Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly was made for the PS2. It flopped for good reasons. It wasn’t fun. The first few Spyro games were a lot of fun though.
Kingdom Hearts is really a platformer type of game in the guise of a RPG. It is great fun but there is constant fighting. It’s a great game and now in the bargain bin.
I picked up Gitaroo Man and Sly Cooper and the Thevius Racoonus from suggestions here and they were the best two games I own for my PS2. Sly Cooper is more 3D platformer but it reminded me of Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers. Great controls and a generally fun game. Gitaroo Man is wacky and music based. It is nice to hear all the J-pop songs and is infinitely better than Parappa the Rappa 2 which is equally as goofy but doesn’t have all the fun controls that Gitaroo man has.
ICO is fun. It is basically a bunch of puzzles that you have to solve while leading around a girl whom you can’t let get taken away by monsters. It is gorgeous and fun however it is a bit short. You sould be able to finish it in about 5-10 hours with subsequent run throughs much faster.
I’ve been pretty loyal to Nintendo (I’ve been playing since I was four, in the long-gone days of the NES), so I’m not too big on the PS2. I do have an old obsolete PSone, however, and of the games I have I enjoy the first Spyro the Dragon game and Monster Rancher, which is a great little monster-breeding game with more depth than a Tamagotchi, but easy enough for Joe Gamer to pick up and start playing. It reads your CDs and makes a monster based on pre-selected snippets of data, resulting in a unique monster every time. Very neat, and later installments (like MR3 and MR4 on the PS2) have implemented the ability to get monsters off of DVDs.
If she’s like a lot of the girls I know, she’ll be most impressed with Dance Dance Revolution, particularly DDRMAX2 (equivalent to the arcade version, 7th Mix). Girls seem to enjoy dancing games, and laugh uncontrollably as they fumble through the easiest moves the game has to offer. Invest the extra $10 or $15 in a hard dance pad though, as soft ones tear or break easily under the intensity of a hardcore dance session.
The EyeToy isn’t just a fluke either. There was a display in the local mall a while back, and people had all kinds of fun embarrassing themselves on screen.
Any of the above recommendations come with my seal of approval.
Has she tried any of the Tony Hawk games yet? I’m not into sports either, and I can’t skateboard worth a darn, but I love the games. They’re fun and easy to play, plus you can customize your own skater. As a female, I get kind of annoyed when games offer customization of everything but gender. Tony Hawk has offered female skaters since customization was introduced.