t wild about that little hover bike you had to bomb around on at times. Yeah, I’m actually amazed to hear you saying the jump isn’t horrible is as high praise as it gets for a platformer on PlayStation. I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t say it’s good, but it isn’t horrible. Crash Bandicoot is a game you actively have to fight the shit controls. This isn’t that, but neither is it like just I wouldn’t play it for the pleasure of playing it. Yeah, to each their own then, because I do find this very pleasurable in a replay. I’ve been playing it while I’ve been working out. I didn’t realize you were such a fan. Well, there’s a part of me that thinks, okay, what is a platformer that can represent the PS2 really well? And this does. This is like the first big platforming series. You’ve got Ratchet and Clank obviously as well, but I couldn’t… I don’t have as much a connection to them. There are loads of Ratchet and Clank games you can play on modern formats that I don’t necessarily think that… I didn’t feel as invested in picking one of those, so yeah, I feel like for a PS2 mini, the original Jak and Dax is a good show. Okay. I think I know what you’re going to pick next and it’s going to kill me inside, we’ll see. Well, so I’m looking at RPG and I feel like there’s a game that I know you really like, but I don’t actually know if it is the best RPG that I would naturally pick, but I wonder if I should go for something more interesting than it, in which case it’s not as important but to get it out there. Oh, this is very difficult. This is the fun of the draft, though, isn’t it, this kind of strategy, isn’t it? I actually think I’m going to leave RPG for now because I think I’m safe for the time being. I’m actually going to go License Game. I’m going to go The Warriors. Oh, that was actually my pick as well. Ah! Yeah, good pick, very good pick. Yeah, like, it is multi-former, right? It is, yeah, but you know, it’s only Sony and Xbox. I just think Rockstar back then, like, in my head there, this is still like Rockstar is a PlayStation company in my mind, so I think it’s fair, I mean, like, if anything, this is a version of Rockstar I really miss, where I just feel like they were not just, like, a one-game company and channeling thousands of people into making extraordinary open-world games, although they were sort of doing that as well, but, yeah, this is the movie tie-in for the 70s film The Warriors, 70s? 80s? I think, I mean, surely it’s 70s, they’ve all got fucking Mark Hamill haircuts, haven’t they? Yeah, like, on paper, kind of, maybe hard to see what the fuss is about, you know, it’s a 3D beat-em-up based on this film, but I think it’s like a real love letter to the film, I think it’s a great advert for I’m excited for how to do an interesting movie tie-in, which is it basically sort of extends the story. The first chunk, at least in my head, maybe the first half, first two thirds or something, is almost like a kind of prequel to the film. It’s kind of like about how the warriors came to be. And it just feels completely true and consistent and coherent with what follows. It really does feel like an extended universe of the warriors, which, you know, okay, maybe you’re not excited about that. But as an exercise, I think that’s super interesting. Like combat-wise, it’s almost a little bit like Yakuza-y, in that it’s very like environmental, picking up weapons, beating people down. It’s big, broad, kind of thumpy brawling, which I really like. You’ve got like AI, other members of your gang, so there’s like a real scale to it. It’s very, very satisfying to watch. I had lots of weird minigames where you go around like graffitiing walls and stealing car radios and stuff. Actually looking into it again, I’d never really made the connection with like all the little weird minigames in GTA Chinatown Wars. They’re actually quite similar to what they were doing in The Warriors, which is kind of interesting. There’s a little bit of stealth, which kind of reminds you a bit of like what they were doing with like Man Hunt. There was another Rockstar game, which was like a big brawler game. Was there? Yeah. I want to say it was called like, was it like State of Emergency or something? I don’t think Rockstar actually made that. I think that maybe their name was slapped on it. Well, we can ignore that connection. Anyway, it’s like on paper shouldn’t really work, ends up being like this really complete Warriors experience, which in itself is just such a sort of mad thing to try and do. But to do it well and this well I think is very admirable. It’s a good sort of high standard for movie tie-ins. I actually think there are other good contenders for this one though. So, I’m curious to see what else you pick. Yeah. I really love the Warriors as well. And I think I agree with you, it’s not quite open world. It’s like the levels are sort of hubs and then you go to different places, complete objectives and leave. They’re like big levels basically. And I think that it’s kind of weird, like Walter Hill, alternate universe, New York feeling vibes are captured very well here. Like in the sound, the music is really well selected. I think I really like the fact that it’s a prequel in the large part. I think about 70% of the game is a prequel. Then the other 30% is just the assassination and the run across New York, which is the premise of the film. So one of the main characters in the game is a cat who gets killed, like very quickly in the film, that Kleon guy, he’s their leader. And in this game, you kind of get kind of like inducted as a kind of rookie into this gang. And it’s like, hey, I’ll just show you around and we’ll do all this. And they got a lot of the original actors back for it as well, which is cool. Yeah, a really unusual game to make. It’s a kind of like, it feels like a real one for us kind of game. Whereas, you know, yeah, definitely. Definitely. This was a more interesting era of Rockstar, wasn’t it? Compared to now. Yeah, I mean, I do like what they’re doing now, but they, I don’t know, they were doing so much more. And it was all pretty great, but they just get so hooked, I guess, on like, just the complete, like, photorealism of like their living, breathing worlds or whatever, that it just eats up every resource they have. And once you’ve gone down that path, what can you do? Yeah, it’s like an arms race of themselves. Yeah, but, you know, I’m sure there’s other films they love as much as The Warriors that they could do in an equally interesting sort of style. I mean, you could argue, like, LA. Noire is sort of like as close as you’re going to get to an LA confidential game. You know, they’ve done things which are sort of parallel, but never quite as, like, madly focused as this one. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, great pick, Matthew. So, we’re both five games… No, we’re not five games, we’re four games through, aren’t we? So, yeah, so this is my fifth pick. Okay, I’m going to pick shooter or fighting game, category one. I’m going with TimeSplitters 2. So, this is famously a game that Matt Castle does not like. I think it’s the only shooter worth having on PS2, personally. Yeah, that’s probably fair. You know, I’m not a Killzone guy, really, although I think the PS3 Killzones are pretty good. Imagine being a Killzone guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is an easy pick. I mean, if you get one of these minis, they always come with two controllers. You want something to play with other people. I think that, you know, if you want something, sort of a fun multiplayer game, this gives you that. You know, obviously you can switch on the bots as well if you want to play solo. Time-hopping FPS game where every game, every level is set in a different time period. I think some people prefer Future Perfect as a kind of like in this series, but I personally think that this is the most well-known and iconic of those games in terms of what people remember. I think the level design varies quite a lot, but I really enjoyed it as a shooter. I thought it was a really good twin-stick shooter alternative to… What I mean by that is like, you know, moving on one stick and aiming with the other was revolutionary for the time, you know, and Halo perfected it on Xbox, but I think TimeSplitters did a great job as well. And there’s a lot of affection for these games years later, and I was really fond of them, and I take Matthew’s criticism that guns feel a bit like firing nerf bullets, but no, I like a lot of how this feels, and I particularly adore the first level in this game, the one that’s the Golden Eye Rift set in the Siberia facility. Yeah. That’s a great, that’s a really like fun level, and like I say, it’s just a sort of hot sort of shot of like, yeah, Golden Eye nostalgia with like some added sort of zombies at the end, and yeah, I’m fond of it Matthew, but was this anywhere near your pick for this century? No, I just, I felt like having ranted about this before, it would be, it would just be horseshit for me to put this on my console. I mean, I just don’t like it. I just don’t like the feel of it. And unfortunately, all of the brilliance of this game, you know, of which there is, there is plenty, you know, structurally, it’s incredibly generous. I mean, it’s really of that era where I think games just went above and beyond to like, earn like every pound you gave them. You know, there was so much unlockable stuff and score attacks and weird hidden things you had to