These rankings are based off of Metacritics list of the best PS2 games of all time, so it cannot be argued with at all. It is 100% FACT BASED SCIENCE.

Also sorry this is coming out the day after Mother's Day, I had some formatting issues.

When it comes to people and their early gaming days their first experiences are usually shaped by their first console. Hearing tell of someone either being a SNES or Genesis kid would allow you to infer a surprising amount. SNES kids still probably have some reverence for kart racers, sharp platformers and anything with a Nintendo Logo while Genesis kids will proclaim that they love games with too much tude for your parents and that they are ok with having to talk about the ‘blue man’once a month with their therapist.

The 6th generation of consoles was no exception to this and it was an exciting time. Life was given to the cool and edgy Xbox by the Halo franchise, birthing an untold number of foul mouthed youths in the process. Nintendo’s Game Cube may have under-performed at retail because, like its defenders do nowadays, Nintendo was living in the shadow of their past glory. The Dreamcast, well if you were a Dreamcast kid you probably were not invited to many parties just like Sega nowadays. The PS2 on the other hand was a juggernaut in every regard.

While the first PlayStation was a surprise success the PS2 was a runaway hit for a few reasons. The PS2 would be able to play all your old PS1 games on it and while the average DVD player cost about 200 Bones, the PS2 launched with one built in for 300. Third parties flocked to PlayStation 2 weary of the unproven Xbox. With Nintendo’s over reliance on their first parties weaker system, lack of online functionalities, use of microdisks and lack of a DVD player and Sega’s habit of being a dying brand, it wasn’t a difficult choice which horse to back. It also didn’t hurt they got to market 6 months before the competition. The first wave of high quality 1st party games hit at the end of the PS1 era and rolling into the next gen Sony had fallen ass-backwards into the perfect sales storm by doing little more than the bare minimum of what was expected from them.

It can be easy to forget now the incredible ubiquity of the PS2 as a system. Remember how it felt like everyone and their mother owned one of the 101 million Wii units sold but that pales in comparison to the PS2’s 155 million units . Everyone and their mother owned a PS2 and half bought a spare just incase. This even extended to me. Well my family. According to my mother the idea of a machine for killing people all day in our house didn’t sit well with my father however apparently our DVD player was beginning to age. Like many others this seemed like the perfect replacement once she could convince my father… After a reminder was put out as to who wore the pants in our house my mother went to our local GameStop and asked for ‘1 videogame, please’… what I’m saying is at this time they were quite tech illiterate so in her defence it’s a miracle we got a PlayStation 2 and not a Dreambox PlayingSaturn as our day-after-Christmas surprise.

I remember loving the PlayStation 2, spending hours playing it whenever I could, being heartbroken when I was kicked off it either by my older brother or by a parent that decided I should see the sun at some point. However, what I remember less are the games I loved. We were never a family to be duped so its not like we bought piles of shovelware. Despite having 5 years on me my brother was never pulled into the gaming scene so instead of going away and researching what hot releases to buy, in gaming magazines he was pursuing other nerd pursuits, like being smart. By the time my brother started to wise up to the concept of ‘hey good videogames are fun’ we had received a Wii for Christmas of ‘09/10 and it wasn’t long after that that thanks to the greasy palms of family members and the Irish Catholic church (confirmation money) I saw a PS3 around , his PS3. While my sister recently lamented her existence as a middle child proclaiming to me on Facebook ‘…dude I have no idea [what games we owned]. I was only allowed play the PS2 about 2 years down the road’. So that left me the one that was only 5 when the PlayStation arrived to divine how we’d be spending much of our free time. The biggest problem with this is I had no concept of value of games yet, receiving €1 or €2 in pocket money a week because my brother was getting a fiver and I didn’t want to feel left out meant that saving for a €60 release wasn’t ever going to happen. So my early memories of being in games stores consisted mainly of looking at the preowned section, stunned by €20 price tags and making mental lists of what to ask my parents to consider getting me as a special treat. All this meant that a lot of our games were licenced products or annualised sports franchises a few years out of step, rarely did we ever buy or receive PS2 mainstays because their prices just wouldn’t fall enough to a comprehensible level for me. So, the only time we were ever realistically going to see some of the heavily advertised PS2 classics was when our parents were buying us games sans any of our direction.

