Fans aren’t impressed that Sony’s only acknowledgment of the PS2’s birthday is an advert for PS Plus’ mediocre classics library.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the PlayStation 2, which still reigns supreme as the best-selling console of all time. The UK anniversary isn’t until next month, but in the US the console launched this week on October 26.
As such, Americans have been honouring the console across social media and while Sony doesn’t seem to have anything big planned for the occasion, it has at least acknowledged it by reminding you to subscribe to PlayStation Plus, in order to access its catalogue of retro PlayStation 2 games on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4.
‘Celebrating 25 years of PS2 classics,’ says a short video posted to the official PlayStation X account, though unsurprisingly, many fans have pointed out how insubstantial the PlayStation 2 catalogue on PlayStation Plus is.
While the line-up of retro games available through PlayStation Plus (specifically the premium tier – the most expensive tier at £13.49 a month) has improved since Sony revamped the service in 2022, it remains noticeably lacking.
At the time of writing, there are 48 PlayStation 2 games available on PlayStation 5, some of which are technically upscaled remasters for the PlayStation 4 and very few of which are from Sony itself.
Even the first party PlayStation 2 games aren’t any of the bigger names, with the most glaring omissions being the original God Of War and any Ratchet & Clank games; both of which are common requests based on some of the comments on X.
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Technically, the original Ratchet & Clank trilogy is available, but only through the PlayStation 3 remasters, which can only be streamed and thus require a stable internet connection.
The overwhelming majority of comments are just wishlists for more games people want added to the service, including third party games such as The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Haunting Ground, and the Xenosaga series.
Some are simply frustrated with the slow output of new additions to the classics catalogue, since Sony typically adds only a small handful at a time. For instance, this month has only seen one retro game added to the catalogue: Tekken 3 for the original PlayStation.
‘If only there was more to this catalogue though. It would be nice to see a bunch of PS2 games added next month to celebrate [the anniversary]. But we’re probably just going to get the usual one or two games with no relevance to this,’ writes one fan.
We do know of a couple more PlayStation 2 games that are slated to come to PlayStation Plus. A PlayStation store listing for Tomb Raider: Anniversary (the 2007 remake of the first Tomb Raider game) states it’ll release on November 18.
Also, just a few days ago, Bandai Namco announced via X that it’s bringing 2005 fighting game Soulcalibur 3 to the service later this year.
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