I didn’t even know they slabbed video games!
I can understand in the broadest terms why “new in shrink” means something even if we all know that “in shrink” doesn’t mean a whole lot. Speaking as a collector of many nerdy things, however, I am completely disconnected from the attitude that “collecting” means sealing something away forever. I get stuff to be read, watched, or played, not sit around collecting dust.
nthing the suggestion for Okami.
The original Shadow Hearts was actually released for the PS2. As I recall, it was developed for the PS1, and they made the decision to switch pretty close to the last minute, so that’s why it looks more like a PS1 game.
If you have kids to share your gaming with, all the Lego games are really fun to play. There’s two lego Star Wars games, an Indiana Jones one, and a Batman one. Batman is my favorite.
Whaddya gonna do, the PS2 is theirs, not mine! I get stuck with the PC.
Weird.
I got Ico for $20 on half.com just about 5 months ago.
It’s worth $20. Not worth $60.
Get Okami. It’s worth a ton!
OK, so I just checked and my memory was off.
I bought Ico on June 5, 2008 for $11.99 on Amazon.com. It was used, but in mint condition.
What happened in the last year?
There was a presidential election. That always sops up the time. And an economic crisis.
Oh, there was the planetary conquest by the alien ant people and we’re now their slaves. Don’t you have a all-wise, kind and just master telling you what to do every second?
Run away. Break free of their tyrannical control while…
Found a copy of Kingdom Hearts 2 at a pawn shop for $4 yesterday. Dive right in, or do I need to play the first one first? Or is it like Final Fantasy, where they’re all pretty self-contained?
Oh - and what about the Katamary games? Which to start with/focus on finding?
A lot of greats have already been mentioned, just repeating them
Okami (one of the best experiential games ever)
Shadow Hearts I and II
Dynasty Tactics
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Devil May Cry 3
Ace Combat Zero
I have an unused copy of Ico sitting at my house. Sadly, I did open it…I wonder how much I could fetch for it if it were still sealed.
With Kingdom Hearts the narrative is heavily dependent on the original game but the sequel heavily uses resources and concepts from the first one. So if you don’t really care about the story then dive right in and you’ll be fine but if you do get the original then you won’t want to play them back to back because they’ll feel pretty much the same.
As for Katamari there’s four games. The first, Katamari Damacy, is definitely the best with the basic concept. We (heart) Katamari is essentially the expansion pack; they developer took a bunch of the cute ideas for playing with Katamaris and brought them together. After the original creator left there have been the PSP game Me, My, Katamari which was marred by a poor transition of the controls to the PSP (my hands cramped before I did two stages). Beatiful Katamari on the 360 which might be one of the biggest scams of the current console generation since as released it has less content than the other games. Included on the disk, however, are enough levels to bring it up to par but you have to pay extra through XBox Live to unlock the levels that you already have.
The awesome thing about Okami being awesome is that it’s also cheap. S’like $20 new on Amazon.
Yeah. Everything I’ve read about Ico in the last 24 hours (hey, this thread sparked my curiousity) points to it being really short and of limited replay value, which makes it sound like an ungood idea at $60.
Both Katamari offerings on the PS2 are very good. Someone once told me that We <3 Katamari is a much better game than the original Katamari Damacy, but that you need to have played through the first one to really appreciate that fact. Now owning and having played both, I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. And they’re both cheap now (unlike, oddly, when I bought We <3 Katamari, when it cost like $50. o.o). Can’t go wrong here, though you risk WTF syndrome if you play the 2nd game without the first. 
Odin Sphere is gorgeous and has a really interesting story, but the gameplay is not what most people go into it expecting, which leads to a lot of frustrations. The game is clearly deliberately designed to punish button mashing, and, in fact, the ‘brawling’ part is only one of roughly 4 interlocking subsystems that you need to “play” in order to really be successful - you need to fight effectively, yes, but you also need to manage your resources effectively. If you have “potion syndrome” and are never willing to use them, Odin Sphere will be brutally hard. You need to balance collecting Phozons for Psypher skills, using phozons to grow plants to heal you and get XP, using plant seeds to get eggs, using seeds (or fruit) as alchemy components to ensure you have an adequate supply of appropriate potions to assist you in battle, all without running out of inventory space. For a “brawler”, it’s very thinky-planny and this upsets people who are hoping to just zip from stage to stage doing ultra combose and smiting their foes. It also does have very significant slowdown in a few areas (Certain bossfights.) which puts some people off. I think it’s worth it. YMMV. 
