Your Playstation console might be gathering dust in a closet somewhere, but the games don't have to be. With two new generations of consoles that gladly boot up and run anything Sony pushed out the door in the last 12 years, you can guarantee that there are hundreds of gems that you're missing out on. The Playstation saw the introduction of countless franchises and companies that today make some of the best games in the world. But for those that didn't own a Playstation way back when or didn't take the time to play every amazing game that made its way down the pipe, you're seriously missing out.The sports and racing genres were always fan favorites, going back to the 8 bit days of Tecmo Bowl and Nintendo Baseball. The F-zeros and Mario Karts opened up the possibilities and the Playstation brought it all home with incredible realism in games like Gran Turismo. The possibility of crafting an actual, fully realistic video game based on a sport was finally made possible with the introduction of the Playstation console. The top selling games every year these days just so happen to be sports and racing games.Gran Turismo 2Gran Turismo 2 was the first true racing simulator for a home console that really captured the art of racing. The genre was limited until this point by technology and format, but the Playstation disc format was perfect and allowed a large array of options and cars to be placed on a disc for use in the game. The first Gran Turismo game was a step in this direction, but it wasn't until Gran Turismo 2 that the true mastery of the genre would be made by Polyphony and their game engines. By the time they released Gran Turismo 3, the pinnacle of their achievements, they'd fully mastered the art of driving simulation.Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was the beginning of an entire new genre of game. It introduced the idea that you could play extreme sports games and they were more than just sports games. String together tricks and combos was an art form that millions would master over the course of Neversoft's perennial series.
And in Tony Hawk 2, with the introduction of the manual, the game truly evolved into the mastermind of extreme gaming that still exists today. In Tony Hawk 1, the game was entertaining, in its sequel, it was unstoppably addictive.Madden 2001Madden football games have been around since the early 90s and the Sega, SNES days. The games were still fun back then, but it was in the late 90s and early 2000s that the franchise truly found its foothold and became what would be the greatest selling game franchise each and every year, by a lot. The introduction of hundreds of features like passing routes, and ball handler control, defensive control, changing players mid play, and dozens more made Madden the king and today it's still the king.Crash Team RacingNo one thought that anyone could create a kart racing game to rival Mario and friends, but Sony gave it a shot and their result, Crash Team Racing was damn close to doing so. Featuring Crash Bandicoot and friends, Crash Team Racing was a lot of fun for a few reasons. It did what Mario Kart did right and then some. Without trying to be anything entirely different, but not trying to copy Mario's trademark effects, it managed to be a semi-serious kart racer with all the humor of the Crash Bandicoot games intact.DriverDriver was one of the true precursors to the Grand Theft Auto revolution on the PS2. Truly inspired by the earlier Grand Theft Autos, those 2D flat screen iterations made so many years ago, Driver was just that, a story of a Driver and his driving missions. The mechanics were great and the missions always interesting and most importantly you got to break the law. Games like Need for Speed and Burnout were born of the early Driver outings and owe this game a lot of credit. By The Unemployed Writer
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