Arika, the developers of both games, followed it with the spiritual sequel Endless Ocean, for the Wii. They are also quickly forgotten about when the next minute you are literally bludgeoning a tiger to death in a cage match.Everblue 2 ( エバーブルー2, Ebāburū Tsū) is a scuba diving adventure game. The only negative to the game is the stealth sections played as the other guy, but these don't make up a large part of the game from what I remember. The amount of crowd pleasing at the end of the arena match then dictates your ranking - a really simple system that very effectively makes your play style progressively more brutal. This can cut a man in two - the "Bloody Fountain", his legs stay upright while blood gushes everywhere. This pops skulls, the "Juicy Tomato", which the crowd loves even more, rewarding you with a halberd. You press the crowd button and they lap it up, throwing you a mace as reward. For example, you can slice a man's arm off with a scimitar, before proceeding to beat him to death with his own arm. After completing combos, there is a button dedicated to appealing to the crowd. From the Onimusha 3 team, it focuses on hack-and-slashing in the arena, however its scoring system ties into the gladiator combat in an interesting way. The story unashamedly apes Gladiator: fallen Roman army hero fights for his life in the arena, while behind the curtains his intellectual friend tries to secure his freedom. Shadow of Rome - It is saddening that there are so few gladiator games, but thankfully as the screenshot shows we got a nearly perfect one in this game. As a stealth game, it's very basic hide in the shadows stuff, and devolves into too much of a shooter for my liking towards the end, but overall the unrelenting depravity and consistency in its execution makes it one of the most memorable PS2 games for me.īonus points: in today's political climate, I think many people will appreciate the levels in which you get to turn neo-Nazis heads into mushy pulp. There is also the interesting ability to let the Director hiss encouragement in your ear through a USB headset (voiced by Brian Cox, the awesome Scottish actor not the lame TV physics personality). The audio direction is also fantastic, with a John Carpenter-esque low-fi soundtrack adding ambiance to the levels. Not only is it a disgusting environment to be in, visually it still holds up today - while technically poor (as a mid-gen PS2 game running on the Vice City engine, it's expected), aesthetically it nails the decayed feeling that anyone who's ever done urban exploration in a rundown neighborhood will be familiar with. What I really like about it is that the blank slate protagonist (who may as well be silent) could have done anything to warrant execution, yet you strangely empathize with his predicament. The Director forces him, through manipulation and blackmail, to gruesomely kill gang members in a rust-belt city to produce material for a snuff film. It still has one of my favorite premises in a game to date - a death row inmate's final moments are staged and he is given an "unexpected reprieve" by a character known as the Director. At it's heart, I think it is best categorized as a horror game, instilling a sense of fear in players as well as the genre's best. Manhunt - Manhunt is well known for its violence, however is deeply under-rated. It is still worth tracking down, especially if you are even remotely interested in the J-horror movie genre. But frustratingly it didn't even receive a US release. Forbidden Siren 2 is nearly as good as Blood Curse in my eyes, containing many of the same quality of life improvements made after the mediocre first title. Siren is one of the finest but most under the radar horror series ever made, so it's a shame it only really came to prominence in the West with the release of the PS3 game Blood Curse - before going dormant completely. One highlight, which exemplifies how genius the sightjack mechanic is, involves a character who is completely blind and can only progress by sightjacking his own guide dog to use as a third person camera. The game is therefore more about studying their movement patterns and planning out how best to sneak around them (however it does occasionally empower the player with guns). However, the odds are evened somewhat with the multiple player characters having the ability to "sightjack", allowing them to see through the eyes of nearby Shibito. They cannot be completely killed, reanimating just a few minutes later, and can even wield rifles almost as well as a living person. Forbidden Siren 2 - In this horror series set in rural Japan, the enemies are reanimated corpses known as the Shibito, however they differ from regular zombies in the sense that they retain a lot of human-like qualities: routines, speech, feelings and most disturbingly, intelligence.
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