Games That Push the Limits of the PlayStation 2
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
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The PS2, the daddy, the biggest selling console of all time!
More limits pushing thrills and there's so many amazing games to choose from on this console, but I have a feeling this list won't have too many surprises.
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Games Featured:
00:00 Intro and GTA San Andreas
07:33 Gran Turismo 4
13:00 God of War 2
15:14 Okami
19:00 Burnout Dominator and Metal Gear Solid 3
20:43 Shadow of the Colossus - Ігри
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Not sure on okami okami, but cel shading on old fixed pipeline systems you do by using an 1D texture to map the lighting. you have this line with the two or three tones, and you use the light calculated normally to pick where on the texture that vertice is, and by the power of UV interpolation etc.. you get cartoony shading. now the lines if i'm not mistaken are made by drawing another copy of the object but slightly bigger, totally black and with the triangles of the back being drawn instead of the ones on the front.
2nd!
Sharopolis, you never cease to amaze me.
American rapper endorsing Chinese made junk is the definition of outsourcing. Don't resort to lying to put food on your table
play NFS PRO Street's in my ps2 lagging game and the map takes time to carry was unfeasible for me to play very low FPS, there was something of RTX sparkles but the unfolding was bad had the 50001
one word: dankpods
I remember turning on gta3 for the first time after having played a whole sunmer of the top down gta2. It was if my dreams of what the game could be had all been realized
Same here. I was blown away by the 3D world of GTA III including actual curved corners and not just right angles. But one moment I'll always remember I was doing a vigilante mission and chasing down a minivan, I can't remember if it was a Moonbeam or a Blista (before the Blista became a compact in other GTA games). I was up past Marco's Bistro heading towards the mafia house. Just as the target reached the left hand corner to head downhill, I managed to tap the rear bumper of the car with my cruiser and it was just enough momentum to send the van into a wide left arc, not getting any grip, and nosedived into the houses on the left-hand side. After that, being top-heavy, the van then rolled downhill until it reached the first level cross junction where it stopped on it's roof and immediately caught fire. The driver just about got out but got unalived by the van's explosion.
I was floored. Didn't need to do anything after that initial tap. It was glorious. 😁
This though. Even though I had been following preview articles with screenshots in magazines, when I finally played it and gameplay started, I thought I was still in a cutscene. I couldn't believe it was actual gameplay that could look that good.
GTA 2 was also my first GTA
I skipped gta3 since I thought it looked dumb and took away the from stylistic theme of top down gta. It just wasn't ready.
Right? I played GTA and GTA 2 and my friends and I were always talking about how a 3D version of that could look like in the future. Then, after years of dreaming about it, when it finally was a reality, I was shocked how much it was like what we hoped for. You could really feel that the developers must have been like us in the past, dreaming about that game and how it would look like until they could finally realize their ideas.
Speaking about limits being pushed, another good candidate is Silent Hill 3. The quality of the character models, and their faces in particular, is still incredible - if you have a look at various blind let's plays, you'll find people getting amazed because of the character details, especially where compared to other contemporaries.
silent hill 2 also
Also a great example of real-time shadow maps, even projected on characters, which was rare at the time.
You can thank Final Fantasy X for that.
@@thegamerfe8751Huh, really? Did FFX pioneer tech that Konami then used, or something?
@@goranisacson2502 I wouldn't say tech since I don't really know but FFX was pretty much the first console game to have really good looking character models that still look good to this day, it was released in 2001 btw.
I guess other developers wanted to have FFX character models quality.
When I worked at a game developer one of the coders ripped open gran turismo 4 to find out how some of it worked. You should find the reflections are cube maps. They update for the different mesh sectors of the track. A trick still used to this day.
I believe most environment textured were black and white or at least a single 8 bit channel with vertex couloirs providing the colour data rather than using an RGB texture.
I think the 'glossy' floors might also be a pair of geometry layers. The bottom one white/glossy with the dark material on top using a alpha channel to let the 'sheen' shine through
another effective thing is the use of phototextures in general. Almost every texture is from a photographed source vs something made by a designer.
That's a really interesting texturing technique, I wonder how much of an optimisation it is over fully coloured textures.
When i was a kid i was dumbfounded to realize that floor reflections are usually just the original room copied upside down with a partially see-through floor when i started getting really into glitching out of the map in tony hawk games
@@micshaz to this day I'm dumbfounded by how Hitman 2, contracts, and blood money on ps2 did reflections as they do them on rooms with other rooms next door. meaning its not the usual trick from the era of doubling the room.
