PS2 Features

Another holiday shopping season is here, bringing with it the grim realization that, once again, the game industry has failed to learn its damn lesson. Just like every other year, seemingly every game publisher on the planet has decided to shove its biggest releases onto store shelves for the holidays, confident that they won’t be buried under the avalanche of every other publisher doing the exact same thing.

We're not gonna lie – this is a sparse month for games. The biggest publishers are saving their biggest products for September, October and November, leaving August with a very short list to choose from.

Fear not, however, because scattered across the barren wasteland of the next four weeks are some very promising oases of gaming goodness. Some of these titles will be just enough to last through the end of summer, while others have the potential to keep you occupied – and happy – right through the fall, distracting you completely from Call of Halo or Fallout Rising 2...

Hide and seek is one of the oldest playground games in existence. It only makes sense to translate the thrill of escaping your friends’ clutches into a digital form. After all, “don’t get caught” is a parameter gamers can instantly recognize.

It’s a simple premise that has expanded from outwitting a single enemy unit into outthinking collective AI.

Nobody likes to see a Game-Over screen. As if knowing you suck isn’t bad enough, some games rub it in by torturing you with really annoying Game-Over screens. What could be worse than having to watch your demise from multiple angles, or sitting through the same long-ass cutscene of the world ending every time you fail? Tack one of these onto a tough boss fight, and you have a perfect formula for gamer rage. We’ve hand-picked this

Thanks to two films - Chinatown and Blade Runner - every action game is practically required to have a Chinatown level. It’s not the Chinatown you see in real-life - a thriving community and marketplace established over a unique hybrid of  Western and Chinese culture – no, it’s all neon signs and gangsters, dragon statues and tile roofs. A lot of tile roofs. And it's usually in the future or

September marked the end of the summer doldrums, cranking out a fair number of noteworthy games in its 30 fair weather days. But October, as has been the case for years now, is overflowing with must-play titles nestled in between would-like-to-play-eventually games that’ll undoubtedly be crushed at retail. Still, that’s good news for us as gamers, as we’re about to be treated to some of the best games of the year...

Even two console generations ago we stopped batting our eyelids if games contained other, smaller games within them. It didn’t even seem odd if whole games were made up of dozens of little ones. Nowadays we use minigame mechanisms to open doors, enact fancy stealth kills, slaughter bosses or open chests. Minigames are everywhere, be it shoving boulders in Conan, coercing peasants in Oblivion or doing anything at all in Thrillville or