21. The most ported: Rayman Revolution (PlayStation 2)

A few years ago when I was probably at the height of my gremlin-like acquisition of games of off Facebook marketplace, I justified buying a bulk of PlayStation 2 games to myself. One of those games being the Sonic Collection that was basically destroyed that I wrote about earlier. The family I purchased them from had two huge containers filled with PlayStation 2 games, many of which were duplicates (or even triplicates). I suspect they had inherited all of them from an EB Games once it had finally stopped selling games for that console.

So the gremlin that pulls the levers in my brain saw this large box of games and thought "well, we can't just get ONE game, right?". And so, despite having no intention of getting it, I purchased "Rayman Revolution" along with a collection of other games. At the time, I was unsure which Rayman game this was, but I should have known: it's Rayman 2.

Back when Ubi Soft had an actually interesting logo and had committed less atrocities

For those unfamiliar, Rayman 2 has been ported so many times it may as well be a Capcom game. Originally released for the Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, PlayStation and PC, it has since been released on the PlayStation 2 (as Rayman Revolution), iOS, Nintendo DS (as Rayman DS), and Nintendo 3DS (as Rayman 3D). I'm honestly surprised it never received a HD port to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One! And then again in 4K now!

I actually played the game when it released on Nintendo 64 because I am very old. So rather than skip the game or replay it, I had a thought: what do "the youth" think of Rayman?

At first I thought I would hit the streets and undertake vox-pop interviews. Just what do the under 40s think of this weird limbless bean-shaped guy? Do they even know what a Rayman is, aside from one of the characters that the very old kept insisting should be in Smash Brothers? Would this entire exercise be fraught and honestly, a bit weird?

I applaud Nintendo for the troll of putting the guy in Smash but as a trophy only

Well it doesn't matter, because I've got some youths close to home I can ask - my human children. Given this is the internet, I won't be using their real names, and will instead default to the standard for young Australians.

Bluey is literally the only thing keeping the Australian economy afloat, since the mines don't pay taxes.

Neither of the kids knew who Rayman was, although they had of course heard of the Rabbids. This may be the point that you, the reader, question my parenting choices. In my defense, they learned of the screaming french rabbits via the surprisingly decent Mario + Rabbids games. So it could have been worse!

Rabbid Peach actually rules.

As I set the game up for them to play, I noticed a few oddities before the kids got their hands on the DualShock. Firstly, the audio mix is quite bad, with extremely low volume for the voice track making it near impossible to discern. Additionally, the visuals in the opening chapter are extremely dark to the point of being difficult to navigate. I suspect this may be changes to the lighting engine in this version, as this was not an issue I recall from my original playthrough.

Regardless, once the very short first level was complete the game switches to a daytime level and become far more readable. For a PS2 game that is originally a Nintendo 64 game via a Dreamcast port, it's still quite visually striking, albeit with some textures clearly left over from its origin.

Regardless, after confirming the game works on my setup, I handed the controller over to the kids, starting with the youngest.

Immediately, Bingo was put off by the controls, particularly the camera. This makes sense, as Rayman 2 comes from the early days of 3D platforming, and Bingo is mostly used to modern 3D platformers which smartly assist by controlling the camera for the player.

The first level is a relatively simple jaunt along a river, with some jumping puzzles and very basic combat. Bingo had a lot of trouble with these very early jumps, both in terms of navigation and making the jumps themselves. Most frustrating for Bingo was a jump over a river, where missing the jump resulted in backtracking longer than necessary to be able to try again. This very quickly wore Bingo's patience down until they decided they were done and wanted to hand over to their sibling early.

I asked Bingo what they thought of the game, and aside from frustrations with the controls, they didn't particularly like the older graphics, but they did quite enjoy Rayman's character design.

Then Bingo left the room to go play Minecraft.

Bluey took over from where Bingo left off, and immediately proved that they knew what was up.

"Dad, the sticks are in the wrong place"

You're not wrong kid. You blew it, Sony.

Unfortunately they also had some frustrations with the game itself. Some of these stem from the age of the game, as at the time, a lot of the conventions for 3D platformers were still forming. In addition to the camera needing constant tweaking:

subtle movements were extremely difficult to pull off, with only a small amount of the sticks travel dedicated to walking speeds. This also made subtle movements, like hanging from an edge rather than walking off it, extremely difficult
the controls for grabbing and throwing felt extremely inaccurate to Bluey, likely as the subtle aim assists common today were not in most games at the time.
the first-person camera is inverted, with no option to change it. A literal crime in modern gaming, but even at the time was a poor choice.
the time between autosaves is quite long, which leads to frustration after a game over results in over ten minutes of repeated platforming.

However, overall, they did enjoy their short time with the game as they climbed rigging and took on robot pirates. In a moment I was particularly proud of, Bluey worked out how to circle strafe around an enemy while whittling its health down using Rayman's fist projectile attack.