The Top Shelf: The Reserves List

This is an accompaniment to The Top Shelf: a year-long project to determine the forty-four games in my PS2 collection most worthy of being displayed for all posterity, or at least until this cheap plywood flat-pack shelving unit eventually collapses. More details can be found here - this "contents blog" collects together all the games we've processed so far, those we've confirmed for the shelf, and those still left to be analysed further.

At the end of the first round, there were 19 of the 44 shelf spaces accounted for. The rest of The Top Shelf feature will proceed like this:

• Weekly blogs where one or more of the 70 PS2 games to survive the first round will be scrutinized, and then either moved ahead to the final deliberations or eliminated.
• After that, we have a "battle royale" series of blogs where two or more games from the same series face down in order to determine which is the superior entry: I have a corollary where I only want to display one game per franchise, in order to keep the shelf somewhat varied and representative of the PS2 as a whole.
• Finally, every game that progresses past the weekly scrutinies and the battle royales will be added to this list, which is in order of preference. Once every game has been processed and this list becomes final, I'll be moving its top twenty-five entries to the shelf.

(I realize this is a lot of palaver for putting a bunch of old games on a shelf, but then this series has really just been an excuse to bust out the PlayStation 2 again and tick off some pile of shame long-stays.)