I'm in the mood for PS2 games. What are some great PS2 games?

Have u got one of these for GameCube?

Then off the top of my head, ico, shadow of the colossus, killer 7, godhand.

Fantavision.

S T A R M I N E

You can always play Ridge Racer V if you hate yourself and want a frustrating arcade racing game. Seriously, fucking AI will pair up to block you from passing. And it's a clusterfuck with 14 cars, compared to 8 from previous Ridge Racer titles.

Shinobi is pretty alright.

sounds retarded, but funny at least

Jak and Daxter is a classic, seems like a floaty 3d platformer at first, but once you get a hang of all the moves, it's really fucking fun. The cutscenes are actually nice to watch and can be funny. It's a bit of a shame it's so short.

If you're up for an RPG then Radiata Stories is a real good one.
You can 4 types of weapons, pretty much every character in the game can be recruited to your party, all weapons and armors have unique models, two different storylines so it offers decent replayability and post game dungeon and NG+! Great game all around.

If you're not up for an RPG, I dunno what to tell you.

I watched this speed run (which was great, just gonna embed a "best of" version) and it looked pretty good. It kinda reminded me of banjo kazooie, not in the sense that you have a partner, but in that the moves are a bit rigid but chaining them together and understanding how the environments are all designed to take advantage of them is where the fun is.

Dragon quest 8, the definite version. The English dub with their extremely British accents is delightfully cheesy. ==Guv==

is it casually british or OI GUVNUH OOIT REALLY TICKLES ME BUM WEN YOU DO DAT DERE LICK O THE BONG ON THE SHEPARDS PIE N OLL DOT

Which ps2 games emulate well?

Yeah, two, but they're not as impressive.

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Thanks. They work for me.

Here's this one as well.

Polite sage for not PS2 related.

Just look up some videos.

Pretty much the entire .hack series on the PS2. If you're up for some dungeon crawling, there's a wizardry game on the PS2 which I thought was pretty good. I also recommend BoF Dragon Quarter, though its significantly different compared to previous BoF games.

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Every single Ace Combat game released for PS1 and PS2.

this game is good

Which types of game are you looking for faygit

bump, need fat ps2 modding guide

Drakan for PS2 is underrated.

katamari damacy

Whoever made this chart needs to get paddled

I used to hide my weed and condoms in the HDD bay of my PS2, so whenever I fire up that old beast I get a raging hardon. Thanks pavlov.

I've combined some stuff from some videos I watched in setting up mine with an IDE drive, as well as various things I noted in my own experiences, into a text file a while back. Thought of maybe making an image guide with it, but I've heard that the program I used (WinHIIP) can be finicky for larger drives (mine's a 250gb); according to some other anons, HDL Dump is supposedly more reliable and thus might be something better to make a guide for, but it seems a lot harder to find good information on in comparison to WinHIIP (I'm guessing that WinHIIP was made first and thus has more information out there on how to use it).

I've been meaning to update it (especially since that version was from well over a year back). However, some anons in past threads have been rather adamant that the multiplats need to be purged due to quality differences between the PS2 versions and Gamecube/Xbox/PC ones (whichever are applicable; also Wii for some of the games too, I suppose) that render the PS2 ones unworthy in comparison. However, that would also mean nuking the likes of some PS2 mainstays, like MGS2: Substance, Silent Hill 2, Fatal Frame II, etc, as I rather keep things consistent rather. In other words, I'm not sure whether or not to just continue as is, or cull from it before adding anything else.

Don't listen to the faggots that want to purge the multiplats. The chart is a list of worthy PS2 games. There being a version in another platform does not make a game unworthy.

Well, it's worth stating that HM AWL Special Edition is certainly the fuller experience between the two platforms, since GC didn't have all the SE stuff. I'll have to concede you that on Prince of Persia though, since I never played the Xbox version of it, I can't say whether or not the PS2 or Xbox version was better.

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I've considered adding a note to the bottom, or perhaps the top might be better for visibility, in regards to multiplats being on there (that the PS2 multiplats on there, while perhaps not the best versions of them, are still a valid option for those without access to other systems they've been on). Not sure how well that might appease things, but it's probably worth a shot rather than removing a bunch of games.

Putting both on the "to do" list for now.

I'm not trying to say I'm not going to add them (and I'll certainly throw HM AWL SE on the "to add" file for now, if it really does have more to offer than on other systems the base game was on), or other games people have suggested, but I feel like I need to decide how to proceed first.

I think I see what you mean. It must take quite a bit of work to make one of these charts. They looks pretty simple at first, but yet I can't imagine trying to make one myself.