do. And the multiplayer suite is obviously huge. You know, all that stuff is great. But if fundamentally the act of squeezing the trigger doesn’t feel nice, it’s kind of all redundant. And for me, that’s that’s what this game is. I should put it on there. But this is like a stubborn one where I’m not going to do it. But I know loads of people love this game and that’s quite a key part of the PlayStation puzzle. Yeah, I think that you need something like this on the console. And this is broadly loved all these years later when it was revealed recently that there is some version of Time Splitters 2 that is set that is inside Homefront the Revolution, like a HD version. That was that got kind of like a lot of column inches, relatively speaking. So I think that, yeah, this is I’m betting on people really liking this game. And I really did love it at the time. So yeah, despite the Matt Castle cynicism, I’m not buying it. The other thing was that of the fighting games that you could also have picked for this category, none of them seem like a clear winner to me, which made it tricky. Like, you know, there are Tekken 5 is more acclaimed than Tekken 4. That was my alternative if you picked Time Splitters first. But I didn’t. My heart wasn’t really in that pick. I played a bit of Tekken 5, but not loads. Time Splitters 2 I played loads of. So yeah, I’m feeling good about this. What’s your number? Your fifth pick, Matthew? I still don’t really know what to do with RPG. So I’m actually going to go wild card. And I’m going to pick, which is something weird and culty from the PS2 back catalogue. I’m going to go Gregory Horror Show. Oh, yeah. Great pick. Which is a I actually didn’t realize this was based on something. I thought this was just a random thing Capcom had concocted. But yeah, I thought this was like peak PS2 Capcom weirdness, you know. Yeah. But this is based on a little anime series about a sort of hotel run by this sort of horrible looking sort of rat called Gregory. You turn up at this place. You are basically doomed to you can’t escape from this hotel. You’ll be sort of doomed unless you can kind of collect the souls of all the other guests. And it’s kind of like the hotels on this like time, not time, but it’s got this like fixed routine element to it. So, you know, a day plays out and everyone does their things. And you basically have to spy on the guests as they go about their daily routines to kind of pinpoint what their weaknesses are so you can steal their souls. So it’s a little bit sort of hitman-y in terms of like messing with people’s routines, but it has got this survival horror element in that as you steal people’s souls, they become hostile to you. So you’re trying to continue doing your sort of spying and whatnot, except now you’re also having to like run from the guests. There’s like a sort of health meter, which is like your sort of psychological state, which can be worn down by things attacking you or like having to go into like dark, spooky bits of the hotel. It’s got, you know, it’s a strange survival horror puzzle game with this kind of very blocky kind of like origami-ish art style. Super, super odd. I don’t think it was ever localised in the US, so hopefully any US listeners will see this My Pierce Mini as an opportunity to play this cult classic. Yeah, just very, very odd. Not necessarily like the most amazing game ever, but like a real novelty that you can just sort of, you know, I think it is a perfect kind of game to discover on a mini console. Yeah, I like that pick a lot. I’ve got to say, this is the category where I felt like there were the most kind of potential picks, just because. I mean, particularly for like this podcast, like I feel like this is the zone where we kind of live, which is like the weird sort of seven out of tens that you sort of adore. Yeah, so they were like, that didn’t even cross my mind because I didn’t actually play at the time. Like it’s quite rare, I believe, in Europe now as well, right? So yeah, this is definitely a cult game. So it’s released in Europe and Japan, but not America. Is that right? Yeah, that’s wild. How does that even happen? That makes no sense. But anyway, yeah, good pick. Good pick. So Matthew, since we’re halfway through, should we do like a little audit? I’ll read out mine and you read out yours, see where we’re at. Yeah, sure. Cool. OK, so I’ve got for survival horror Silent Hill 2, for sports of racing, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, for free pick, Shadow of the Colossus, for platformer, Jack and Dax of the Precursor Legacy, and for shooter or fighting game, Time Spitters 2. What have you got? And I’ve got action or stealth game, Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake Eater subsistence, for open world game, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, for licensed game, The Warriors, for wild card, Gregory Horror Show, and for free pick, God of War 2. Those are both good lists. Yeah, good lists. Yeah, that’s a tough call. This will be very close, I think. So, number six, it’s my sixth pick. I’m finally going to pick RPG, Matthew. I’m going to go with Final Fantasy X. So, thought about a few different options for this. Thought about Final Fantasy XII, which I think critically is considered the better game. I think, though, when you think PS2 RPG, this is the game that comes to mind. It’s tricky if you pick a Persona from this generation, because the more comprehensive versions of Persona are available on handhelds. Actually, the Persona 3 FES might be the same as it is on PS2. I thought about that one. But Persona 4 is obviously considered better on PS Vita, some more complete version. That’s the version you can play on PC. I thought about Dark Chronicle, the level five game. But I didn’t really love that, to be honest. So Final Fantasy X has the good mix of being an essential PS2 game, just to its core. It’s like a PS2 game to me. And I think to everyone at the time as well. It was the first big RPG on the system. And I obviously do personally love it as well. So it was obviously the first PS2 game of this generation, the first of each voice acting. The voice acting is terrible, famously. Something to do with how their voice acting was coded. Coded meant they had to fit all their lines into a certain amount of syllables. It was kind of some localization madness. Quite interesting stuff. But that aside, I think everything else about this game is fantastic. So it’s set in this very tropical infused world where there’s this big monster called Sin, like a giant sort of like mystical whale thing that basically goes around the world destroying different bits of it. Whenever a place gets too built up, there’s a bit too much going on in terms of culture or population or whatever, it turns up and destroys that place. It’s basically about keeping humanity oppressed. And then there is this religion in the game that preaches that in order to basically stave off Sin, we have to do things like not use machines and all this stuff, basically behaving to a certain code of conduct. And even if you defeat Sin, it comes back several years later, and it’s quite this whole cycle of death thing that’s quite bleak underpinning this game, but the world is beautiful. Like I say, it’s not like the opposite of Final Fantasy XII. It’s not built up or sci-fi at all. It is just like lots of gorgeous-looking Caribbean-like locations. It has a really good turn-based combat system with a few tweaks from the PS1 ones, a really good progression system called the Sphere Grid that basically turns progression to a big board game, really distinctive characters in terms of how they play, some of the best summons in the series. You can actually manually control the summons, I think, for the first time. Yeah, I think it’s just a really good all-rounder Final Fantasy game that holds up very well visually as well. So I feel good putting this on the PS2 Mini. I feel like anyone buying a PS2 Mini would expect to see this on there, more so than any other RPG on the system. So, thoughts, Matthew? Yeah, that’s… I mean, it’s difficult. Personally, I’m still umming and ahhing about a couple of other things on here. I knew this is, like, in my head, a bit of a definitive Samuel Roberts game. Yeah, like, I do have affection for it. I came to this massively after the fact, like, I played through this with Catherine, actually. We played through the HD version on PS4, because Catherine loves this game. She’s, like, super into it. And actually playing it with a superfan and sort of seeing what they react to and the stuff that kind of gets them pumped, you sort of realise how formative a thing this was for lots of people. Which is obviously something I can’t ever tap into, coming to it after the fact, you know. You sort of see it. If you play it years on, I think you see it in a slightly different light. I always thought it was mad that people got so upset about Final Fantasy XIII being a long corridor, because the world design of X is basically that too. Yeah, the only difference is that you can go back to bits of the corridor using the airship at the end of the game. That’s the main difference, really. And there are towns with people in them, which XIII didn’t have. Yeah, but it really did just feel like a very long winding path with awesome cutscenes on it. I don’t contest that, that’s fair enough. Yeah, we didn’t get into all the Blitzball stuff. Is Blitzball good? I really like Blitzball, but I’ve never really… I don’t think