Category: PS2

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What we’ve been unwrapping – Christmas Day edition

25th December

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week it’s all about Christmas presents and video game memories we associate with the festive season – what we’ve unwrapped, gifted, or otherwise been somehow involved with at Christmas time over the years.

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.

A pop star and Need For Speed: Underground 2, PS2

NFS: Underground 2 has been modded to look nothing like the original game.Watch on YouTube

I don’t think I have any amazing Christmas memories that are tied to video games I received. Most of my video game gifts as a child were on my birthday, just a couple of months earlier, but I do have a couple of lovely memories of giving the gift of video games.

My son, cursed to be obsessed with video games like his father (me), was surprised with a Switch and a bunch of games five years ago. In classic video game tradition we did the whole “And one more thing” reveal, and he was obviously over the moon. Lucky so and so.

Of more interest to you, reader, though, is likely the time I gave a copy of Need for Speed: Underground 2 on PS2 to a cousin who would go on to be a UK chart-topping pop star in the early 2010s. I say cousin… the family relationship is a little more complicated than that, but I’m going with it.

Happy Christmas, everyone! Let me know if you have given a present to someone famous.

-Tom O

Can you beat the joy of Zelda at Christmas?

An illustration for Zelda game Majora's Mask, with hero Link standing close to the viewer holding Majora's Mask over half of their face.

I haven’t asked for any games this year – the curse of being a games journalist is that there’s usually precious few gaps in your library by year-end – but I will likely be playing varying degrees of NYT Sudoku this holiday, as well as finally tackling Star Wars Outlaws. For reasons even I’m not wholly sure about, that’s the big blockbuster from this year that’s calling out to me the most at the moment. Not Dragon Age. Not Silent Hill 2. It’s Star Wars, of all things. Though with a lot of travelling between families this week, I will likely load up my Steam Deck with a bunch of great indie games I’ve missed this year as well. Top of the pile? UFO 50.

I haven’t even given many games as presents this year – just Unicorn Overlord for my younger brother, as he’s already decked out with most of this year’s major RPG fare, which is his go-to genre these days. If there was a new Zelda or Xenoblade just out, those might have been good presents for my two older brothers – and yes, Echoes of Wisdom was in contention at one point. Then I discovered my younger brother already has it, so there’s a very good chance they’ll have just borrowed his copy instead due to our ancient family law of never ever double-buying anything (which I willfully ignore all the damn time, mostly because I just live much further away from all of them).

I do love getting a big Nintendo game for Christmas, though, and Zelda games at Christmas has always a bit of a personal treat for me – apart from the time I got Twilight Princess for the Wii for Christmas, but no actual Wii to play it on because I didn’t ask my parents to pre-order one in time and so had to wait three more months before I finally had a Wii to call my own and play the damn thing. The less said about that, the better, really. But I still can’t forget the sheer joy and excitement I felt unwrapping Majora’s Mask in the Christmas of 2000. It wasn’t just that it had a special gold cartridge. It was because it was all mine – a present for me, and not something I had to borrow from my brothers. Most of our other console games up until that point were all shared between us, but Majora’s Mask was finally something I could call my own – something they had to borrow from me this time, if they wanted to play it (which they didn’t really, in the end, as my older brothers were off to university at that point). But cor, I really did love that little gold cartridge. Steam credit just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?

-Katharine

A Christmas Dream(cast)

The first time I saw Sonic in full 3D on a Dreamcast I was astounded. Though I grew up on the original Sonic Mega Drive games, I shifted to Nintendo for the N64 and fell in love with Zelda instead. But once the Dreamcast was released my heart was all a flutter as my beloved blue blur was chased by an orca whale, running around vibrant, rollercoaster-like levels in proper realistic graphics, not just a side-scrolling pixel.

I never actually owned a Dreamcast, though. I had friends who did and I distinctly remember Soul Calibur sessions after school, taking turns on Crazy Taxi, and one particular all-nighter at a house party playing Sonic Adventure from start to finish. Yet once the GameCube was announced – and subsequently swept up a load of previously Dreamcast-exclusive games (Sonic Adventure 2 and Skies of Arcadia specifically) – the dream was cast aside.

