When GQ released its list of the 100 best video games ever made, most of TheGamer editorial team decided to see exactly how many they’d played. We all cleared into the 70s, most into the 80s or even 90s, but I’m built different and have played a total of 97. During my two decades and change on this planet, I have become a video game encyclopaedia.
Time will tell if that is actually something to be proud of or not, but despite these numbers, there are still a bunch of games that passed me by. One of those is Sly Cooper, a PS2 and PS3 mascot platformer that sat alongside similar icons like Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter. It was a different era,but one that is slowly coming back to life in 2023.
Earlier this month saw Sony add the first Sly Cooper title to PlayStation Plus, or $9.99 if you wanted to pick it up outside the subscription service. That’s a reasonable price, especially for a decently enhanced version of the game that also comes with Trophy support. So, when I took a break fromShadow of the Erdtreethis weekend, I decided to fill a hole in my gaming knowledge that has remained unfilled for far too long.
It’s known as Sly Raccoon in Europe, which is significantly less cool than its American counterpart.
What surprised me most is how this version of Sly Cooper isn’t pulled straight from the PS3 HD Collection, and is instead emulated like all other PS2 titles available on modern console hardware. You can use save states, rewind the gameplay whenever you like, and make use of distinct filters and visual enhancements which don’t make a massive difference, and each one exists to emphasise the fact that you’re playing a game from several decades ago.
Sly Cooper frustrated me at first. It’s a platformer from the early 2000s that I’ve never played, and thus don’t cling onto nostalgic muscle memory when it comes to every little thing our titular protagonist is capable of.
Being killed in a single hit by enemies and obstacles in the early stages before you’re able to pick up horseshoes and get an extra nugget of health drove me up the wall, as the movement and combat options never felt flexible enough for my deaths to feel especially fair.
But I soldiered on through each level and quickly gained the ability to dive, roll, and tackle a number of themed stages in whatever order I fancied. Sly is able to climb up ropes, slide along walls, and act like a classic thief, so it didn’t take long for me to be pulled in by his charm.
Many of the visual options available as part of the emulation on PS4/PS5 seem to try and accurately recreate the colour, static, and scanlines of older CRT displays. It’s a cool gimmick, but hardly necessary when the game is presented in 4:3 aspect ratio already.
There’s a beautiful simplicity to it all that most modern games lack, yet I can also put myself in the shoes of someone from two decades ago who might have been blown away by a title like this. A stealth action game as much as it’s a platformer, it sees the talking animal protagonists wrapped up in a grander plot than they ever could have imagined.
I’ve been told that future games only deepen these relationships and expand Sucker Punch’s world in ways nobody thought possible for the genre too. I admire how the controls can be finicky sometimes, while the visuals on PS5 are still slightly grainy and lacklustre in places, as Sony wanted to preserve Sly Cooper in its original form instead of reshaping it into something unrecognisable. There’s value in that.
It’s an imperfect revival of a classic game that isn’t trying to improve upon it in pointless ways or take advantage of nostalgia. Sony has released Sly Cooper for a reasonable price and made it available to a huge new audience, including people like myself who had never played it before. This spells a bright future for digital preservation in the current age, and at the very least ensures that we will be receiving more and more classics in the years and months to come. I don’t even have a wishlist to hand of games I want, and prefer the surprise of seeing things like Sly Cooper arrive out of nowhere and tempt me to try them.
Sly Cooper is far from perfect, and I doubt it’s going to be an all-time favourite by the time I’m through with it, but that doesn’t matter. What does is having a chance to experience it without having to jump through archaic hoops, and if you’ve ever been curious about this thieving raccoon yourself, now is the perfect time to give him a try.
