PlayStation 2

You know, in other system entries I've talked

about success, and how it can shape the overall

future of a system, or even the company itself,

either in a positive or a negative way.

And that makes sense. A machine that customers

enjoy and let them play good games will have

an easier time having more attention and sales.

Thing is, the success of one company does not

happen in a bubble, and if the success becomes 

way too big, it can actually affect negatively

the medium and cut short the overall

potential of a gaming generation.

This entry is going to be a bit of a 

change of pace compared to others,

as I'm not as positive about it myself,

so let's get it out of the way quickly.

Let's talk about the PlayStation 2.

It's pretty obvious by the name that PlayStation 2 is the successor of the original PlayStation, and it released at the dawn of the new millennium, in the year 2000.

Sadly, I can't talk much about the story of its creation. Sony has made quite the effort in maintaining its development history obscure, which is pretty disappointing for people like me that like learning the little stories behind these machines, but oh well.

The information floating around the net says that, as I pointed out several times in other entries and is the usual way of doing things, work on PS2 started right after previous system was launched, something that happened with the PS1 in late 1994. Some people point out that the development of the system did not take place in Japan, but in the West Coast of the United States, and by former members of Argonaut Games, which are, if you know your oldie video game stories, the people that worked with Nintendo to create the FX Chip, and the original Star Fox among other things.

The few other details we have are thanks to leaking information, as in 1997 rumors appeared that said the system would be backwards compatible with games of the original PlayStation, and it would be also compatible with DVDs, a format that was leaps and bounds better than CDs as far as storage capacity. Lastly, it was also mentioned that it would be capable of connecting to the Internet, although that wasn't all that incredible to think about, as the Dreamcast already had quite a bit of effort put into online capabilities. All these rumors would end up being true, too.

Originally, it was set to compete with Sega's Dreamcast, which was set to launch in 1998, and had an amazing beginning sales wise, selling over half a million units in North America in two weeks. And shortly after Sega released their machine, Sony revealed their own in the Tokio Game Show, a video game convention that takes place annually each September, showing off games like Gran Turismo 3 and Tekken Tag Tournament.

Honestly, it's not what I could call pretty, but seems better prepared for Multiplayer duties than what we got.

Not much there is to say beyond this, except maybe talk a bit about the seen prototype versions of the system, and found a couple images. Both are wildly different from what the system would end up being, with the first being rounded, having what seems to be four memory card and controller ports (now the last ones would have been useful, I think), and a strange LCD screen that, I guess might have been used for movie and music functions, just like those electronic devices have them. Another big difference with the final, original model is that this prototype was a top loader unlike the original version of the PS2, and something that would end up bringing back with later models.

At least the artist had the hopes for it to be smaller than what it ended up being.

This second one I found, though it is a mere artist conception image, it's what I would call a rather shameless copy of Sega's Dreamcast design. Like, wow, they're close, you can smell the lawsuits. I know there's a decades old joke that still gets use currently about Sony copying everything, but man, that image was made before late 1999, there's something about picturing the artist creating this that makes me laugh.

In any case, the system was released in March, 2000 in Japan, October in North America, and November in Europe and Australia. The system exploded in sales, making more than twice the money than Sega did with their Dreamcast in their first day. It sold at such speed that retailers couldn't respond to the demand and were some serious manufacturing delays. There were resellers taking advantage of chumps that wanted the system "now" and some paid over a thousand dollars to have it right there instead of waiting for new shipments.

The system sold almost a million units, around 980.000, in a single day in Japan.
That's, to put it simply, ridiculous.

But here's the thing, it made sense. You got a lot of value for the money. By buying this machine, you got a PS1, you got a PS2, and a DVD reader, which, back then, and for a number of years, would be incredibly expensive. PS2 did cost less than your usual DVD reader then, so it was an amazing deal.

And that's the catch, most general consumers bought it for the DVD reader and by doing so they indirectly also entered the video game market. As a business, it was a genius plan, but one that didn't come without problems (at least, for the overall medium).

