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.

It's time for my regular check-in with Giants: Citizen Kabuto. On this occasion I didn't even get as far as the introduction to the RTS elements, instead spending the whole time with Meccaryns Baz and Tel as they jetpacked their way across a hostile alien planet killing the same three monsters. Giants: Citizen Kabuto was mostly sort of a big deal back in its day (that would be around 2000, though this PS2 port came a year later) as it was the first game produced by a new studio formed by many ex-Shiny Entertainment people. Planet Moon Studio would continue where Earthworm Jim/MDK left off, combining British absurdist humor - though the studio itself was based in California, its creative leads were from the UK - with a lot of imaginative future 'splodey guns in spiritual successors such as Armed and Dangerous and Giants before eventually settling down into a comfortably numb rut of Wii and DS shovelware. As if to highlight the constant chain of Cinderella stories that is the modern big-budget video gaming industry, Planet Moon went defunct in 2011 and was bought out by a German browser MMORPG company who chose to abandon all of its IPs and thus the legacy of its poached staff, before they too were acquired by a slightly bigger Chinese browser MMORPG company. Ah, the glamorous world of the entertainment industry.

Anyway, back to Giants. Every time I try to replay this game, the point at which I bounce off it comes a little sooner. That's not due to its humor - unlike Metal Arms, this game can be occasionally funny with its broad slapstick humor and charmingly awful characters - but rather its antiquated third-person shooter gameplay. You gun down enemies by lining them up in your sights as you strafe around to dodge incoming fire, and you soon acquire a jetpack that gives you a limited amount of vertical movement. It actually reminded me a lot of traversal in No Man's Sky: the way you try and wring every drop of your jetpack's thrust before being forced to land and wait a few seconds for it to recharge. You have no jump button and a moderate ground speed, and the jetpack simply won't get you off the floor if you happen to be running towards a higher elevation, so it doesn't quite sport the breakneck speed of something like Quake. The controls can be a bit awkward, including our old friend Forced Inverted Camera Controls, but at the same time I imagine it was quite liberating back in the year it came out. Third-person shooters hadn't widely adapted to include free-form flight at the time if I recall. It is hard to put this game in a modern context as a result, at least not without playing a lot more of the games that came out closely before and after for comparison.

Rather than one enormous map, the gameplay progression moves from archipelago to archipelago as you drop into a new map with a new objective to complete, often involving a bit more variation than simply "destroy this target" or "reach this location". However you don't see more a single checkpoint per area, and that can sometimes mean up to ten minutes are lost as you progress 90% of the way through an enemy base before your health reserves suddenly run out from too many snipers or a scythe-armed "Ripper" creature you didn't know was behind you. In my case, I'd keep falling into the ocean and get almost immediately devoured by piranha because I'd once again underestimated how far my jetpack could take me on a single tank. It's not particularly unfair, since most of the regular enemies leave healing items behind and you really need to screw up to let your HP bar drop the whole way. There's even marked shops on the map if you need a quick ammo or health refill. It's more about the situational awareness; the game can get very busy in some zones, and you need to take things slowly in order to remove threats as they appear, rather than running half-cocked into an area and finding yourself surrounded. Basic laws of shooters, perhaps, but it's the moment-to-moment gunfight survival that makes the game appealing, on top of its irreverent, self-effacing humor.

All the same, there's a number of modern games of this type I'd rather be playing these days. It almost works as an antecedent of the modern day open-world, seat-of-your-pants mayhem of a Far Cry or a game of that ilk, where you have map markers and a set of objectives but also all manner of unexpected and dangerous obstacles to deal with along the way. And that's not even getting into how off the reserve the later parts of the game gets, as it starts introducing RTS sections and its other two protagonists: the Sea Reaper Delphi who uses magic and medieval weaponry, and the enormous and eponymous Kabuto. There are definitely aspects I appreciate about Giants: Citizen Kabuto and a notion of why it became a cult classic, but I think I've tried to play this game four times since it was released and could never stick with it long enough to reach the point where I could switch characters, so I'm just going to quit trying.

Result: Eliminated.

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