That’s why my partner and I have decided to gift ourselves a Dreamcast this year – the one console neither of us have owned. And then we’re going to scour second hand shops for all those iconic titles. I can finally play the likes of Shenmue and Jet Set Radio. I can kick his arse at Power Stone. I’ll have an excuse to play Skies of Arcadia again. And, no doubt, I’ll play Sonic Adventure once more and remember how it’s a bit crap actually but I still love it regardless. Christmas is all about nostalgia, after all. Which games should I catch up on?

-Ed

A flaming hot Christmas (Spyro 2: Season of Flame – Game Boy Advance SP)

Unwrapping the Spyro 2: Season of Flame cartridge for my shiny pink Game Boy Advance SP is a vivid memory I have of a christmas in the early 2000’s. My sibling and I sat on the floor underneath the tree unwrapping presents to christmas music while my very tired mum (that we got up at the crack of dawn) sat on the sofa excitedly watching our reactions to each gift we were fortunate enough to get. Then, it happened, I had Spyro 2: Season of Flame in my little hands – one of my first Game Boy games. I still remember ripping the paper off and seeing the iconic purple dragon adorning the case.

To this day, if I’m in need of a comfort game that’s not Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing, I’ll always hop back to Season of Flame. The gist was to hop across realms through portals to get back the missing Fireflies and having to navigate different themed areas. Candy Lane in Celestial Plains was themed around sweet treats, Moon Fondue in Starry Planes felt like you were on another world with the green sponge-like rocks around you, and (my personal favourite) Tiki Tropics in Sunny Plains where you feel like you’re battling your foes in paradise.

It was a pivotal game in my childhood as it was also one of the first ones I finished. I vividly remember the moment I clocked you could use different breath types to stop enemies: Ice Breath to freeze Rhynocs to make it easier to charge them, Lightning breath to bring machinery to life, and it wouldn’t be Spyro without flames! My little mind was blown that Spyro could now do all these things.

Also, this could have easily been my first experience with playing different characters in a game’s universe. There were levels where you could play as a Kangaroo called Sheila, Captain Bird, and Agent 9 (whose levels were ones that really tested my patience – and still do.) At this time, being able to play as anyone other than the main character blew my little mind and was the coolest thing on the planet.

But, the above are just the minor reasons this game has stuck in my memories since getting it all those Christmases ago.

The reason this Season of Flame is such a fond christmas memory is that, as I was only young, I did find some of the levels tricky and I just remember sitting beside my sibling after christmas dinner while they taught me what to do. From using Spyro’s glide and hover ability to get to platforms far away or how to outsmart the Rhynoc playing ice hockey, these are just a few of multiple moments my older sibling helped me get through. Learning to beat the game was, indeed, awesome but having that time just sitting together and being shown what to do to someone who was, frankly, the coolest person ever, has played a huge part in my video game journey and taste has been one of my favourite gaming christmas memories to date – and I’m playing it again this year!

-Marie

That’s us done of the year, but we’ve got plenty of Game of the Year articles to come. Please do share your video games at Christmas stories in the comments, and we hope you’ve had a great holiday.

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Reappraising Shadow the Hedgehog, one of 2005’s biggest misfires

The day was 8th March 2005. The event: the inaugural Walk of Game celebration, in which gaming icons Mario, Link, Sonic and Master Chief were recognised for their contributions to the industry. Sonic even got a nice trailer showcasing his most glorious exploits since his inception in 1991.

As the video wrapped up, no one could have predicted what happened next. Shots of classic 2D Sonic were suddenly riddled with bullet holes. The screen, full of happy memories, was shattered, revealing a morose Shadow the Hedgehog – and this hog was packing heat. The footage that followed featured Shadow running, jumping and bouncing around environments similar to previous 3D Sonic games, with one not-so-subtle new feature: guns. Laser guns, machine guns, pistols, you name it. And Shadow wasn’t afraid to use them to blow the game’s alien enemies away. No, this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke, a hallucination or a mod by an angry prepubescent wishing their colourful cartoon mascot would grow up and start handling his problems like an adult. This was a legitimate Sonic Team-developed game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise featuring firearms, and it was coming that holiday season – whether we liked it or not.