@@billycausey4277or it probably is, but rooms outside the immediate one are culled (not drawn) so they can occupy the same space.
Failing that they could render the mirror scene separately and draw it in place of polygon materials marked as mirror in the main viewport
Some guys have mentioned Black and there's no denying that game looked amazing on PS2. Personally I have a soft spot for Gran Turismo 3. Sure, GT4 looked even better but, for me, nothing really beats seeing GT3 in action on a high quality SONY 32" crt tv back in the day. Absolutely glorious!
A man of culture, I always found GT3 to be much more visually impressive, especially for the time. Stellar art direction and a much closer chase cam give it the advantage. Trial Mountain in GT3 with the cool green colors and the light rays through the trees is something I'll never forget.
GT3 is both the source of my fondest memories and my most traumatic gaming experience. I had spent hundreds of hours building up a massive collection of _precisely_ tuned vehicles, with everything from gear ratios to LSD tweaked in detail to my exact liking, as any GT player would. These were my pride and joy, and of course I enjoyed showing them off to other players. But then one day I let my girlfriend's little brother and my roommates play on my save... and they proceed to sell all my cars in order to buy one random race car that they thought "looked cool," not realizing that the game automatically saved their decisions. Those hundreds of hours. Gone.
It took me about fifteen years before I ever touched another GT game.
I feel like Final Fantasy 12 deserves a mention here. There's a lot of high res textures in that game, huge open areas with lots of detail, npcs, and great looking water.
GT4 is even more incredible when you consider that it also did what it did smoothly at 1080i, which yeah, is kind of a trick since it’s really 540p, but most players didn’t even have access to progressive scan TVs in the first place!
As for missed games, I can’t believe Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner isn’t on here- resolution aside, it still holds up, with two HD remasters as proof 💕
The PS2 really is an amazing machine. I'll always remember how exciting its release was, and all of the joy it brought me. It was the perfect console.
Crazy that 2 of the games on the list (GTA and Burnout) used the Renderware game engine that EA bought and than immediately abandoned. To this day it makes no sense why they forced all their devs to use FrostBite when it was the least moddable engine that they had. Renderware was used for every genre during the PS2 days from FPS (Black), open world (GTA), racing (Burnout), JRPG (Persona 3 & 4) etc.
burnout 3 and later apparently had entirely new rendering engines and not stock renderware
Not quite - RenderWare is a render engine, a very good one, but it did not handle logic, which is why renderware games feel so different between eachother, each developer still had to develop their in house logic/scripting engine for actual game logic
Frostbyte does everything, which is why its games feel similar, even if they themselves are completely different one to another
the upside to ea is lower cost of development per game, as dice Sweeden and LA take care of the engine, and everybody else focuses on the actual game scripting/development
@@antoniocesarscartezzini The devs outside of dice had to takeout most of that stuff except the renderer. Also frostbite was missing many features that devs in other studios needed. For example, Bioware was forced to use FrostBite on Mass Effect Andromeda. Frostbite did not have any rpg gameplay mechanics which Bioware had to add. Most obviously FrostBite's animation system was poor. So Bioware had to add a whole new animation system, which is why the facial animations were so poor.
The dumbest example is that frostbite really cannot really do 3rd person correctly. So the devs of Need for speed had to mount a car model on top of where the gun is supposed to be to represent the car. They also had to completely get rid of the physics engine because it was incompatible with how real cars handle.
Forcing Frostbite on Visceral Games, eventually led to its closure. They were working on the single player star wars game developed by Amy Henning (creator of Uncharted and Legacy of Kain series). Again, frostbite really couldn't do 3rd person and scripted events was hard. They couldn't get the engine to work as they needed and miss deadlines, eventually EA closed them.
It's for this reason that EA games were technical nightmares during the PS4/Xbone era. Now EA is more lenient on the engines devs used. Luckily Respawn was able to use their Unreal Engine 4 for Star Wars Fallen Order and it's sequel. And EA knew the sports division do it's own thing so they always had their own engine.
@@jc_dogen Burnout 3 used Renderware 4, which Criterion would have licensed out before EA bought them. Burnout Paradise showed what the engine could have done on the PS360 era but EA pushed all devs to use FrostBite, which led to many of the technical problems that EA had during the PS4/Xbone era.
@@BurritoKingdom yeah idk, i'm just repeating what i read from one of the developers.
GTASA on the PS2 also has unique colored lighting that I don’t think any other version of the game has
It’s my favorite and also the best console ever made.
