You have to remember the financial incentives for PS2 releases were a lot more promising and it ended up being the main target through most of the generation.
Well, sure, but that's why I said "technical", not "financial" when I talked about the strength of multiplats on PS2. In today's day an age, when revisiting these consoles, whatever games lined up with the fiscal goals of some developer or studio 20 years ago doesn't change how these games look or feel in their playability.
If a game runs worse, looks worse, or is missing features, it's an inferior port. And that's the vast majority of multiplat ports on PS2--if nothing else because virtually all of them are still locked in fuzzy, butt-ugly interlaced mode, due to so few PS2 games supporting 480p resolution. Even some of the best games on the system are still trapped at a subpar resolution--which is nuts considering you could get better visual results from the majority of the DreamCast library with just a VGA cable.
I really hope that now that the PS2 has turned 25, and homebrew enthusiasts have a better understanding of its inner workings, someone manages to make a PS2 equivalent to all of these retro aftermarket clone consoles like the Retron 5 or the Analog consoles, and makes a PS2 clone that can output at a higher resolution---kind of like what Analog is promising with their N64 Clone Console that (supposedly) natively outputs games in HD.
Because it would be nice to play games like
Urban Reign and
Genji on disc without them looking like visual herpes.
Even the 007 games some effects just look a lot better on PS2, I would tend to play them on Xbox but wouldn't mind the PS2 versions. Onimusha I wouldn't bother with anything but the original PS2 versions, same with the Fatal Frame games without getting into really poor port jobs like Metal Gear Solid 2 or Silent Hill 2.
How'd you figure? The Xbox port of
Fatal Frame added 480p support without compromising the original version's 60fps, improved detail and sharpness on the character models, remedied the PS2's muddy ghosting whenever the characters or camera moved (which also resulted in combing artifacts), removed the PS2's on-screen motion blur, fixed the lightning and saturation, improved the camera speed, as well as new enemy types, a revamped HUD, new costumes, a harder difficulty mode, etc.
Fatal Frame II on Xbox is a near 1-to-1 port of the PS2 version, but with a 480p boost that, again, doesn't compromise the framerate in any way.
Also, there was only one version of
Onimusha ported to Xbox, and that was the first one. And on top of being graphically superior to its interlaced, fuzzy native port on PS2, it also boosted a wealth of difficulty changes, enemy type revamps, added costumes, the Green Soul system, and also added the Charge Attack that became a staple to the later games.
I understand that the infamous Konami ports to Xbox has created this hearsay that all PS2 native games ported to the console are just universally borked, but that just isn't the case with the examples I mentioned.
