PS2 Games That Show Up Modern Games

Sorry to repeat this now pretty common saying, but gaming just isn’t what it used to be. That’s not to say that there aren’t some amazing modern games out there and the industry isn’t still doing impressive things, but when you compare it to how it used to be a couple decades ago, something has definitely been…lost. “The sauce” has been tampered with, and someone threw in, I dunno, prawns. Rhubarb? Let these incredible PS2 games show you exactly that.

 

Shadow of the Colossus

Right — this is one of the obvious ones, but it’s obvious for a reason.

What’s wild about Shadow of the Colossus is how little of it there actually is. Honestly, there is not much fat at all. Sixteen bosses. No side quests, apart from finding little lizards and that. No skill tree. No crafting. No map covered in icons asking you to clear bandit camp #47. You ride across an empty world, find a giant thing, and figure out how to climb it and stab the glowing weak spot. That’s it.

And that’s exactly why it feels so refreshing today.

Modern open world games are obsessed with volume. More engagement to make the metrics go more higherer. Colossus goes the opposite way and commits to one amazing idea — giant, puzzle-like boss fights. Every colossus feels distinct because the designers weren’t distracted building fishing minigames or battle passes, they just wanted to make each feel like its own event.

You ride up to them. You figure out how to get on. You physically hang on. You manage stamina. The creature moves and fights back. And then you try to ignore the pang of guilt you feel when you stab its glowy bit. Don’t worry about that.

The world is quiet. The story barely explains itself. Most big-budget games now are terrified of silence — they fill every second with dialogue. A game like this from a modern AAA studio would probably have a little dude called Gubbins McCoy around your waist to dump exposition and hints.

It’s not perfect. The camera can be awkward. The controls are a bit stiff. But the core design is still sharper than a lot of games that cost ten times as much to make today.

And let’s not even get into the fact that the guys who remade this were shut down because they were sent into the live service mines. It’s enough to get you burned out on the whole industry.

 

Burnout 3

Burnout 3 is basically the end result of a developer remembering when they used to smash toy cars together as a kid. I can’t believe nobody has remembered to make one of these in 18 years. I genuinely didn’t even realise it had been that long. That is very upsetting.

You load it up and within seconds you’re boosting through traffic at 200mph, sideswiping rivals into oncoming cars, chaining takedowns, and triggering slow-motion pile-ups while Rise Against blares out. It’s instant bloody great fun.

Burnout 3 doesn’t waste a second of your time. You unlock a new car, say “sick”, and then load up the next race or event then smash that car around. Crash Mode is still one of the most stupidly replayable ideas ever.

Now imagine this getting made today by Electronic Arts. Sorry, I know it’s not Halloween yet.

Crash Mode would be seasonal. Limited-time intersections. Premium demolition packs. Probably in-game ads on billboards that rotate every quarter. Leaderboards tied to cosmetic boosts. Battle Passes to unlock Burger King decals. You can already see how easily “go fast and smash stuff” would turn into a part-time job. I mean, look at what’s happened with Skate — a game about messing around on a board is now a live platform with a paywalled tutorial.

I’m not even sure Criterion Games could make this now. They’ve spent years assisting on other projects or making Need For Speed, but with probably worse and worse results. Burnout 3 feels like a team at full confidence, building exactly what they wanted.

Burnout 3 is loud, aggressive, and just complete in a brilliantly 2004 way. No roadmap. No “Year 2.” No random season crossovers with, I dunno…The Office. Just a finished arcade game that understands its job.

 

Jak II

It’s actually crazy how little we’ve talked about the Jak games on this channel. Let’s change that.

The first Jak and Daxter game was bright, clean, seamless platforming. Then Naughty Dog looked at the market, saw open worlds getting darker and edgier, and said, let’s do that, but with a ferret guy. So suddenly you’ve got guns, a dystopian city, hover bikes, wanted levels, and a difficulty curve that will turn boys into men. Or maybe slightly angrier boys. One or the other.

Haven City feels like an actual place because it isn’t bloated. There aren’t 400 icons clogging the map, but there are more NPCs dotted about than even in the GTA games. Missions are tough, sometimes brutally so, but they are beatable. Maybe you have to get your older brother to lend a hand, but still.

Modern open-world games would smooth this out. Make Daxter yap even more than usual and tell you exactly what to do. Jak II just throws you into traffic and expects you to cope.

But the bigger contrast is the studio itself. Jak II launched just two years after the original Jak and Daxter. Two years. And then Jak 3 came out a year later! That kind of turnaround feels impossible now. In the last thirteen years, Naughty Dog has made just two entries in The Last of Us — and re-released them almost as many times.

Back then, they could pivot genres, change tone completely, and ship a full sequel in record time. Now everything feels like it has to be a prestige event. Massive budgets. Huge cinematic ambition. Insane guilt trips. I only wanted to pet that dog!

