Did you know that licensed games can often be bad? It’s true! While you pick yourself off up the floor, it’s time for me to prove that the PlayStation 2 actually had quite a few licensed games that were some of the best games on the system.
The Simpsons: Hit & Run
Me not mention Hit & Run? That’s unpossible.
The Simpsons’ history with video games has been spotty at best. While the arcade beat ‘em up was good, along with the Treehouse of Horror Game Boy games, you also had some big misses like The Simpsons Wrestling and Skateboarding, and also arguably the unashamed Crazy Taxi rip-off Road Rage, I dunno I quite liked that one though. When Radical Entertainment and Vivendi Universal announced Hit & Run, this time cribbing from Grand Theft Auto,expectations were lower than Mayor Quimby’s approval rating, but The Simpsons: Hit & Run turned out to be a perfectly cromulent game.
Even though the Grand Theft Auto inspiration is clear as day, with players controlling one of the members of the core family (plus Apu), exploring sections of Springfield and completing missions assigned by other characters, Radical made steps to ensure Hit & Run’s take on GTA was more than just Poochie returning to his home planet in terms of effort. Along with the constant barrage of golden era-level jokes and great voice performances from the not yet 80 years old cast, Hit and Run is basically the de facto Simpsons game.
Just sit back like Homer in the massage chair and enjoy one of the best licensed games ever made. Now here’s Devil May Cry for the real sickos.
The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge
If you’re like most millennial emos who watched The Nightmare Before Christmas and decided to make it a key part of your personality, you probably already know that Jack Skellington and the gang appeared in Kingdom Hearts 2 for a spell. It’s a wild section of the game, but what’s even wilder is Jack Skellington’s own licensed game for the PS2. It’s basically the perfect game for a Nightmare fan. The only thing missing is a pair of these included in the case.
Titled The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge, what’s wild about this game is that it was developed by Capcom, specifically members of the Devil May Cry team. The results are exactly what they sound like. Okay, so anyone picking up Oogie’s Revenge expecting to play as Jack Skellington and start performing moves like Stinger, Royal Guard and Table Hopper is prob ably going to be disappointed, but as baby’s first Devil May Cry game, you can’t go wrong here. There’s style switching, combo meters and secret missions to find, and even the in-game menus look like a reskinned version of DMC 3’s menus.
As for the story, Jack left Halloween Town to find inspiration for next year’s festivities, leaving Oogie Boogie to be resurrected and run amok. Cue 20+ levels with new music and voice acting for all characters, and Halloween Town is yours. The world too, maybe.
Scarface: The World Is Yours
Considering Al Pacino’s Scarface film pretty definitively ends with the titular drug lord being riddled with more lead than me after my eighteenth pencil snacky snack of the day, Radical had to put their thinking caps on when pitching their tie-in licensed game, Scarface: The World Is Yours. Their solution? Sack off the film’s original ending entirely, with Tony Montana somehow surviving the climactic fight in the mansion, albeit with a few bullet holes for his troubles. Three months of rest and recuperation later, big Tony returns to Miami to find that it’s been taken over by former associate Sosa, with Tony resolving to reclaim “the world, and everything in it”.
Again inspired by GTA, particularly the success of Vice City, which owes much of its charm and vibes to Scarface, The World Is Yours sees you building your criminal empire by procuring and selling drugs, taking over districts and committing wanton destruction on anyone standing in your way. The way you build your empire, taking over districts and completing supply runs of drugs and cash, is a lot more involved than other open world games, while the combat is fast and violent, like it should be for a Scarface game.
It does have some rough edges, and the framerate is not good, but you can taunt your enemies to fill a Balls meter, allowing you to unleash Rage and gun down everyone in front of you. 10/10, would get high on this supply.
The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King
The Lord Of The Rings film trilogy was huge during the PS2 era, so naturally, licensed games were to follow. Pretty much all of them retold the events of the films in some way, but the best of the best remains Return Of The King.