MGS2 I thought looked absolutely incredible so when I saw MGS3 I couldn't believe my eyes. I genuinely could not believe they managed to get that much detail and that many effects into a PS2 game. Genuinely a marvel.
Jak 3 was really impressive for a ps2 game. It had good graphics and no loading zones aside from dark souls type loading zones disguised as elevators.
GTA ruined Jak
The PS2 was my re-entry into the world of games after having moved on. So grateful for it and some of my favorite memories. A few games that deserve a mention: Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal was absolutely epic, as was Jak 3, and Viewttul Joe 2 was magical. Love this system. Great content.
kind of surprised that Midnight Club 3 didn't make it in. I remember that game having crazy light and shadows for a ps2 game.
Test Drive Unlimited is pretty out there - the whole island of Oahu! On the PS2! Fully modelled interiors in high detail! Functionally unlimited draw distance, and nice houses (with a few omissions from the xbox/pc, such as the honolulu flat) too.
What blew my mind when I booted it up recently is that the showrooms have accurate exterior views with traffic, while you are closely examining the interiors and exteriors of 8 or so cars in a menu.
(The roads do look a little bit shit though. The "sun on road" effect is so bad I thought it was a glitch that made the headlights shine in the daytime, until I realised it actually follows the sun. Also, there's some kind of vsync bug in 60hz mode that makes a lot of screen tearing happen in showrooms only.)
What is absolutely amazing about TDU is the fact that every patch of dirt is accurate to the actual island. I fired up Streetview once and compared a plethora of random places and they all matched up perfectly. Foliage, typography, height levels, all of it.
Yeah pretty impressive that on that one game disc you could explore the whole of Oahu with ai traffic driving around, police that would try to chase you down and arrest you, apartments you could purchase so you could store vehicles in the garages plus having over 100 different vehicles to test drive and purchase made the game pretty feature packed. Also to me having a sat nav that showed you the way to go to your next race or challenge with a voice over telling you the directions really felt like going on adventure and made the game seem pretty realistic and made you feel like you were exploring that island from the comfort of your own home!
One of the games that really impressed me on ps2 was transformers, seeing the draw distance stretch far out into the distance and some of the water effects were brilliant for the time
Man, the Transformers game went so much harder than you'd thinknit would. Tidal Wave alone...
Yeah, transformers from 2004 came out exclusively on the ps2 and it has amazing graphics, I own this game in my collection.
I'm surprised none of the Armored Cores were mentioned. To this day the PSP versions are usually the go-to for many of them, just because of how much the PS2 ones tried to do. Windows blowing out as you boost by, weather effects over ecm Jammers while keeping different views based on your head part and choices, fully custom player model with a ton of moving parts and features (from shields to fold out sections and such), on top of being a 3d shooty sandbox that kept track of things from internal heat to part destruction mechanics later on.
Not to mention the usual Fromsoft skybox porn.
They still had some of the most bland and basic environments, though. Really held them back from looking more technically impressive.
You forgot about jak and daxter 1
The unskippable cutscenes serves a purpose to render and load areas in the game to keep the game free from loading screens and fluent gameplay and for 2001 it still looks beautiful and vibrant
Yeah one of my favourite things in the first jak game was that you could see misty island from sandover village and the fact you could fully explore that place and you could go to anywhere you could see in the distance was pretty special- but for me my favourite jak and daxter game is jak 2 it’s just so cool riding the jet board around doing tricks and piloting the various hover cars around haven city
other beautiful looking games from 2001 are:
Klonoa 2
baldur's gate
ssx tricky
atv offroad fury
Splashdown
Metal gear 2
Nba street
Rayman 2 revolution
Okami uses cel-shading same as Jet Grind Radio but with setting a to make more of a inky/painterly style than cartoon style and would have probably looked even better on Dreamcast due to its antialiasing, higher resolution and colour output than the PS2 even if it pushes less polys.
The outlines in _Okami_ appear to be achieved by just adding an extra mesh of polygons around the object, painting them key-black, and telling the game to only render the triangles that would normally be facing away from the camera. Which is a decent trick but does come with limitations (look up Totalbiscuit or Jim Sterling playing _Guise of the Wolf_ to see an example of how it can go very wrong indeed). Couple that with painting some outlines directly onto the texture, similar to what _Borderlands_ and Telltale's _The Walking Dead_ did, and you're most of the way toward a hand-drawn look.
The trick was used in some Quake 3 community made models and worked in Unreal Engine 2, too (XIII used it).
Yes the "inverse hull" method, though it isn't so much about telling the game what to render, but that those polygons are literally facing inward, so the effect is rendered automatically without any special code. Okami definitely had more tricks up its sleeve though to complete the look.
