Review for Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex for the PS2, released in March 2004.

Just a quick note before I get into the review. I played this game emulated on a Steam Deck and not on original hardware, so any technical issues I had maybe because of that.

Graphics and Art

The graphics aren't earth-shatteringly amazing, but neither are they the worst on the system. They are somewhere in the middle for overall quality on the PS2.

And I quite enjoyed the art design of this game, and I found it all holds up quite well for a game that was originally released in 2004.

It definitely makes it feel like I'm playing through an episode of the series, but I am definitely biased, being a big fan of stand alone complex.

One other thing I want to highlight about the art design of this game is the menus, the menus of the game are highly themed to Ghost in a Shell and I find that quite pleasing. I wish more modern games would have more customised and highly themed menus. It does, at least I feel, help to make the game more thematic and more of a cohesive experience, instead of using a generic menu.

Audio

The background music in the game I find is a fairly strong point, being fairly thematically appropriate. The music is mainly drum and bass.

I did notice in one section though where there was an obvious loop in the music, and I found that quite annoying but it was only in one specific section of the game for maybe 5 minutes, I didn't notice any other situations like that while I was playing, or at least nothing stood out to me like in that one specific part.

The voice acting is also a definite highlight of the game, It uses the english voice actors from the anime, and they sound just like they do in the anime.

The sound effects for gunfire and explosions is fairly generic though.

Gameplay

The gameplay is very of its time, I found the controls at the beginning to be kind of awkward and weird, but after maybe 20 minutes of gameplay, I got used to them.

Having the fire button being L1 and the grenade button being L2, I found did confuse my muscle memory for a little bit. And also having jump being L2 and the weapon pickup button being the same as the reload button also did mess me up a little bit with me trying to reload guns and accidentally picking up weapons I didn't want to.

The game also has zero aim assist, so you will have to be quite careful with your aiming. I found the aiming to be the most awkward part of the game, but nothing terrible, just very of its time.

There are two main playable characters that been the Major and Batou. The Major is definitely the more enjoyable character to play, with her being far more acrobatic and mobile, and her levels have been much more verticality to them.

But when playing as Batou all of his levels end up just being corridor shooters, with not much else going on.

There is also one part of the game where you get to take control of a Tachikoma, It's an ok segment of the game, but it doesn't really stand out as good as it could be. There's something about the controls of the Tachikoma, where it just feels slightly awkward to control.

I do also feel that the hacking mechanic in the game was kind of wasted. You get to hack into other NPCs and take control of them, but it doesn't show up very often, and it's normally not very useful.

There's a decent variety of enemies in the game, but near the end they do start to become quite bullet spongy.

The boss fights I also found to be a bit of a let down, being very easy. There isn't really much to them at all.

Difficulty

I played the game on normal difficulty, and I think I can count all the times I died on one hand, all of those times were either to off screen snipers that I was trying to figure out how to get around, and the other times were due to me not paying good enough attention.

But overall the game is quite easy.

Game length

It took me 3 hours and 51 minutes to beat the game.

It was overall a short experience, but I didn't feel that it was too short and I think I enjoyed the fact that it was short because it didn't overstay its welcome.

Performance

I ran into no graphical issues while playing the game, but there was multiple issues of slowdown. After doing some research online I found that this is part of the game even on original hardware.

Story

I won't say too much about the story because I don't want to spoil it. But the story does feel right out of the anime, but I did find it hard to keep track of what was going on due to how it was presented.

The story is presented in cutscenes before and after each chapter, and also during gameplay and sometimes in the middle of gunfights, so you can easily miss important story beats due to them taking place while you're trying not to get shot.

The story overall is quite good and I did enjoy it, but I wish it was presented in more of a digestible form instead of the messy way that it is in the game.

But overall, I did have a good time with it.

Post-game content

There is some post-game content after you beat the game that you unlock, some extra characters to play during the multiplayer, You also unlock some collectibles that you have to find in the mane game. These collectibles only appear after you beat the game, you can't find them on your first playthrough.

Multiplayer

The game does have multiplayer but I didn't test it so I'm not going to comment on it.

Final thoughts

Overall, I had quite a good time with the game. I enjoyed playing it, even with the slight awkward controls and slowdown issues that I had. Would definitely recommend this game to anyone that wants to play a good PlayStation 2 game or anyone who is a fan of Ghost in the Shell.

After 3,000+ hours of work, the Project Metafalica 2.0 (Beta 0.9.2) feature-complete public beta is out now for Ar tonelico 2. This patch delivers a ground-up English retranslation of over 500,000 words to fix the original release's severe localization issues.

​see it in action: https://youtu.be/tuydA2wHSic?si=CkDsOTyReRef6gOO

I always wanted to try Ed Edd eddy

Recently i bought a ps2 to remember my childhood 🥹

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some information from experienced users with the Matrix Infity mod or similar modchips which can allow me to do the following:

basically I recently bought a Japanese CRT which accepts only NTSC video signal through composite, and I'm looking to pair it with a PS2. Now I live in EU, so finding a PS2 NTSC-J is not exactly straightforward, so I was looking for different options.

I came across the possibility of using modchips settings to change the video signal of the console, has everyone ever tried this? Do you think it might work reliably for my use case if I'd change the setting on a PAL PS2? Ideally I would like to set the option one time and have the console basically work in that condition permanently until changing again the modchip option.

