Sony’s PlayStation 2 was a legendary console in just about every measurement. A best-seller with a universally and critically acclaimed library of games, it may be tempting to lay all the credit for the PS2’s success at the feet of its hardware. However, while it certainly boasted impressive potential, the real heroes of the 6th generation console were its third-party developers.
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While there are examples of innovation in game design or storytelling, these PS2 games are impressive for their technical achievements, from unprecedented graphical fidelity to revolutionary physics systems and other technical marvels that had no business running on 32MB of RAM.
8
Demon Chaos (2005)
Cast Of Tens Of Thousands
- Allowed as many as 65,000+ enemies to be rendered on-screen at once
Similar to Dynasty Warriors‘ thousand-soldier crowd-battler set in China’s feudal times, Demon Chaos pits players in a battle against armies of demons in feudal-era Japan. Instead of legendary heroes of history, the player controls weapon-proficient divine beings.
While Demon Chaos never took off like Dynasty Warriors in popularity, nor did it garner critical acclaim as many Musou games inspired by Dynasty Warriors did, it was able to boast of a feature that would far-exceed the other game series about juggling thousands of enemies at once: its capacity for impossible enemy density, with its ability to render as many as 65,000+ enemies onscreen at once.
7
Gran Turismo 4 (2004)
Fast On The Track, Easy On The Eye
- Built with then-photorealistic visuals for cars and scenery
- Included a now-standard photo mode with all the bells and whistles
Eye candy has always been a big part of this racing series’ appeal, as it proved with its technical prowess in the PS1 era, but Gran Turismo 4 reached further than before to photorealism in its cars and tracks. Its graphics during replays and galleries look positively HD.
This is impressive considering the HD standard was a few years away during the PS2 era. Gran Turismo 4 raised the bar for in-game Photo Mode excellence, in which players could snap SuperFine shots of their (then) painstakingly rendered vehicles to the backdrop of scenic vistas with all the gradients of filters, framing, and more.
6
Half-Life (2001)
A Powerful Port With No Half-Measures
- Released
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November 19, 1998
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language
- The PS2 port carried over everything from the PC edition, including smooth FPS
- Improved the polygon count for models and added a new mode the size of an expansion
This PS2 port of Half-Life is relatively unknown, especially as the series (and Valve itself) is synonymous with PC gaming purism. This legendary shooter blew the hardware capabilities of fifth-generation hardware out of the water. Following a brief misfire with the Dreamcast, Gearbox Software was tasked with translating the former-PC-exclusive and its codes over to the PlayStation 2. There’s a level of technological genius behind Half-Life on the PS2.
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For example, the dual-stick controls translate smoothly from the mouse-and-key PC setup. While some of the environmental textures are occasionally smoothed over, in-game models (characters and interactive objects) enjoy a much higher polygon count, with most characters being fully articulate. The entirety of the game, including its interconnectedness (besides a few seconds of loading) is included in the port, and for the most part, players can expect 60 FPS with dips (but never below 30 FPS) during combat.
5
Rogue Galaxy (2005)
A Densely-Detailed Adventure Set In A Seamless Universe
- Released
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January 30, 2007
- ESRB
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T For Teen Due To Blood, Crude Humor, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence
- Incredible graphics thanks to Level-5’s in-house “tonal rendering”
- Has no loading screens between battles, zones, or cutscenes
A sprawling space opera with warring factions and rogue heroes, Level-5’s RPG answer to Star Wars, Rogue Galaxy, is filled to the brim with detail, thanks to the “tonal rendering” developed in Level-5’s other graphically gorgeous cel-shaded games, such as Dragon Quest 8, in which static (but fully rendered) backgrounds received high levels of detail with fluidly-animated cel-shaded “anime style” characters in the foreground.