The PS2 would end up selling over 155 million units world wide, making it the most successful video game system ever created, and it's also one of the systems with the longest commercial life ever, and it's going to be pretty hard for any other system to reach that. Thing is, for the PS2 and Sony to get to that success, the video game landscape had to suffer from it.

After the PlayStation 2 launch, Sega started to suffer serious financial problems, and its Dreamcast also got hit brutally by the success of the PS2 with declining sales, so much so that Sega would discontinue the Dreamcast only a year and a half after its announcement. While it's true that Sega did some very stupid moves in the previous years, with the Dreamcast the seemed to find their way back to a good shape. But no, it only lasted 18 Months. And the premature death of the system wasn't the only bad news, Sega also announced they were leaving the console making business.

This picture of SeGaGaGa is painful to watch in retrospective...

That was a big blow to the video game industry, specially after Sega started to get its groove back, with a system people liked, and in a time where they started to create many cool and exciting new franchises, like Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5, Skies of Arcadia or Jet Set Radio, and also revivals of older ones that felt fresh like Puyo Pop, Phantasy Star Online, and of course the jump of Sonic The Hedgehog to 3D. Of course the company managed to stay alive by going "third party", but that doesn't change how bad these news were at the time, not to mention how Sega stopped making games of many of its franchises that would probably kept doing if they had their own hardware.

But it wasn't the only one. The PS2 would put the Dreamcast out of the scene, but it would also hurt the potential of Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's Xbox on the long run. Those systems were better hardware-wise and had features the PS2 did not have, and who knows where could they have ended if it wasn't for the gross dominance of the PS2. Who knows how many games could have been made that we'll never see.

And this is why I can't bring myself to feel happy towards the system, even if it has dozens upon dozens of games that I love. I can't just let myself ignore how much damage it did to the potential that existed within the Sixth Generation, and this is coming from a guy that thinks the Sixth Gen. is one of the best we've had yet!

I mean, let's look at this way: PS2 sold 155M. Xbox sold 24M. GameCube sold 23M. Dreamcast sold 9M.

While in other console generations there were systems that had an indisputable first place, it never was with such a difference, and often times lagging systems were so because of the companies' own mistakes, like NEC and the pricing of the TurboGrafx-16, or Sega and Nintendo focusing on 2D over 3D and Cartridges over CDs with their Saturn and Nintendo 64, respectively.

What happened with the PS2 is a monopoly I feel should never happen again. Heck, this unprecedented success would end up even hurting Sony itself the next generation quite a lot, and the situation would sort of turn around.

Eh, whatever. Let's continue with the machine itself.

There were a variety of colors, besides the basic black one.

The PlayStation2 was a big improvement over the original system as far as power is concerned, and as I mentioned in the GameCube entry, the jump from the Fifth to the Sixth Generation is a gigantic one, not only because of the improved visuals, but also for for the jump in resolution and overall stability it brought too.

The Backwards Compatibility, or also known as retrocompatibility in certain places, with the PS1 is also a very big part of the system, and it's for the most part great. The original PS2 model had PS1 hardware inside it for it to work, while later models removed part of the PS1 hardware and used a mix of emulation with it. While not every PS1 game works on PS2 (depends on the model, it seems), you still have access to play the vast, vast majority. Although I wonder, last year I played Tomba! on my PS2 with no issues, and reading Wikipedia says that the game does not work with it, so who knows.

One good extra feature for playing PS1 games on PS2, is that you get a couple of extra options, you can activate higher reading speed to shorten loading times, and also turn on a texture smoothing option, both can be rather useful, although they must be switched on every time you turn on your system, for some reason. That said, there's a few games that may have issues with this options, so it's better try them before playing something seriously.

Sadly, the hardware of the PS2 had quite a few flaws and issues, some of them became pretty well known even in the days of early Internet.

It's funny how quick people forget how big the PS2 was initially, it wasn't
that far away from the Original Xbox. Thank goodness for the Slim.

One negative point of the original model was how bulky and big it really was. If the Xbox was 32 cm long, the PS2 was 30 cm, while the GameCube was half of that. Coming from the PS1, or more recently the PSOne model, it was to be expected that the newer system would be bigger, but the jump was quite something. Also, certain certain serial numbers seemed to be more prone to overheating than others.