I think Final Fantasy XII is one of the best looking games on PS2 and has a huge world. It looked pretty next gen.
I love your videos, some of the best and most unique retro-gaming content on UA-cam.
A completely overlooked and forgotten PS2 game with some of the craziest physics ever in a game was Psi Ops: A Mindgate Conspiracy.
One of the earliest games with true rag doll mechanics and insane graphics for the time.
Okami was seriously one of the most amazing games I ever played back then and tbh still is. Story is amazing, graphic style is gorgeous and it even has freaking replay value with super good unlockables with weapons and skins 😩🖤 ugh such a timeless untouchable classic.
In my opinion "Black" is the most limit pushing game for the PS2 by far
Yeah, game looks great and even better on Xbox, it can pass for an early X360 title.
To bad they made this game almost impossible to beat I can’t get past like level 4
Valkyrie profile 2, FF12, Soul Calibur 3, Tekken 5, Black, Odin Sphere.
Appreciating a new Sharopolis video to watch on my lunch break.
I think the Flatout racing games push the PS2 to it's limits. In those games the cars have quite detailed damage modeling, they deform and parts break off, the drivers can also come flying out, also the tracks all have like hundreds of physics objects that can collide with each other. Just the physics with the things you can collide with are so impressive for a game of that generation.
God of War 2.... What an epic mind-blowing game for the time. I still think it's a beautiful brutal experience!
I prefer God of war like this instead of the newer generation games.
TJGM did a thorough breakdown on how GTA SA's lighting works. From what I know they use textures projected onto the ground but actually cast lights onto CJ and other objects, at least with active light sources that is.
Prince of persia was insane aswell for ps2 terms.
The PS2's vector processing units are programmable, behave a lot like shaders and VPU1 can directly feed geometry to the GPU. I wouldn't be surprised if it was used to create the fur of the colossi. Other than that, having a huge, but empty game world is a no-go for me.
Pretty sure I recall it being done manually for SotC though. The fur textures are also adjusted per layer to get some flow/waviness in the effect. They also used this method for some patches of grass in the world.
Also, have you actually played the game? The world for one thing isn't that huge, but I'd also argue that it's used very well for the mood/storytelling of the game.
I wonder how many Renderware games I've played without knowing it.
Amazing engine. Burnout 3 probably my favourite, SSX 3 right up there too
I'm sad that Zone of the Ender's the 2nd Runner didn't get mentioned.
No game pushes PS2 like Gran Turismo 4 does. Just look at how the textures look when upscaled on pcsx2 compared to every other game on the console. Its actually mind boggling how great GT4 looks by simply raising the resolution. Hell...the game supported NATIVE 1080i AND 480p, and at a rock solid 60fps, in 2004!
Not native 1080i, it's upscaled from 480i.
Though it does speak volumes about Sony's amazing upscaling tech.
Okami is an impressive game that keeps delivering. On the PS3 they apparently super sampled it to 4k and output it at 1080p for more sharp visuals.
What you might want to include in any future info on God of War 2 is there's a code to unlock a high res mode. The devs left it in as a code because apparently it wasn't fully tested but, I think it lets the game output at 720p? Impressive even with Grand Turismo's 1080i output.
The American version runs at 448p with the code enabled. European SD tv broadcasts were in widescreen, and higher res than in America so the PAL version is 576i on a PS2, and 576p on backwards compatible PS3s.
I have always admired how good every Gran Turismo game looks for its time.
GTA SA still blows my mind to this day. The fact they were able to do such an ambitious game on ps2 hardware is impressive. In alot of ways its better than most open worlds today. I know in reality the map isn't large by today's standards but they managed to make it seem huge and varied with lots to do.
I forgot how insanely good Grand Turismo 4 looks. Game still looks great today.
If you squint a little it genuinely does look photorealistic. More so than most current games.
@@StraightOuttaJarhois that makes no sense, considering even the GT sequels look significantly better due to newer hardware.
@@spiral7399 most current games aren't Gran Turismo sequels.
@@StraightOuttaJarhois a lot of current games look better than GT7
@@StraightOuttaJarhois Yea you don't even make sense kidboy. Go comment something that is comprehendable 🤡
As someone whose first version of San Andreas was the Xbox version (I just played the PS2 version this year!) I must say that I prefer the look of the original PS2. Yes, the OG Xbox port runs at a better resolution and more stable framerate but they got rid of lots of light effects that really set the mood and setting. For example that orange tint/fither on when there's late on the day is completely gone, almost all the lighting looks flater and boring while the PS2 ones is warmer and cinematic.