I’ve ever met another person, like in person, who has said it’s good. So can I truly say it’s good, Matthew? I’m not sure. Tough gig. But I think you’re right. This is like a sort of definitive… Definitely a definitive game. You know, PlayStation in my head is just defined by Final Fantasy. And I guess at the point this came out, you know, this is not… I wouldn’t say this is like the beginning for the end, but I think Final Fantasy gets a little weird after this in terms of dominance and where it lives and where it belongs. So maybe it’s like the last hurrah for like the very traditional Final Fantasy, PlayStation kind of relationship. I know XII is on PlayStation as well, but in my head, like, this is kind of… This feels closer to 7, 8, 9 maybe than what follows. Does that make sense? I think so. I think 7, 8 and 10 are kind of of a piece a little bit. 9 is kind of its own thing that’s sort of got some connections back to the older ones. And then I think she’s a 6, 7, 8 and 10 are kind of connected, I think, a little bit. Yeah, then you’ve obviously got 10, 2 as well on PS2, which I’m not as big on. I know that was quite a formative game for a lot of people, particularly young women, at least anecdotally. That’s when I’ve heard people talking about it critically. That tends to be the audience for it. So yeah, and I completely respect that. But yeah, so yeah, Final Fantasy X, Matthew. I don’t think that’s a category you can out and out lose, though. So I’m really excited to hear your pick for this one, whenever it comes up. Yeah, I mean, I think now all the categories, we’ve each picked at least one. So like the pressure’s off a little bit. We’ve got a little bit of like elbow room now to just kind of pick over the remains. Yeah, I feel like I’ve calmed down now and could just talk about the games a bit more. And I’m just like a bit less. Yeah, it was like when I picked Silent Hill 2, a pressure valve just released. And I was like, oh, fuck, Jesus Christ. So yeah, what’s your sixth pick, Matthew? I’m going to go sports or racing. I’m going to pick Burnout 3 Takedown. A series I like rather than love, but definitely like appreciate it. I mean, I just remember this like emerging in real time and it being super exciting. Like particularly, you know, Burnout 1, this idea of like, oh, you got to drive like dangerously and drive into traffic to go faster. And you’re like, oh, that’s really cool. And then I just felt with each game, they made such amazing leaps. And after this, there’s not one which like it’s revenge is for, isn’t it? Um, yes, that’s right. Or is that? It maybe becomes a little bit diminishing returns after that point. I know Burnout Paradise, but that almost feels like so different that it’s kind of you have to kind of put it in a different category. Yeah, this just how like big and exciting and obnoxious it is, you know, a game that really captures like the thrill of speed and the kind of just the carnage of the takedowns, the kind of the camera that follows the cars as you flip them by just a really, like really exciting game, like a game that just gets going like instantly and doesn’t take time to win you over. It serves up all its best stuff like instantly and just says like, here you go, enjoy this. A big generous game in terms of like the different modes, you know, the different kind of race types. The crash mode obviously is like one of the best mini games of all times. A series of very busy road junctions which you drive into aiming to create as much chaos as possible. It was in Burnout 2, this added, I think, I want to say this added things like the aftertouch where you could like jump around a bit as the car and just like really came alive. A great multiplayer game as well. Yeah, I just, you know, I think the Burnout series is something I really associate with the PS2 era. They were multi-format, but they feel like, well, some of them were, this one wasn’t. On Gamecube, just one and two, but yeah, just really of that time, everything, you know, of a piece with Tony Hawk, in a way, you know, it’s values feel very similar to me. Very shiny. Very fun. Yeah. Why not? Yeah, I think that this is a good pick. So I agree that this is kind of a sweet spot between Burnout being quite a sort of straight faced racing game, which I think the first one was straight, you know, straight face street racing, street racing game, like it wasn’t as big on it was quite conservative with how much you just use the actual, you know, burnout mechanic to hit the kind of nitrous button. It’s almost like it didn’t know what it had. Yeah. Then the second one, like really identifies what it has and dials in on it. And then the third one, like you say, just kind of like takes it to that next level of sort of chaos and silliness. My memory of Revenge is that it’s a bit too much. It’s a bit too chaotic. We did a big interview with Alex Ward from Criterion in Official Xbox Magazine. Alex Dale on the mag did the interview. A really great interview because they’ve obviously set up their, they’ve got their sort of, they all left, the kind of creative heads sort of left Criterion, set up a studio called Three Fields Entertainment who kind of make games sort of based on burnout now. You know, they’re kind of, you know, on a smaller budget, much smaller team, but kind of spiritual successors and so we did a big interview about that and I actually just, I had a little quote from it where he was talking about making Burnout 3, which he says like this is the best one we ever made, you know, in my opinion. Yeah, this little quote from the interview said, that was a time period where we were really influenced by SSX. In that series, you can kind of power the character up and then when you go back to the start, the character fully charged, you know, it’s a completely different game. That was mind blowing. SSX was a bold and vibrant game made by a brilliant creative director called Steven Rex Schnaffer, who was a Burnout 2 fan. He came to visit us and gave us the wonderful advice that using the boost in Burnout 3 should be like snorting a huge bowl of cocaine. SSX was big and brash and when you got into the zone with run DMC thumping, it was very clear. And I just like this idea of like this was like EA’s sporting identity. Like these big brash like they really sold you on like the fantasy of like you’re going fast you’re doing amazing stuff. I almost picked one of the SSX games for this but I don’t have the same emotional attachment to them so I thought it would be a bit a bit false. Hmm yeah same. Yeah I think that this I think this is a really good pick I will say I think that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is a little bit more PS2-y in my head than this is yeah I mean but then that’s a really arbitrary like criteria so I think that I think that is that is fair. It’s more like the attitude of like big dumb noisy sports games feels PS2 so I felt like I wanted to pick something from that genre. It’s interesting that neither of us has picked old PlayStation’s incredibly boring car game. Yeah that was why I didn’t pick it I mean I just I know that like I knew loads of kids who fucking love Gran Turismo 3. How can you love that game? It’s the most beautiful but like cold thing. I do not understand that series at all. It’s like deadening. Yeah I think that I think it’s just like a car enthusiast thing I mean it’s like you know I know some people prefer like mainline Forza to Forza Horizon I’m like kind of like I’m only really wired to enjoy racing games like Forza Horizon you know so yeah I think that I think that it’s a real shame that you can’t get burnout the older burnout games on EA’s game pass thingy because that would actually be spot on with the Xbox’s backwards compatibility that like you can play like black on their ancient Xbox shooter black and I thought well you know surely the older burnout games would be a really good addition to that but I suppose like it’s probably no one’s job to think about putting that stuff on there so you know yeah good pick Matthew good pick but yeah Gran Turismo I mean hey it got an entire generation of young men into feeder you know the sort of light indie rock band so you know okay cool so we’re on my seventh pick I believe oh what should I pick at this point so at this point yeah like you say the competition sort of the competitive element is lessened a little bit because now it’s just about picking some cool stuff like There’s no race to grab a thing. So, let’s go with my shittiest pick then, which is for open world game. You pick Grand Theft Auto Vice City, I’m picking San Andreas. So, I think that the residual affection for the 80s makes Vice City probably the right pick if you’re going first. But this is the best-selling game on the console, San Andreas. I think that, on that basis, I feel like it has a place. It showed what the PS2 could do at its peak. You always see a modder has hacked CJ into Breath of the Wild or whatever, and you’re like, okay, I guess there’s just a lot of, he was just such a pervasive pop culture figure that people are big into him. I’d really, really love to read some cultural analysis on San Andreas by some people who are better equipped for that sort of thing than me, because there’s not a lot of that on the Internet actually, and I would love to know what people think of it. It’s kind of used as boys in the hood as a starting point for this South Central LA type narrative, and then it turns into this mad odyssey across California, just