So recently I sat down with my mother to discuss the titles she chose to buy us when we first received our first family console and why none of them were any of the 10 highest rated PS 2 games of all time…

1. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3

Released: 28th of October 2001

Metascore: 97

Why didn’t my mom buy it for us? And what is a Benihana?

‘This is Ireland we didn’t do skating’. We did, turns out Ireland was famous for it,s skating counter-culture especially at this time. This paired with the staggering statistic that Ireland had the second most PS2s per-head in the world at 47% of households (beaten only by Japan) and the fact that it rains all the damn time here resulted in Ireland having one of the strongest Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater adoption ratios for the console. Still haven’t found out what/who a Benihana is…… we must have grown up in a gentrified area.

2. Grand Theft Auto III

Release: 22nd of October 2001

Metascore: 97

Why doesn’t my mom like GTA?

GTA III launched with the usual GTA fanfare, by which I mean hordes of talking heads decrying it and its contents while vast swaths of the gaming populous brushed off these responses as the wider media ‘just not getting it’. However, considering this was the first time the franchise stepped into the third dimension, all of this was amplified. Misinformation and genuine debate became one in a hailstorm of news bulletins and tabloid spreads. What did this result in when it can time for my mom to purchase some light entertainment for her first-time gamers? In her words, ‘I’d heard about GTA and how it treated women’. She gave it a pass. This left me thinking about society’s wider neglect of real discussion around the actual content of these games and this franchise in particular. I tried playing devil’s advocate to quickly describe the satirical nature of the franchise, how over the top it could get, how you could kill anyone in the game and everyone is caricatured to a comical degree and I presented her with the oft used ‘self-parody’ argument. I tried to present it to her in the eyes of a 2005 gamer. Tired of answering questions about a murder simulator by those that had never tried a similar game and who held an open distain for much of the medium. Most of the gaming populous already ‘got the joke’ of the franchise and was just annoyed that it seemed like the wider media didn’t. I asked her, in light of all this, if she was only buying for my then 10yrs old brother would that have made a difference?

The she gave me a look which indicated that this was a mistake, the devil shouldn’t’ be given a platform sometimes. I have way too many of these to get through to risk our relationship over settling decade old debates for news hosts and talking heads , so I just accepted her first answer of ‘it was 18s! and you were 5!’. Fair Enough.

3. Resident Evil 4

Release: 25th October 2005

Metascore: 96

Why does my mom hate one of the most important games of all time?

Resi 4, the game that brought a franchise back from the dead, birthed a new genre and set industry standards that still hold to this day. Truly a seminal experience any and all gamers should enjoy, but I never have. I know that I would have had the chance to get my older brother to buy it later on the PS2. I also know I had the chance to buy it on the Wii, PS3 and PS4 and I didn’t and now I’m going to still not experience this classic when it comes to Switch… but I feel my mother should’ve taken some ownership over my gaming encyclopaedia so that I wouldn’t wind up with it in my backlog of shame like it is now. But apparently in her words ‘Resident. Evil. 5’, a response which left me confused and reminding her, ‘No, 4’. At which point she attempted to explain ‘No, no, a game called Resident Evil? For a 5 years old? No, not going to happen’. Apparently if it was called House of Spooks that wouldn’t have helped either… And she wasn’t a fan of how the 4 in the logo looks like a knife. Can’t wait to show her the giraffe having sex that is 6.

4. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Release: 12th November 2001

Metascore: 96

The fast one Kojima pulled on all of us with this release is still unparalleled in its sheer brazinness and surprise: marketing the entire game as Snake’s follow up to his espionage thriller, only to pull the rug out from under those of us into Raiden’s shoes after the first mission. It was a controversial move among fans, which they still debate. My mom however opted to skip the title because ‘Its name sound like a game about metal work’ and ‘the man on the cover looked like the man from the vile film in the hotel…what’sis called? Psycho, chimed in my dad, to which my mother claims that was exactly who she was thinking of. What? How did the conversation get here?

5. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Release: 26th October 2004

Metacritic: 95

(two days after I first went through this list with my mother)

Me: Hey, mom have you ever heard of GTA San Andreas’ Hot Coffee?

Mom: No… Why’d you ask?

Me: No reason.

6. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Release: October 27th 2002

Metacritic: 95

I got through two other GTA’s and she’s still willing to talk to me. I’m not risking a third. From here on out we’re just going to disqualify franchise repeats, where the franchise name carries all the likely impressions.

7. REAL 5. Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec

Release: 9th July 2000

Metacritic: 95

Why didn’t you buy us a racing game with our new consoles?

… If I’m being honest it took about as long as it takes for a GT game to be developed to get a quote out of her on this one. But we did get to give out about, ‘The Lanky British Fella… the asshole’ for a while when I told her it was a racing game. No one tell her the Grand Tour has its own game now, cause she’ll be pissed.

8. Real 6. MADDEN NFL: 2003

Release: 12th August 2002

Metascore: 95

Why didn’t you ask the scraggly teen at the Irish GameStop for an American Football game?

Her first reason was ‘you weren’t that kind of sporty kid’, which felt like the wrong answer. She panicked and realised this too, she began claiming John Madden looked like a used car sales man, but that wasn’t going to fool me.

What were we talking about?

9. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4

Release: 23rd October 2002

Metascore: 94

What was her problem with the last great numbered Tony Hawk’s game?

She’d forgotten about the franchise since I asked her about 3. This led to me meditating on the irrelevant nature of the Tony Hawk name and brand. Not dissimilar to how Tony Hawk must often contemplate his existence while at the airport being misidentified by someone at passport control or when he’s thinking up his next funny and relevant tweet.

10. REAL 7. Devil May Cry

Released: 16th October 2001

Metascore: 94

This one she actually thought she’d heard of before, so I quickly showed her the cover art and asked her what she thought the plot might be?

‘Looking at it, its probably, a game where you have a gun, there’s plenty of blood and you shoot rooms full of men…. I like her hair though. This is beginning to sound quiet good’.. I had to let her down on most fronts, but she seemed pleasantly surprised she landed on the same page as most of the fanbase when it came to the hair thing comparing DMC Danté to a character from Buffy

11. MADDEN NFL 2002

Released: 12th August 2001

Metascore: 94

According to my very Irish mother ‘it’s just not Gaelic Football or hurling, now is it’, at which point I showed her some gameplay of Gaelic Games Football, released in November of ’05 and all we’ll leave it at is nothing seems to be quite like Gaelic Games Football, nothing I’ve ever seen before.

12. MADDEN NFL 2004

Release: 12th August 2004

Metascore: 94

So wha-?

At this point she’d grown so tired of American football, it had turned her into a prototypical English mother and she just whispered ‘American tripe’ under her breath.

13. Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence

Release: 14th March 2006

Metascore: 94

While I would have loved to have asked my mother about the idea of waiting a real life week for The End boss to die of old age, I realised that I’d have to eliminate Subsistence, it came after she bought us our PS2. I guess she doesn’t have to justify herself to Kojmia fanboys… for now. Although if they do come for her she’ll be well prepared to check those yuppies at the door, as she callously told me that this sounded like a spin off to ‘one of those farming games you mock all the time’. Brutal.

14. REAL 8. NCAA Football 2004

NCAA Football 2004

Release: 16th July 2003

Metascore: 94

So mom what was your problem with American Football games?

‘What is game reviewers’ problem, liking them all so much’.

Damn, getting savage.

15. REAL 9. God of War

Release: 22nd March 2005

Metascore: 94

Before I even got a word in after saying the title my mother proved her supernatural skills by laughing to herself and saying, ‘he’s probaby just murdering and killing because he’s grumpy’. If I have managed to prove one thing it is that videogames sure are predictable.

16. REAL 10. Virtua Fighter 4

Release 17th of March 2002

Metascore: 94

Does the man on the cover look like a cool dude?

‘His neck looks like a building under his body, its too big’ and while its true that some games from the early PS2 days haven’t held up amazingly well under the magnifying glass of time- ‘they all look like Bruce Lee want-to-bes with bad haircuts’ … Listen, there were only so many polygons to go around and its not like hair matters that much… to a character’s design….