Halo

I wouldn't call them hard exactly, at least beyond trying to get good cover art scans at times (google is unhelpful a surprising amount of the time; had to go dig around on yahoo to even find a non GH cover for DMC3: SE, for example, as google refused to provide a location with it). What they are, is tedious, particularly when making an initial version (which usually will have a LOT of games on it that I have to compile covers for, check the ppi and/or crop to just the front cover, make tabs for them, and then organize onto the background), but even for updates there's a fair bit of tedium just moving things around if you remotely care about organization (an issue one of the older PS2 images had was that after a certain point, whoever made it didn't give a shit about alphabetizing, a sign they weren't the person that had worked on it prior). Still, I don't mind. I've got a lot of time on my hands, it gives the programs I have on my toaster some use, and the process I've got for making these keeps everything standardized and aligned properly.

That's just for the system images that have been cover and name only though. Ones with individual descriptions are harder, simply because not everyone feels like or has the time to write a blurb as to what makes a game worthwhile. Main reason I can't get much off the ground for a Vita image (doesn't help either that Vita threads have gotten VERY slow lately).

Ace Combat 04, 5, and Zero.

GLORY TO BELKA

Okami - made by Kamiya. A comfy living sumi-e painting starring a strong female lesbian (at least in shinto lore) wolfgirl and manages to not let any of that interfere with the story. Also the best 3D Zelda

Steambot Chronicles - a relaxing non-linear adventure. With robots. And playing harmonica for tips. Sequel never ever

Kingdom Hearts - the gameplay's a solid introduction to the character action genre, and if the Disney doesn't bother you, you might just find yourself enjoying the story

Dark Cloud 2 (may be called Dark Chronicle depending on your region) - fucking play this game. Do it. 1's also good but fuck yeah DC2

Jak & Daxter series - the genre shifts each game (from quintessential platformer to GTA with hoverbikes to Mad Max (2 and 3 still retain platforming, just not as much)) but all 3 are pretty good we do not talk about Lost Frontier

Ratchet & Clank series - yes even Deadlocked, which was very much the spiritual successor to Smash TV you didn't know you wanted

Sly Cooper series - Lupin the THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRD. The hub kind of suffered in 3 as you aren't given reason to explore it as you were in 2.

Great going, you left out the best one of all.

Impressive. I didn't expect Busin Wizardry to get a mention around here. That one was produced by Cozy Okada, so it's been on my radar for a while now.

You've got that the wrong way around, son.

Some good games here, lots of underrated stuff like Blood Will Tell and Primal, however it needs all these multiplats cut out.
Hitman Blood Money on PS2 isn't the best version of the game by far.

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Wouldn't this technically be considered downloading CP? Since they got hit with that lawsuit for using footage of a poor, innocent 17.9 year old child?

I can vouch for most of these recommendations. Though I think it's worth pointing out that Rogue Galaxy turns to shit at the very end.

came here to recommend Haunting Ground, FFX, CvsSNK2, and Xenosaga. MFW this post did it for me.

Damn, son! This thread is relevant as fuck to me because I have my PS2 right now in the shop because they're jamming a hard drive in there so it can run games from there.
It's not a huge hard drive, but it's big enough for months of fun.

Shouldn't have to take your PS2 to a shop to get an IDE drive inserted, assuming you've got a fat one.

I have a fat one, it's really big. It's kinda heavy, too.
Black, and it's old but boy oh boy is it fat, and has brought you to lots of kids, let me tell you. Still works just fine!

I kinda get what you mean, I should have done it myself, but I'm not so sure. I mean, what if I fuck something up?

The finale is kind of shit but the post-game is fantastic.

First thing that comes to mind is Dark Cloud, Nocturne, King's Field AC, and surprisingly Unlimited Saga.

Well, as far as actual insertion there's very little to fuck up. Just pop the backing of the expansion bay off it, align the drive properly and insert it, gently connect the network adaptor into both the drive and PS2, and screw the screws in. Done.

As for actual setup of the drive itself, that's admittedly a different story, but there's a number of videos out there for how to get it working, plus packs of pre-installed app like loaders. I will say that most of the instructions/tutorials out there are for WinHIIP instead of HDL Dump (I've heard from other anons that the latter works better, especially with larger drives; not as much information to be found on it in my own searches though), but it's good to learn how to do it yourself, so you can reinstall stuff if need be, as well as properly install game files. First time I got mine set up took maybe an hour or so (I was double checking stuff with videos/text a lot) and there was a bit of troubleshooting involved, but now it's pretty easy to install games on there when I need to. Didn't have to pay anyone either.

On a related note though, I do feel a need to ask, if anyone out there might know: How well do loaders handle multi-disc games? While certainly smaller in number than with the PS1, there's still a handful of games with multiple discs of actual content, and I'm wondering how the loaders handle switching from disc one to disc two when needed.

Hows the PS2 modding scene lately? still need memory cards fixed to install CFW and stuff?

You can use a HDD.