increasingly bizarre. You go to a version of San Francisco and a version of Vegas, just an absolutely enormous game packed with secrets as well. Obviously, it has a jetpack. There’s a mission that takes you to Liberty City from GTA 3. There is an Area 51 version, I think it’s called Area 69, of course, because it’s Rockstar Games. It obviously has these RPG elements, which I’m not convinced added loads to it, to be honest. The ability to get fans to work out. Rockstar have never really got that weird RPG thing down. No, no. But I must admit, I think Vice City is a good pick, because all of the versions of Vice City that Rockstar has done on newer consoles has changed the color palette of the original version on PS2. The skies never look as blue or pink. And I don’t know why that is, but people have modded it on PC to try and restore the original look. But the same also applies to San Andreas, where the orange sky that’s over Grove Street, which is an iconic bit of imagery in that game, is not as orange. It doesn’t look the same. And I’m quite obsessed with the minutia of this stuff, because I think in this early part of the open world genre’s lifespan, all these details fed into making these worlds feel very real and very vibrant. So yeah, like just like the resolution or the kind of softness of CRT is like, it’s almost part of the heat shimmer of the game. Yes. Yeah, the look and feel of it. Yeah, I mean, it’s like that thing with the Silent Hill 2. It’s texture of these games is so kind of vital. Yeah, it really is. And like here, obviously, you just have that married to the ambition of, you know, this vast world with like a countryside in between all of these different radio stations. I think that to a lot of people, the radio stations here are probably as or comparably at least like important to how Vice City did it. I mean, I think Vice City’s music is such a key part of why that game works so well. But, you know, the music is fantastic in this game as well. The 90s setting is very kind of like real feeling. It’s a bit shitty to pick another GTA, but I think they’re kind of two sides of the same coin. Yeah, I don’t think it’s shitty at all. It’s perfectly valid. Yeah, I just never clicked as much with San Andreas. I had such a bumpy ride with it along the way because it has a few of sticking points, which just made me so cross that it kind of like tainted it for me. That fucking flying a little helicopter around that building site or whatever it was. Yeah, that is a bullshit mission. All the missions you do for the David Cross character in this game, zero, are absolute shit. They are optional, but yeah. Vice City has them too. Like the one we have to go and save water’s chops from the junkyard. Quite early on, yeah. I feel like it’s early on. Isn’t it early on that you’re controlling a small helicopter or something like that? Oh, sorry. Oh, in San Andreas. Yeah, sorry. No, I was going to a junkyard in Vice City where your mate gets taken hostage. It’s like two thirds into it. Absolute pig. Absolute pig of a game. And this was… They were both before proper checkpointing or anything as well. You just had to do all the driving across the city to fail again and again and again. Oh, man. Yeah. Stressful. We put up with a lot of bullshit for such critically acclaimed games. These games have got a lot of bullshit in them. Yeah, these games are like, yeah. I mean, the shooting with both of them is rough, of course, as well. Oh, terrible. I really love the mix of characters in San Andreas. There’s no reason why this guy would leave this city and go on this grand journey and stuff. But it is almost like an RPG-like structure in terms of the journey of it, and then you come back at the end and track down the friends of Atreides. The buzz and the excitement around this, I can remember this was probably around the time where… I think I was at university and had better internet access, so I could watch very slow-loading videos on IGN or whatever of this and be like, wow, it’s got the whole world between the cities. There’s countryside and woods and all that. The scale of it was mind-blowing at the time. Obviously now we can’t take that stuff for granted, but the size of it was just sort of obscene back then. Yeah, for sure. So the other really obvious one I could have picked here was Bully. Yeah, I had that as my backup. Yeah, I considered that, but I thought that for a PS2 Mini, I mean, Bully you can play on Backwards Kebab on Xbox formats and stuff. I’ve not let that influence my choices really, but I think that San Andreas maybe feels a little bit further away, the original version of it, even though you actually can play that on PS4. That’s a bullshit criteria. I just think that you need San Andreas on a PS2 Mini, Matthew. That’s why I picked it. Did you, unless this is picked elsewhere, I’d be surprised if it was. Did you play and have any thoughts on Mercenaries? Oh, I did play it. I wasn’t a huge fan of it though, to be honest. But Pandemic were like a proper sort of, we will just make quite fun 7 out of 10 developer, and then it just sort of went away the next generation. But no, were you a big Mercenaries fan? No, not really. But I had that as a potential, it feels very PS2 era open world in terms of like, well we’ve kind of built the space, and then it’s got a slightly sort of middling action game in it, which kind of is the character of a lot of early open world games. Yeah, the other one I thought about was Spider-Man 2. But there’s no way that, I mean, that’s obviously not comparable to San Andreas. There is a better version of that experience that exists anyway, Spider-Man 2. Yeah, it didn’t feel as compelling a pick, plus it was 7 out of 10 at the time, and probably be quite rough by today’s standards. So, what’s your seventh pick, Matthew? I’m kind of left with things I’m less interested in. I’m going to bite the bullet. On survival horror, I’m going to pick Forbidden Siren. Wow, I would have thought you’d pick Fatal Frame 2. That was my backup. Well, yeah, I guess it comes from a similar place in terms of the dominance of Japanese survival horror and J-horror tropes, which I guess they both tap into. Yeah, this feels more intrinsically PlayStation to me. I guess because I came to Fatal Frame on Wii first, like in my head, it doesn’t feel as PlayStation-y, even though it is. Yeah, Forbidden Siren is the quite strange survival horror where your main power is the ability to sort of sight-jack the enemies, look through their eyes and use that knowledge to try and get around them. So you basically use what the enemies can see to then work out their routines or whether there’s an enemy with a gun so you need to avoid them because they’re more dangerous. The information you get about the game is through the eyes from the other characters’ perspectives, which is kind of interesting. Again, this is one I’m not entirely sure I love it. I certainly didn’t finish this game. I’ve only played a bit of it, also because I found it super scary and stressful, which I guess isn’t a great sales pitch, so ignore that. I’m pretty sure this was a series made by the original creator of Silent Hill. I feel like it has a similar kind of cursed vibe. It’s got these really distinctive character models, which are quite simple, but they’ve almost got photorealistic faces, almost projected on them. It’s a really unnerving effect, and it kind of, again, it keeps saying texture, it kind of looks definitively PS2 to me. I don’t really know how this game is sort of held in critical consensus. I mean, I feel like they kept doing these on subsequent platforms, and they had a very kind of cult, small base. Whether it’s like a weird little vanity project for Sony or what, I don’t know. But, you know, the very traditional Japanese setting, that weird sidejack mechanic, I think this is certainly an interesting pick. I think it’s scary, scary stuff, very, very unnerving, so it would sort of satisfy, you know, on that level. Maybe it’s a good game to discover on a PS2 Mini, but, yeah, that’s Forbidden Siren. I think that’s a good pick. I think that it’s a tough category after Silent Hill 2. It just is. But there is about five or six, eight out of ten games that are sort of like, you know, perfectly good survival horror games. If they were released now, would be acclaimed, you know, because they’re actually scary. Well, that’s it. It’s, yeah. It’s before everyone got embarrassed about, you know, things being scary, which I don’t understand because films are still scary. But horror films are absolutely slaying it at the moment. It’s just games. Just don’t seem to get it. Yeah. Weird. Yeah, it is weird, yeah. Hopefully someone will break that out at some point. Maybe we just need more Japanese game developers to make some horror games. Maybe it’s just something about that specific mix of influences. