The Best & Worst PlayStation 2 Ports

What a blast from the past. I was lead concept artist on the PS2 version of The Force Unleashed, I’m glad it’s remembered fondly. The team poured so much love into that project. It’s fun seeing my old sky-domes too, they were so interesting to build for the PS2. You have so little to work with, it had almost a puzzle-like quality to make them look right. Thinking to yourself “Sure, this 16x16, 8 colour texture looks okay, but I can save a little more memory if I drop it 8x8 with 4 colours, then tile it along this edge and z -force it to draw behind this other texture…”. Good times. Then we reduced them even further for the PSP, along with some all-new content. It was a really rewarding project, but I’ve never been so busy in my life!

When Embracer cancels the new Deus Ex game and pretty much kills the entire series: "What a shame. It was a good franchise. What a rotten way to die."

Fun fact; gman has never actually seen the simpsons, its just his editor putting in the references.

Force Unleashed reminds me of how good the PSP version was. Basically the same as the PS2 version, but with extra content. Actually, good PSP ports would be an interesting follow-up to this.

I worked as an artist on the PSP version of Force Unleashed, Some of the PS2 maps we actually made for PSP and the other team just dropped them directly into PS2. Jedi Temple for example was made for PSP first. We also made a ton of bonus maps on PSP based on famous scenes from the films, Sad that they weren't also included in the PS2 version. Anyway at the time I was never really sure if the game was good or not, So I'm glad people liked it.

I miss the era of early 2000's gaming when video game composers would just go off and write the hardest tracks for almost no reason

Night Dive tried to do a re-release of No One Lives Forever, but gave up. It was already a mess with Night Dive unable to even figure out who owned the games, as neither Activision, Fox, nor Warner Bros ever offered any conclusive proof. But it was Warner Bros that shut everything down, flat out refusing to support any re-release while also threatening legal action if Night Dive attempted anything without their approval?

"For that last one, you're trying to sneak into a haunted museum." Seems normal. "turns out the museum is haunted." WAIT WHAT

The PS2 start-up / intro cinematic is literally the sound of my childhood.

1. The Half Life version also has the highest polygon count for models across the board and they are far more detailed, even than HL Source. 2. The saving thing is not from performance, its because PS2 Memory Cards were limited in storage and even hard to buy sometimes and people would legitimately just not save as often in some games to save money, so devs usually did not include auto saves to not flood the mem card.

I still remember buying that shitty network adapter to play Resident Evil: Outbreak. Why Capcom hasn’t brought that series back, I have no idea. 🤷‍♂️

Glad you covered the PS2 (and Wii, and PSP) version(s) of Force Unleashed. Cool part: Aspyr and Disney released that version on the Switch (with the Wii versions multiplayer), while you can still find the HD versions on XBOX BC and PC. Disney also did the same with Aladdin not long ago as well, having both the Genesis/MD version (aka the "Tommy" version) from Virgin and the SNES version (aka the "Shinji" version) by Capcom on the "Disney Classic Games Collection". If only other companies did the same, looking at you SEGA (Sonic Colors, Sonic Unleashed) and Mad Dog (Ghostbusters 09).

13:37 - having never played NOLF, both of those sets of music sound good

Yeah as a kid, the office sneaking -mission in No One Lives Forever made me quit the whole game entirely

3:28 I´m pretty sure you could still move in Deus Ex when you injured your legs, but you were forced to crawl.

sigh I guess it's time to re-install Deus Ex on my PS2 again... wait, what?

Dat PS2 intro though

In Quake 3 Revolution you fight the Vadrigar himself in the end of the game, becoming the Arena Master. Also, there was an Unreal Tournament port. That was a blast in splitscreen.

Actually X-Men Origins Wolverine came out on Nintendo Wii and not Original Xbox, it should also be noted that the psp version of star wars the force unleashed has more extra content than other versions.

The Half Life port for PS2 is pure quality. So is the Dreamcast port that was sadly cancelled. 99% of the work was done for Dreamcast and the game had gone Gold which means they had a release candidate build. Fortunately this build is very available and many have put together working ISOs of it. I've played all of Half Life on my Dreamcast and it's pretty comparable to PS2 in how much porting effort it got. it even runs just as well for the most part. They did a good job. It also got Blue Shift which was originally created for the Dreamcast release. Dreamcast is another topic for another time but devs working with it had a knack for making single sticks work well enough in shooters.