PS2 Pickups

I was feeling a little sorry for myself after the events I described yesterday,  so with it conveniently being the weekend I decided to take a trip into town. I am an unrepentant filthy capitalist, after all, so acquiring material goods makes me feel better.

I came back with a stack of PS2 games from my local CEX, which came to just over £15 altogether. Bargain.

Some of these I'm well familiar with, some of them I've heard of but never played, and a few others I've never even heard of, but thought they looked or sounded interesting. So expect… something on these over the course of the next few weeks and months.

You've probably noticed a fair bit of PS2 content on both my YouTube channel and MoeGamer recently. This is because I've been keen to do a bit more in the way of retro content, and the PS2 era is actually surprisingly underexplored in this regard; most retro specialists online tend to focus on the 8- and 16-bit eras (with perhaps some PS1, Saturn and N64 games) rather than anything later, and that's a bit of a shame.

I think the reasoning behind this situation is the fact that 8- and 16-bit games are, in many cases, markedly different to the games we have today thanks to their more obvious technological limitations, whereas the PS2 era is pretty much where we started to see what we can think of as "modern gaming" get underway. The system was much more comfortable with 3D polygonal graphics than its predecessor, developers and publishers started to grow in size and the games in general started to get a lot more ambitious.

The PS2 era also started to get underway as the Internet was becoming a more important part of everyone's lives, which means there are a lot of previews, reviews and interviews already online from when these games were originally released. Perhaps this makes people feel that there isn't a need for "new" content on PS2 games in 2017. But the PS2 launched nearly 20 years ago now! That's definitely "retro" or "old-school" by most people's definition.

That old content doesn't tell the whole story, either; it tells the story of those games in their original context when they were released into an increasingly crowded marketplace, struggling for attention. And this caused a lot of titles to get passed by, particularly low-budget games such as those of D3 Publisher's Simple Series. It was the beginning of a problem that has become particularly pronounced in today's games press: the fact that there are more games out there than can be reasonably covered by even a well-staffed site.

This led to an awful lot of games becoming incredibly obscure; sometimes deservedly so, sometimes less so. I've found it particularly fascinating to revisit the Japanese games of this era, as there are some hidden gems among them that just don't get talked about enough… or at all in some cases.

Of course, there's some unmitigated garbage, too, but I often find there's some value in taking a look at that, too, because a developer didn't usually set out to make a stinker, and sometimes considering their intentions can be rewarding in itself, even if the game they ended up with wasn't all that fun or well put together.

What I've found interesting, though, is that looking back at many of these games from the perspective of a modern gamer can be very different to how it would have felt to pick them up "in context" during the PS2 era. Whereas once you might have thought, say, "why on Earth would you play Energy Airforce Aim Strike! when Ace Combat 4 exists?" (I'm casting no aspersions on Energy Airfoce Aim Strike! here, since I haven't tried it yet, though Ace Combat 4 is amazing), now there's little risk in trying these games out and seeing if they do anything particularly interesting or enjoyable… because, well, they cost 50p each, and you can't even get a cup of coffee for that these days.

So if you're into the retro thing… now's a great time to start expanding your PS2 collection with some more obscure titles, because you can get them for insanely cheap prices in most cases if you know where to look. Alternatively, if you have some PS2 games (preferably PAL region) you don't want or need any more… well, maybe let's talk, because I know a very good home for them.

Now, let's just hope the retro collector market doesn't jack the prices up too much before I manage to track down the origins of the Oneechanbara and Earth Defense Force series…