Watch on YouTube

I vividly remember the myriad questions that ran through my teenage mind on first seeing the trailer. Why did this game exist? Who signed off on this utterly pants idea? A solo Shadow game wasn’t far-fetched by any means – his surge in popularity after his debut in Sonic Adventure 2 was undeniable. But why take the Sonic series down the same dark, edgy road other franchises like Jak and Daxter and Prince of Persia had already trodden?

To answer those questions meant looking at the paradigm shift the video game industry was undergoing at the time. Dark, brooding anti-heroes were all the rage in the early-to-mid 2000s. Colourful mascot platformers had been unceremoniously shoved off their pedestal as the dominant gaming genre by first- and third-person shooters – perhaps most notably by the Halo series. US gamers in particular were flocking to the genre in droves, and it was to that group that scenario writer and director Takashi Iizuka sought to appeal to with Shadow. At the same time, Iizuka made it clear that the game’s mission was to expand the Sonic franchise for a more mature audience without alienating the existing fanbase. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite pan out as Iizuka envisioned.

Shadow the Hedgehog runs through Westopolis in Shadow the Hedgehog (2005).
Image credit: Fandom/Sega

The story opens with an amnesiac Shadow wandering the city outskirts, struggling to remember the secrets to his past that have eluded him since first being awakened in Sonic Adventure 2. As luck would have it, the one person who can answer his questions appears right in front of him at that exact moment: the evil alien Black Doom, who claims to have ties to Shadow and will divulge what he knows if Shadow gathers the Chaos Emeralds for him. The thing is, Black Doom is also trying to conquer the planet with his alien forces known as the Black Arms, leaving Shadow with a huge moral quandary on his hands.

That’s where arguably the most interesting aspect of the game comes into play: Shadow’s morality system. Does he fight for the planet and fend off the alien invaders, side with the Black Arms in their conquest, or barrel ahead without paying heed to the conflict at all? Each level allows players to decide for themselves. In the opening stage Westopolis, for instance, you can gun down the soldiers repelling the alien invasion, save the city by taking out the aliens, or remain neutral and simply race to the end of the level. Your chosen path dictates which level you tackle next. It’s up to the player to determine whether they want to go pure hero, pure villain, stay neutral, or bounce around like a morally confused pinball depending on their mood.

An advert for Shadow the Hedgehog, featuring Shadow growling while holding a large gun in front of an explosion. The ad says players can decide if he's a hero or villain.
Magazine adverts for Shadow the Hedgehog also played up the game’s morality system. | Image credit: MobyGames

Eventually, you’ll reach one of the game’s ten initial endings, ranging from Shadow decimating the planet’s military, beating up Black Doom, deciding to take over the world himself, or a variety of paths in between. All in all, there are a whopping 326 different pathways you can take to clear the game. While only the most hardcore fans are likely to try, you have to admire Sonic Team’s dedication.

However, the story doesn’t stop there. While you’re free to play through the game once and call it quits, it’s only by unlocking all ten initial endings that the final story becomes available. There is a canon ending, and – spoiler alert – at the end of the day, Shadow’s a brave-hearted hero. Well, anti-brave-hearted hero, anyway. You won’t see Sonic shooting an alien in the face with a machine gun anytime soon.

Speaking of, let’s delve deeper into its weapons-based combat. At its most basic, Shadow the Hedgehog plays like the 3D Sonic titles that preceded it; Shadow can run, jump, home in on enemies, and even engage in fisticuffs when his hands are free. Unlike previous Sonic games, however, upon defeating an enemy, Shadow can commandeer their weapons for his own use, including a wide variety of guns, swords, hammers, spears and grenade launchers. Players who recoil at the thought of using weapons in a Sonic game can finish the adventure without ever touching them, though they are significantly more effective at clearing out enemies than your standard homing attack – undoubtedly an intentional move by the developers to encourage their use. It’s easy to argue that the ultimate lifeform using a weapon is as redundant as Sonic driving a car – to say nothing of the silliness of the concept – but from a gameplay perspective, the implementation is competent enough.