How is Champions of Norrath not on this list? That game and its sequel Return to Arms look an entire generation ahead.
GTA SA was amazing at the time. The cars would get dirty if you kept driving them and you could wash them, bumpers would hang off after a crash. Looking back at it now the graphics look garbage, but through the lens of someone 20 years ago and played on a CRT it was basically virtual reality.
Absolutely love these videos and the presentation style.
The King Kong 2005 game should definitely also be in this list
I remember most ps2 games could survive a good bit of scratches but when it came to GTA: San Andreas, it felt like it was way more sensitive to scratches with how much data is in the game. So many of my friends had copies that you could play for the most part but stuff like the VTOL jet spawning in would crash the game.
I have 3 copies on GTA San Andreas that are too scratched, need for speed underground is another that does easily lol
Sly 3, too.
@@ethanwasme4307I never knew that if the game disc got scratched it could cause game crashes, it’s great now though that the pcsx2 emulator works really well and gta San andreas plays pretty much perfectly even all the cheats work with it
Nice, I bought my PS2 just to play GTA 3, still got it 20+ years later.
You forgot the True Crime games, they even pushed the PS2 limits due to how big the map is in both games even L.A. Rush
GTA III was the first 3D game in the series. I remember refurbishing a broken PS2 just to play it in my office. I couldn't play it in the living room on my first PS2 due to the kids. So I had to get creative. Found a kid with a broken PS2, he thought it was, he gave it to me to test out. He called me and told me his mother bought him a new one and to just keep it. I stopped by and gave him $40 and we were good. Turns out it had a bad gear in the DVD drive mechanism, and I was able to fix it. Now I had 2 of them. And everyone was happy. Until I beat the game and then I was bored again. Luckily the XBOX had come out and I was very happy with many of the games on it.
One I always felt that pushed the PS2 was Just Cause. It’s massively downscaled from the Xbox and Xbox 360 versions, toning down or removing heat haze, shadows, textures, tire tracks, framerates, reflections and the amount of foliage and tree density, but the fact they got the game running at all on the system is a miracle.
Another one is the PS2 port of Resident Evil 4. The scaling back of features to ensure it ran in the far weaker Ps2 is nowhere near as visible as they are in Just Cause - infact, at first glance the PS2 and GameCube versions are very similar, and it’s extremely playable.
Yeah I agree, I would also add Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix the fact you could run from your dorm room all the way to the bath house with no loading screens was amazing to me also the little details in that game blew my mind like the fact you could find the egg from the goblet of fire movie and just like the film could use Wingardium leviosa on it then take it to the bathroom - of course at first it makes a terrifying sound but if you filled the sink with water and dropped the egg into it you could hear the singing from the mermaids also remember it being really fun finding the invisibility cloak in your room, equipping it and going around the castle spooking the other students by running into them
I'd be interested in hearing if Odin Sphere lagged so much because it was a limit pusher, or if it was just not very well coded. It's at least pretty enough that I believe it could be a limit pusher.
Nice video. And keep up the good work, mate!
Mushroom Top Zoomers sadly have never experienced jumps in tech like we did in earlier console generations. Going from Sega Genesis to PS1 to PS2 was INSANE.
Now compare that to PS3 to PS4 to PS5.....Not really mind blowing at all.
I've always said if i want photo realism, I'll open my front door and walk outside.
I don’t know much about the technical stuff, but given the framerate, Odin Sphere certainly seems to be pushing the PS2 pretty hard, and doing it with style.
Gran Turismo 4 played on a modern LCD TV using a set of component cables looks great for a game that's nearly 20 years old. Also, using a component cable cleans up a lot of the look of most games compared with composite. God of War 2 looks awesome and supports progressive scan 480 resolution, as does GT4. In general, the graphic jump from PSX to PS2 was amazing at the time.
I agree I was stunned the first time I saw crash bandicoot wrath of cortex on the ps2 with the visual effects being used to the blocky graphics of the ps1 crash games showed how much the technology had advanced from the successor to the ps1 - I would say the ps2 has one of the best game libraries of any console such variety
@@therunawaykid6523 I actually have my slimline PS2 hooked up to my 50” LCD in the bedroom. Funny enough, this tv doesn’t have component so I had to buy a component to HDMI converter in order to play it. It may be that the converter is defective because the color rendering is awful. Using the plain component cables on my older LCD tv with actual component cables looks much much better.
