I remember a mission where you have to be stealthy in the woods and you were able to screw/unscrew your silencer onto your pistol, that blew my mind as a kid. the level of detail and animations were crazy for the time
007 Nightfire had this feature and I loved it. Felt just like Bond, coldly screwing the suppressor on before stealthing around. To this very day, most games make you go into customisation menu and change your loadout to add them!
@@MrHammers I remember Gulag best level on these genre by any game. It was impossible to beat on hard. It took me 30 restarts to unlock silver weapon. Problem was I was poor my TV wasnt crystal clear like Monitors now.
@@MrHammers I loved this game til FarCry 3 came. I wasnt fan of 1st person cause Im more Lara Croft camera style gamer but after I played this on PS2 and Far Cry 3 on PC cemented my love. Today I love Generation Zero best game by any mean in this genre I even dare to rank over Far Cry 4.
I really love the fact that they use mp5 sound effects from Die Hard and Predator. that sound will always be the most deadly automatic gun sound to me :D
best feature of this game was the way your screen focused during a reload. Just hitting reload would blur the world beyond your weapon and you'd reload faster, or you could tap reload again and bring the environment into focus and blur your weapon with a slight delay in reload speed. Never seen another game do it and it really set this game apart in my mind.
I found this game in a flea market. It was already the ps4 generation so I knew that new great looking stuff was out, but I remember being blown away by how good this game looked, from the home screen to the game itself. Not a single other game on the ps2 I owned looked this good.
I have a personal connection to this game. Not that I helped develop or knew anyone associated with it. When the game came out I was living in Florida and working for a private security company. My call sign for that company was Echo -51, just like the main character in Black.
This definitely has that "game released an asshole hair away from that generations end" magic, looking like an early PS3 game. God of war 2 has that going on too 👌💪
I love playing this game as a kid and the graphics blew my mind back then. The Forest level is very realistic looking. There's a detail I want to point out is reloading is much faster when chaos happens. I also love this game gives us infinite ammo if you beat the game on Easy. Yes the other difficulty also gives infinite ammo if you beat it. I always had a fun time with this game and this game had a special place in my heart.
One of my most cherished games from that era. The destructible environments were phenomenal for its time, only perhaps rivalled by something like Red Faction: Guerilla. A remake of this with an extended campaign to cover off the cliffhanger ending from the OG version would be beyond amazing.
The musical score for the game was composed by an Academy Award winning hollywood composer, Michael Giacchino who had done scores for movies like the Batman (2022) and some pixar movies like Up and Ratatouille.
My favorite section in that game was the final battle area on Graznei bridge (The level before the last one). You walk in. The orchestra kicks in. Two MG nests start spitting out lead. Your two squad mates are yelling at your character and your character yells "We're gonna get cut to pieces! Drop the guy on high ground!" Then after a while, one of your squad mates yells "RPG!" and you see a rocket flying next to your face. Chef's kiss for that fight. It was so memorable and it will always hold a special place in my heart
I remember the day I bought this game. Standing in line at game stop, talking to other people buying games. I think we all lived through the best days of video games and this game ties me to those memories.
Me and my best buddy used to play this for hours. You said it, there was nothing else like it. The closest thing I can think of is battlefield: bad company, and that came a couple years later.
i remember playing this on my ps2 when it came out for hours on end. my brother would be in the same room listening to nelly, chingy, cassie, the game. man. what an era.
odd fact, the shell casings you dispense never disappear, each bullet you use will appear on the ground and stay there throughout the whole game, theres also an alex jones reference in the game relating to bohemian grove, this game has too much attention to detail, one of the ps2 titles to use ragdoll physics, love this game.
I remember exactly where I was when I first played this game. It was a fair in Bakersfield, CA that had some Xbox’s set up to play Black and buy copies. Me and my buddy sat and played for way too long and came back to the booth like three times. Good day. Finally got a copy of my own and I will never get rid of it.
I remember playing this game with my brother on our PS2. The first time it loaded my first thought was "damn the graphics are elite" when comparing it to the other games we had.
I never got around to playing this one. But my mind always painted it as a prestigious PS2 title. Maybe it was because it came out so late in that console’s life cycle, but I also found the game’s simple title and bullet filled box art to be so classy.
hugely underrated game imo. it combined a realist setting with stylised, hyper realistic violence. it's easy to reduce it to its fundamental gameplay mechanics and encounter design and write it off as just another shooter. but sometimes form has a function all of its own.
Black is one of those games that, once you get older, you realize it's not the best game of the world, neither "one of the bests". It's just a good and fun game to play, and that's ok because there's some kind of charm in games like this, games that no matter when you play, they're always a good time.
