Sure, it's a train wreck - and when you end up taking up the mic with someone for a duet you'll probably end up crashing and burning spectacularly, too - but that's part of the fun. Simultaneously the greatest and most painful thing you're ever likely to hear is two friends attempting to harmonize to songs they think they know. In Buzz!, knowledge isn't necessarily power, but tag-teaming nearly always is. In the end, though, even when you're playing against a bunch of friends, you're still playing with them, and who doesn't love a friendly little drinking game (apple juice, of course) mixed in with their quiz show? Buzz owes plenty to its addictive pull, but nothing is quite so powerful as the sort of on-the-fly wheeling and dealing that can come from a handful of players banding together to take down someone who, say, just happens to be plain more knowledgeable than they are. It's probably a stretch to call Buzz a 'cooperative' experience because you're basically playing head-to-head with everyone else, but if we've noticed anything about Sony's little quiz show, it's that alliances end up forming - and then they're summarily destroyed when it comes to the final round. Nothing beat stompin' monsters with friends. The result? Well, throw the game in and see for yourself. Because everything in Snowblind's engine was tile-based (meaning they could use little bits and pieces of high-res artwork rather than trying to model everything wholesale from polygons), the worlds could not only deliver the kind of detail that you'd normally equate with more advanced Xbox techniques like bump mapping, but everything was rendered at a resolution higher than the normal PS2 output and then scaled down. The key was using a technique called supersampling. Plus, it sports not only local co-op, but online, too, and some of the prettiest graphics you're ever likely to see pumping out of a standard def TV. Sure, we've already got their Baldur's Gate dungeon crawler on our list, but Champions of Norrath is the culmination of those original concepts.

When looking for games that have hit since our original feature was whipped up, almost instantly Snowblind Studios' take on Sony's own EverQuest world came to mind.

See it on Amazon / See it on Amazon (UK).Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest

Best two player video games ps3