Shadow the Hedgehog attacks an enemy on a road with a gun in Shadow the Hedgehog (2005).
Image credit: IGN/Sega

The game’s edginess goes beyond firearms, though. Keeping with the more mature tone, the developers allowed the characters to drop their filters and belt out some salty language. You’re not going to hear the characters you’ve known and loved for years dropping F-bombs (though the game did initially feature some stronger language, according to Shadow’s voice actor Jason Griffith), but there is mild profanity throughout, mostly by Shadow himself. Of course, it’s debatable whether it makes the game edgier or simply more meme-able. The alien enemies also bleed when hit, though their blood was changed from red to green to keep the game’s rating down. It’s relatively tame compared to many games in this day and age, but it was still certainly jarring to see in a Sonic the Hedgehog game nonetheless.

So, then comes the million-dollar question. Taking everything into consideration, is Shadow the Hedgehog a good game?

As someone who grew up with Sonic from the very beginning and was completely taken aback when Shadow’s solo title was announced, it’s… fine. Like, surprisingly fine. Was it a dumb idea? Absolutely. Was it a blatant attempt at cashing in on the dark and edgy game craze? Almost certainly. Was it executed decently despite all this? I personally lean toward yes, but ‘decent’ is about the highest praise I can give it.

Plenty of Sonic games are still widely discussed by the community and greater internet decades after release, for better or worse. Sonic 06. Unleashed. Colours. Beyond the occasional meme, Shadow isn’t one of them. Even Sonic Team itself tend to gloss over the game; the only legal way to play it is by purchasing a used copy for sixth generation consoles, and official references that aren’t outright mocking it are rare to non-existent.

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Watch on YouTube

That’s part of what makes the recently-released Sonic X Shadow Generations, and the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 film, so significant. For the first time since Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Team is taking a deep dive back into the character’s rich but troubled history as part of its broader Year of Shadow celebration. We even get to witness the unexpected return of Black Doom, undoubtedly a past version of the character brought about via the game’s time travel shenanigans.

Just as Shadow must once again confront his ugly past, so too is Sonic Team bravely acknowledging one of its biggest misfires in the hopes it can find something worth salvaging. While I doubt the new Shadow-centric story campaign is going to retroactively sway public opinion in favor of his original solo outing, it is nevertheless a potent reminder that, despite its laughable concept and numerous shortcomings, Shadow the Hedgehog did have some cool ideas.

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DF Weekly: Silent Hill 2 patched on PS5 Pro – and PSSR is gone from the performance mode

The arrival of a new working week can be pretty bleak, but hey – at least you have a brand new edition of DF Direct Weekly to watch or listen to. Despite the colossal workload we have, there’s a huge amount of discussion this week – from an extended chat about the strengths and weaknesses of Sony’s PSSR upscaling through to a look at Assassin’s Creed Syndicate‘s 60fps patch and some quick impressions on the new PlayStation Portal update.

This Direct is longer than usual, because Bloober Team released a patch for Silent Hill 2 on PS5 Pro after filming, aimed at improving graphical problems – described in depth in Tom Morgan’s coverage last week. So, has the game improved? The answer is yes, but it seems that the route forward was simply to roll back on PSSR support, dropping back to Epic’s TSR upscaler – in the 60fps mode at least. PSSR remains in effect in the 30fps quality mode, so that’s still presenting some issues.

Let’s recap on the issues as they stood with patch 1.05. In providing Pro support, Bloober Team shifted from the use of Epic’s ‘in house’ upscaling solution – TSR (temporal super resolution) in favour of Sony’s machine learning based alternative, PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution). In image quality terms, while PSSR has some advantages, they were significantly outweighed by the negatives – intrusive flickering in Lumen reflections, inconsistent global illumination and general ‘noise’ problems. Disocclusion issues were also problematic, with objects noticeably leaving visual artefacts when the camera moved. We went as far as to say that the Pro version of Silent Hill 2 looked worse than the standard PS5 version as a consequence.