And oh, yeah, I quite enjoyed Shadow Hearts: Covenant, but boy, it was kinda weird. Okay, more than kinda. I submit the Penny Arcade comic from the time of its release.
I liked Ico much more than SotC and agree with pretty much everything you say here. SotC is beautiful in retrospect (which is why I think it’s a game everyone should have played) but I’m not sure I’d want to go through it again. I think I fell off (more importantly: had to re-climb) the last colossus about 50 times before I figured out the way onto its head.
Ico is beautiful and amazing though and I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t like it.
Ugh. Great Odin, the last colossus was the one that finally drove me to look up how to beat the blighted thing on GameFAQs, since the bit with the bow was completely outside the scope of anything I’d even considered, and every time I mucked things up at that point I had to climb for 5 minutes to get back to where I was. It sortof took the rest of the game and dialed it up to 11 - while it’s exhilarating to get something right, or to barely hang on as a colossus tries to shake you off, far, far more often than not I found myself repeating actions I’d already done just to get back to where I was when I tried something that didn’t work.
How frustrating of a game is Shadow of the Colossus? I tend to dislike annoying and frustrating Boss fights, but I loved Ico and Okami.
Watch this to get a pretty good idea of what the game is like.
Shadow of the Colossus is nothing but boss battles. Literally. Glancing back over the thread, I think maybe that point was glossed over…
The only enemies in the game are the twelve colossi. They’re spread out over a large map and you have to find them. The first couple are easy to find, but after that the bitches start hiding from you. You can spend way more time just locating the damn things than actually fighting them. How do you find them? You hold your sword up in the air and the light from the sun reflects in a beam in the general direction where the next one is located. So what you do when hit the edge of a cliff, or an impassable barrier, and you still haven’t found it? You start exploring. Am I supposed to climb up or down here? Am I supposed to travel further down the map and find a bridge or a pass of some sort? Is it in a cave below me in the face of the cliff? Am I actually near the thing or is it still further away across that plain in the distance? Bring up your map and study your surroundings… Where could a ten story tall monster even be hiding at if I am, in fact, near it? And where did my damn horse just run off to?
Each of the colossi is a boss battle unto itself. You have to figure how to climb it, (or bring it down to you), and where the weak point is. Then after it shakes you off you have to climb back up it and do it all over again. It can be very frustrating.
I really did enjoy my time with the game. Honestly! 
SotC is getting a lot of mentions, and I would echo it’s recommendation. I really liked the game, more than ICO. Upthread is mentioned Ace Combat Zero, but my personal favorite of the series is easily Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies. It’s a flight combat sim, so if you’re not into that I guess that’s a strike against it, but I was really grabbed by the narrative; specifically how the story was told.
For older stuff that I would suggest players not miss, I’m a fan of the Suikoden series of RPGs, notably Suikoden II. The graphics of the series (even the PS2 sequels) are a bit dated, but the gameplay and narratives are very rich. If you enjoy RPGs, it’s the kind of series that has a lot for any kind of RPG fan.
Hmmm…that actually looked pretty cool.
I’ve been on the edge of buying this game for a year or so. I loved Ico and I liked all 3 Prince of Persias(the PS2 ones) and this looks similar.
I really liked Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I didn’t play any of the others on the PS2. I would not consider it to be similar to Shadow of the Colossus at all, simply because the penalty for failure was so much lighter. Single missteps in SotC, especially when “exploring” are frequently immediately lethal, and inevitably involve a lot of retracing not necessarily easy steps. Of the later colossi took me 30+ minutes to kill even after I figured out “how”. It ceased being fun and started to be more of “Okay, now I wait on this ledge for it to walk under me… again, and then I grab onto its head and try to…damnit, now I need to climb back up onto that ledge again.”
In case anyone is unclear, I do not recommend this game. I do not go so far as to ‘unrecommend’ it, but I don’t think it deserves a place in a list of games you absolutely shouldn’t miss. It’s definitely not on my ‘must own’ list. Maybe a ‘must try’ list though.
You should buy the third one, which was called The Warrior Within. The second game was “meh”, but the third was really good…as good as the first one, actually.