PS2

You’re down at K-Mart or Sears, looking at all those shiny new PlayStation 2 games in the sharp glass case; which one is the lady behind the counter going to bring out for you?

In Champions of Norrath, you’re tasked with single-handedly killing the God of Hate. Now they want you to kill the God of War in the sequel. Firiona and her crew are really pretty useless, aren’t they?

Mad Maestro is a PS2 classical music rhythm game. Why would you need a PS3 to play it?

I promised myself I would work through my PS2 game backlog by playing every game at least a couple hours. First up: Star Trek Conquest.

We found ourselves once again awash in a sea of retro games. We found some winners, maybe…?

The latest updates to the PCSX2 PlayStation 2 emulator have done amazing things for its convenience and compatibility.

It’s a roguelike, it’s the next chapter in TWO long running game series… but is it any good?

So, there, it’s done. 62 hours and 22 minutes from the start to the end of the game, LucasArt’s near forgotten cinematic tactical strategy gladiatorial combat RPG defied all my expectations. The last time I blogged about Gladius, I’d just left Imperia for the Windward Steppes. That gave us the last group member, Eiji, an archer, who was more than she first appeared. But who didn’t know that? Continuing on to the Southern Expanse brought us a cutscene where one of the many evil villains dogging our steps said she would be sending someone to us who would bring us right to her, followed by a new character joining us immediately afterward. ...

After adding another hero and a minotaur to their motley crew, the Viking twins conquer the fighting pits of Imperia and set their sights windward. I just spent an hour writing a shell script to take the PNG files that PCSX2 generates for screenshots into resized, blog-friendly JPG files. I do and do and do for you all :-) (…and now I just rewrote it in Python) (…and now I asked GitHub Copilot to rewrite it for me, which it did.) (and now I just rearranged my Github folders). ...

It’s hard to get your main characters killed, but not impossible. I did it :-) Gladius trades plot for deep strategical game play, and I’m there for it. Given Gladius is from LucasArts, known for deeply cinematic games, I expected there to be a little more plot in the twin stories of two Vikings, or an Imperial gladiator, who build their gladiator schools from scratch until they are large enough to challenge the emperor’s best fighters. ...