It doesn’t even feel like they’re allowed to make a straight-up “fun” game with brevity anymore. And that’s really quite sad.

 

Gran Turismo 4

Gran Turismo 4 feels like the last time this series was built as a complete package instead of a platform. There’s a reason why basically everyone thinks this is the best one ever.

You boot it up and it just has everything. Hundreds of cars. Dozens of tracks. License tests. Endurance races that take actual commitment. A sense of pride and accomplishment in progression that is genuine. You unlock things because you earned them. There’s a clear ladder and you climb it.

Compare that to modern Gran Turismo 7 and the shift is obvious. Yes, there’s ongoing support. Yes, cars and tracks get added. That part is genuinely, objectively good. But the whole experience is wrapped around online events, rotating content, limited-time availability, and a credit economy that makes you feel like you’re pulling up to the Burj Khalifa in a Skoda.

Now, look. Long-time support for a game is great. But it’s come at the expense of that old-school progression loop.

GT4 didn’t drip-feed cars across months to keep engagement charts healthy. It shipped absurd value on day one. If you wanted a rare car, you knew what you had to do. Win this series. Complete that championship. Grind an endurance race. It was brilliant.

Modern Gran Turismo feels more managed in that typical live servicey way. More curated. More concerned with how long you stay logged in. More teasing how long you can go before dropping some more money.

GT4 just trusted that the depth of the driving and the structure of its career mode would keep you playing anyway. That’s what it did for literally millions of people.

And that’s the main difference really. One feels like a game you buy and complete. The other feels like a service you maintain. Like your Skoda when it breaks down outside the Burj Khalifa.

 

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

Sands of Time is so brilliantly designed that it feels like the template for countless inspirations. Hell, you could even argue Call of Duty and Titanfall took stuff from this.

When it comes to one of the greatest reboots ever, the wall-running, the vaulting, the rewind mechanic is all simple to understand, hard to mess up, and satisfying every time. There’s no excess fat on it.

Which is why the remake situation is so baffling.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake was announced, shown off, criticised, delayed, rebooted internally, and then got fully cancelled. And this isn’t some sprawling open-world RPG with a thousand systems. The blueprint already exists. The pacing is there. The structure is there. You could almost rebuild it room by room, beautiful bangs by beautiful bangs. I’m talking about his hair here.

But that’s the problem. Modern big-budget development pipelines aren’t built for this kind of focused, 12–15 hour, mechanically tight action game anymore. Everything now leans toward sandboxes or live-service hooks. A compact, precision platformer with a clear beginning and end doesn’t fit the current production model of the AAA world. Or, well, Ubisoft’s model. It’s hard to imagine that across two studios and well over 5 years of development time, they couldn’t piece together a decent linear single-player game. They must have been trying to cram in time savers, skins, or something.

Sands of Time just respects your time. A lot of modern games do not. It doesn’t pad. It doesn’t over-explain. It doesn’t stretch mechanics thin across 60 hours.

And yet rebuilding it has proven bizarrely difficult, probably cos Ubisoft forgot how to make games.

 

SOCOM

It’s been 15 years since the last one of these. That’s crazy, isn’t it? SOCOM was serious in a way console shooters just aren’t anymore.

This wasn’t run-and-gun. It wasn’t sprinting around slide-cancelling. It was slow movement, careful angles, voice commands to AI teammates, and rounds that could end in seconds if you messed up. For a PS2 game, that level of tactical thinking was kind of mad. And also great for team building. 

Yes, modern PC games like Squad exist and push realism even further. But on console, in 2003, SOCOM felt grounded and deliberate in a way that was miles ahead of its time. It demanded patience. Communication mattered. Map knowledge mattered. There were no glowing outlines or constant UI nudges telling you what to do.

But if Sony revived it today, it probably wouldn’t look like this.

A modern console-focused tactical shooter would almost certainly get layered with crossover skins, seasonal operators, premium cosmetics, branded weapon packs — all the usual stuff. The tone and that tension would soften. The edges would be rounded off to make it broader, louder, and more marketable.

SOCOM II didn’t care about that, because well nobody did. It shipped with maps people still talk about, modes that felt complete, and online functionality that — at the time — was groundbreaking for consoles.

You look at some of what Sony’s trying with their live services these days and it just seems like they’re scared to break any new ground. It’s about time they did.

 

TimeSplitters 2

You forget how much stuff is actually on the TimeSplitters 2 disc until you list it out.

Full campaign. Proper split-screen multiplayer with your mates.  Bots if they were off not lifemaxxing with this game. Dozens of characters to unlock. Arcade challenges. A full-on mapmaker. All there. All put together less than two years on from the original.

It feels generous in a way that is unhea rd of these days. You never get single-player and multiplayer FPS games outside of Battlefield and CoD these days. Even DOOM dropped its multiplayer!

