First Impressions: PS2 Games

I tend to play a lot of games at once, and recently I’ve been sampling the start of many different games just to keep myself fresh and avoid getting bored with any particular game I’m playing. It also helps that I recently got ethernet streaming set up for my PS2 and have a much wider set of games available for myself. Although I have a list of titles that I’m closer to finishing and will be focusing on those for the time being, here’s some early impressions of a few under-the-radar titles that I know I’ll be returning to in the future.

Yanya Caballista: City Skater

The tutorial of Yanya Caballista: City Skater, showing how to skate forward. [src]

I was hoping that this one would capture some kind of Jet Set Radio idea for me, but it being produced by shmup powerhouse CAVE is reason enough to give it a courtesy try. The game hints at having a normal control scheme buried somewhere but as far as I could gather you’re stuck using its batshit “peripheral”-assisted scheme instead, where you lay a fingerboard across the analog sticks and hold the controller vertically. One thumb on the top (right) stick and one thumb on the bottom (left) stick… if you thought this would amount to any nuance in how you control your skater, you may be disappointed. The whole thing boils down to clicking the nose to turn in place, clicking the tail to ollie, pushing the whole board (or both sticks) forward to push, and moving it side to side to turn. In the air you get three moves you can chain – a spin, a grab, and a flip – and each one simply corresponds to either clicking one of the sticks or pushing them in opposite directions.

Clearing each level involves finding aliens throughout an area and “attacking” them with tricks; there’s variations for each alien that dictate the range the player must do the trick in and what tricks will damage the alien. As far as I’ve played the aliens seem static, so the primary obstacle is making sure you maximize your trick (get as much air time as possible and start the trick immediately) and getting to the alien in the first place if they’re up high or off some rail. I’m a little concerned at this point that scoring favors milking the extremely simple trick system over and sort of timing/routing, but we’ll see as I get further in, especially in case hard mode alters anything.

Red Ninja: End of Honor

Kurenai latches onto one enemy with the tetsugen while another swings his sword. [src]

Quickest thing that pops out here for me in this Acquire-esque stealth title is the main character Kurenai’s garrote weapon (called a tetsugen in-game). The player can latch on to an enemy with it and then pull it taut to sever other enemies. It immediately sets up these linear crowd control lanes that I’m always a fan of instead of the usual blobs, and there’s actually some modeling of the cord physics, where players can loop the tetsugen around objects in the environment to change the dimensions of the hitbox. This gives the player the ability to actually snag an enemy, wrap the tetsugen around a tree, and run it back to the original latch point, severing the enemy in two in the process with a lovely spray of gibs. The downside of this is that the range of the tetsugen gives a considerable amount of safety to the player on top of the crowd control, and in a game attempting to be a stealth-driven adventure, this eliminates the danger of getting caught even on hard. From another perspective, the dynamic it adds to combat helps make the limp attempt at stealth less egregious; why bother with the Mario 64-esque analog sneaking to get a single-button takedown combo on idiotic cycle-based guards when you can decapitate three of them at once in open combat? Curious if it’ll evolve past this push-and-pull as I move further in or if it will stick with running past legions of enemies on rooftops and crassly “seducing” lone guards to instantly kill them.

Astro Boy

Those buildings are actually modeled, and you can fly to them if you wish! But yes, these ring missions are present. [src]

Sega grabbed this license around the time of the 2003 anime reboot and got a couple games out of it; arcade action heads surely know Treasure and Hitmaker’s Astro Boy: Omega Factor on Game Boy Advance but may have missed this larger-scale rendition by Sonic Team. And larger-scale undersells it; as soon as you get out into the open Metro City you’ll find an absolutely incredible draw distance, with massive buildings dwarfing the dimunitive titular hero stretching off in every direction. Of course, this comes at a cost, namely that Metro City is more or less a glorified hub for pocket-sized missions in smaller locales, and that even with this restriction the frame rate frequently nosedives. If you want a little something to do, there’s some Superman 64 ring missions for you… I’ve been sticking to the regular missions. Beyond that, the game feels like many contemporary superhero open world titles, giving the player a bevy of abilities in a tech-limited open world with heavily scripted missions taking up the majority of the runtime. Gravity Rush also strongly comes to mind, especially with combat that early on devolves into a similar “lock on and bash yourself against the enemy” loop. Each mission early on gives Astro a new ability to play with, although I haven’t seen it require anything that actually weaves the abilities together. Abilities are limited by meter that refills… not super interesting. Interested to see where it continues to go with the premise though, as I’m not averse to a fun little setpiece-driven title once in a while.