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. So my eighth pick then. Time for my wild card. So I’m going to pick, from Koei and Inis, I-N-I-S, I think that’s how you say it, Rhythm Action Specialists, I’m picking Gitaroo Man, obviously. So this, I feel like there’s loads of games I considered for this category. I thought about Katamari, Damacy. I don’t have that much of a personal relationship with it. And I think that, you know, I think there is a point you make about discoverability on this, Matthew, that I think is a good one. And that’s why I think I needed to pick something that just isn’t really around at the moment. And so this was ported to PSP. So it was like a rhythm action game where you basically play a guitar-wielding superhero. His little dog also becomes a little superhero. And you control the sticks to basically pull off sort of guitar moves. And a lot of the levels are in the form of duels, basically. Kind of set pieces playing out in the background, quite visually. A sort of very stylish game, I would say. It has a great art direction. But there’s one pretty famous level where you’re playing guitar to your sort of girlfriend that’s really nice. Generally speaking, I think this sums up what was actually quite an important genre on PS2. So you’ve got stuff like amplitude and frequency, which are the predecessors to Guitar Hero. You’ve obviously got… There’s a Parappa the Rapper 2 on this, on PS2 as well. So it’s kind of continuing a bit of that heritage from PS1. And yeah, this is just a favourite of mine. Obviously Guitar Hero becomes a thing on PS2 before the end of the generation as well. So this, I guess, sums that up. And I think is a good, like, weird pick for people who… I think this is a game people would have heard of, but probably not played. Would you say that’s accurate? Yeah, I actually haven’t played this. So, yeah, that’s like… That’s the kind of thing which if I saw it on the list, I’d be like, oh, I’ll get one of those to play that. Yeah, like people who, I guess, got the SNES Mini to play Star Fox 2. Right, exactly. It’s something… Yeah, of that ill. Yeah, I don’t know why I haven’t played this. Probably because it’s not readily available. Yeah, it’s not very long. I think the PSP version is, like, fine. But, yeah, I just… I think PS2 is where it should be. But isn’t Inus, the developer that would make Elite Beat Agents and the Wendan? Is that them? Yeah, so, you know, this is… Yeah, I think a great pick for this category, which I also consider God Hand for this category. But it’s a bit too obvious to Samuel Roberts’ choice. I was still expecting to see that in this list, so it’s interesting. I just thought I would go against type a little bit just for a variety sake. So, yeah, it’s not just all about me, Matthew. But what’s your eighth pick? My eighth pick… Oh, God. I’m really into the stuff which I… Well, actually, no, I guess… RPG, though I feel like you’ve sort of nuked a couple of my options by quite elegantly explaining why you didn’t pick them. And now I’ve got to pick one of them. It’s not what you want. No, I… See, I was going to say Persona 4. But I think you’re right. There is a better version and the pitch of that, like, hey, do you want to play the lesser version? Even though it’s still amazing in itself. So I think I’m just going to have to… I think I’m going to go Final Fantasy XII. Good pick. Yeah, a really great, classy Final Fantasy. Very grown-up feeling. I always feel like it’s a bit more of a acquired taste. There’s something slightly muted about it. A lot of the characters are a bit more subtle than you might expect from a Final Fantasy. They’re a bit more adult feeling to me. I’m not a huge, huge, huge Final Fantasy guy. So maybe there are better examples than this. But in my mind, you know, okay, you are the younger link in the group. But it’s hanging out with a lot of quite strange, elegant-seeming characters in this world, which is… I’m trying to explain this without making it sound shit. We need to keep this in now. That’s good. I guess if you compare it to Final Fantasy X, which is, you know, a wild, tropical paradise, it’s a really exciting holiday. This is like… I was going to say, it’s like going to a fucking museum on holiday or something. Great. Just what I want. It is a more, like you say, adult, it’s more stimulating in terms of being an RPG as well. Like your Gambit system programming. Yeah, I mean, definitely, like, mechanically, like, there’s so much going on. Like, the Gambit system, where you basically, like, program the AI behavior of your party members, sort of as little or as much as you want, is just, like, one of the most sort of absurdly detailed RPG systems and, like, the magic that’s in it. It’s absolutely incredible. It’s so thoughtful. And this is that kind of thoughtful game. Like, it doesn’t sort of… I must admit, I don’t really know the story to Final Fantasy… the development story to Final Fantasy XII in terms of, like, how hectic it was. I know it kind of changed directions and didn’t change directors. I think that, yeah, the director… the original director stepped down, I believe, yeah, for health reasons. Yeah, it just… I don’t know, it just feels like it goes in a very different direction to the other games. It feels self-contained in a way. Even though they are all self-contained, its combat system is so distinctive and its world vision and its art design is so distinctive that it kind of lives alone a bit more. This is definitely the one where, like, I feel I see the least sort of effusive love for it. I think it’s kind of respected rather than loved. I would agree with that, for sure. So I echo what you say about how intricate it is. I mean, this is a game that is running on a console with no hard drive. It’s like you’ve got an 8 megabyte memory card, and it stores, like, you know, hundreds of, like, different variables of how your characters behave. That’s one reason this game is really impressive and how intricate it is. But also just the… Even though the resolution, I think, is lower than Final Fantasy X, it is so, so visually spectacular for a PS2 game. It just looks amazing. So much so that when they release the HD version, it does look fucking amazing still by today’s standards. That’s the thing. I struggle to kind of pin down its style, because it goes to quite a lot of different locations with different energies and stuff to it. But I’d say everything in it is really ornate. It’s just… It’s very fine game making. It is, yeah. I think in a lot of ways, it’s antithetical to what people like about Final Fantasy and their tone level, which is that very colourful, quite operatic storytelling. And just, I think it’s a bit more, like you say, adult, there’s not that much melodrama in it, really. It’s like Denis Villeneuve’s Final Fantasy. Yeah, I like that as a comparison. That’s good. You know, it’s like he’s the guy who comes in and he takes Blade Runner. And I’m not saying the original Blade Runner is like crass or dumb or it needs to be like classed up a bit. But it is kind of that for Final Fantasy. Yeah, I think as well this game makes brown look beautiful. Right. Whereas a lot of games at the time that were brown in the wake of Gears of War look fucking ugly by today’s standards, including Metal Gear Solid 4 in places. And this game is set in primarily brown, desolate environments, though not entirely. And yeah, but still manages to look amazing and vibrant. Kind of like, also like, Borrow’s Bits of Star Wars as well, this game. Very much so in Bolthea, the secret protagonist of the story. And yeah, I think this is a good pick. I think that X is much more of a heart pick. X I think of much more as like the PS2 RPG. This comes out so late in the life cycle. But I think it’s a good selection nonetheless. I think this is like you picking Vice City and me picking San Andreas, but for this category, where it’s like… Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I was thinking Persona 4. I did think about Dragon Quest VIII. Yeah, yeah, it would have been quite good. Which feels like a big story in that it feels like that’s… I don’t know. I know there had been other Dragon Quests before, but it felt like a big kind of push into the West. And like that’s when Dragon Quest becomes like… It’s definitely where it ends up on my radar more. But I just don’t have a huge personal connection to that particular one. Yeah, I think there are probably later ones that would fit the bill better, but that was a very well localized Dragon Quest game as well. And a good introduction. It looked amazing for the time as well, the cell shaded graphics. So yeah, I think that’s still very good though, Matthew. Yasumi Matsuno was the director who dropped out of this game. I want to just double check his name before we moved on. So we’re on to my ninth pick, penultimate pick, Matthew. I’m going to pick License Game. I’m going with Kingdom Hearts. Oh, okay, interesting. Yeah, I think this is thinking laterally about the category a little bit. I think it counts though, right? It definitely counts, yeah. So I think this again, this is like a PlayStation exclusive series right up until you get to, well, unless you count the handheld ones, Kingdom Hearts III. So I have a lot of affection for the first Kingdom Hearts. It was obviously a kind of mix of Final Fantasy type JRPG tropes and other stuff. Some of the characters appear and obviously Disney worlds and Disney characters. It seems like quite a bizarre mix, but a very winning one. This is one of the best looking games on PS2, like absolutely. They came up with a really good art style that managed to accommodate the Final Fantasy and the Disney characters very well. I think that I wouldn’t consider this like a kind of all time action game or a platformer. I think it really is about you have to kind of get into the choice to kind of like merge these Disney worlds with this other stuff and kind of go with it. The reason the first Kingdom Hearts is my favorite is because the story doesn’t have a lot of the bad Namura lore stuff that creeps in later on. It’s very straightforward, like your friends are sort of