Yes absolutely! Inspired Dark Souls, future zelda games, & basically every indie game to come out afterwards.

I started The Last Guardian, still need to go back & finish it. I liked a lot of what it was bringing to the table, but the pacing dragged a bit in the middle imo.

That fight is so incredible, I could gush about it all day. The ambience, the visuals, the environmental storytelling, just amazing.

I love the ps2 era of games! Here are some suggestions:

• ICO: Minimalist game about a cursed boy & a girl with mysterious powers trying to escape a castle together. An absolute classic.
• Shadow of the Colossus: Another Team ICO game, this one you’ve probably heard of. You play as a young man who sets out for the Forbidden Lands, finding and slaying 16 colossi to resurrect his deceased love.
• Silent Hill 2: One of the greatest survival horror games ever made. Introspective, tackles mature themes, and deeply chilling. A game I truly feel is haunted.
• Persona 4: High schoolers solving a murder mystery in a rural Japanese town. I prefer the vanilla ps2 version to the revised Golden edition, it graphically preserves the fog & spookier ambience - with better pacing from less bloat.

For some more obscure games:

• The Adventures of Cookie & Cream: A brutal co-op/singleplayer puzzle game developed by Fromsoft. Has a fun art style & interesting levels.
• Tak 3 - the Great Juju Challenge: Works best in co-op but still a blast in single-player. 3D platformer with varied levels & a fantastic voice cast (Patrick Warburton as Lok is the highlight).

Btw if you’re playing mgs3 on the ps2 make sure it’s the Subsistence edition! It has a 3D camera that works way better than the top-down the og game shipped with.

I think part of that silliness is intentional, at least in my interpretation of the game. The internal thesis of the game seems to be examining how far they can push the player-to-protagonist relationship until it breaks. Similar to the first game, where it was intended for players to have complicated feelings about having to control Joel in the hospital at the end doing something they may not have wanted to do but was 100% in character for Joel.

Part 2 feels like that idea stretched across the entire game, especially for Ellie. There’s a pretty powerful metaphor for addiction in the form of addiction to violence/revenge, and I feel like going to Santa Barbara shows Ellie reaching her rock bottom. The player doesn’t want this (especially after playing as Abby), Dina doesn’t want this, hell part of Ellie doesn’t even want this. It’s just the main thing she knows how to solve her problems - through violence

I had you all wrong, you’re not greedy… you’re batshit insane!!

The avenues for trans kids is conversion therapy, or the dog-whistle “faith based counseling”; seen with the recent federal insurance ban on covering HRT but explicitly calling out conversion therapy coverage. A practice which is banned in several states but has been challenged by conservatives claiming that banning the torture of kids infringes on their “free speech”

Model replacement, voice acting update (uses line stitching for existing npc voices - I didn’t notice anything that drew me out of it), and a fully voiced protagonist. She does a great job! Voice Showcase

Played through Deus Ex earlier this year with the Lay D Denton (female protag) mod. It’s amazingly integrated & gave such a fun spin on the existing game