At the time, i used to read some articles from EDGE magazine and added to my collection based on the editors reviews but also on insights/postmortems articles or interviews with the original developers, which gived me a different idea based on different aspects not exactly like game-genre or personal likes: reading about the "making-of" and the process involved on creating a fun product for the season stretched to budget,launch, developers teams..:
- "The suffering" and "The suffering: Ties that bind"(didnt finish yet), "Second Sight" short but very close to a good action-film with some MGS details,...
- Killer7 (although i couldnt pass the first hour),
- The Red Star mixes shmups with beat'em-up (also on PSP but without co-op).
- Rygar: Very underrated at some point between DMC and GOW... (edit) God Hand: Another mixed of Action/Beat'em up/RPG Has a lot of flaws with control and camera, but somehow it has a "slightly-mature" and some fun and irony not used to see on games.. Initially difficult and confusing, once you start to understand the GodHand system and save for last resource, you can advance easily on the game, i recall also that gambling was also needed for upgrade ...
- Cold Fear/Alone in the Dark: For a long time i searched for a "not Resident Evil but Dead Space"-like game, and i was really happy to discover that Cold Fear had all the elements although a bit hard and really game-sadistic, on the other side, The last AitD Ps2 release i really didnt disliked but i think i finished in less than one hour...
- Heroes of Might and magic: The quest for the dragon-bone staff (or something like that)... Bought on release and really missed. Dont get confuse by the name: Its a direct-remake of a 16-bit era "King's Bounty" for MD/Commodore,although didnt know at the time,... has no story, mixes free-roaming,on-fly missions and the most simple tactics chess-battle system, ala Dragon Quest you could try to avoid enemies on the world map, or give-up battle and restart a new army (emulator and savestates recomended)
As i commented in another post, i think the most underrated PS2 game is "Silpheed: The Lost Planet", its not the shmup as usual and initially easy at the beginning, but have to learn enemy mechanics as in any other games but also you need to understand the risk/scoring system to level your ship accordingly to beat the game, not to mention its great graphics, great intermission-based story, great music, great pc-98/megacd remake, etc.. And hope you could play REZ on original hardware, at least once on your life
Pics are for the kings bounty MD version
