This year's Christmas offering has been great and many game developers decided to release a whole new league of PS2 games of the impending celebration. And the same thing happened 3 years ago on the release of PS2. During the release of PS2, 4 main titles raved the game offerings, and they are as follows:

- Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
- Grand Theft Auto 3
- Gran Turismo 3

Now, the titles quiet down during the years with exception for Grand Theft Auto, which released a successful sequel Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Being great and all that, we're faced with the same saga that repeated 3 years ago. 4 titles were brought up to the mainstream of PS2 owners...

- Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
- Grand Theft Auto: San Anderas
- Gran Turismo 4 (no official website for the moment)

Now, let's take a look on each of the game...

Ace Combat 5
One of the greatest visually air combat simulator flight ever designed. Although it doesn't have the real mechanics of the real simulator, it has come close with it's visually acute of dogfights, bombings, ground hugging with the feel of arcade. There's a lot of variety of missions ranging from defending to offense and even up to plain sneaking! Great for fighter plane fans and there can be no other that can match up to it's photo-realistic graphics.

Metal Gear Solid 3
Snake returns! This time, unlike Metal Gear Solid 2's main sissy protagonist, Raiden, Hideo Kojima (the director of the game of course!) finally put in the real character of Snake (no, not Solid Snake. Just Snake, just like Escape from LA) into play with new game mechanics. In order to complete your mission, you need to use various terrain to your advantage. This includes using suit camouflage, eat raw animals to regain stamina, new interrogation handling, new moves & many more aspect that will certainly entertain for fellow players for time to come. This time, Snake has to stop a maniac Russian colonel from starting the a real war against the America. Great game graphics plus with good gameplay makes this game hard too resist.

San Anderas
Just like Grand Theft Auto, players are taken into the shoes of Carl Johnson where after returning to his neighborhood after disappearing for 5 years. Finding that his mother has been murdered, he vowed to take those responsible and start putting his life all together by trying hard to gain respect from his old gang. The game features a real living city where players can mug / shoot / rob / kill / bang / shag / fly / swim / ride / drive / exercise / boxing / fighting / kicking around the fictional world. New stuff including swimming, riding a bicycle, robbing mission, truck mission, role-playing statistics and featuring a whole new lot of vehicles. Great game but it's quite a challenge to play as it is really easy to get into while hard to get out of it.

Gran Turismo 4
Not yet here so no news for the moment. Tried Gran Turismo 4: Prologue, and find it quite interesting to play. Although not a racing game freak as Fuminari, but I have learn to enjoy & appreciate the graphics the developer put into. Verdict? Get this one if you're a real fan. More? If you're a HARD CORE FAN, go get the original¹.

¹ Well, in Malaysia, it's very expansive to get a PS2 game. The range cost will go between RM 100-300 and I checked with some shop and it goes up to RM 250! With a pirated version, it'll go as low as RM 4. So imagine the price difference we're paying. It'll be reasonable if the game priced about RM30-40, which I gladly buy the original...