scattered to the wind. You’re on this island dreaming of like, you know, going away and building a raft and escaping this slightly boring life on an admittedly very gorgeous island. Those kids didn’t know how good they had it. It’s quite small though. Yeah, I think there’s like another island where they live though. Like I don’t think it’s just those kids like Lord of the Flies or something. I think, okay, because you see a bit in early in the game where Sora’s mum goes into his bedroom and says, Sora, where are you? And so I assume that that little island is like near another island. They never really explain that very well. And then you just go to these different, tour these different Disney worlds. You sort of like just sort of appear within the story. And the stories largely play out as they do in the films, to varying degrees of like authenticity in terms of how those stories play out in the films. The Alice in Wonderland story is very pared down compared to how fucked up and weird that film is. What a great film. But yeah, I think some of the other ones, like Aladdin, is particularly well done, I think, in this game. And yeah, I think that to a lot of people, Kingdom Hearts, PS2, they’re synonymous. Yeah, I suppose between this and Final Fantasy X, I feel like I’ve got the Squaresoft era stuff wrapped up quite nicely. So there are other licensed games I pondered. I mentioned Spider-Man 2. I thought about Star Wars Battlefront 2. I don’t think I could quite… I don’t think that quite had enough PS2-ness to pick. That’s why that category was quite tough. Were there any other licensed games you thought about, Matthew? I thought about The Thing. Yeah, yeah, that seems like quite… Someone should re-release that. That sounded pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, The Thing is… The Thing is that you think, man, this would be… If someone took another run at this now and could do slightly more sophisticated things with it, on paper, the idea of the paranoia of these NPCs who might turn on you and how suspicion… You’re suspicious of them, that they might be the thing. They’re suspicious of you. And it does a pretty good attempt for the time at replicating that, but you could do a lot more with that idea now, I think. It feels quite prescribed what happens in that game, so it’s a bit sort of fake-sy with it. So, yeah, I think that aside though, there aren’t many top tier licensed games. It’s not a great era for that type of game, is it? No, not massively. I guess, I’m not big into them. I’m not saying they’re necessarily good games, but EA, through a lot of money, are making quite polished movie tie-ins. Like, the Bond games. They made some quite visually lovely Lord of the Rings hack and slashers. Yeah, that might not have been a bad pick, actually, one of those. You know, they’re like absolutely 7 out of 10 territory. But in terms of, oh wow, it’s the stuff from the film looking quite good on your TV, pretty good, I thought. Yeah, for sure. I played a lot of that Two Towers one, actually. And the Return of the King one was very well reviewed for the time, I think. Not quite up there, but definitely an interesting time for licensed games. Yeah, me picking Kingdom Hearts is like gambling against Matt Castle in a lot of ways. It’s like, I’m putting my chips on… No, it’s good. It kind of makes total sense. Because it’s sort of, it’s almost like the definitive licensed game in terms of like, you know, you’re trying to work with one of the most notoriously controlling IP holders of all time. And to get them to do what they do and get them to go where those games go must have taken some incredible feats of negotiation. And also, as part of that, the authenticity, the idea of getting actors back from the films to voice their characters again in the games, it’s pretty amazing what they did with those games. Absolutely. They capture an extraordinary amount of the original actors. The other thing is, I think other people have pointed this out, but this was actually quite a low ebb for Disney at the time. So this was early noughties where they kind of come off the back of a few of their 2D animated films flopping and CG was just getting going. They didn’t own Pixar yet. And so that might have been another factor of how else can Disney get its characters out there or grow its reputation or whatever. So I think it might have been a feat of timing as much as anything. I feel good about that pick, Matthew. Yeah, I think that is perfectly valid and very solid. Okay, what’s your ninth pick? Platformer. Maybe this doesn’t pass the PS2 test, but I’m going to say Prince of Persia, Sands of Time. Oh, no, that’s a great pick, actually. That didn’t even cross my mind. Nice work, sir. Yeah, I feel like it’s a great platformer for starters. I mean, the decision to kind of take that kind of series famed for its sense of movement and motion and acrobatics and translate that fully into 3D. It was so elegantly done, it had a time rewind mechanic and that you had the sort of the dagger of time or whatever it was, which basically let you rewind and take a second run at something if you botched it. And almost with that safety net, it let them string together these huge chains of like sort of acrobatic feats of like, you know, a wall run into a pole swing into a jump off this, jump off that. It could just ask a lot more of you because it gave you the ability to kind of fix little bits of your runs. The kind of Arabian Nights theme, beautifully done, had this very soft lighting on it. The framing of this game is kind of like one of the best narrative devices ever, I think, in a video game, in that it’s the prince kind of telling you his story after the fact. And, you know, whenever he dies, he’s like, oh, no, that wasn’t right. And then kind of corrects himself. So they rewind it and you take a second run at it. It’s, you know, storybook in every sense of the word. The tragedy of this is just how much they fucked it, following it, going down this grim sort of angsty teenage sort of violence phase with two and three. But this game, ignoring those, I think, is just a really majestic magical platformer, which I associate more with the generation maybe than specifically PS2. But listen, I didn’t have a lot to pick from. No, I think that this is definitely like a multi-format game, for sure. This, I think, sold well across all formats basically. But I think it’s perfectly fine because of its generation, yeah, this is a very significant game. Like an intricate platformer as well, one that requires skill, which is actually quite a hard thing to find from this generation. Like a platformer that’s not super fiddly, that is like critically legit, that’s quite tough. And I think this is a really good pick, yeah. Yeah, my other one for this was, I was toying with whether I could pass off whether Tomb Raider Anniversary counted. I think I would have been a stretch, yeah. Because it’s more of an action-platformer hybrid. I love the platforming in it, and it is a really gorgeous remake of that game. But yeah, Prince of Persia I think I’m pretty safe with. Cool, yeah. Tomb Raider would have been a good free pick, maybe. Yeah, that would have been a heart pick, but maybe a non-wise one. Okay, fair enough. Okay, so my final pick, Matthew, my tenth pick, is for action or stealth game. Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition. So, again, I could have picked God Hand for this one. This was tough because I knew that if I got Silent Hill 2, I’d lose Metal Gear Solid 3, so I planned accordingly. This is an interesting category as well, because I didn’t feel like I could pick just stealth game, because that narrows it down to basically, like, you know, Metal Gear and Splinter Cell, which is just too narrow. But you have to have capacity for Metal Gear to be picked at all, outside of free pick, I think. So that’s why I kind of fused it with this, which is, you know, action is a very vague word, obviously. But I think in terms of how 3D action comes into its own this generation, Devil May Cry is like the headline story of it, really. The first game is fantastic. I debated picking the first game. It’s definitely not as good as this one. It’s not as varied in terms of its combat. It’s not as funny tone-wise. But it does arrive as a kind of complete package, and was like a really significant early sort of PS2 exclusive. One of the most significant things Capcom did on the system in a generation where it was primarily focused on GameCube, it seemed, for a lot of it. So, yeah, Devil May Cry 3, it comes with four different sort of styles in combat, so you can vary up your play style. This isn’t worked on by Kamiya. He’s working on Clover Studio at this point, making Beautiful Joe and Akami. So, they did a great job with it after Devil May Cry 2 famously shat the bed. This has some fantastic bosses, really just good level design generally. Like I say, the tone is spot on. It’s really kind of silly and fun. Dante is a fun character. It’s all about his fight with his brother, Virgil. It’s a prequel to the first game. And as we’ve explored on previous episodes of this podcast, we’re still not really sure what Dante’s business is, how it’s sustainable, how he’s covering his rent, all that stuff. But we don’t need to litigate that now. So Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition, Matthew. I don’t have loads more to say about it. I talked about it quite a lot on our Best Games of 2006 episode. It was a high pick for me. But this was probably the defining combat action experience that I had on the console. So I feel good picking it. Any thoughts? Yeah, a really, really great pick. I think it’s widely held as the best in the series. Yeah, I think so. I think 5 has got a good reputation, but I think it’s quite a short game, and 3 I think has the benefit. 