How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

I think about it plenty. Largely thanks to games like this being my bread and butter in my formative years. Was this irresponsible on my parent's part? Probably not, but I'm thankful for that. When I started playing this in 2024, I was worried that it wouldn't have aged well and that I was a spectator in my blissfully biased youth. I'm over the moon that isn't the case.

Narratively, the game is a 2005-era PS2 game, wherein you play as two characters, one with stealth-focused gameplay and the other with heavy combat focus. It has shoddy voice acting and laughably bad dialogue, which adds to the game's charm.

The game stumbles through one of the characters' stealth-focused gameplay. However, thankfully, the game's AI is potato-brained, and you'd have to try hard to find yourself stuck in any area for too long. That said, the different gameplay suits the narrative well and never feels like it drags on.

The Colosseums are where the game truly shines, though, with various modes to keep the player engaged, such as the arenas being littered with traps, different rules to each match, whole-ass chariot races, and even fighting elephants and lions. The game has a reward system wherein you complete feats such as dismembering your opponent to gain crowd praise, like a Devil May Cry-esque Style Meter, where you're rewarded with weapons and health. Through this system, the game actively encourages you to mix up your fighting style to get maximum points. Thanks to this, I was rewarded for thinking out of the box in ways such as slicing an enemy's arm off and beating them to death with it or breaking all the bones in their arms so they can't use any weapons.

Towards the end of the game, it doesn't quite hit the heights of the middle section of the story; however, it finishes strongly with me thinking about future replays.

TL;DR: Game fucks.

A creative vision where the gameplay and controls were improved this time, snake eater is very close to being in the top 10 games of all time list but it has its issues so I can't give it that.
My biggest complaint is the level design, a confusing mess that I constantly get turned around in and have to keep readjusting myself. My other issues aren't that big and I could maybe look past them, But The way Eva is sexualized creeps me out alot. I feel this could have been a bit more subtle and still worked out however the team wanted it to. The camo feature feels very useless at times, like it was tacked on last minute, I'm sure it's somewhat useful but it's never made clear enough to me to understand if it's actually working.
This game is fantastic and might be one of the best PS2 games ever made, I just wish this was the last one.

A friend of mine through circumstance ended up being gifted a box of old gaming bits including some Megadrive controllers and a broken Sega Master System. With a bit of research online he managed to repair it fixing the cracked motherboard to get the TV picture back. This led him onto then being asked to repair a neighbours Gamegear. After tinkering with that and becoming interested he then ended up buying a broken one for pennies from an online seller to repair for his own use. He's very handy like that.

Why am I telling you this? Because before Christmas I went to stay with him for a week and for the first time in my life, play a Gamegear. First I tried the original Gamegear he repaired for his neighbour with the original backlit screen. Playing Sonic on it I was pretty unimpressed to be honest. The poor lighting made seeing details or enemies difficult and the small screen coming from playing my Steamdeck made going back to it hard. Playing his own Gamegear though where he had modified it adding a modern LCD screen was literally like night and day. I could see the light, literally. Playing the same Sonic game I could see the detail, colours and animations. Sonic actually seemed...pretty good? This led me to take an invested interest in what actually is available on the Gamegear. Something I'd never so much as glanced at, which has led me to try GG Aleste.

Initially I thought GG Aleste was just a Gamegear port of the original Aleste from the MSX but upon starting realised I was quite quickly wrong. You play as the daughter of the original protagonist from the MSX game in an alternative timeline, Ellinor Waizen. There isn't much other story to be had here except the opening scene if you leave the title screen running of her taking off in the Galvanic Gunner fighter craft, and an end scene upon beating the game.

The game plays over 7 vertical scrolling stages or rounds as the game calls them which mostly end in boss fights. Most of the enemies are pretty much the same for every stage without too much variation. Some of the boss designs are pretty decent though with the final couple being especially cool like a mixture of H.R Giger and Cyberpunk fused. In between these there are a couple of bonus stages to collect power ups and boost your score. Killing every enemy will give you a huge bonus point score but as you can only see your score between levels rather than during it, it comes together as earning points feeling pointless? (ba dum tss)

Speaking of power ups, the Galvanic Gunner Fighter has two ways of increasing how it attacks. Firstly is just power chips that drop from certain enemies increasing your base attack power, there are also 8 different weapon types that can be collected like homing, wide shot, laser etc. These level as you collect multiples of them for more shots, spread or damage. There is no bomb, special or charge shot though you do explode when you die. Dying is actually fairly un-punishing letting you keep your current weapon type just dropping the power level as consequence for your play error.

And that's pretty much all there is to it, the game doesn't have any extras or much to encourage re-playability. What you get here in totality is an extremely simple shoot 'em up but it isn't bad. It's pretty easy without flourishes but it is running on a Gamegear and except for a couple of moments of slowdown is a pretty fast paced game for an 8 bit system. It has some varied level locations, ok music and stunning front cover art. If you're interested in games of yesteryear or gaming history you can do far worse then play this little title.

+ Simple, easy and short.
+ Looks and runs pretty well.
+ Cover art is gorgeous.

- Kind of forgettable experience overall.
- Lack of enemy variety or reasons to replay.

I don’t have anything else to add to what other people have already said about this masterpiece. I love survival horror games and this excels far above the rest, only in competition with the RE2 remake. But what that game doesn’t have is the absolutely impeccable, beautiful story that SH2 has. I haven’t experienced a game that has a story as phenomenal as this. Fantastic symbolism, characters, atmosphere, art direction, everything. I love it so much.

I fear that a remake of this could be an absolute mess and most likely would end up being just that. The beauty of this game lies in the off kilter dialogue and voice acting, the grimy look of the environments and the thick fog that shrouds the town. It wouldn’t have the same effect without these things.