There was True Crime Streets of L.A. which was more detailed in comparison to GTA San Andreas while almost as huge as GTA SA. Also there was The Getaway, Guy Richie's movies - inspired massive open-world. Nothing was said about Black, which was the most graphically impressive FPS on the platform. As for the third-person actions, there were stunning visually Primal, Ghost Hunter and Genji.
Black also pushed the console to the limit with all those effects and destructibility, brilliant game.
Great video, these games are incredible for that hardware.That Gran Turismo PS1 to PS2 comparison is a massive step up compared to GT7's PS4 vs PS5 versions. Technology is awesome.
I think Okami is just "screen space tell shading" - much like environment mapping in the older style of reflections, it's a second texture mapped onto the triangles based on normal to the screen.
Also worth noting that Shadows of the Colossus didn't come up with that layered fur shading in 2005. Star Fox Adventures on the Gamecube in 2002 also had fur shading with the same technique.
That's really interesting. I did not know that. I will take a look a that game when I get round to featuring the Game Cube.
Will never forget the first time I played the shadow of the colossus demo on the ps2 I was blown away by the scale of everything the colossus designs were amazing
Resident Evil: Dead Aim looked absolutely insane to me back in the day.
In third person mode that is. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the fps direction that game took but it was a phenomenally designed game for the PS2, graphics wise.
I think prince of Persia series is also a very excellent candidate for this list
Genji and Black are also worth mention, these two would look decent even on PS3 as launch titles. But I'm sure there is much more, you just need to remember them)
i would like more videos like this and i have been really wanting a video on how older games use tricks to make things happen, like illusions to make things seem a certain way.
Sad that Black isn't on here. That game looks like it could've been a launch ps3 game. It's still impressive to this day graphically
Resident Evil 4, even downgraded from Gamecube, was still one of the best looking PS2 games out there.
I know this is about PS2 games specifically. But one thing I remember vividly that I never see people mention, is that when GTA 3 got ported to the Xbox, I remember Game Informer gushing that the characters finally had fingers. But then for whatever reason, every subsequent Xbox port of the GTA games had stub hands again lol.
Did you know that some of these games support 480p mode? Some have it on the menu as 'progressive scan', some others require you to hold X and ∆.
By the way, Gran Turismo 4 has an HD 1080i mode, selectable in the menu.
Oh, and watch out with the widescreen. Some games actually reduce the vertical FOV in widescreen mode, reducing what you are able to see compared to 4:3 mode.
And it would have been better if games like Okami that are 4:3-only weren't stretched too.
Grand theft auto San Andreas.
I'm going to admit that I wore out three different playstation 2 fat machines disk drives on this game.
The game was pretty much constantly reading/loading the disk & there is only so much a drive can take.
Good game, completed without cheating and the fact that the world was still open after completion was the most important thing.
As I was determined to find all "tags" and one was alluding me.
Thanks for doing a well researched video :) yeah GT4 does still have some issues on the emulator but most of them are minor in the "nightly" builds (which have come a long way since 1.6 stable). I guess if I was to say other games which pushed the PS2, the Ratchet & Clank or Jak games for sure, they had a dynamic framerate much like Shadow of the Colossus but provided some very striking visuals, most of it rendered optimally by only providing the mipmap levels that it actually needed to render, so if you try to turn off mipmapping, you end up rendering junk, it's quite neat.
You forgot to mention The Getaway and Getaway black monday, it had 60 square kilometers of accurate london.
Great video, I'm rather surprised so VanillaWare titles graced the list. Perhaps they weren't as technical as I thought / remembered? Certainly were gorgeous.
YES! Again! Just when I needed a new video… :)
All I needed to know was that the actual two games that pushed the PS2-Shadow of the Colossus and God of War 2-were mentioned in particular. SotC pushed the console's open world limits, and GoW2 pushed everything else. I think it's important to underscore that the PS2 was the very last "console" console, in that it was packed with specialized hardware aimed at ensuring it could do things with graphics that no other platform on Earth could do. And GoW2 was the game that came in at the very tail end of developers maximizing said hardware, which makes it the most advanced game on the last proper console before everything became basically glorified (underpowered) PCs.
"Could do things with graphics that no other platform on Earth could do"
That was more with SEGA in the 6th gen.
Differed rendering (rendering textures only visible to the camera) has been done by 0 other consoles before or after.
Did reflective lighting (see Sonic Adventure in for this one) which was extremely early days ray tracing.
These are unique techniques with the latter never coming back until the Series X/PS5 got true ray tracing, and the former is still an exclusive feature.