I recently softmodded my Playstation 2, had to send some files to the memory card with an AR Max and a tweaked PSX save to exploit the system and launch the installer, so yes, you still need to send stuff on the MC at least for fat models.

What? If you use FreeHDBoot you don't need to do anything with the memory card at all. You literally just write an image to a drive and you're done.

I believe we are referring to two different things, I am talking about installing FreeMCBoot. Since I have a fat model I need the Network adapter to install an HD so I either use a USB drive or burn games and run them through ESR

Many great games are well known so how about some rarer/lesser known ones, ps2 is my favorite console, these are just off the top of my head:

Nice list, faggot.
FTFY

Ace Combat 4, 5 and Zero. I just finished Zero and it was crazy good. 5 is 3x3 worthy. You can play them in any order really, but you know what they say, playing in release order keeps the casuals away. The community is also very supportive of emulation and has lots of helpful information to help anyone set up.

wtf dude?

Just no, skip that crap

I highly recommend RE outbreak 1 and 2 specially now that there are fan servers out there.

Anybody got a quick and dirty softmod guide to allow play of burned media?

What I have on hand:

Shit list.
Also is Ratchet Gladiator is called Ratchet Deadlocked in your country or something?

I beleive it's Sony that has the last word on the games' titles.

web.archive.org/web/20151127152829/http://bootleg.sksapps.com/tutorials/fmcb/index.php
(I only found the Internet Wayback Machine version of it)
See if you find a method that suits you under the "Installation" tab

Second question, is it permanent or is it only active so long as the memory card is inserted?

You need to have the MC in slot 1 when you turn on the console to load FMCB (See it as loading an OS from the MC instead of the console). Once you launch the game through ESR or similar you can remove it. Of course, if you reset the console you will need to have the FMCB card inside slot 1 or it will load the default boot menu

Thanks user. Wary about permanent mods as they can brick things. Software-only mods that aren't writing stuff to firmware are always preferable to me.

The PS2 firmware is in a read-only chip.

Good to know. The less I can muck around with it, the better.

Yeah, that's what discouraged me from doing it myself. I don't have the time, and I've seen the videos. A LOT of steps, man. A lot, and none of the steps seems particularly hard, but there are a lot of 'em.

Finally got my hands on a fat ps2, but it seems a lot of the fmcb lists and install guide sites are down. anyone have a recent list of games that have the fmcb exploit?

gotta get me a cheap memory card tomorrow at the shop.

Yeah, it's more complicated than trying to mod, say, a PSP or Wii, but it's not all that harsh either. Only reason it took me as long as it did was just from double checking stuff to make sure I was doing it right. Got used to installing games on there pretty quickly, though I suppose I'm still a bit iffy on how to actually add/replace applications, as I haven't had to do so much since the initial setup.

Wat do?

Alright, got both a card and agent under fire platinum as well as Smackdown vs raw 07, AUF aint working as im going by the archived game swap trick, any suggestions?

*Timesplitters series*
THPS4
Devil May Cry
*GTA VICE CITY* and San Andreas
Shadow of the Colossus
Jak and Daxter
*RESIDENT EVIL 4*
Metal Gear Solid 2
SSX Tricky

Those were some of my favourites from the time, system has a sprawling catalogue though.

Glad I got that on PS3 for $3
Is the PS3 ports worth it or are they as bad as the Vita?
Wii version is better
HD collection

I know HD collections are jewy as fuck, but if you don't already own them, they're usually better than buying the PS2 version

Yeah makes sense, I skipped the PS3 so wasn't sure which games received a remaster/rerelease.

I just did the HDD trick with my fat ps2. Wheres a good place to snag ps2 isos?
I downloaded steambot chronicles so far and its alright but I want more.

Romulation

TheIsoZone

Emu Paradise

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Emuparadise has a lot of stuff, but you usually won't find pre-patched (be it undub or fantranslated) PS2 games there. The ISO Zone and Nicoblog have some of the latter, but it's worth noting that the former has native "you've done too many downloads for now" stuff (Nicoblog generally provides multiple options for download sites), and since PS2 games can get fairly big it can get obnoxious.

I never got to Ghost Ship Extreme unfortunately since the finale was such a pile of shit.
For those who haven't played:

nyaa.se/?page=view&tid=598931

Maximum weeb convenience - although it's probably missing a few of the more recent releases like the Ar Tonelico 2 patch.

PS3 is an alright system. Lots of HD remasters for cheap. A lot of patches for shit like Gran Turismo and Killzone are fucking busted though.

I can't blame you for dropping it there, the entire ship fight is garbage. But if you can get past it, doing all the hunts, getting highest Hunter ranks, completing the frog log and factory, and then having the ghost ship and its extreme version is more than worth it imo. And that's not even counting the insectron shit dear God.

