Do you miss how weird and liminal some of the games on this system were? Maybe it's because of the magical thinking of a child (I was like two when this came out but played mine every day until I was fourteen, loved that thing like a religion lol) but even the startup screen and disc read failed screen were so... Weird? Freaky? I don't know, I know there's plenty of indie games now and plenty of shovel ware on current gen but it feels different, there was a strange magic to some games on the PS2 that seems to be sort of inimical

[–] lunsjentilanette@sh.itjust.works 7 points 22 hours ago

When watching some videos from retro game youtube channels, they tend to point to how much more daring they were back then, and all new games will just safe it. New aaa games cost so much they cant fail, but then a flop was to a larger extend "meh" and move on for the studio. Guess that made some of these games feel more freaky as you say

[–] timo_timboo_@lemmy.world 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

oh definitely. Games just felt differently back then. It was rarer for games to hold your hand, too. Not to say that that was always a good thing, sometimes it was quite annoying I guess, but maybe it was part of the reason games felt different. Combined with having to find stuff out on your own, you literally were on your own, yeah.

There are many things though that make this era of gaming special, this one is just something I often think of.

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago

Omg absolutely! With the "not holding your hand" thing, I think a lot of the magic and enigmatic feeling of the PS2 games catalogue is that you'd only hear about Easter eggs, rather than knowing theyre in the game via dlc listings in storefronts or anything. They felt weird and slightly messed with understanding how big games were. Even up to Halo 3 with that weird developer monkey family and Black and White 2 where it would whisper your windows account name if you played after 10pm?

Games were just slightly hostile back then, or at least had the developer's agenda in mind rather than the marketing algorithm's

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Wow........I remember the PS2 as the console that you smoked weed when you played. I was 16 when it came out. And it was my first ever dvd player.

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Weirdly enough, I am currently smoking weed and playing Airblade on my first PS2 lol