The Top Shelf: The Second Round 025: Second Sight
by mento
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 narrow...
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.
From my spindle of unacknowledged games to survive round one comes Second Sight, a supernatural (well, more supernatural) take on Metal Gear Solid from the developers of the TimeSplitters franchise, Free Radical Design. The player, as Dr. John Vattic, wakes up in a near-death state without his memory but with the power to move things with his mind via telekinesis. Making his way out of the initial ward he was trapped in and figuring out how to heal himself, he recalls back to his involvement in a shadowy government organization built to research and counter the untapped powers of the mind. That's about as much as I could piece together of the game's story, for reasons I'll go into in a little bit, but it strikes me as boilerplate thriller territory about the government's tinkering around with ESP and other forces into which no-one should meddle. That both this game and Midway's thematically identical Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, another third-person shooter featuring an amnesiac hero with mysterious psychic powers, were released around the same time is a mighty strange coincidence. Eh, maybe they just read other's minds?
The gameplay of Second Sight is a little more elaborate, befitting a game aiming to replicate some of the gangbusters that the narratively convoluted Metal Gear Solid 2 saw. You have a range of combat and stealth options on top of your latent psychic abilities and can move your way through the game killing as many or as few soldiers and security personnel as you wish. The controls are about as intuitive as MGS2's, which is to say "reasonably", and I was able to pick up on them fairly quickly via the game's protracted tutorial section where Vattic is given his military training. It's a lot of snapping to cover, moving around that cover to elude or ambush hostiles, having a generous auto-aim that points directly at center-mass but allows for some minute adjustments for headshots (a compromise for controller aiming that we also recently saw in 007: Agent Under Fire and Rogue Trooper), and a separate sniper mode that makes the curious decision to stick the sight aiming in the bottom right corner, giving you full awareness of everything around you as you line up a shot. Of course, the downside is that you have a relatively small viewing window to pick out targets with, but the game generously auto-zooms these sights to put targets at an ideal size. It's a clever way to play down the long-range combat in a game that generally keeps out-and-out combat deemphasized in preference of stealth and environmental solutions that use your telekinesis. A half-naked guy covered in bandages isn't going to get too far in a fortified military research facility, psychic powers or no.
Unfortunately, I won't be playing any more of this game because the disc is badly scratched. I received Second Sight (along with many of my other PS2 shooters) in a pre-owned bundle, so I figured we'd be seeing another case like Onimusha 2 eventually. I can play the game just fine, but cutscenes have all sorts of interesting glitches from clips of dialogue being endlessly looped to how character models in scenes will vanish and reappear randomly. Some cutscenes straight up soft-lock the game if left to continue, so I've had to skip a few of them immediately to get the requisite hour's worth of gameplay for Shelftember. The game's load times are also incredibly long, though I can't as readily assign blame to the disc's condition here as it may well have been something that plagued the game in its optimal state. It's a shame, because it's the sort of brief and interesting game I'd have been happy to complete for the sake of this project. Without any of the story cutscenes, however, I'm not sure I see the point. It would be fair for me to say that Second Sight probably deserves another look someday, if only because my jokes are terrible.
Result: Eliminated.