As far as a lot of Sony’s AAA and first party stuff, it was all fairly drab. Quite a bit on Xbox too, for that matter. Considering the sheer library available on the PS2, however, calling it all drab is doing a massive misservice to the system and a lot of the gen itself.
As far as genuinely good games went, the 6th gen gave us MGS 2 and 3, copious Tony Hawk games, DOA 2 and 3 (plus 4 on the 360), Burnout 3, Mercenaries, Blinx, the best of the Silent Hill series, arguably the best of the GTA series, some of FromSofts’s best non-SoulsBourne output (Otogi 1-2 and the Japan exclusive Metal Wolf Chaos we eventually got), Puyo Puyo Fever, the PSP Ridge Racers, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio + Future, a good chunk of Xbox’s first/second party racers (Ralisport Challenge, Project Gotham Racing, Midtown Madness 3), those weird Simple Series PS2 releases that got localised, and those are just a few off the top of my head. I could probably go on and on (mainly because I forgot about the Gamecube).
I experienced most of these and more later on, as the family jumped from SNES to Win 98 to Xbox by about 2005. We eventuslly got a PS2 later on but still long after the hayday of the platform.
PS3 era being drab? I can totally understand. HD was the hot ticket item, and cinematic photo realism was usually done at the expense of performance and any real sense of style. Unreal 3 was big, but it had issues. The big push for HD “remasters” of games released 5-10 years back probably didn’t help either.
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As far as a lot of Sony’s AAA and first party stuff, it was all fairly drab. Quite a bit on Xbox too, for that matter. Considering the sheer library available on the PS2, however, calling it all drab is doing a massive misservice to the system and a lot of the gen itself.
As far as genuinely good games went, the 6th gen gave us MGS 2 and 3, copious Tony Hawk games, DOA 2 and 3 (plus 4 on the 360), Burnout 3, Mercenaries, Blinx, the best of the Silent Hill series, arguably the best of the GTA series, some of FromSofts’s best non-SoulsBourne output (Otogi 1-2 and the Japan exclusive Metal Wolf Chaos we eventually got), Puyo Puyo Fever, the PSP Ridge Racers, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio + Future, a good chunk of Xbox’s first/second party racers (Ralisport Challenge, Project Gotham Racing, Midtown Madness 3), those weird Simple Series PS2 releases that got localised, and those are just a few off the top of my head. I could probably go on and on (mainly because I forgot about the Gamecube).
I experienced most of these and more later on, as the family jumped from SNES to Win 98 to Xbox by about 2005. We eventuslly got a PS2 later on but still long after the hayday of the platform.
PS3 era being drab? I can totally understand. HD was the hot ticket item, and cinematic photo realism was usually done at the expense of performance and any real sense of style. Unreal 3 was big, but it had issues. The big push for HD “remasters” of games released 5-10 years back probably didn’t help either.
The only good games on your list are Dreamcast (later ported to PS2) and PSP titles though 😅