So it turns out i need to crack open the console and risk damaging the drive to do it, the swap guide on the freemcboot archive did not state that the console had to be opened.

My faves that nobody will mention:
A cinematic crime drama set in London
Fun turn based strategy with minigames for targeting
The last game Westwood ever made, a pirate adventure across different themed archipelagos (fire islands, ice islands, spooky islands, hell, etc). Has ship upgrades and naval combat, and lots of supernatural powers
3D WRPG WHERE YOU RIDE A DRAGON

The ps2 is also great if you love fighters. You can check out all the greats, like MvC2, SFIII:3s, Melty Blood, Vampire Savior, Hokuto no Ken, or more fun ones like Bloody Roar 3, Onimusha: Blade Warriors, or The Rumble Fish

Might also add to that that, as far as future PS2 game English fantranslations go, Tales of Destiny Director's Cut and Atelier Marie + Ellie have some that are actively in the works, so it might be worth a couple downloads for the future if those are of interest.

True. I don't think Nicoblog's even got a prepatched AT2 at this point, though I'm not sure they have any fan retranslated (the "re" being key) games aside from Breath of Fire II at this point. Maybe there's some idea there that in most cases if a game saw an official English version, that's the one they host? I don't know. Either way, at this point it's probably a game one either needs to patch on their own, or see if an user can dump a prepatched file of (and thankfully it seems like they haven't had to release any further patches to fix things, so I haven't needed a dump since v1.00; helps to have extensive beta testing like they did).

No, I 100%'d that before hand. It was so damn comfy.
I'll probably go back for the rest eventually.

this is just a friendly reminder that the best way to get 64-bit processor support and multithreading in pcsx2 is to tell the developers and anybody that will listen that

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO IMPLEMENT 64-BIT COMPATIBILITY AND MULTITHREADING IN THE SHITTY PCSX2 CODE

and

THE PS2 WILL NEVER BE EMULATED PROPERLY BY PCSX2 WHILE IT'S STUCK IN 32-BIT MODE AND CAN'T USE ALL AVAILABLE CPU REGISTERS OR THE 128-BIT AVX REGISTERS

It would be an ok game if the controls weren't so clunky

Top fucking kek, the PS2 has so many games and so many hidden gems it would be better to just list games to not play, and Getaway makes that list every day of the week.

right infographic under multi-platform, last row, the jap game next to XIII, what is that?

blazblue, gg, cvs2 if you have niggers to play with
lament of innocence, maximo. jak 1+2 are great, never played three though.

Shikigami no Shiro II.

Blazblue wasn't on PS2…

This is a good enough thread to ask, since I haven't seen a emulation thread for a couple days.

Anyone know the best settings to use when running PSCX2?
I've tried everything I can think of, but every game I'm playing plays at 30FPS and has serious sound issues due to sound playing at normal and video rendering at half the speed.

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Varies with games and if you run it on a potato it won't work properly no matter what you do. You can try setting it in software mode instead of hardware and play around with the speedhacks. There are still games which I can barely run and I'm on a high-end machine, it's simply that the PCSX2 devs still didn't find a way to properly make the game work. looking at you games made by Snowblind If talking about ace combats, there are weird issues when I try to play them, I can either run them full speed with glitches or 40fps without glitches.

Oh, so software is the way to go with the render settings?
The first game I ran to try and make it work was Black, which gave me a headache, and only after 2 hours of testing did I find out that Black is an absolute nightmare to emulate on rigs built just last year.

Thanks for that, hopefully I get something playable.

Some games work better using software, yes. The difference between ace combat 5 reactions is exactly that, if I use hardware, I get glitches but 60fps, software 40 fps but no glitches or vice versa, it's been so long that I don't remember quite well. Either way I just gave up and plugged my PS2 back again if I want to play that particular game. I also know that some games simply don't work if you use the multi-threading speedhack.

the unstable git version runs like 40% faster if you can build it. I get full frames on an i7 870 on git.

Doesn't matter. Emulations is not recommended for playing PS2 games.
PCSX2 is ZSNES-tier and should be avoided.

Shit, not even. At least ZSNES can run 99% of games in a playable state.

Top 10 PS2 games:

GODHAND
Katamari Damacy
Shadow Tower Abyss
Yakuza 1&2
Contra: Shattered Soldier
Maximo 1&2
Gradius V
Klonoa 2
Chulip

No way, bro.

Could be the samefag that usually starts PS2 threads with his "Emulation is not reccomended" copypasta.

Sure, could be but then again… what if it ain't??!!

Ctrl+F showed no results for:
SSX 3
Romancing SaGa
Digital Devil Saga

Also seconding:
Bujingai
Devil Summoner
SMT 3
God Hand
DMC3
MGS3
Yakuza
Ratchet and Clank
Jak and Daxter
Dark Cloud