Despite being called Return Of The King, this hack and slasher includes events from The Two Towers, going from the battle of Helm’s Deep all the way to the climactic fight with Sauron/the struggle atop Mount Doom. Unlike the game based on The Two Towers, players in Return Of The King actually have the ability to choose between three separate paths, Wizard, King and Hobbits, which determines the characters you play as throughout the game. While each character has the same basic abilities, everyone has their own unique abilities and attributes that can be upgraded as you go, along with Fellowship upgrades that make all characters stronger. It also still looks and sounds amazing for a PS2 game, even 20 years on, and those awesome transitions from movie scenes into in-game cutscenes still hit hard.
For a simple hack and slash game, there’s a shocking level of depth and budget here, but here’s The Thing:
The Thing
Here is the thing about The Thing: it’s pretty good, as many people have found out recently thanks to the HD re-release courtesy of Nightdive. Even if the game version of The Thing turned what was a cerebral body horror experience into a more action oriented survival horror game, the licensed offering manages to retain a lot of the themes, ideas and even tone of the film with its mechanics and gameplay. Having a squad-based shooter in a property where there’s a shapeshifting alien? That’s just money on the table as far as games are concerned.
Following the events of the 1982 film, The Thing (the game) sees an American team investigating that Arctic outpost from the movie, finding the body of Childs while MacReady is nowhere to be found. Before long, Things start appearing and people start being bodysnatched, which makes managing a squad a lot more challenging. Not only can any of your squadmates be a secret Thing waiting to assimilate you, but your squad can also lose trust in you if you refuse to fight enemies or lead them into danger. Trust with AI partners in video games is usually a one-way street, so to have players be punished for treating AI squadmates as disposable is actually genius, though obviously there are some issues with two decade old AI.
Now, can Nightdive do anything with this next game?
The Matrix: Path Of Neo
For a series set in a simulated world where you can download kung fu into your noggin, you’d reckon that there’d be more games based on The Matrix. Beyond Enter The Matrix and The Matrix Online, the short-lived MMO sequel to the original trilogy, there’s not been much outside of that one Unreal Engine 5 experience, but are we really calling that a game? While there’s an obvious dearth of Matrix games that should be addressed, at least we’ll always have The Matrix: Path Of Neo to tide us over in the meantime. Sure, you made us fight the Merovingian’s weird ant army for some reason, but you were incredibly fun all the same.
As the name implies, Path Of Neo follows Mr Anderson’s journey from unassuming cubicle worker/harker to religious hero/simulation superhero across the first three movies, including plenty of key moments: the rescue of Morpheus, The Burly Brawl and even the fight with Bane outside the Matrix itself. Of course, Path Of Neo expands on the story, offering a range of fun and original levels that people can enjoy. The gameplay itself is a bit janky and ropey, granted, but the development of Neo’s powers during the course of The Matrix, and the mix of brawling and third person shooting, makes Path Of Neo a pretty barmy, pretty fun licensed game on the PS2 that you should really come out to play. Ay.
The Warriors
Whoever at Rockstar pitched the idea of creating a video game based on the 1979 cult classic movie The Warriors was…brave. Typically, film tie-ins would capitalise on the release of a recent movie or TV show to generate hype for the game, but Rockstar were simply hoping the success of Grand Theft Auto would carry The Warriors to profit. Did it work? Well, it wasn’t quite as successful as GTA or Bully, but that didn’t stop The Warriors from becoming one of the greatest licensed games of all-time, and a genuinely excellent companion piece to a renowned film.
While The Warriors film follows the titular gang on one fateful night they’re framed for murder, the video game picks up with the gang three months before that night, showcasing how they rose through the ranks of NYC’s gangs. Given that the film displays only a small part of what seems like a massive world of gangs, The Warriors was perfectly poised to flesh out The Warriors, making it an interesting addition to the story. The gameplay was fantastic too, focused on gritty street fighting and grappling, and while the character models may obviously not be top of the line today, few developers knew the PS2 inside and out like Rockstar did.
