Did you know that a working PS2 averages about $50 on eBay right now once you include shipping? Because I didn’t know that until a couple of days ago.
tl;dr, I want to replay the .hack games. The original and G.U. series’ were incredibly huge parts of my childhood gaming experience as well as being pretty much what turned me on to the entire concept of online gaming (despite being single player games themselves, go figure).
The best thing about these games is, by far, how well they create the environment that they’re aiming for. Most of the .hack games take place within the game within a game, an MMORPG known as The World. But The World is broken, and as the plot of the series went on, these glitches would just get worse and worse, including textures designed to look broken, NPC’s that repeat the same few lines of garbled dialogue over and over again, screen tearing and server crashes. Without spoiling anything, you’re playing the .hack games as a character who themselves is playing a game, and that game hates your guts.
.hack is probably one of the only games that managed to pull of the idea of the malicious video game well. Hell, it’s probably one of the only pieces of media in general that manages it. In the era of godawful creepypasta and nosleep stories based around evil and somehow haunted video games, I think it’s important to point out (and laud) people that do it right.
And seriously, the .hack games do it really right. Just watch.