PS2 has some interesting techniques too, but none top these ones.
Now the PS2's upscaling technique used to make Gran Turismo 4 go from 480i to 1080i was stellar.
I'd love to learn more about that one.
@@BlueEyedVibeChecker About five years ago, I got the weird urge to trick out my old PS2 with a mega-HDD and all the bells and whistles. It was startling how many games could be made to output 1080i. Like, almost more the rule than the exception. Gradius V looked amazing. It was all this potential that the platform never saw realized before its gen was over.
What about the PS3 and its CELL processor though? Hell, even the 360 had revolutionary tech for 2005.
@@spiral7399 The PS3/360 were the last consoles that had a brief edge over PCs when they launched, but they lost that edge long before that gen was done. And under the hood, they really weren't doing anything that didn't effectively amount to "rasterization per second", same as PCs. Bluntly spoken, the PS3 was overengineered, and because of its hard limits on what you could do with RAM, almost every multiplatform game played better on 360, which of course came out a year in advance. This gen had no "mode 7" advents.
Gran Turismo 4 also has a 1080i mode if you had the component cable. It's amazing such a good looking game also happened to be one of the only with such a high res mode
I remember it looking amazing on my old Sony WEGA. So much contrast. so vibrant. Looks like arseholes in video capture or an LCD.
it's only marginally better than the standard mode, something like 512x540 instead of 512x480. pal had higher resolution anyway :P
@@shortcat Unfortunately, no PAL game on PS2 does 576p.
@@Nikku4211 exactly. that's higher than 540p framebuffer the game uses in 1080i output mode.
I remember Burnout Dominator being _fuck_ _you_ hard on the PSP steering with the nub
Kingdom hearts 2 still looks fantastic to this day
I think the main issue with finding specific details about how PS2 games are made is that there was no standard dev environment or pipelines from Sony.
Game developers had to do all of that themselves so there's no real 'PS2 lighting system'.
Also, just because you didn't mention it, Gran Turismo 4 is capable of running at 1080i on the PS2.
I'm not saying it was one of the best games on the PS2, but I remember being pretty impressed with Black when it came out, from technical point of view.
You're also forgetting "Just Cause" "Tekken 5", "Black" and "Final Fantasy 10".
A curious ‘benefit’ of the bevy of quality PS2 games - with their generally very, very high bar of art direction to boot - is that a lot the HD remasters for the PS3 ended up being so crucially refreshing against the sea of Brown & Grey UE3 games.
I still have not the faintest clue why Rockstar didn’t at the very least crank up a rock solid 720p conversion of San Andreas, instead of that abomination that the mobile port was.
I'd also like to shoutout Silent Hill 2, but especially Silent Hill 3 on actual hardware is still a marvel to behold. The model quality, hand animated faces, texture quality, lighting tech which allowed them to very convincingly fake dynamic object and depth shadows cast by the flashlight. It's amazing how Team Silent took what was originally done as a PS1 hardware limit (take a game that could only render a very short draw distance and shroud it in fog or darkness) and instead of expanding the draw distance, purposely stick to using it and having condensed enviroments that allowed the devs to push poly count and texture quality far better than most with rock solid performance (something I think some devs today could learn lessons from).
While I'd have a harder time pinning down what they did to look as good as they do, Tekken 4 and Tekken 5 are still impressive to this day, especially in progressive scan mode.
Killzone might also have been doing some pretty big stuff for the hardware but I'd have to look into that more to say.
Wasn’t GTA San Andreas on an engine that wasn’t exactly optimized for PS2? Not sure it should qualify as limit pushing.
That is exactly why it pushes limits. It straddles the line exactly between being stable enough and the software clearly struggling in front of you.
There wasn’t a single MB of storage left on that DVD.
RenderWare was tailored first and foremost for the PlayStation 2 - that was one of Criterion's biggest accomplishments for the platform, even if it wasn't super lean out of the box.
GTA San Andreas just completely stretches the limit of what the PS2 could feasibly do, as it switched up how it streamed data compared to its predecessors. Both GTA III and Vice City keep some base assets stored into memory between the various areas of the map, which is why there's loading screens when traveling in between islands in both games. San Andreas doesn't do that, instead opting to stream just about everything you see on the screen as it's needed. This goes for world geometry, vehicles, music (of course), textures, so on and so forth. I've never found the game particularly attractive, but it was doing A LOT on the hardware it was designed for.
Great Video, i personally would of put final fantasy 12 on this list.
It never gets talked about, but some of the cross-generation titles from that time _really_ push the PS2 to it's limits, but it's not as pretty.
