Hey don't make this about PS2. I still get a bit emotional thinking about:

• [Swarm Assault ](https://dzierzan.itch.io/opensa
• Red Ace Squadron
• GTA Vice City (not exactly niche, but it was the first violent game I played)

Thanks for this post, because otherwise I would never have found out that someone recreated Red Ace Squadron in Unreal Engine

Onimusha for me, or maybe dark cloud if that counts.

Core childhood memory. I remember getting this game for Christmas 2004 and playing it religiously until the sequel came out a year later.

I played Evergrace at my cousin's house. I have such fond and vivid memories from that game. But when I went back to play it as an adult, I realized that it's kind of terrible.

It’s a PS1 game, but still. I loved this game. If I wasn’t playing Twisted Metal 2 then I was playing this.

Am grill but:

I was gifted Alter Echo by my late Memere when I was a teenager. I'm early 30s now, and I still have it.

Swiv 3d 4 life

Oddly enough I recently played obscure. It's niche but I enjoyed it. Multiplayer resident evil in a highschool.

Honestly online play has set co op games back 20 years.

Smugglers run all day.

Champions of Norrath

Never owned a PS2 but a friend had the game and I was so addicted. Sadly he preferred FIFA. Was never able to find the games name again for over a decade, and when I finally discovered it, it was in a demo video for an android handheld I had just preordered. Double win since it ran smooth as butter

Not even a shitpost but it’s a good repost so I’ll accept it

I started playing music around the time my friends moved on to PS2 from PS1 and I didn't have any bandwidth for anything else for years. Everyone my age has these memories and I have never played more than a couple of hours of PS2 in my life. I'm like Tony Hawk, AMIRITE?

This is Freedom Fighters for me.

Dark Cloud 🤘🤘🤘

Shadow of the Colossus.... Man, way to put me in my feels

Battlefront II LAN parties...

Neither are obscure, but I played the shit out of Ace Combat Shattered Skies and Simpsons Hit and Run...

The Legend of Dragoon. We need a reissue of it 🥲

A bit younger than ps2, and for PC, but still.

That captain crunch game for the PC.

God of War

I was cursed with an xbox as a child and have Nightcaster: Defeat the Darkness as mine. I dont think it was even particularly good but it remains a monolith of cobwebs

"shovelware" movie/cartoon franchise tie-in games, my beloved

Asterix & Obelix: XXL 2, Ice Age 2 (the game), G-Force (the game)...

"Slop" used to be peak.

Actually it was the GC game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. It was a game about unraveling the mysteries of the murder of your uncle that devolves into fighting the old gods.

I love it and come back to it every so often, I even still have a GameCube squirreled away for it, but I'd rather play it on my Deck more often than not.

Mister Mosquito

My.memory is a little fuzzy and I'm sure it's nowhere near as good as I remember but was there a game called Ape escape? Something about catching monkeys and they had like flashing helmets or something and you would run around with a net catching them?

A very basic sounding premise but in my memory it was a really good game.

Ratchet and Clank. I dunno. It just clicked for me.

Hunter the reckoning

Um Jammer Lammy.

While I liked the Parappa games, I'll die on the hill that Lammy was better than either of them and should have continued as a series.

Goddamn. Nostalgia fest scrolling through the comments.

Here are my additions (I was primarily a PC Gamer as my folks didn't believe in consoles):

Cyberspeed

One Must Fall: 2097

EGA Trek

Xbox for me, Phantom Crash. That game is solid gold, baby! SOLID GOLD!

Oni

gender-affirming lack of obscure ps2 game

coming back to this post later to find recommendations though...

I was looking at random speedruns recently and I came across Shinobi, and holy shit. A rush of memories came flooding into me like a download from the Matrix. My pupils dilated, and suddenly it was 2002 all over again.