However, its finest achievement, made all the more impressive thanks to its graphical fidelity, was the complete absence of loading times between battles, cutscenes, and levels. While this had been done before in platforming games, such a feat had never been achieved in a script and calculation-heavy, action-roleplaying game, making Rogue Galaxy‘s universe feel more open.
4
Red Faction (2001)
Taking The System Apart, Brick By Brick
- Released
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May 22, 2001
- ESRB
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M For Mature 17+ due to Blood, Violence
- Its GeoMod engine provided players with a fully-destructible environment
The destructive power fantasy of getting armed with heavy weaponry only ever extended to blowing up enemies, as getting a game engine to convincingly render true environmental demolition was out of the question until Red Faction came along. Thanks to its then ultra-innovative GeoMod engine, players can dynamically blow their way through walls, collapse bridges, and reshape terrain, creating shortcuts or traps for enemies.
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Other games had showcased environmental destruction with scripts, but this PS2 game allowed them to do it with their own hands (or, more accurately, arms). The mechanic perfectly fits with the game’s story of a Martian mining colony rebelling against corporate oppression. Blowing up infrastructure isn’t just cathartic, it mirrors the scrappy, improvisational combat of a guerrilla uprising.
3
Shadow Of The Colossus
A Giant In Technical Mastery And Presentation
- Released
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October 18, 2005
- ESRB
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T For Teen // Blood, Fantasy Violence
- Pushes the limits of the PS2’s hardware to create enormous, climbable creatures with fluid animations and floating pathfinding
- Renders an incredibly detailed open world with stable FPS despite the heavy processing
Team Ico’s Shadow of the Colossus managed to stream its sprawling, desolate, and hauntingly beautiful open world without loading screens, a technical leap built on the foundation of its predecessor, Ico, a game worthy of a shoutout that pioneered physics-based interactions and AI pathfinding for its companion character.
Shadow cranked the spectacle to 11 with its innovative technology. Each fur-covered colossus is rendered with dynamic wind physics, destructible weak points, and bespoke animations that taxed the PS2’s CPU to its limits. The camera struggled during tight spaces, and framerates dipped a little when chaos erupts, but the sheer scale of its seamless world and real-time physics easily place it as a work of gaming art as well as a technological marvel.
2
Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas
A Huge World Of Depth And Style
- Released
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October 26, 2004
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs
- Rendered not only one living, breathing city, but three, and a whole state between them
- Incredible cinematics and detail, smart NPC AI, and total horizontal and vertical traversal
While the first in GTA‘s “3D Universe,” Grand Theft Auto 3 could probably take this spot for the sheer influence it had on the gaming industry alone thanks to its technological leap in sandbox, open-world gameplay, it is hard not to credit San Andreas for the towering achievement of not only rendering a huge city, but an entire state filled with three cities and a whole lot of wooded countryside between, all of it explored by land, sea, or air vehicles.
The world space was not only physically larger but the activities and interactions available across the map were profound. How Rockstar managed to squeeze in the RPG elements, higher vehicle density, improved pedestrian and law enforcement AI, and style into a sixth-generation game is akin to magic, and is an incredible achievement in technological efficiency that even studios in the 2020s failed to grasp, at least without considerable patches.
Setting Superior Standards For The PlayStation 2 And Video Games
- Released
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November 13, 2001
- ESRB
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M For Mature 17+ Due To Animated Blood, Animated Violence
- Brought video games to the next level of cinematic, interactive storytelling
- Complex but intuitive features large and small blew away audiences and critics alike
From ultra-detailed character models, highly-interactable environment and setpieces, a drastically expanded player moveset, and dynamic enemy AI that works in groups and is smarter and more responsive than anything that had come before, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty somehow outshone the original MGS in terms of presentation.
And that’s all without getting into how it demonstrated the cinematic potential of video games as a medium and pushed the limits of interactive and postmodern storytelling. Its sequel, Snake Eater, would go on to stretch the limits of the PlayStation 2 even further, but that would not have been possible without the groundwork of this technical masterpiece.
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