---
layout: post
title: "Videogames in the new millennium - Armored Core 2"
lang: en
date: 2024-11-24
tag: ["Videogames", "Playstation 2"]
---

"Liminal" has become a buzzword lately, and surely I do not wish to become another guy using it
wrong, still, I feel it describes really well the coming of the new millennium.
Even though I wouldn't be born until a year later, the year 2000 is uncannily transitional (liminal, basically)
although more years have passed between the year 2000 and 2024 than between it and 1980, the latter feels farther
apart between them than the former.

I hope that _Videogames in the new millenium_ will be a series of posts revisiting the launch titles of the Playstation 2
(a gaming console that went on sale in the 2000), while a lot, if not all, excepting a couple, went obscure and forgotten, 
they exemplify one of the most pronounced generational transitions, and, at the same time, most bounded to that which preceded it
in the history of the medium.

# Armored Core 2

Released a year after the last game of the series in PS1, _Armored Core: Master of Arena_, _Armored Core 2_ introduces us to
the (then) FromSoftware's flagship franchise jump to the sixth generation and what it would be the first game in its most 
prolific period.

![armored_core2_menu](/assets/images/2024/armored_core2_1.jpg "Armored Core 2 main menu")

Besides the introduction to the Playstation 2 period of _Armored Core_, it also presents us a FromSoftware bound to its
own tradition: a priori _Armored Core 2_ plays the same as its predecessors on the first Playstation. It even is kind of
funny taking into account that it is a game released on a console whose base controller was already completely analogue.
But maybe for stubbornness, not wanting to bite more than they could chew or simply because they considered the d-pad and the
tank controls necessary for the experience they wanted to make, _Armored Core 2_ control scheme is the same as it was on the
Playsation: with front and back on the d-pad we control movement in those directions, we turn with left and right, strafe
with L1 and R1 and L2 and R2 for the camera's vertical movement.

This trend of closely following the patterns set in the previous generation will be a constant in the three games FromSoftware
would release as launch titles in the Playstation 2. And, maybe, in all of its catalog on the Playstation 2, more or less 
(hey, you can use guns in _Shadow Tower: Abyss_).