I think NFS: Pro Street should be on this list, it's practically witchcraft that it ran at all, let alone look as good as it did.
The PS2 version of SA is still the best version imo, even the modded PC experience cannot replicate some of the graphical features in that version
I think spartan total warior is a good game for this category
Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 should have been number one on this list for sure.
We need someone to analyze how the PS2 VRAM work and be able to make a VRAM viewer for it, especially from PCSX2 save states, and the VRAM is stored on PluginGS file (extract the savestate using an unzipper, they're basically compressed zip files). It's interesting how the PS1 VRAM works and even some games pushed the specs limitations by using the VRAM as a cache for non-image files and/or images stored on RAM and loaded to VRAM on demand, as the VRAM is too small to store them all. I use psxfin to see the VRAM (press F11)
Examples:
1. Valkyrie Profile stores all the sprites and battle UI on RAM and loads them to VRAM when it's shown, the VRAM constantly writes images and overwrites previous images during battle. The same thing can be seen in Grandia during battle
2. Saga Frontier uses VRAM to cache non-image data during battle and after battle transitions, right after the screen completely fades
3. Dragon Quest/Warrior VII and Dragon Quest IV (Japan only) store a chunk of data inside the VRAM that is related to "Talk" command and if you corrupt it, the game crashes if you use "Talk" command to talk to your characters. This data is always refreshed after the battle ends and the data is random, meaning the data is unique to every refresh/load (this data is loaded from the disc), and maybe this is some kind of checksum
4. The most extreme of all that I've known: Mickey's Wild Adventure. Almost all the images aren't stored on VRAM and you cannot rip the level images and sprites from the VRAM. The VRAM is almost entirely blank
The PS2 VRAM might be similar to PS1 but with a different format, which arranges the canvas into blocks, similar to PVR (or Dreamcast) image format (if you open it on TileM or PVV PSX VRAM Viewer). If you play Legaia 2 and when you're on the title screen: go to the load screen, swap the disc to another disc, and back to the title screen. The title screen is now glitched with textures and playable characters' face images, and one or two characters' faces are not loaded if you don't have a save file with that characters' faces. This proves that it might be similar to PS1
it's so strange to see (relatively) modern games like these on this channel.
The cup definitely goes to San Andreas and God of war
Check out those games and you will be amazed: Splinter Cell series, Hitman series, Scarface, True Crime NYC, Cold Winter, Area 51, Peter Jackson's King Kong, Wakeboard, Stolen, Alias, Matrix Path of Neo, TimeSplitters 3, Primal, Ghosthunter, The Getaway 1&2, Mercenaries, Destroy all Humans 1&2, Tomb Rider Anniversary & Legend, 007 Quantum of Solace, 007 everything or nothing & from Russia with love, Psi-Ops, Cold Fear, Rise to Honour, Without Warning, Darkwatch, Shadow of Rome, Project Zero 3, Forbidden Siren 2, Obscure 2, Silent Hill 3&4, Onimusha 3&4, Flatout 2, Juised, WRC Rally Evolved, Evolution GT, R Racing Evolution, Tourist Trophy, Ford Racing 3, Tekken 4&5, Fight Night Round 3, Soul Calibur 3, Mortal Kombat Armageddon
San Andreas was so ambitious. It needed more memory than the PS2 had. GT4 is literally on a track so it's much easier to make it look photo realistic, even back then. I loved that game. And I love the original Ridge Racer for the PS1. Great games for their times.
What capture setup were you using for this?
It’s crazy how, on ps2, Gran Turismo has a photo realistic look to it.
BLACK was one of the games pushing the PS2 to its limits
For me the best part of OG playstation and playstation 2 are the JRPGs.
The absolute best of any consoles even to this day.
I just noticed Shar only has 36k subscribers. I always assumed he was one of the top gaming UA-camrs.
I'm on the way up I hope!
PS2 was the first actual TV game console that I owned. Gran Turismo 4 always stood out.
I suppose you will probably get to Xbox (Halo 2 comes to mind) and GameCube (Metroid Prime?) at this rate.
The ps1 was my first and to me it was amazing seeing the graphical improvements with the ps2 in comparison
@@therunawaykid6523 Oh yes, it was an enormous jump. Same for the N64 to the GameCube. Gaming tech was advancing _very_ rapidly at that time.
The last console without hardware shaders and only a primitive T&L system. I was not at all impressed with it vs. PC titles of the time (or the NV21 based XBOX), I've become a fan over the years of the development tricks they had to use to make decent looking graphics :)