And that reboot? Bloody hell. Weirdly similar to what happened with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake. The version that leaked footage looked like Fortnite. Which isn’t inherently bad, but we already have one Fortnite. TimeSplitters was its own thing.

The bigger issue is this: if TimeSplitters launched today, it absolutely would not ship with this much stuff.

You’d get a campaign, maybe. Multiplayer at launch, but light. Mapmaker would probably be “coming in Season 2.” Half the characters locked behind battle passes. Challenges rotated weekly. Cosmetic packs front and centre.

TimeSplitters 2 unlocks characters by asking you to actually complete specific tasks. Beat this level on hard. Finish this arcade run under a time limit. It ties content to skill, not currency.

And that’s why it still feels complete. It shipped as a full-featured playground. It just gave you everything and said, “Go on then.”

 

Mercenaries

Mercenaries is such a straightforward pitch that it’s like playing football on a ruler. Here it is: Blow stuff up.

That’s it.

You’ve got the Deck of 52 — a literal list of targets ranked like playing cards. You hunt them down however you want. Steal a tank. Call in an airstrike. Hijack a helicopter. Flatten half the map if that’s what it takes. The physics aren’t hyper-realistic, but they’re fun. Buildings crumble. Vehicles flip. Explosions feel chunky and goofy.

If this got made today, I honestly think it would perform worse. Not because the idea’s bad, but because modern open worlds tend to overcomplicate simple fun. The destruction would probably look prettier but feel less impactful. And it’d probably even dip into lower FPS somehow.

And you just know the structure wouldn’t stay clean.

Instead of one cohesive campaign, it’d be a roadmap. “Season One: New Target.” “Season Two: New Walmart.” Season Three: Big Asda”. Targets rotating every 12 weeks to keep engagement ticking over. Half the Deck of 52 locked behind timed events.

You’d also have a brand-new ally — let’s call her, I dunno, Ruby McGubbins — constantly in your earpiece. “Head north!” “Target spotted!” “did we just blow up that airport?” Gulp. Directional arrows everywhere. A mini-map lit up like a Christmas tree carrying a concealed weapon. No room to just explore and cause problems when you fancy it.

I can’t remember when we had a AAA open world game as concentrated as Mercenaries PS2. Can you? War, what is good for eh.

 

War of the Monsters

War of the Monsters feels like it slipped through a crack in time.

It’s a full retail release built around the idea of giant B-movie creatures punching each other through office blocks. It doesn’t want to win awards. You’re a lava monster throwing a bus at a robot in downtown San Francisco. Buildings crumble piece by piece. You can climb them. Rip out chunks. Use debris as weapons.

Enjoy.

Developed by Incognito Enterainment, today, this wouldn’t be a standalone game. It’d be a limited-time mode inside something else. “Kaiju Mayhem Weekend.” Maybe a crossover event in a bigger live-service title like I dunno Warzone. A goofy seasonal playlist that disappears after three weeks. It wouldn’t get the time to be itself. You can get GigaBash these days, but that’s an indie game.

It’s also the kind of project Sony just doesn’t seem to publish anymore. Their modern first-party output is serious, polished, cinematic, and extremely expensive. War of the Monsters is whimsical and a bit stupid in the best possible way. It knows it’s daft The only thing even remotely close to this kinda silliness is Helldivers 2.

And you already know half the monster roster would be locked behind premium passes nowadays.

The PS2 version just ships with unlockable characters tied to progression. Play the game, earn currency, buy monsters. Done. Split-screen works. The arenas are all there. No promises about future content drops. It’s all gone downhill since then.

 

Downhill Domination

Another Incognito Entertainment banger, Downhill Domination doesn’t pretend to be a proper representation of going downhill and also dominating. It’s just fast, slightly ludicrous downhill racing where you can punch someone off their bike mid-corner and boost away. It’s like SSX but even more like MTV, if that’s possible.

The tracks are broad, exaggerated, and designed around trying risky routes. Tricks feed your boost, combat keeps races unpredictable like something like Road Rash, and you get ridiculous pickups like a kart racer. It’s a wonderfully arcadey extreme sports game that’s somehow never left the PS2.

Now stack it next to Steep and Riders Republic, which are probably the closest modern peers.

Yes, those games are huge. Massive maps, with seamless sport switching and social spaces full of other players. They’ve got personality, sure — but it’s very trademarkTM personality. Announcers cracking jokes. Random references. UI popping up constantly. You can feel all the market research in the code, basically.

But Downhill Domination doesn’t wrap itself in a big shared-world structure. There’s no hub where 60 players are emoting next to you. You pick an event and you race. Unlocks are tied directly to performance, not seasonal rotations or online participation. And you can just pick up and play without trudging through an hour of onboarding.

A lot of live service sports games are technically impressive, but they’re built to retain you. Downhill Domination feels built to entertain you for 20 minutes at a time — and somehow that makes it easier to return to, even with all the eBay and Mountain Dew ads.

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