As one of the few licensed PS2 games easily available digitally on PS4/5 at least, you should definitely check it out. Next up: Cultured Vultures Presents Peter Jackson’s King Kong The Movie Remake The Game.
King Kong
The gaming industry obviously isn’t the only entertainment medium obsessed with remakes. Both Scarface and The Thing are remakes, so what’s another game based on a remake between friends, hey? Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake isn’t quite as beloved, especially when Jack Black gets about an hour too much screentime, but it did spawn the King Kong game, which actually managed to be pretty ruddy good. Shockingly as well, King Kong: The Game accomplishes this without going for the obvious route of letting players cut loose as the titular monkey for the entire runtime. Obvious, and perhaps wise.
Despite being called King Kong, the bulk of the game is actually spent playing as Adrien Brody’s Jack Driscoll, who travels to Skull Island along with the rest of the crew to shoot a film. Most levels play out like a dinosaur shooting FPS, but with a few interesting mechanics thrown in like being able to use fire or exploit the island’s food chain to navigate around dangerous dinosaurs, making it more than just a brainless shooter that also really quite bloody lovely.
After a few levels with Jack, you’ll switch to King Kong, brawling your way through the island’s wildlife in some decent beat ‘em up action, going back and forth between the two characters before climbing up that Empire State Building for a nice picnic. Maybe share a pizza?
Spider-Man 2
There had been dozens of Spider-Man games that had been released for plenty of different platforms before Spider-Man 2 found its way to the PS2, and while some of them were genuinely decent, it felt like none of them truly nailed that all important web swinging. Most games just had Spider-Man swinging on nothing, but that all changed with Spider-Man 2’s physics and buildings based web-swinging. Here you’d need to find an anchor point to latch on to, and now you just can’t imagine a Spider-Man game without it.
The rest of the game is pretty good too.
Spider-Man 2 follows the plot of the film, with Doc Ock’s no-good experiment creating Spidey’s most dangerous villain yet, though the game bolsters this plot with more villains for Parker to thwart, like Mysterio, Black Cat, Rhino and Shocker. It also has way more Bruce Campbell, reprising his role from the previous game as the Narrator/tutorial voice over guy, which is always nice.
Admittedly, the beat ‘em up combat might be a bit ropey by today’s standards, especially compared to the slick combat of the recent Insomniac games, but as a licensed film tie-in, Spider-Man 2 gives you a bit of everything.
007: Everything Or Nothing
Bond games have big shoes to fill, as how can you possibly compare to the FPS juggernaut that is 007 Goldeneye for the N64? After Agent Under Fire and Nightfire, EA finally found their answer: you don’t even try. Ignore what came later.
Before that, 007: Everything Or Nothing moved away from the first person shooting gameplay of its predecessors to instead create a third person action adventure, similar to the PS1’s Tomorrow Never Dies. Did it work? It’s arguably the most beloved Bond game since Goldeneye, though EA would abandon the third person immediately afterward to create that weird Goldeneye reimagining, so who knows.
A brand new adventure for Bond set after Die Another Day, Everything Or Nothing explores nanomachines son with Bond (voiced by Pierce Brosnan in his final Bond appearance), squaring off against former KGB agent Nikolai Diavolo, played by Willem Dafoe, the only man who has potentially done more shagging than Bond himself. Turns out old Russian Nikky was mates with Max Zorin, the Christopher Walken villain from A View To A Kill, making this a personal affair for Bond.
The gameplay is your standard blend of third person shooting, driving abouting and gadget using, but just with absolutely crazy high production values and a lot of famous faces. Look, it’s Mya! Everybody knows and loves Mya!
If you’re sick of getting your balls tickled while waiting for IO Interactive’s take on James Bond, Everything Or Nothing will tide you over for a good while, along with From Russia With Love too.
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