#Retrogaming | The Lost Paradise of PlayStation 2

It is late at night and you are not sleepy, you go to bed hoping to sleep peacefully, but almost unconsciously you are on YouTube and on the home, including tutorials on how to assemble a lamp and Indians building huts with sticks, here is a 10-hour compilation on "old PlayStation 2 games that you may have forgotten“: You're curious, open the video and you are automatically transported into an ocean of memories, game afternoons with friends and an adolescence marked by colorful, fun and overwhelmingly“ next-gen ”titles.

I admit, it has happened to me too, many times, and it is precisely for this reason that I have decided to write and tell you about a video game series that in the early 2000s invaded the second Sony home console, but then, like a bolt from the blue, they have not been re-proposed in the future, but born and died in the past, here you are: the PlayStation 2 Paradise Lost!

Heaven suddenly

What I am about to write at this point would most likely be better as a conclusion, but it is useful to make you understand what we are talking about: the titles in question are not certainly masterpieces and it is easy to imagine why they were never repeated in the future: some had objectively technical problems, others may not fit well with a series or sequel, while others still only made sense in their release period and would nowadays result in sensational flops.

We are not here talking about how beautiful Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Resident Evil, The Sims were, but simply remembering, even with a hint of nostalgia, a series of not so well known video games, but that in the bedroom of some assiduous player they have ground hours and hours turning inside a PS2.

Today videogame productions, especially as regards the exclusive PlayStation, require years and years of crazy and desperate work due to the right needs of consumers, and it is rare to run into real flops, at most some "technical problem" (* coff coff * Cyberpunk * coff coff *). The PlayStation 2, on the other hand, also gave space to experiments, perhaps of emerging studies, but which could still have their say in a period of extreme videogame consumerism like that of the early 2000s.

Trash is also nice in company

The "party game" genre is booming 90 years from every pore, today the most important titles strongly focus on single player adventures, steeped in deep narration in which the player, alone in the dark in his room, must identify with the story told by the game.
Many titles of the time instead they put aside the narrative, except for a trivial plot to act as a pretext for the gameplay, to leave room for a fun and sometimes "no-sense" game to be stripped in the company of your friends.

This long and tedious introduction I wrote to present, without even too many preambles, a 2003 party game released exclusively for PS2: Super Farm, very first effort of ... Asobo Studio (yes, the ones from A Plague Tale and Flight Simulator).

Explaining this game in words would be something absurd and for this reason a gameplay video has been included in this article: judge for yourself. The music, colors super lit and saturated, the sound effects, seems to be watching an episode of the Looney Tunes; how much fun it was to play in the company of friends, brothers and cousins, always and only choose the rabbit and splitting teeth to other players.

Between fun and competition

The other side of multiplayer is definitely the competition in sports games, if we now have the online challenges of FIFA and PES (yes, I know it's now called eFootball), at the time sports games were much more varied and among these c 'It was also a beach volleyball simulator which apparently could seem the apotheosis of trash, but which in reality hid a well-built gameplay and not so much arcade: I'm talking about Beach Volleyball Summer Heat, developed from one of the many side studies of Acclaim Entertainment.

I am not a fan of volleyball and I got to know this game thanks to my sister and it was with her that real beach volleyball tournaments were staged in our bedroom. I hardly understood the rules and played without any pretensions, but this title kept me hooked for hours and hours. thanks to music. And I'm not talking about a simple satisfying soundtrack, but real and very famous songs of the time: between games and even during matches the game played songs of the caliber of "Love at First Sight" by Kylie Minogue e “Get The Party Started” di P! Nk.

From Japan with the van

I toys that come to life and no, we're not talking about the plot of Toy Story, but one of the darkest video games in the Western world, which many guys like me have found themselves playing without having the slightest idea what was happening on the screen: colorful toy cars who, between races, talked to each other and carried out missions as if they were human beings. Didn't you understand anything? Don't worry, neither do I.

cry Q is a series of video games (yes I know I said to talk about unique titles that were not part of the series, but it was impossible not to mention it) born even in 1984 in Japan, developed by Taito and based on a series of branded toys Takara: the Choro Q models, precisely. The titles of this wacky saga have been released on almost all consoles out there, but what I have played and most likely most Westerners is what in Japan is called "Chorus Q HG 4“, Released on PlayStation 2 and developed in the West by none other than Atlus.

Choro Q has been included in this list precisely for the curious fact that it has depopulated here only this chapter and for many years I believed it was the only one existing, while thanks to my internet friend I discovered that it is part of a saga of nearly 30 titles, the last of which was released in 2008 on Wii.
The game itself is not bad, although very difficult to understand for a Western audience, but it had some interesting ideas and the "rpg" part was well curated. In addition, the customization of the vehicles was very deep with the possibility of choosing the types of engines.

Good and bad news: which one do you want to know first?

If you also know these titles, either you are an assiduous collector or you used to grind like me whatever comes your way on your console regardless of the genre or the quality of the game itself. This last sentence is difficult to apply today and perhaps it is good for the quality of modern video games, now reached levels absurdly realistic.

La nostalgia it is a double-edged sword: it is certainly a good thing that many pearls of the past are re-proposed to the present day with remake or remastered, see Crash Bandicoot, MediEvil, Spyro and many others; but it is also true that many video games should remain in the past because they are strongly linked to that era, both in terms of time and console: perhaps this is not the true meaning of retrogaming?