While there's a list of issues to mention, like how noisy could it get, the biggest one was without a doubt, the Disc Reader, but most commonly known as "Disc Read Error", as the console told you about it. You see, the lenses used on the PS2  were prone to suffer many different issues and not last too long. And if it wasn't the lenses, it could be the tray. And if it wasn't that, it could be another thing. If you're interested you can actually still find many complains from the early 2000's about all sort of issues people suffered with their systems.

It got to the point where Sony actually got sued, with the lawsuit addressing reports of reading errors related with DVDs and CDs. Sony ended settling this by compensating the customers (one of the compensations was lowering the costs of repair, which sounds kinda cheap, in my opinion).

This is one of the reasons why the console kept getting revisions, many more than any system that came before it. There are colloquially known to be 19 revisions, from v0 to v18 over the years. The first few revisions kept the overall system design while trying to improve the faults it had, sometimes causing new ones too.

In 2004, Sony announced a new model, aptly named PlayStation 2 Slim. It was a much smaller, much lighter and compact version of the system. A few elements, like the internal HDD capacity were removed, but to be fair very, very few people back then used it. One of the biggest changes was related with the way the system used discs.

The original PS2, known after the announce as "Fat", used a tray to insert discs to the system. The Slim model removed many of the headaches related to this by making the system top loading again, like the PS1 models were, and the prototype shown originally. Instead of relying on mechanical parts you only had the basic button to open the case which was a simple piece of plastic. It was not only less prone to problems, it was also cheaper to produce. Other improvements were being quieter, having an Ethernet port, and having external power supply, which means less heat inside the system, and an easier time replacing it if for some reason it broke (I seriously don't know why companies keep forcing it to be internal if it just causes more issues). For intended uses, it was an overall big improvement, although it still could have some issues...

...Like, the ribbon cable that connects the lens with the system damaging your discs by creating scratched rings throughout the disc's surface, something that actually happened to me mere hours before starting writing with my silver PS2 Slim. Luckily I managed to fix it (at least for now) with double-sided tape. Lovely.

Is this also a feature?

Now, while the console had many, many changes throughout the years, do you know what didn't have almost any change at all? The Controller!

I suppose it was positive for the Backwards Compatibility!

In one of the biggest cases of "If it's not broken, don't fix it", the DualShock 2 is pretty much the same thing as the first. It has a few minor cosmetic changes, and now the Analog Sticks can be pushed to act as Buttons, which are named L3 and R3, they're also a bit stiffer, although you'd only notice this if you tried new controllers to compare.

Talking about Analog Stick, the left one is still positioned as the secondary input for movement, while every other console maker moved it to the upper side, making it the primary way of moving around in games.  It made total sense, it was a better and more reliable way of moving around 3D games, so giving it the main spot was a no brainer. But Sony stuck with the design of the Dualshock 1, and even today they've not made the switch, and probably will keep the overall design for their PlayStation 5.

It's interesting to say the least; and if I had to guess why, I would argue that maybe is just to preserve the overall image of the controller that often is used as a brand icon. People quickly recognize the PlayStation controller, it's rather symmetric too, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was for marketing reasons.

While this is not very exciting compared to the evolution of other systems' controllers, it offered some perks. For one, a DualShock 2 could be used in a PS1 system, which is neat, and Dualshock 1 could be used in a PS2 if you play PS1 games, and of course the DualShock 2 worked with PS1 played through the Backwards Compatibility, so that's useful too. The controllers being basically the same also meant that you didn't have to accommodate to a new controller, although that's a very unsubstantial perk in my mind, as playing with a multitude of controllers from different systems kinda made me immune to that.

Personally I would have liked for the D-Pad to be improved, but hey, that's just me.

The system still has only two controller inputs, and at this point, Nintendo already established having four inputs as the way to go on the N64, and Sega and even Microsoft followed suit by incorporating that into their Sixth Gen. systems, so it was a bit of a bummer to see the PS2 needing again an accessory for that, specially as, if you read about Multitaps, the PS2 had many issues with this. Some Multitaps in the early years only worked with some revisions of the system, or with specific games. Once the PS2 Slim was released, a new Multitap that would end most of this problems would be created too, and one that actually worked with both PS1 and PS2 games, which were great news, but by that time every other system could do 4 Player games without external help. Oh well.