Honourable mention: right after this she looked at what would have been next on the list and decided that Burnout 3: Takedown sounds like a much better fighting game name. Yes, yes it does.

So, what have we learnt? Firstly; it seems that our DVD player dying may have been the biggest factor in us getting this cutting-edge technology in our house and had less to do with the software on offer. Secondly; game names are either oblique to the point of literally spelling out what the game is or a just a jumble of nouns with the occasional adverb written to confuse mothers. Finally, if you want to get your game to review well, make an American Football game for a decade old console.

Oh, and Rugby 05 and the first Lego Star Wars game were alright, I guess. Thanks for getting me into video games Mom, you’re the best.

I miss those days of going to a store as a 14 year old and having my dad come with me to get 18 certificate games. He acted like he was buying drugs, bless him.

Sorry the formatting is a bit messed up, this is what happens when you have too many images.

Sorry good sir or madam but your list is invalid, it doesn't have Okami on it.

I grew up in Dublin at the height of skate boarding and Tony Hawk games popularity. My mam would buy me the games but she was adamant I never get an actual skate board because she thought I would kill myself on one. She'd no problem with me getting inline skates though, which I took to and used to head down to skate parks and attempt flips, landing on my head a few times. But somehow she deemed this safer?

I'm older than you based on this post and by that time I was able to mostly buy my own games, but there are a few on the list that if I tried to ask her to buy me for a birthday or Christmas present would be met with a resounding no. The GTAs are the usual ones, Madden was another because "you already have one".

Literally the only game on the Metacritic list she liked the idea of(I started skimming through it with her when we were done), to the point MY MOM convinced me to finally buy it on Switch. This is hilarious, you have no idea! I actually thought about mentioning this but I still haven't played it yet, so I thought it would be unfair!

@basicallyolly: oh get ready for some goodness. Lots of goodness.

Not having Ratchet and Clank 3 on the list what a bunch of Sudo science they even got THPS4 on there how dare they praise that abomination :D. As someone who only got to pick one game a year for the PS2 around Christmas i always picked the latest Ratchet And Clank game goodtimes. Even my mom was like "do you have to pick a videogame for Christmas every year" "Yes mom!" Look at this Lombax!

@basicallyolly

Now i wanna know what games you got since your price tag was 20 bucks?

Also a amazing read i like the idea that you sat down with your mom and talked about videogames. Especially the GTA debate is something that was a thing in every household. I tended to "rent" GTA games from my older nephew without my parents knowing.

@frodobaggins: @basicallyolly: This was a refreshing read. Thank you.

I’m playing Okami (PS4) for the first time, and it’s been a blissful experience. Breath of the Wild, and A Link to The Past are tied for my #1, and I’m still enjoying Okami more then most Zelda titles.

@soulcake: Found them all again recently while doing some tidying (There's no order to this):

BTW after writing all this and looking at the pic I took of my Wii games too, I know what the thing I'm going to be writing next week is, so thanks for the inspiration!

The Simpsons Hit and Run (Definitely a favorite, even before we got our memory card)

Sly 3: Honour: Among Thieves (One of the few games I could beat, eventually)

The Golden Compass

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger

Mr. Bean (Piece of shit hardlocked 10 minutes in everytime I tried to play... Ok that may have been shovelware)

Athens 2004 (This was pretty close to shovelware)

CRASH MIND OVER MUTANT(I remember seeing probably Crash 1, 2 or 3 at a friends house, think it looked awesome an only getting this one because it was newer... So it had to be better)

Spider-Man 3 (age saw Spider-man 2 at a friends house and was certain the newer one would be better

Super Monkey Ball Deluxe (This was a gem that was probably too difficult for me to appreciate at that time)

Wallace and Gromit 'The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Remember playing a lot of this but never finished it and highly doubt it holds up)

Kung Fu Panda (Went to see the movie with my god-mother, loved it, she got it for my birthday don't think I could get past the first few levels. She always had terrible luck buying me games I remember she bought me a Bionicle game that worked on her family's PS2 but not mine and got me a god awful Toy Story Wii game for the same reason as Kung Fu Panda)

Rugby Challenge 2006 (A friend of mine had EA's Rugby 08 and they had added off-loading and I thought it was the greatest thing ever, Rugby Challenge 2006 was the newest edition of a rugby game the GamesStop had after one of my birthdays and I was very impatient... I didn't live up to the hype and I went back to Rugby 05 soon after.