Got 160 minutes or so spare to hear about the latest gaming and technology news? DF Direct Weekly #190 is just for you.Watch on YouTube
  • 0:01:05 News 1: PS5 Pro PSSR issues analyzed
  • 0:29:50 News 2: Silent Hill 2 patch tested: PSSR dropped!
  • 0:39:02 News 3: STALKER 2 suffers launch woes
  • 0:51:04 News 4: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate gets current-gen patch
  • 1:02:23 News 5: Sony in talks to acquire From Software
  • 1:12:34 News 6: PlayStation Portal updated with cloud streaming support
  • 1:22:57 News 7: Callisto Protocol PS5 Pro patch released!
  • 1:32:36 Supporter Q1: Are there any Nvidia graphics cards for $400 or less that are good deals?
  • 1:42:29 Supporter Q2: When there are glaring performance issues in a game, what do you chalk them up to?
  • 1:50:24 Supporter Q3: Why do games often offer so many console modes when one of them is clearly optimal?
  • 1:57:13 Supporter Q4: Are you feeling Unreal Engine 5 fatigue?
  • 2:01:29 Supporter Q5: Will Microsoft bring Xbox backwards compatibility to PC?
  • 2:10:39 Supporter Q6: Which vaporware is better: Blast Processing or “the power of the cloud”?

Bloober Team’s solution for this problem is pretty straightforward – to roll back on the PSSR support in the lower resolution performance mode, re-introducing TSR. In using this strategy, the game now reverts to the kind of image quality seen on the standard PlayStation 5 version of the game – and that’s absolutely fine. We can’t rule out dynamic resolution but it seems that performance mode is upscaling from something in the region of 1008p. There is a small frame-rate advantage over the standard PlayStation 5 rendition of the game, but it’s not as big as expected – just a few fps higher. Perhaps this is explained by the standard PS5 running at 900p, with Pro operating with an improved pixel count.

Beyond that, there’s not much to tell the two versions of the game apart – they look quite similar. That said, there does seem to be a change in the way global illumination presents on the new patch – it looks significantly lighter than it does on the standard PlayStation 5. It’s difficult to tell whether that’s intentional or not but it’s only really noticeable via direct A to B comparisons.

All of which leaves us with the quality mode, which is in a very strange place right now. We can’t discern much in the way of differences against the existing 1.05 code, meaning that PSSR is still in place and all of the existing problems we’ve documented are unchanged. What this also means is that – perversely – the image quality of the performance mode now using TSR is significantly better than the 30fps quality mode. That’s a somewhat stark appraisal of the situation, but it is what it is. We hope that Bloober Team have effectively triaged Silent Hill 2 – prioritising a fix for the performance mode in terms of the distracting PSSR issues, with further optimisations to come. We’d like to see the frame-rate dips in the performance mode fully addressed and image quality fixed on the 30fps quality mode.

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The discussion with Silent Hill 2 is our second news story of the week, with a 28 minute chat on PSSR taking point as the lead topic. While Silent Hill 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor have exhibited what we’d describe as egregious PSSR problems and shouldn’t have shipped in the state they did, it’s clear that there are a number of games where the technology is not delivering as it should. The idea is basically to see PSSR replace FSR 2 or Epic’s TSR as the upscaler of choice, where the problems are manifest – especially at lower resolution. Now, to be clear, PSSR is capable of some excellent results, as you’ve seen in our coverage over the weeks, but there are clearly problems.

In upscaling from resolutions under 1080p, there are image quality issues – as seen in Alan Wake 2, for example. However, we’ve also seen challenges when certain ray tracing effects are plumbed into PSSR. Again, Silent Hill 2 and Jedi Survivor bear mention, but Dragon’s Dogma 2 is also presenting very noticeable issues – and has done since its debut at Sony’s gameplay press event a while back. Looking back now, it’s interesting to note that of all the problematic titles we’ve seen so far, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was the only one that made it through to the hands-on events.

So, what happens now? Bloober Team has put out what you might call a mitigation for the issues in Silent Hill 2, while Respawn says it is aware of the issues with Jedi: Survivor – as you’d hope bearing in mind how glaringly obvious they are. However, on a more general level, we need to accept that in entering the machine learning upscaling space, Sony is taking on industry juggernauts like Nvidia and indeed Intel, both of whom have shipped accomplished solutions. Up against DLSS, PSSR is up against best-of-the-best technology, iterated on over years by some of the most experienced, talented engineers in the business.Some might say that PSSR accomplishing what it has in a first generation product is a good achievement – and a great foundation for the updates to offer.

That said, it’s clear right now that PSSR in its current state requires careful integration – and it can’t be seen as a ‘fire and forget’ solution to FSR, no matter how much we might want it to be. Sony will almost certainly get to the point where PSSR becomes a must-use foundational technology for PS5 Pro and whatever comes next, but this is just the start of the process.