Remember when the PS2 was a big deal? A historical milestone? Everybody you knew lining up, camping out in tents outside major electronics retailers for the slim chance to buy one? Then of course many of them turned around and scalped their freshly bought PS2 on the internet for many times what they paid.
This only makes sense if one understands what a massive, international success the Playstation 1 was. The Playstation 1 was to its generation what the NES was before it: Such a popular sensation that just about everybody had one.
For wet behind the ears kiddos for whom the PS1 was their first console, the PS2 was their first taste of riding the "next generation" hype train. What a hype train that was! It had no brakes. PS2 was going to be the second coming. It had the "emotion engine" and would boast "Toy Story graphics".
Of course when it actually made its way into consumer's hands, it didn't quite live up to all that hype, but close. With a 300Mhz, 8 core CPU/GPU combo, it really did feature exotic and in some ways revolutionary computing architecture.
Usually that's a death warrant for any console because it makes it difficult to program for. But the success of the PS2 was all but guaranteed by the success of the PS1, such that it basically couldn't fail and developers just had to suck it up and learn to code for it.
Since then, the hardware is much better understood and demo coders are able to squeeze power out of the PS2 that nobody thought it had in it back in the day. For example, "4 Edges" by The Black Lotus:
If you don't remember PS2 games looking that good, it's because they didn't. Only post-mortem has the exotic architecture of the PS2 really been picked apart and understood well enough to make such marvels possible. However some demos don't shoot for overall visual appeal, but demonstration of technical effects more impressive to programmers in the know than the average consumer. "Inner Loop" by Neoscientists is a good example of this:
The lengths to which these digital artists went to make the PS2 reach its full potential are truly an inspiration. The visuals seen here, in "Altair" by Aqua rival anything seen on PCs at the time, and convincingly imitate shaders only possible at the time on PC graphics cards that cost more than the entire PS2:
But then, what games pushed the PS2 hardware the hardest? To this day, there's a great degree of disagreement about that. What constitutes "good graphics"? Are shaders impressive on their own, or must the art direction of a game be compelling in itself?
Most agree that Shadow of the Colossus was both technically and artistically brilliant, making judicious and groundbreaking use of Bloom on a 300Mhz console that shouldn't have been capable of it:
ICO is another title from the same developer widely held to be exemplary of the very best visuals possible on the PS2 hardware. Is that the case? I'll let you be the judge, but keep in mind how limited and paltry a 300Mhz processor really is:
Gran Turismo 4 was the last title in the series to come out for the PS2, and inarguably a strong contender for the most technically advanced. It boasted features like widescreen support and the ability to take 1080P screenshots recorded to the memory card, though the car models were still the real star of the show:
God of War 2 is also often mentioned when the topic of stellar PS2 visuals comes up. God of War 1 was groundbreaking, visually, when it came out in 2004 but God of War 2 somehow dug even deeper to force lighting effects, texture quality and animation that beggars belief given what it's all running on:
Odin Sphere may seem like an odd inclusion. It's 2D after all, yet it came at a time when gamers were recovering from their snobbish disdain for 2D sprite based graphics, ready at last to see what a next gen machine could do in that regard. The results were stunning, to say the least:
If only the life cycle of consoles were longer, imagine how much further they could have been pushed before becoming genuinely obsolete and irrelevant. Having seen what talented coders can squeeze out of these machines, can there be any doubt that their average 5 to 7 year lifespan is artificially short?
Given that some original Xbox games had rudimentary widescreen HD support, and that the PS2 got competent ports of even very demanding Xbox titles like Psychonauts, I can't help but feel that a slightly longer lifespan would have challenged developers to achieve truly great things.
As it is, some seriously baffling feats of technical wizardry were achieved back in the heyday of the PS2, and continue to be one-upped by nostalgic demo coders eager to show the world what this machine could do in the hands of sufficiently brilliant programmers.
That's all for now, stay tuned for subsequent episodes wherein I will explore the very best that gaming machines both popular and obscure were capable of.
Stay Cozy!