Thanks to the magic of emulation, it’s now possible to play a selection of classic PS2 games in native PS5 apps as part of the PS Plus Premium offering. For context, the first wave of emulated PS2 classics arrived in 2022 with the new PS Plus tiers, but the games had major issues that made them difficult to recommend, including PAL/NTSC compatibility issues, poor scaling options, and delivery in a PS4 app -container. Sony has the opportunity to deliver a substantially updated experience alongside native PS5 apps, but the revised offering is disappointingly underpowered – despite the selection of some great games including Sly Cooper, Tomb Raider: Anniversary and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
The core of the problem seems to be a clear lack of care when it comes to emulation, with some of the same issues we noticed with the PS4 version of the emulator remaining unresolved two years later – and some new ones too, like John and Rich noted in the latest episode of DF Direct.
That’s not to say these releases are completely without merit: you can play PS2 games with PS5-native menus to enable game enhancements like rewinding or saving states, custom controls, and a free choice of NSTC or PAL versions, with addition of welcome options. The problem is that the implementation of these ideas is often disappointing, or even actively detrimental to your enjoyment of the game.
Let’s start with the presets. In Tomb Raider: Anniversary you can choose from four options: the default image, modern (which crushes black), classic arcade (which adds an unconvincing CRT filter), and modern arcade (which adds a slightly different, unconvincing CRT filter) .
Standard for official emulation efforts so far, but video upscaling is significantly worse. Reports of an unchanged resolution from the original on the PS2 are unfounded, but it’s an easy mistake to make as the output is scaled to look about as blurry as the original. This is most noticeable on UI elements like text, which are the PS2 assets, but stretched (without considering the anamorphic pixels that would have been used on the original hardware) and scaled with a simple bilinear filter for a blurred result. Considering that third-party upscalers like the RetroTink 4K (and even software emulation) can make the game look better even on the original hardware, it’s baffling to see how sloppy the scaling is here on PS5 hardware.
In addition to these topics, there are also some minor differences in the way these games are run. On the plus side, some cases of lag from the original hardware have been fixed here, with Sly Cooper running at a locked 30fps on PS5. On the other hand, the same game had some issues on Sony’s latest hardware, including a level that played without music.
Manage cookie settings
We also tested the current state of PSP emulation on PS5, including Daxter and Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy. In Daxter we noticed jittery, uneven frame rendering, and we’ve noticed similar and even worse frametime issues in other PSP releases on PS Plus.
Ultimately, it’s hard to accept Sony’s efforts now that the retro hardware community has collectively solved so many of the problems here – particularly developing a range of really good upscaling methods and filters that you might actually want to use.
Given that this knowledge exists in the retro community – and no doubt within Sony’s offices as well – it feels like Sony simply doesn’t want to spend the time presenting its classic titles at their absolute best. To paraphrase John Linneman, it’s like someone firing up an emulator with default settings and just handing you the controller. Sure, you can play the game, but wouldn’t you rather have someone who knows and loves the title in question set it up for you? just now right?