Shrek 2 (I remember so little about this game but preferring the Shrek party game I play like once a year for 3 years at a friends house on the OG Xbox)

Dog's Life(Master piece)

Disney .(middle of the screen dot, not a colon for some reason, was wrong with the people that made mid 200 game spines) Pixar Ratatouille (they forgot the 's in the Pixar's Ratatouille and I remember the game reflected that level of polish)

LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game (This shit had a Gonk Droid you could punch!)

Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (This shit had a Gonk Droid you could play as!)

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (I real into LEGO)

EA SPORTS Rugby 2005 (a god among video games)

LEGO Batman: The Video Game (This game got me into a very brief Batman phase and was succeful enough to get its own spinoff series... Vindicated)

Crash of the Titans (I never beat this and even though MIND OVER MUTANT soft locked me out of it, I think I played more of that because the letters were all caps and the box looked cooler)

Sonic Riders (The only Sonic game I owned on that console, which I'm very proud of. Things got worse when I bought the Wii and thought all his games would be as fast feeling as that cart racer that I'm sure holds up real well)

Worth noting a friend also learnt me and my brother Star Wars Battlefront II and we played the ever love shit out of it for like 6 months before giving it back. We didn't have a memory card at the time but my brother still got to the end of a Galactic Conquest and became a god to me that day.

@bobobones Thanks that's great to hear, looking forward to Okami now!

@basicallyolly: Oh man i broke my nephews controller once while playing Athens 2004 (the discus mini-game) the top of one of the dual shock sticks came right off because of all the circle motions you had to make.

@soulcake: I knew there was a reason I hated that game, it was where we broke one of our original controllers and after that we only ever got crappy third party knock offs. I don't think I even managed to successfully 'do' some of those games in all the time I played it.

Holy shit, 4 American Football games!? PS2 has soo many great games and derivative sports games take up 4 slots smh. Fun post though, thanks a lot!

My folks took zero interest in my favourite hobby so I had free reign to get whatever and games were my go to birthday/christmas presents as a kid, ended up with a shit ton of good games on PS2.

@basicallyolly: You might be a bit young to remember this since you grew up on the PS2 but when HMV used to be around they had an absolutely killer deal on games for £20 and then €30. Depending on the quality of game you could mix and match either 3 games or 5 games. I used to get an allowance of £2 a week, so I'd save up for ten weeks, go to HMV, pick up 5 games of unknown quality because I didn't have the internet and didn't buy magazines (it would eat into my game money) and then play those for the next two months while I saved up again.

This was before pre-owned games really became a thing.

@jesus_phish I very distinctly remember searching HMV for games and loving them and Extra-Vision compared to Golden Disc because they carried games but what I forgot completely about was how competitive they all were. THe deals they were running even into the first half of the last generation were crazy compared to now; buy one get one half off and actual trade in deals, thats some shit I really miss.

Now in Ireland the only physical place to buy ANY games is GameStop (not long for this world by the looks of it), Smyths (a toy shop so a bit of a pain) and Argos (which is brutal for day one releases or pre-orders). You just made me really sad for the days when there was a booming second hand/trade-in market in Ireland rather than just GameStop ripping people off.

CEX still does exist but often times there prices are hardly any better than Gamestop's new stuff only difference is they have stuff from last gen too and you have to wait for people to trade in new games. I actually fear the day GameStop close because despite how much I hate half there shit, if I want a 60 euro game on release at least I know one place that is guaranteed to have it.

@basicallyolly: There's a brick and mortar store in Drogheda called The Game Exchange, I've never used them but they might be worth checking out. Smyths do free shipping too, so while you probably won't get a game on release they'll at least get it to you and usually cheaper than Gamestop.

@jesus_phish: It going to become a real sad state of affairs real soon over here.