10 Best PS2 Demakes

Shattered Memories came out on the Wii in December and was ported to the PS2 and the PSP in January 2010. It is a reimagining of the first Silent Hill. Harry Mason is still looking for his missing daughter in the town of Silent Hill, but the plot is different and the characters have changed. The game comes in two parts. One is a first-person session in the office of a therapist, Dr. Michael Kaufmann. The other follows Harry through the snowy town, and every so often the world shifts into a far more dangerous version of itself. Akira Yamaoka wrote the soundtrack, the first in the series to put dynamic music up front.

It landed very late in the PS2's life. Players still recommend it when someone asks about Silent Hill on the PS2, and it earns the spot. It is a strange, cold little horror game, and the cold is mostly the point.

Double Agent is really two games with one name. Ubisoft Montreal, the studio behind Splinter Cell and Chaos Theory, made the version for the GameCube, the PS2, the Wii and the Xbox. Ubisoft Milan and Ubisoft Shanghai made a separate version for the PlayStation 3, Windows and the Xbox 360, on a completely custom engine. The Montreal game is built on the technology of the earlier Splinter Cell games. The two share the same voice actors and background music. The story opens with bad news for Sam Fisher: his only child, Sarah, has died after being hit by a drunk driver.

Here is the twist. Players who tried both versions say the PS2 one is the better game, and they say it with feeling. The older consoles got the stealth game Splinter Cell fans wanted, while the new machines got the shinier sibling. If you only ever played the HD one, this is basically a sequel you missed.

Viewtiful Joe started on the GameCube as one of the Capcom Five, directed by Hideki Kamiya and produced by Atsushi Inaba. The same team then ported it to the PS2 under the name Clover Studio. It is an action game where you fight crowds of enemies coming at you from every direction, the foreground and the background included. The hook is Joe's VFX Power, which copies camera tricks from the movies. The first one is Slow, which slows time down so your hits land harder and you can dodge more easily. The working title was "Red Hot Man", until the name ran into the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

It was only a minor commercial success, but players still put it among the best action games on the PS2. Its style still looks like nothing else on the console, and the PS2 version means you do not need a GameCube to see it.

The Force Unleashed was made for the PS2, the PS3, the Wii and the Xbox 360 at once, plus a pile of handhelds, and it came out in North America on September 16, 2008. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions run on the Ronin engine, with high-definition graphics and big dynamic destruction effects. The PS2 had to do without all that. The story bridges the two film trilogies. Darth Vader secretly takes a boy strong in the Force as his apprentice, and Sam Witwer gives that boy, Starkiller, his voice and his face. It was a bestseller, with over a million copies sold in its debut month.

Players who tried both say the PS2 version plays out differently from the PS3 and Xbox 360 game. It is not a shrunken copy, it is its own take on the same story. That makes it worth a look even if you already finished the HD one.

Splinter Cell was an Xbox game first, and the PC version stays fairly close to it. Ubisoft started work in 2001, after buying the Tom Clancy license in 2000. You play Sam Fisher, an NSA black ops agent voiced by Michael Ironside. The plot starts in Georgia, where President Kombayn Nikoladze took power in a bloodless coup, and it ends up with a cyber attack on North America. The GameCube and PS2 versions came later from Ubisoft Shanghai. They have many small changes over the originals, and the result is that they are generally easier.

Easier is not the same as easy, though. Players who grew up with it on the PS2 still talk about it with real affection. For a lot of kids, this was the first game that taught them to wait in the dark instead of running in shooting. Few PS2 games made a shadow feel so important.

Psychonauts grew out of an idea Tim Schafer had back while making Full Throttle. Microsoft was going to publish it, but it dropped the rights in 2004, and the game's future was unclear for a while. Majesco stepped in a few months later, and Double Fine finished it after four and a half years of work. You play Raz, the son of a family of circus performers, who runs away to become a Psychonaut. At the camp you jump into other characters' minds, where censors attack you for being there. A family curse also means water can hurt Raz, which is a rough deal at a summer camp.

Critics liked it, but Majesco took a severe financial loss after its release and left the video game market. Players have spent years making up for that. They call it underrated and an overlooked classic of the PS2 era, and they keep telling people to play it.

Half-Life was Valve's first game, and it runs on GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. It was a PC game through and through. Instead of cutting away to movies, it tells almost all of its story through scripted scenes while you stay in control. It won more than 50 PC Game of the Year awards. In 2001 it was ported to the PlayStation 2, together with the multiplayer expansion Decay.

Players still remember being surprised that it came to the PS2 at all. They also still recommend the PS2 version today, which says a lot about a port of a mouse-and-keyboard shooter. It keeps the feeling that something is very wrong in that lab, just with a controller in your hands.

Deus Ex was a PC game first, published by Eidos Interactive in 2000. Warren Spector created it and wrote the original design document. It mixes first-person shooting with stealth and role-playing, and its levels give you more than one way to solve a problem. The design took ideas from Half-Life, Fallout, Thief: The Dark Project and GoldenEye 007.

A game built for a mouse and keyboard had no business working on a PS2. Players who played it there loved it anyway, and they call it a solid port that turned out far more playable than anyone expected. It was the deep end for a lot of console kids, and they still talk about it.

Max Payne first came out for Windows in July 2001. It is a grim neo-noir shooter that tells its story through graphic novel panels with voice-overs, drawing on hard-boiled detective novels by authors like Mickey Spillane. Its big trick is bullet time, which slows everything down for a moment while you stand or dive through gunfire. Kärtsy Hatakka composed the music. Critics loved the gunplay and the noir storytelling, and the game sold 4 million units.

Players still recommend the PS2 version as the way they first met Max. It was the gritty action game of the PS2 years for a lot of people. Think about that for a second: a cop whose wife and baby were murdered, on the same console as all those cartoon platformers.

Resident Evil 4 is famous as a GameCube game, but development began for the PlayStation 2 in 1999. Several versions were thrown away, and one of them became a new game, Devil May Cry, before Shinji Mikami took over as director. The finished game put the camera right behind Leon and zoomed in over his shoulder to aim, with a laser sight on every gun instead of a crosshair. For a while the PS2 was not supposed to get it at all: as one player remembered, Mikami "said that he'd cut off his own head if Resident Evil 4 were to be released on PS2." It was released on PS2 anyway, and Capcom added content for that version, which later went into the PC and Wii releases.

Players agree the PS2 port gave up some of its looks and kept the game. It won multiple Game of the Year awards and sold 15.2 million copies by March 2025 across its many versions. On the PS2 it is still one of the best games you can put in the tray.