5’s great, but I think what people like about 5 is that Dante is very much like he is in 3. So that’s what a lot of people like. Yeah, people are waiting a long time for that. Yeah, that’s a really great pick. Very PlayStation game as well. A wise one. So we’ve come to your final pick, Matthew. This category, shooter or fighting game. I just have no connection with fighting games whatsoever. I just don’t play them. It’s terrible. It’s like the one genre I’d say I have zero opinions on. I think I bought like a Soul Calibur on GameCube. Yep, that would be the second one we’re thinking it, right? Yeah, and I really tried to give it a go. I just can’t get into this genre at all. And for some people that’s like handing you a game or card or whatever, but I just can’t get excited about it. Which kind of leaves me with shooters, which is just rancid outside of Time Space 2. This is my weakest pick by far. I’m going to go… I can’t believe I’m saying this. I’m going to say Red Faction 1. Okay, interesting. This is just because I have to pick something. The novelty on paper, the big thing with this was it had its deformation of the environments. You could blow holes in things and bits of rock would fall down. You could shoot a hole in the wall and shoot someone. It’s obviously a very technically limited version of that. But it was enough that I remember playing this split-screen multiplayer with my brother and having a relatively good time. I think it is a total 7 out of 10, maybe even a 6 out of 10. Why is it on my fucking PS2 Mini? I have no idea. It let you shoot a hole in some rocks and that’s more interesting than any other shooter I’ve played or pierced to. See, I thought you might have stretched the definition of shooter a little bit and picked something like, I think there’s an R-type game on there. I did contemplate that. R-type Final, that’s quite an acclaimed game. Yeah, but again, it would be based on absolutely nothing. I literally haven’t played any of those games on the platform and I felt like I just couldn’t… I had to have something which I had some experience in. Even though it’s rancid, it really is a duffer. It may have single-handedly lost me this draft. Are you sure you don’t want to reroll this one? I’ll allow it if you do. I just can’t fake it and I honestly couldn’t think of anything else. I mean, I was so desperate. The two things I had written down was Red Faction and Cold Winter. Oh, right. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because Cold Winter was absolutely solid. It’s a game which you play and you’re like, oh, that’s surprisingly solid. But that’s it. That’s all it has going for it. It’s a surprisingly solid feeling shooter. I contemplated, like, did I like any of the kind of Medal of Honor stuff that was happening on PS2? But again, that felt like a series that didn’t, you know, everything good about it was happening on PC, and it was just like a poor version of whatever they were doing on PC at the time. That’s a weird trend for this era, because all the Call of Duty games are the same, aren’t they? They’re not the same as the Call of Duty games on PC. They’re like, yeah, lesser versions. It’s all a little bit. There was that one which was like Pearl Harbor. Oh, Rising Sun. Yeah, it was pretty bad. You know, yeah, listen, I really struggle with this genre. I think it’s an absolute pig. Yeah, I’m just going to stick to my quite unsatisfying feeling guns and save Red Faction. Okay, this is a final chance. Are you really sure, Matthew? Because I will let you re-roll this if you want. No, just because I don’t have anything better. Okay, well… What a pig. What a pig of a pig of a pig. Well, what a great way to end there. Ending on a high. Good stuff. A console which runs the gamma from Metal Gear Solid 3 to Red Faction 1. That’s something else. I think you’re being a bit… First of all, I don’t know why you didn’t pick the second Red Faction, which I think was a better game. Like a legit fun shooter. I remember playing it at the time. I think it was pretty good. I don’t even remember that existing. Yeah, I knew a kid who was weirdly obsessed with the Red Faction. He was a beta tester on the second one. He used to boast about how exciting that was. I was very jealous. But now as someone who’s played loads of Preview Co. for bad games, I don’t really care. So, okay. Well, we’re done then, Matthew. That was really fun. Quite stressful, but fun. I really enjoyed that. I thought it was a good exercise. Yeah, it was fun. It was nice to go into it and think about it in those ways. I think the categories forced some, you know, interesting thinking. I think it’s a mix of the mainstream and slightly more hidden gems. I think we’ve done all right. Yeah. I think next time you should pick which console we do for one of these drafts, because that way you’re the one who’s on, like, home territory, and I have to work a bit harder to research it. So maybe give that some thought. See if there’s anything that fits, and we’ll circle back to it. So let’s read out our entries then, Matthew. Let’s do it one by one. So I’ll read out my category one, you read out your category one, etc. For shooter or fighting game, I have TimeSplitters 2. I have Red Faction. For second category, survival horror, I have Silent Hill 2. I have Forbidden Siren. Category 3, sports or racing, I have Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. I have Burnout 3, Takedown. For category 4, which is RPG, I have Final Fantasy X. I have Final Fantasy XII. For category 5, action or stealth game, I have Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition. I have Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater Subsistence. For category 6, I have Platformer. Sorry, for category 6, Platformer, I have Jak and Daxter the Precursor Legacy. I have Prince of Persia, Sands of Time. For category 7, open world game, I have GTA San Andreas. I have GTA Vice City. For category 8, licensed game, I have Kingdom Hearts. I have The Warriors. That’s a good pick. For category 9, wild card, I have Gitaroo Man. I have Gregory Horror Show. For category 10, free pick, I have Shadow of the Colossus. And I have God of War 2. Okay, great stuff. There’s loads of great games in there. That’s good. So, all you have to do at home is running for the week after this because I can only make a Twitter poll run for a week, unfortunately. I’ll put it up the Friday that we put the episode up, which will be the 13th. So, running until about, I guess, the 20th of August 2021, you’ll be able to vote for this. If you go to the top of Back Page Pod on Twitter, you will see a poll where you can just vote Samuel or Matthew. And on the Tuesday after this episode has gone live, I’ll take a screen grab of the different games. I’ll give people a chance to listen to it and then put a screen grab of the games up so people can make their picks. So, yep, if you vote, then we’ll address the results two episodes from now. We’ll make sure that we discuss it. So, yes, vote for who picked the best games for this PS2 Mini. But any closing thoughts Matthew before we have one short final section here. I hope we do get some more mini consoles for real, I guess. I’d certainly like to have one, play them. So, you know, if anyone from PlayStation is listening to this and they’re like, you know what? For those 20 games, that would be a banger. Please do do it. Yeah, 19 of those games and Red Faction would be… They’re like, oh, we can’t get any of them except for Red Faction 1. Yeah, that’s the thing. If Sony did this for real, I don’t think they would get all of these games. But, you know, hey, what can you do? But yeah, I think the console I want more than any other is basically a PS2 with a HDMI port. So I long dream of such a thing. So Matthew, I’ve got one short final section to give you here. We’re going to take a short break. We’ll come back. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to read the premise to some weird PS2 games. And you have to guess what the name of the game is. So, we’ll take a short break. Yeah, let’s do it. Welcome back to the final short section of this podcast. So, to kind of catch the breadth of the PS2, you can only do so much when you’re picking 20 games. Like I say, it’s apparently got more than 1,800 games as a console, it’s out of control, you know? There’s no time, for example, to talk about the Thunderbirds Titan game that you use on PS2, or the many bad FIFA’s. You know, it’s just, there’s too much. So, in this section, what I’ve done is, I know a fair amount of play about PlayStation, because obviously I owned a PS2, and I worked on a PlayStation Mag, so I’ve dug into some relatively obscure, some are super obscure, some are like more well-known, games that Matthew, I will read out the premise to Matthew of these games, and he has to guess what the name of the game is. See if he, it kind of sparks anything on his head. So Matthew, all of these games were released in either Europe or America, except the first one, which is a Japanese only game, but it’s quite an easy one to kick off with. So number one, in this Japanese only adventure game, a man whose job is to find things people have lost is stuck in a time loop leading up to the day an explosion goes off. I actually don’t know what that… You have played it on another format. I’ve played it on another format? Oh, is this Flower, Sun, Rain? Yes, that’s right. Yes. Yeah, well done. Phew, that could have been my credentials, mega busters. I wanted to give you at least one that I knew you would get. So yeah, that’s what I was hoping I’d describe that enough without it being too vague. Okay, so number two, in this stealth style game, a mosquito has to covertly suck the blood of the different family members living in a house to survive the upcoming winter. This was released in Europe. I actually know what this one is. Yeah, I thought, yeah. This is Mr. Mosquito. Correct, yes. So I again wanted to pick, because it’s actually like a canon of obscure PS2 games and this keeps coming up, but I feel like this was talked about a lot in magazines back in the day. Have you played it? Is it good? No, no idea. I haven’t played any of these, I should say, actually. There’s a lot of research that got into these. But yeah, good, good. You’re two for two so far. Oh, this is good. Okay, in this RPG, you draw your own monsters in the game using a canvas on screen and they come to life so you can make your self-designed monsters. You’re basically drawing monsters on screen. Battle other creatures. It was released in America, but not Europe. Any idea? Oh, gee, I don’t know, like… I don’t know, like, paint beasts? You’re actually kind of along the right lines there. It’s called Magic Pen Gel, The Quest for Color. Quite an obscure game. But I watched a Let’s Play where a guy awkwardly drew a snake on screen on PS2, a very simple snake. It’s just a shape, basically, and then it becomes a monster in the game. That’s the only thing it’s got going for it, really. Right. OK, so, in this light gun shooter that is clearly inspired by the movie Run Lola Run, a woman with red hair is on the run from an agency that wants her dead in a dystopian future dominated by a virtual reality company. It was released in Europe. Oh, Christ. No idea. Scarlet Killer. This is Endgame from Empire Interactive. Sounds like Alias. It was quite Alias-y, but she looks exactly like, is it Frank-a-Potent, the actress in Run, Lola, Run? Oh, that’s based… Let’s make a light gun game. Yeah, it was the early noughties, Matthew. That is so weird. That is weird. This is one I think you might get. So, in this horror game made by a developer who would go on to do great things, you’re in a Kyoto manor in the Heian period of Japanese history. Is it Heian? Have I pronounced that correctly? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, dealing with humans resurrected as monsters by two mystical trees. This was released in Europe. Oh, fucking blind me. I thought you might have come across this in your research. It’s a very notable developer. No, I have no idea. Like, because sometimes he’s… This came out over here? Yeah, it did actually, yeah. From a small label, but it did come out. It’s like a proper weird horror game. Yeah, you get things like, you know, clocktowery stuff and things like that. I have no idea. Okay, it’s Kuon from From Software. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that. Yeah, I have heard of it, didn’t know much about it. It’s got mediocre reviews, but yeah, quite notable. This was a game they worked on before. Is this actually a Miyazaki game? No, it’s not. I think it’s before his time. Oh, okay, right. Yeah, but it comes up in lists of best Final Horror games. Difficult. Maybe I’ve made this too hard, sorry. No, it’s good. Okay, cool. So, this number six. An oddball alternative to Metal Gear Solid 2 by a notable Japanese creator and developer, this espionage thriller has you uncovering the intentions of a terrorist organisation called Enigma. It was released in Europe. Oh, this isn’t like… I should say the creator would go on to be notable. Oh, okay. Oddball stealth thing. That’s like… The thing I always think of, that’s like… It was N64, there was like Operation Windback. Yeah, you’re sort of along the right lines, kind of. But it’s not… That was N64. Oh, I don’t know. Is it going to have some terror? I don’t know, like… Shadow Agent, I don’t know. Well, you’re fairly close there. It’s Spy Fiction. Oh, Spy Fiction. Yeah, Swery was the developer. Oh, that’s… I thought it was a good one. I made this too depressingly hard. I had a good start. I’ve got a couple of them. Yeah, you’re doing alright. So, in this early PS2 RPG, you play a musician stuck in a five-day time loop after he’s asked to play at an island wedding. The game features multiple guitar-based minigames, and I think your guitar in the game actually is sentient, it comes to life. This is like a super early PS2 RPG that was originally intended to release on Dreamcast. So, yeah, Japanese RPG. I mean, it sounds amazing. I can’t believe I love time loop games, but I have definitely not heard of this. Trapped in Paradise. No, it’s called Ephemeral Phantasia. Yeah, it’s a Konami RPG, but it was actually very poorly reviewed. When you look at it, it’s so rough visually. Yeah, it’s really funny. This is a year apart from Final Fantasy X. They look about five years apart, but yeah. Okay, so you might get this one. So, number eight. In this first PS2 outing from Core Design, you control four characters and try and solve puzzles and kill enemies in a Judge Dredd-style future. Oh, Core Design, yeah. It’s like one of them’s a robot. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I can see the four of them. It’s not… I can’t think of a name, like Elite Squad. No, it’s called Project Eden. Project Eden, yeah. Yeah, rings a bell. Yeah, I had hoped to get that one. God, I’ve made this too hard. I’ve just made this too hard. This is on me. This is on me. Okay, cool. So number nine. In this turn-based strategy game that features a lot of mechs, we’re in an alternate history version of Japan where it was conquered by both the US and the Soviet Union and subsequently split into two warring countries. This was released in Europe by a major Japanese publisher. That sounds like a bit like Front Mission. Yeah, it is along those lines for sure when you look at it. But a different publisher. A different publisher. Oh, jeez. I’ve really let myself down with my lack of obscure PS2 knowledge. Well, you definitely worked on a PS2 back, you know. Yeah. Robo War. It’s actually called Ring of Red. It’s a Konami game. Ring of Red? Blimey. Yeah. Okay, one final one Matthew. I don’t think you’re going to get… Can I redeem myself? Probably not. I don’t think you’re going to get this one. I’m going to tell you the publisher you write up though to try and give you an extra chance. Enix published this. It only came out in America and not Europe. In this action game, you control a robot called Omega Knight to fight an alien race called the Volgara. By robot I mean like, we’re talking Power Rangers size, like city fights basically. That kind of thing. But you also control your character on foot in amongst the chaos. So, yeah. Any idea? Fuck, no. Sounds amazing, but absolutely. I have, like, I want to play all of these games you’ve described. That sounds like a great gimmick, but… Fuck, total destruction. It’s called Robot Alchemical Drive or RAD. Oh, of course. This is like, this was quite an obscure pick, but it was a really interesting game to read about. It’s one of the rarest PS2 games, I believe, in North America. But, yeah, so sorry to… What a bummer to end on. All those time loop games have just reminded me of that weird… Is it Konami, the one where you’re in the town? Yeah, Shadow of Memories. I almost picked that. Shadow of Memories. That could have been a good cult, like, wild card. Yeah, that would have been a good pick, actually, yeah. I thought about including it here, but I thought, Matthew will probably be able to guess that quite easily. Instead, I made it so hard that you couldn’t guess any of them, so, apart from two. Listen, I’m pleased I got two, because when I got those two, I thought, oh, no, if I get all of these, Sam’s going to feel sad that I was too good at his quiz, and then that didn’t happen, so now it’s fine. Yeah, yeah, it’s all good. No, that was fun, though. Hopefully, people at home who, I guess, have, like, mega PS2 knowledge, hopefully enjoyed that. Everyone else is just really confused. Yeah, I should have thrown in something, like, really weird, like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban tie-in or something. But, Matthew, we’ve done it. The PS2 mini-draft is over. So, as stated, if you’re listening to this on the week beginning the 13th of… the Friday the 13th of August, you can go vote for this on Backpage Pod on Twitter. That’s where you’ll find us generally on Twitter. So let us know your thoughts on this episode. We’ll also at some point post, like, the blank categories so people can tweet us and tell us what they would pick for the categories. I think that would be fun. Drive engagement, as the community managers say. And yes, Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? I am MrBuzzle UnderscorePesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. We’ll be back next week with an episode about Games Magazine rivalries. That was a fun one, wasn’t it, Matthew? Yeah, it was great. Look forward to it. Yeah, you’re on for an absolute treat. Some of the best stories you’ve heard on this podcast so far. So, thank you very much for listening. We’ll be back next week. Bye-bye!