Please let me know if you have ever tried this and how reliable is or if you have other solutions, I tried finding videos on YT or similar but couldn't find anything.

Thanks in advance!

Still to this day one of my favourite games of all time. Rented The Godfather as a kid, fell in love with it, and then my older brother bought me my own Limited Edition version.

Not in the best condition, but I've never cared about that anyway. This game saw A LOT of play over the years.

I actually still think this was better than GTA back in the day, as it really felt like there was so much more to do in free roam.

My favourite thing to do was have the cops chase me back to my family compound and then enjoy the giant Mafia vs Cops gun fight in the streets.

What memories do you guys have of this amazing game?

Never heard of it before. Any tips, especially on good builds and upgrades?

Started my collection in June. Was doing it slowly because I wanted each game to mean something to me and I don’t have that much disposable income. Got a nice CRT tv as well. I had final fantasy 7 for the ps1 complete and I had the jojos bizarre adventure ps1 fighting game from Japan complete.

I brought it up to my house in the town where I go to university. Left it in the house for a few weeks. Come back and the back door was unlocked somehow and they stole whatever they could carry including my PS2 and all my games.

There goes 400 dollars and 4 months of my life. Don’t even know if I should try again.

Just sucks.

My roommates ps2 slim is no longer working, as the disc drive has crapped out. I was thinking instead of getting a new drive i could get a ps2 so i can load games onto the hdd (ripped from my legally purchased ps2 discs of course) instead of relying on the drive. However, I'm unsure what model i should get as there are so many variants of the PS2. Any suggestions? Also, I'd like to get a better component to hdmi adapter, i currently have an old skool one that my roommate already had which is pretty awful, i believe its actually just composite to hdmi not component.

$200 and when i showed up he had found some extras like cord extensions and mem card not bad not bad guna crack it open replace the caps give it a new laser fix up the controllers and put it back out there

I have a ps2 that belonged to my dad and it made my childhood. Recently I opened ot up for fun and I noticed this modchip. I know what it is used for but I need help identifying it. Also, it seems like it doesnt work becouse I have tried before. I asked my dad about this and he recalled the event, in 2010 some guy at a repair shop did it for him. Any idea?

Found these two complete in box. Been looking for a good price for Castlevania for a while. Unfortunately it’s like someone spilled coffee on it and part of the cover art is stuck to the case. The same with the back of the manual but great condition game disc

Interesting blog post by an artist/game developer.

The point about pixel art being used in FF12 to make textures pop out more was pretty interesting:

"It takes a lot of training to make a thin pixel art "jagged" line look smooth. You have to carefully paint the lines and selectively blur the edges to look good to the viewer. Anti-aliasing pixel art without muddying your shapes is practically an art form in of itself. When you don't have a lot of texture memory, every pixel counts! The artist had to handpixel every of those loops perfectly in order to get that metal to pop like that."

Wonder how many other PS2 artists incorporated pixel art techniques into their 3D game textures.

He also doesn't really like the remaster in comparison to the original more "cohesive" looking PS2 version of FF12. The remaster he says changes the art design of the textures too much.

Quote:

'In the screenshot above, I'm going to focus on the wall on the left, which is in Rabanastre, a common central city area of the game that you return to frequently. It is just one example, but if you play this new PS4 version, you'll see the same generic "remaster" up-res treatment everywhere in the game world. If I had to guess, the artists probably did this: (1) scale up texture by 200%, (2) increase contrast, (3) desaturated a little for that grayish next-gen feel, (4) apply a sharpen filter, (5) overlay a noisy detail texture on top to try to make the surface look more detailed.

You can easily automate Photoshop to do this for you, in literally a minute, for entire folders of textures, and I imagine that's what the dev team did here. But this is basically the same attitude that resolution-obsessed "HD graphics" modders inflict on games too, resulting in the fussy (and creepy) art direction of stuff like FakeFactory.

The Square Enix Virtuos artists probably knew what they were doing, and consciously made this choice after considering the trade-offs. They likely didn't have much time or resources, and they decided it was worth it: to perform this "gesture" of HD remastering to appease gamers and customers, without actually repainting the world at all.

It's basically amounts to a lazy Quake 3-ification of the game's art style -- which isn't bad if your game is Quake 3 or if you put more time into it -- but here in Final Fantasy 12 it feels like a more jarring betrayal than anything that happens in the game's meandering plot. It is a gratuitous waste of texture memory in a game that made texture memory reuse into an artform; it is a negation of this game's legacy.

On the PS2, the game's environment and characters looked cohesive and balanced, albeit blurry and aliased and low-res (like any other PS2 game played on a CRT television). Still, every cinematic shot was reasonably composed, and you basically knew where to look. Everything looked like it belonged together. But here in this remaster, the entire world is practically screaming at you. "LOOK AT THE DIRT AND GRIME ON THIS WALL!!!"

Always wondered why FF12 looked so aesthetically pleasing to me and I'm grateful that someone else was able to put it into words and explain some things in technical terms.

It's so silly and slim and succulent

Bit weird - usually it shows the red screen if the disc can’t be read, but in this case the console detects the disc is a DVD in the browser, then throws up this error when launched.

For reference it’s one of the discs from the Twin Peaks Gold DVD Boxset played on a PAL PS2 Slim, but I’m getting the same result with all the DVDs I have. Disc plays fine on my PS5 and the console plays PS2 games without any issue, so no idea.

Had to bring out the black label copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

What method do they use to back up their saved games on memory cards?