PLAYSTATION 2 CLASSIC SERIES

One of several promising RPG series that were stifled by Final Fantasy's all-encompassing +20 Cloak of Ubiquity, Dark Cloud deserves to be remembered for its curiously alluring mixture of Zelda and Sim City. What we said: 'You'll be instantly hauled into its delightful world, desperate to help out in anyway you can.' That it spawned two sequels which failed to capitalise on this sweet foundation just makes Eternal Mana all the more special. Viewed in isometric 3D, with a delightful platform game feel to the way you scamper around the quaint towns and leafy forests, Atelier Iris is a throwback to a gentler role-playing age. At its heart is Klein, a young alchemist whose ability to extract mana from objects in the gameworld and combine it into new items is central to the slightly obsessive gameplay. If, however, you like a little whimsy with your inventory-hogging and NPC chatting, it's time you delved into one of the most charming games of its kind since Chrono Trigger. If you recoil at dialogue like 'Could you pick up a tingleberry from Veola's magic shop?' then you should probably continue to avoid Atelier Iris, one of several RPG series that would be flying off western shelves if the title contained the words 'fantasy' and 'final'. What we said: 'We'd be fools not to give this a big mark and a thumbs-up.'Д®bay price guide: Around GBP 20 Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana Amplitude's prequel, the equally overlooked freQuency, is also well worth finding.

But ultimately, it's this slight awkwardness that makes Amplitude so interesting - this game sank like a stone, but its direct descendant became a monster smash, and the evolution between the two is most curious. The 26 tunes on offer seem stingy by modern standards, especially since several are composed for the game by the developer, while the presence of David Bowie, Blink 182, Slipknot and Run DMC lend the game a musically schizophrenic air. While this happens you flip over to another song track and try to add that to the mix, eventually building up a complete rendition of the song. Capture enough notes in a sequence and it's locked into place, looping on its own for a short time. There are separate tracks for bass, drums, vocals and so on. In what has since become a familiar sight, notes glide down the screen towards your 'beat blaster' and you capture them by hitting the corresponding button. Developed by the people who brought us Guitar Hero, Amplitude is - you guessed it - a music game, not entirely dissimilar to that fret-mashing smash hit. Let's start with one of the classic cult titles to grace the PS2, a game that was clearly five years ahead of its time. All are recommended for adventurous souls with a taste for the eclectic. Many more are solid 7/10 efforts that fell by the wayside.

PLAYSTATION 2 CLASSIC PS2

This, then, is not a list of the greatest PS2 games ever made, even though several here certainly deserve that praise. The games that were deemed too weird, or were sunk by poor marketing. The games that were maybe too innovative to stand out in an industry increasingly devoted to predictable franchise-building.

PLAYSTATION 2 CLASSIC SOFTWARE

It's been a while since we've done one of these and, since each new console generation usually results in older hardware being passed on and great software going cheap, it seems like a good excuse to have another dig around in the archives for some of the PS2 games that never really got a fair deal.

Playstation 2 classic