The PS2 games I got recently

A list of the PS2 games I got recently:

Guitar Heroes 2 (RedOctane): A really good music game (not from Konami’s legendary Bemani series) that allows players to mimic playing a guitar instruments to 50+ songs. The song list is very good, and much fun to be had with the proper Guitar Hero SG controller which has a pluck device and 5 colored buttons to mimic the playing of the…. errr… guitar. However, the game sucks while playing on a PS2 controller, so I am desperately hunting for the Guitar Hero SG controller now. My rating: 8/10.

Final Fantasy XII (Square Enix): A very nice story, a new battle system plus loads of new features. With impressive graphics to boot and many hours of explorations and story to get to, this will take a long time to finish. That all I can say about it, as I have not played it long enough to tell much more. My rating: 9.5/10.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent (Ubisoft): Love this game, loved the new things Sam Fisher (the protagonist) can do and love the retained old features. The graphics are improved and taxes the PS2 to the limit. I am currently playing this game most of my time, wanting to finish it before going on to other games. My rating: 10/10.

Phantasy Star Universe (Sega): Good looking game, but rehashes the old gameplay from the series. Not much time spent on this game either. My rating: 6.5/10.

Need For Speed: Carbon (EA): Similar graphics as the previous NFS entry, at least to my eyes. I hated the speed trails animations added to the cars to simulate speed, looks cheap for a non increase in actual speed animation. The actual racing game is good, with the added Drift races which is a blast to play. My rating: 8/10.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (Activision): A symmetrical top down view beat-em-up game, with control of one member in a team of 4 within the Marvel comics’ universe of superheores. You can change team members on the fly to take advantage of the individual prowess. Nice graphics and bash-em-up type of gameplay, although it will get repetitive with later levels. My rating: 7/10.

Bully (Rockstar Games): Rockstar’s latest sandbox game, but on a much smaller scale. Revolves around a problematic boy and his days spent in a lived-in high school, it’s been called “GTA in a high school setting”. Again, not much time spent on this yet, will be digging deeper into the game actual when I complete Sam Fisher’s missions. My rating: 9/10.

The Sopranos: Road to Respect (THQ): Based on the hit HBO series, you play a fictional character, Big Pussy’s son, and work to climb your way up Tony’s family. I just got this game recently, so has not played much of it. But from what I have, there’s good but jerky-at-times graphics, mission based gameplay (go here, fetch this, do this type of missions). My rating: 8/10.

Scarface: The World is Yours (Vivendi Games): Similar to GTA, The Sopranos: Road to Respect – sandbox type of game. Also have not spent much time to review this game. My rating: 8/10.

There you have it, a list of some of the latest PS2 games I have managed to get my hands on. I am planning to do a longer review for some of the games, maybe for the future entries.

Have a good weekend.