Being a 36 year old man, it's quite a strange feeling for me to hear someone say "My dad used to play this game" about a game that I used to play. And yes, I have no children yet.
As a person who never played black and had a PC which a year prior had just released F.E.A.R, Black felt like it was the consoles answer to FEARs gunfu.
F.E.A.R. is most definitely the better game, but console vs PC in that generation was a big unfair advantage. Black was a good attempt at what FEAR excelled in
@@MrHammers certainly it was definitely not a fair comparison and I do remember I was very interested in black when it came out. Apparently Sean Murray From hello games was a creative director I think on this game.
I replayed this game so many times, it felt like you had to replay it several times to unlock all the secrets. The hardest one I remember was probably the destruction one where you had to destroy everything in every level that would make the reticle turn black when placed over it indicating that it could be destroyed. Most of the time you would need something explosive to do it or the RPG with its range to hit stuff out of reach, like in that trench maze level where you're surrounded by apartment buildings that can have their sides blown off to kill the snipers.
I won't lie, your reviews get me interested to try out all these PS2 games that I missed out on. They're what got me to try out Urban Chaos: Riot Response and Area 51. Now I'm interested to try out Black for myself. BTW that opening bit about renting videos and games got me nostalgic like you wouldn't believe. Especially since my local rental store went out of business in 2020. Thanks Covid.
Ah, nam, forgot about this game. Remember bits and pieces of the game play, but do recall loving it and playing it loads. Still got my PS2 and games, so might have to dust it off one day... Cheers.
Black was a random buy and purchase for me way back when and I can whole heartedly say every single line and sentiment of this review was spot on and true! Simplicity was indeed king and what made this title as great as it was!
Heard this was good when it came out, never bought it, then eventually bought in on xboxone as a back compat game, never finished it, but this video makes me want to go back to it.
You forget About the Soundtrack, its was Really amazing, And Theres a lot of details In this game, Like When theres no Enemies Around you, The reload was kinda Slower like he Enjoying it.
Damn I remember this game from the ps2 era. We didn't have internet , and I never heard anything about this game and no one recommended it to me . Our paths just crossed accidentally . The first couple of minutes I played , I knew this games quality was on another level. The light rays coming through the windows ,the sound ,the destructible environment .I was thinking like what the hell is this. This game caught me so of guard and that element of surprise I wont ever forget. That's why I love this game so much.
This game came out my senior year of college. If only it came out about 10 years later, it would have gotten more praise and probably had multiple successors.
Theres one part where this game excells even today: the sound of the weapons! To this day it has the best sounddesign, period! No game offers that ooomph like Black does! Played it countless times on all difficulties and went for all special weapons and skins. Loved it to death!
I remember back in the day playing Black on PS2 During a summer, being jawdropped by how detailed and satisfying it was, the gunfighting was so satisfying.... good old days
I primarily remember Black as the game that taught me how much I loathe "depth of field" and "bloom" as visual effects, and the moment I learned to go into the settings in future games to disable both.
I think I was around 12 when I saw the previews for this game in a Game Informer magazine and had it pre-ordered for my Xbox the next day. I remember my dad and I absolutely gushing over how insanely realistic the graphics looked.
I remember playing this. The destructable environments were mind blowing at the time. Not sure which mission it was, but I remember taking on a small army from a gantry at a mine or something.
makes me smile knowing this great game is still living in the hearts of many and not forgotten. it's such a shame how EA just abandoned this fantastic game
This was my favorite fps. The story, the difficulty, the sounds the guns made WHEW! When you beat the game you get unlimited ammo on that difficulty and you can really spam crazy stuff like rpg, grenade launcher, revolver. Fun fun fun!
i remember coming to a videogame shop when i was younger and i overheard the worker talking to a guy saying that "this is the best shooting game in the market right now", i was so intrigued by it, i didnt have a PS2, only the PSP and always tought about this game and what was it about. Good times.
I played the demo for this a million times. It made the guns feel devastatingly powerful, and the smoke effects are still awesome. Never played the full game until I got a series x. Not up there with the Halos and Half-Lifes of the world, but it was really solid.
I remember in the starting area, there was a table that moved when you walk into it, that was probably the first time I've seen a detail like that and it blew my young mind. This series would've been a cod killer if it continued, such a shame it's sequel was cancelled.
I will never forget the heartbeat sound. Also, the silenced Glock level was the best mission of any game I have played. So much fun. And the sounds were awesome.
my childhood. I can't remember if i had the full game or a demo, but this game blew my mind as it was a whole new experience and i didn't even make it that far through i just kept replaying the first few sections over and over again