However, the beauty, expectations and inevitable praise lies with the game's new-gen debut. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions have already garnered a tremendous amount of attention. Mercenaries 2 is also headed to the PC. But where does that leave the other version, which was designed for the eight-year-old PS2?

Note: These screens are from the Xbox 360/PS3 version of Mercenaries 2.

All That’s Glorious

On Sony's older platform, Mercenaries 2 is full of run 'n gun moments that capitalize on the game's enormous outdoor environments. While not as big as the Grand Theft Auto cities, you won't be confined to one puny locale. During my first or second mission alone, I screwed up and jumped in the water when I should have stolen a vehicle and driven along the shoreline. As I pushed the thumbstick forward to swim toward the mission's destination -- noted on the in-game map, a la GTA – it became clear that this was going to be a very long swim. This enormous area is just one small part of the world. Like GTA, you have specific missions that need to be completed. But the rest is up to you.

Vehicles are an essential part of the experience, and unlike most open-world games, the controls are really well done. Steering is generally smooth and most vehicles, even the big trucks, are easy to maneuver. In this regard, Mercenaries 2 takes more of an arcade approach, trading in the stiff and/or sluggish feeling that accompanies most driving games for a quick (and often exaggerated) mechanic that anyone can grasp on the first try.

Battles unfold with steady streams of bullets, grenades and other weaponry that will make you hate the thought of standing still. Only two weapons can be carried at one time (you can thank Halo for inspiring developers to do that), but there are weapons everywhere – most commonly next to the corpse of a defeated enemy – to prevent it from becoming a problem. This is, after all, a shooter more than anything else. You aren't conserving ammo like in Resident Evil, or thinking about which weapons to carry as you might in Halo.

Players with a lousy aim can take advantage of the auto-target feature that makes killing a breeze. The enemy AI isn't too sharp, preventing the need for intelligent battle tactics. But opposing forces are fairly strong when fighting in great numbers, especially during an escape or evasion mission. So while the game may seem easy most of the time (the missions have a straightforward, follow-the-directions setup), you may occasionally find yourself on the receiving end of a deadly explosion.

All That’s Gray

Imagine a world where the sky changes color on-the-fly. Nighttime, daytime – who can tell when things adjust automatically at the game's whim? Buildings materialize at random, filling vacant landscapes as necessary. The fog of war is heavily apparent as it covers the environment like a security blanket, evaporating slowly as you draw closer to the area masked in a haze. Enemy soldiers are just as mysterious – they too may appear invisible. At that time, only the bullets shot from their guns can be seen. And when the enemy charges in uncloaked, do not be surprised if you see one or more soldiers overwhelmed with a gray coating. This coating, which resembles the basic character models developers create before adding skin and clothing textures, can be found throughout Mercenaries 2.

All of this would be interesting – maybe even unique and memorable – if it were intentional. But these graphical tidbits were not the result of clever game-making. They are the unfortunate byproduct of a game that was made, from the ground up, for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This is eerily evident at startup when the game begins its 120+ seconds of loading, followed by an additional minute or two of loading in between missions, and as much as 10 or 15 seconds of loading just to pause the game or check the map screen. Considering the massive world that had to be loaded in advance (to prevent mid-mission loading), the first two times were acceptable for PS2. The pause load times are torture, but gamers have endured worse for far less.

Then the game actually begins. You take a look around and discover that the graphics are about five years behind the first Mercenaries, which was made for PS2, Xbox, and PC. At that time, Xbox 360 was several months away from its November 05 debut. Thus, Pandemic – Mercenaries' creator – was at the helm of Mercenaries 1. Now that they've moved onto PS3 and Xbox 360 development, they did what most developers do and handed the PS2 version of Mercenaries 2 off to someone else (a studio by the name of Artificial Mind and Movement, according to the game’s credits). Weak textures, ugly backdrops, bland explosions... This is not the Mercenaries you remember playing three years ago.

Nonetheless, bad graphics and lengthy load times are a small price to pay for a game that's overflowing with excitement. In the beginning, that appeared to be where Mercenaries 2 was headed. But once the oddities began to occur, the game lost its fighting edge. It wasn't uncommon to be walking around an outdoor area and suddenly discover that you were, in fact, walking inside of a large building. The building wasn't there initially because of an obvious glitch that should have been ironed out long before the ship date. But then, out of the blue, the building appears – just like those invisible enemy soldiers and the screwy disappearance and reappearance of textures, which makes the game look like you're playing a work-in-progress demo, not the finished title heading to retail.

Missions are harder to complete when you can't see the enemy or buildings you're supposed to find, or when a bridge isn't where it's supposed to be, causing an unprepared player to dive straight into the water. The game is even more difficult when it freezes, which was more likely to occur whenever something disappeared. Technically that should have made it easier for the game to run, as software requires less processing power when fewer things are displayed on screen. But it always bogged down the game, and with it, my PS2. As if it that weren't frustrating enough, the lengthy load times made it hard to tell the difference between a freeze and a regular loading phase. Typically when a game appears to be frozen for more than a minute, you need to shut down your console. In Mercenaries 2, it may be loading (or temporarily frozen?) for at least that long. Thus, you'll just have to wait a while and see what happens.

And what about the sky changing colors? Mercenaries 2 uses various lighting and color schemes to enhance the mood of the game. While cool in concept, the execution is as glitchy as the rest of the game. Whether entering or exiting a building, crossing a bridge or diving into the water, you never know when the sky is going to change. One could assume that this was done on purpose, but when the game is running normally, the colors blend fairly well from one area to the next. Unfortunately, Mercenaries 2 runs abnormally more often than not.