Xbox Series S runs PS2 games better than the PS5 does

The new Xbox Series X/S have really been let down by their lack of exclusive killer apps. While Sony has all those new first party exclusives, Microsoft is instead relying on people playing some of their older games thanks to the backwards compatibility of the system and the magic of Game Pass.

Of course, people have taken that to the logical extreme and have started playing old PS2 games on the new Xboxes because of course they have. The things are basically little PCs, and it makes sense that someone would have figured out how to throw an emulator on there.

Vidoes have begun popping up all over YouTube of people pulling off the trick with the most popular one coming from Modern Vintage Gamer. The video in question shows off a whole load of PS2 classics running very neatly the Xbox Series S.

How does it work? Well, if you boot the console in developer mode then the Xbox is capable of reading and running Windows Platform apps which means it basically functions like a PC. At that point, throwing an open-source emulator like RetroArch will enable all those classic PS2 games to be playable.

It’s worth noting that RetroArch isn’t a perfect emulator though. Many games are capped in their size so the library is a little limited and certain aspects like music and performance are more than a little wonky.

Yet actually seeing the games work as well as they do on next-gen hardware is pretty remarkable. Maybe it’s time to go back and see if God of War 2 holds up… Only the second game though, we all know the first God of War definitely hasn’t.

Last Updated: December 1, 2020