Retro Shortlists

Each console's full library, narrowed to the games worth your time. Picked by a consensus of critics, the players who rated them, and what retro players are still playing today.

Consoles

PlayStation 2

496 games

Action, JRPGs, racing and cult classics from the best-selling console ever.

Dreamcast

Coming later

Xbox

Coming later

How a game makes the list

Each list starts from the console's playable library, minus a few deliberate, opinionated cuts (each list spells out what and why). From what's left, a game is shortlisted if any of these is true:

  1. Critics rated it 80 or higher.
  2. Retro players still play it: it's among the most popular games on Vimm's Lair or RetroAchievements.
  3. Players love it: GameFAQs and Metacritic user ratings, merged and weighted by how many people voted, give a high lower bound from enough ratings (for PS2: 3.65 / 5 from 25+ ratings).
  4. Retro players love it and someone backs them up: a high vote-adjusted Vimm's Lair rating, plus solid player scores or a good critic score.

The lower bound is the score we're ~97.5% confident a game is at least at, so a game rated 4.5 by thousands outranks one rated 4.5 by a handful. Each list explains its columns in detail.