In the video game industry, a key aspect of debate that has
been going on for years is the ‘console war’ between all of the major video
game consoles released onto the market, like when the SNES faced off against
the Sega Genesis or the PlayStation went up against the Nintendo 64. Nowadays,
it’s between three consoles; the Wii U, the PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One. And
I’m just going to come out and say it… I think that this whole ‘console war’
thing is really stupid and quite honestly rather pointless. So what if someone
gets one of the three major consoles and it’s not the most popular one? Like
what if they bought a Wii U but everyone else got a PS4 or an Xbox One? If they
like it, then the more power to them. In my case, I’m a big Nintendo fan even
though the company, while still playing a key part in the video game market, is
now sort of in the back of the pack behind Sony and Microsoft. The Nintendo 64
was the first video game console I ever owned and most of my favorite video
games of all time came from, you guessed it, Nintendo. I don’t own a Wii U at
this time, but I’m considering possibly getting one in the future. For the
record though, I have ventured out and bought a few non-Nintendo consoles over
the years and probably the one that I’ve used the most aside from all Nintendo
consoles was the PlayStation 2, which is currently the best-selling video game
console of all time with over 155 million units sold since it was first
released in 2000.
During its run, the PS2 (and basically Sony for that matter)
may not have really had a definitive mascot like Mario with Nintendo or Master
Chief from Halo for Xbox, but there were a lot of pretty good franchises
released during the PS2 era, including series such as ‘Jak and Daxter’,
‘Ratchet and Clank’, and ‘Kingdom Hearts’. However, my personal favorite Sony
franchise would have to be one that apparently wasn’t as successful as those
franchises, but is still a really good series; the ‘Sly Cooper’ franchise,
which was originally developed by Sucker Punch Productions before they moved on
to the ‘Infamous’ franchise (Sanzaru Games took over after that, beginning with
the PS3 re-mastered re-release of the original three games and then releasing
the fourth main game in the series). Not only that, but there’s actually a
full-length animated movie in the works slated for a 2016 release. But for now,
we’ll be looking at the first three Sly Cooper games, all of which were
released for the PlayStation 2; ‘Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus’, ‘Sly
2: Band of Thieves’, and ‘Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves’. I don’t own a PS3 at
this time so this won’t include the most recent entry in the series, ‘Sly 4:
Thieves in Time’ though I hope that one day I can finally play that one.
Taking place in a world fully inhabited by anthropomorphic
creatures, the series focuses on the titular Sly Cooper, a raccoon whose
family, the Cooper clan, is known for being world-famous master thieves. Each
member of the family has passed down their techniques to each new generation
through a book known as the ‘Thievius Raccoonus’. But before Sly is able to
inherit the book, a gang of criminals known as the ‘Fiendish Five’ kill Sly’s
father and steal the book. Sly ends up at an orphanage but while there, he
meets his future partners in crime, tech genius Bentley the Turtle and muscle-man
Murray the Hippo. Years later, they team up and travel the world, while also
trying to avoid the law (primarily inspector Carmelita Fox, Sly’s nemesis/love
interest), in order to stop the Fiendish Five so that Sly can take back his
inheritance. In ‘Sly 2’ (don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything major from these
games), Sly and the gang deal with another gang, the Klaww Gang, who have
stolen some extremely valuable parts that could spell trouble if they’re put back
together. Finally, in ‘Sly 3’, Sly, Bentley, and Murray round up a team of
‘specialists’ in order to help Sly get into the ‘Cooper Vault’, which contains
his family’s entire fortune.
One of the things that I find really interesting about this
series is that each game’s engine was built by improving on the engine from its
predecessor. In short, each game got better as the series went on. Now while
I’m basically saying that ‘Sly 2’ and ‘Sly 3’ were the best games in this
trilogy, I’m not saying that the first ‘Sly Cooper’ game was bad; far from it
in fact. It was a very enjoyable platforming game with solid controls and plenty
of fun stealth elements thrown in. However, there are certain aspects about the
game that were rather frustrating, with the most notable being that it operated
on a ‘one-hit’ system. If Sly was hit just once, you’d lose a life and would
have to start over either from the beginning of the level or a checkpoint (if
you’ve reached one). You could find ‘lucky charms’ throughout the level
(represented by horseshoes), which would give you extra hit points but at the
most you could only get hit three times and that’s it. Some other problems
included a bit too much repetition in certain areas and some missions that
were… well, I won’t say ‘hard’ but they could get rather frustrating and in
most cases that’s because of the whole one-hit problem that I mentioned earlier.
Thankfully, the two sequels removed the ‘one-hit’ system and
instead gave the player a full life bar, which was definitely a welcome change.
The hub worlds in both sequels were also much more expansive and offered a lot
more chances for exploration whereas in the first game there wasn’t much to
explore within the game’s hub worlds. But probably the best new change made
with these games was that they offered much more variety in regards to the
gameplay. You see, the first ‘Sly’ game had about only 3-4 mission types (not
counting boss fights); stealth missions, driving missions, shooting missions,
and one hacking mission. All of Sly’s stealth missions had the exact same
objective; get to the end of the level and find a key that you use to unlock
more of the hub world and ultimately to get to the boss and the other missions
had you collecting keys as well. ‘Sly 2’ and ‘Sly 3’ offered much more variety
in regards to the missions, referred to in these two games as ‘jobs’. Not only
did you get more interesting missions to do, but you could also play as Bentley
and Murray whereas in the first game you only got to play as them for brief
moments in racing and hacking missions.
Overall, I think my personal favorite game of the three
would have to be ‘Sly 3’, which might be because this was the first one of this
series that I played even though I completed the other two games first. Also, I
had to actually buy another copy of the game (along with another copy of ‘Sly
2’ for that matter) because both games had this odd problem where the game
‘froze’ but not in the usual case of a game freezing. The game still ran but the
dialogue wasn’t progressing forward (It's kind of hard to explain, and unfortunately I can't provide a link to a video of this problem at the time I'm writing this). Anyway, back to
‘Sly 3’; the game had the best variety out of all of these three games in both
the unique line-up of villains (no gang association this time) and the fact
that in this game, Sly and the gang recruit a few new members into the game as
well. Heck, they even team up with some of their enemies from previous games in
the series. Of course, as it was common throughout the trilogy, each game
featured some excellent writing/voice acting (though in the case of the latter,
for some reason Carmelita was voiced by three different actresses in these
games… and none of them even had the same accent), a full cast of memorable
characters, and were just really fun to play.
So those were the first 3 Sly Cooper games, and out of all
of the PS2 games that I’ve played over the years, these three games are
definitely amongst my favorites. All 3 of the games had solid controls and fun
stealth gameplay although I mostly prefer the second and third games due to the
more frustrating elements of the first Sly Cooper. Again, I’m not saying that
game was bad but it’s just that I wish that they had done something better than
just having the whole game operate on a ‘one-hit’ health system, which really
got annoying in certain areas. Thankfully, ‘Sly 2’ and ‘Sly 3’ got rid of that
system. So now, it looks like this series is running again with ‘Sly 4’ for the
PS3, which continued the series after the third one seemingly ended the story
though had a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the game. I’m interested in
seeing where this series goes now and as for that movie coming out in two
years, I’m hoping for the best. After all, video games and movies haven’t
always worked well together but who knows? Maybe this could break that unlucky
streak of video game movies… but only time will tell.
Ratings:
Sly 1: 4/5
Sly 2: 5/5!
Sly 3: 5/5!
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