There have been rumours of PS2 games coming to the PS4 for a couple of weeks. Sony has since confirmed it is happening, but not in the sense of true backwards compatibility. It has now announced it is remaking some of the most popular games built for PlayStation 2 to bring them into the modern age, upgrading graphics to 1080p resolution and adding support for PS4 features including Remote Play, Live Broadcast, Share Play, Activity Feeds and Second Screen streaming to smartphones and the PlayStation Vita.
Initially, only eight titles will be available: Dark Cloud, Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Rogue Galaxy, The Mark of Kri, Twisted Metal: Black and War of the Monsters.
Sony says it will be “working tirelessly” to add to the collection in the future but it doesn’t help to mask the fact only a very limited selection of games will be available at launch. Further bad news comes to people who already have copies stored with their old PS2 console as all the remastered PS4 versions will have to be bought anew from the PlayStation Store.
They’re available in the Americans and Europe but are relatively expensive. The first six titles are priced at $14.99 and the latter two at $9.99.
Sony is advertising the new games as a “look back at the heritage that helped propel us to the brand that we are today.” It said: “PS2 remains the best-selling console of all time, thanks in part to the revolutionary tech built into the box, such as support for the DVD format for games and movies, a powerful graphics processor, and specialized chips for particle effects and physics. Above and beyond the technical innovations that make PS2 stand apart is the huge catalog of amazing and much-loved games.”
There’s currently little footage available of the games actually running on a PS4 console. Fans of the available titles are likely to enjoy reliving them in 1080p on modern hardware but may not be willing to splash out $15 to buy them again. For some, it could represent a third purchase if the original PS2 copy and PS3 “PS2 Classics” digital edition are both already owned.
Details on the technical processes used to bring the games to PS4 remain scant but Sony is expected to reveal more at its PlayStation Experience event in San Francisco this weekend. This is clearly not true “backwards compatibility” in the same sense as what Microsoft recently added to Xbox One though. Owners of an initial selection of 104 Xbox 360 games can insert their game disc into an Xbox One to immediately start playing it.
