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The Top Shelf: The Second Round 013: Time Crisis II

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

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I've started this month-long spring-cleaning (well, autumn-cleaning) exercise to hurry along this feature, since I've still got around 30 games left to process and only some... seventeen? Tuesdays left in the year to do so. More than that, I've got a birthday coming up in October and it's one of the last opportunities to fit in some 2017 games before the year's out and the GOTY season peeks disapprovingly over its clipboard at the zero progress I've made on that front. Fortunately, Time Crisis II is the perfect game for the "one hour playthrough test" approach, because that's pretty much all you need.

A home console conversion of the second game in the popular Time Crisis cover-and-shoot light gun series from Namco, the console version of Time Crisis II retains most of the same giddy excitement and manic pace of the original arcade game, pitting you in frantic gunfights against multiple Counter-Strike-looking dudes across various locations. The core of the game involves holding a button to come out of cover, shooting as many enemies as possible, and then releasing the button (though there's also a toggle mode if desired) to get back behind cover and reload. The process of getting behind cover and reloading is almost instantaneous, but there are times when you might want to stay ducked down there and let your partner deal with foes for a while. Then again, I'm not entirely convinced cover's always safe - there's enough goons tossing explosives your way that I'm sure hiding behind a crate won't keep you protected forever. Besides, you wouldn't want to spend the whole time hiding when there's bad guys to shoot, would you?

Namco clearly took a lot of lessons from their contemporaries at Sega when constructing the Time Crisis series, doubling down on the ridiculous plots and dialogue from something like House of the Dead and keeping the player's adrenalin going with quick camera zooms and rapid traversal between its "scenes". Arcade games had some crazy psychological business going down to attract as many players as possible, similar to the loud and colorful slot machines in gambling establishments, and it's given them this distinct attention-grabbing personality that still resonates regardless of the platform those games happen to be on. As someone who rarely got to drop quarters (or UK equivalent, probably 20 pence coins) into arcade machines in their 80s/90s heyday, the attractive effect of those presentations is still so potent to me.

The chief issue, of course, is that games like this were built to be quarter-munchers, and that doesn't translate well to a home video game medium where there's no extra money to wring out of hooked players. Instead, developers usually have to come up with some equitable solution without necessarily dropping the challenge level: these games had about an hour or two of content, so you can't expect someone to shell out forty bucks for a game they'll beat in an afternoon with infinite continues. What Time Crisis II does, which I appreciate, is unlock the means to make the game easier for players that are suffering too much with the harsh but fair finite limits the game imposes on lives and continues: when I got my first game over at the first boss, the number of available continues increased by one. There's also difficulty modes, though I didn't see any appreciable difference, and ambidextrous players can use a "two gun mode" which allows them the use of two simultaneous light gun controllers, if they have them. You could always drag in a second player to help out also.

The big roadblock for my wanting to continue with this game is that the challenge level is all over the place. The cynical side of me wants to believe that the red-suited goons who can hit you as soon as they appear on the screen, as opposed to everyone else who either misses a lot or takes some wind-up before they start firing, are there to force quarters out of players. You can only mitigate a lot of that psychological gambling warfare in the home version of a game after all, especially when the core game design is full of it. It's also something that plays with your perceptions: there might well be an in-game way to avoid those guys beyond simply memorizing where and when they appear so you can get the drop on them, but I'm conditioned to believe that I'm meant to die and throw more quarters in to keep going, and I don't trust the game enough to try to work that solution out if one truly exists. It's sort of like a "The Boy Who Cried 'Insert Coin'" fable. There's also no chapter select that I can see, which is perhaps expected of a game with a limited amount of content, but it still means repeating a lot of the same material endlessly.

I guess I'm too much of a content tourist these days to want to spend a significant amount of time playing through the same sequences several times in order to master them with minimal incurred damage. There's also the slightly more personal matter of how much I've always sucked at games like this, and I'm sure using a controller instead of the intended G-Con 2 light gun peripheral isn't maximizing my chances of success either. Of the handful of light gun shooters I've played on consoles, Time Crisis 2 is clearly one of the better ones, but I'm fairly certain it's not heading to the shelf. Not without the G-Con 2 along with it, and my shelf only has so much space to spare.

Result: Eliminated.

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