The console also had two USB 1.1 entries for a variety of accessories, and in a handful of games like Gran Turismo 4, it was used to store snapshots. If you care about the homebrew scene, those USB ports can play a pretty big role too.

Besides that, Memory Cards were still in use as the main way of saving progress in games. The official Memory Cards had a size of 8 Megabytes, which is a big, big improvement over PS1 Memory Cards, although at the same time, save sizes grew a lot too, with some games (specially sports games) taking large chunks of free space, some even could take half a Memory Card's space!

Thankfully most games didn't take as much space, you could have more save data from way more games than in the PS1. On the other hand, like Sony did on the PS1 days, some games coming from specific companies would actually check if your Memory Card was official, and if not, it wouldn't let you save, or even corrupt your data. I've found this on God Hand and Silent Scope (Capcom and Konami games, respectively). A very disgusting tactic, specially since Sony never really made themselves Memory Cards of more than 8 Megabytes. Some special ones were licensed, but that's about it.

One of my little pleasures of retro gaming is finding out all the save icons
from GameCube and PlayStation 2 games. I don't know, I find them charming.

But there were a few positives. The biggest one for me was to be able to pass PS1 saves from a Memory Card of that system to your PS2 Memory Card, which was really nice to back up your saves and not lose anything to free up space for more games, that's a great feature. Also, PS2 saves had for the most part very cute save icons, most of them being small 3D models, some with little animations.

They're really neat, but I ask myself how much of the space the save files this fluff takes, specially character models with textures and animations.

Anyway... I know I'm not been the most positive guy up to this point, but hey, it's just how I feel. Compared to other consoles, the hardware was more unreliable (although not to the level of Xbox 360, of course!), its mark on video game history is more bitter than sweet to me, and the Memory Card stuff has only got more annoying as time has passed.

But, as I usually say, what ends up having the most importance is a systems' library. And I already mentioned a while back, that this system holds many, many titles I love.

So let's get into the important stuff, the games!

Just a tiny, tiny chunk of a gigantic cake.

Already mentioned on the GameCube entry, but the library of the PS2 is massive. Its library sports more than 3.800 different titles, that's just absurd. There's so many games worth checking that you could "survive" by playing only PS2 games for a decade and still not see all the interesting games it has to offer.

Having such monopoly over the Sixth Generation, you can expect most of the "important" titles released during these years to be on the PlayStation 2, and yeah, they are. While I believe that what "the best games" of the system is a very subjective matter and changes from person to person, this system got most of the big releases, like the Grand Theft Auto series, which is by far the best selling games on the system, or Metal Gear Solid and Square Enix titles.

Personally, more than the "big budget" or important games, I like the PS2 library for its more obscure and niche titles. I don't give a rat's ass about GTA, FIFA, or most Square Enix titles for the system myself (although I forced myself to like GTA back in the day, as it was the subject of most conversations related to video games much to my dismay), but smaller games like Chu-Lip, Mister Mosquito or Katamari Damacy (it and its sequel being two of my favourites) in the picture above, are the games that pull me towards the system.

The PlayStation 2 has so many interesting and memorable experiences obscured by "the big stuff" that it's both ridiculous and saddening. There were also games developed with very varying degrees of budget, so games could have very different feelings too. The amount of variety in genres is also staggering.

This is a small fraction of a big, awful nightmare.

Although, of course, by having close to 4.000 titles, you can bet your behind there's a lot of stuff not up to par. Nothing is perfect, after all. And the truth is, even if some people try to hide this under the rug or point fingers to other places, the PlayStation 2 library is chock full of Shovelware. Like, big, big mountains of quick cash-grab games, quickly made stuff trying to scam people.

Some of the most infamous companies to do such practices were Blast Entertainment, Midas Interactive Entertainment and Phoenix Games (really notorious that last one!), but there were many more trying to do the bare, bare minimum in order to trick people in giving them money, although often times what they did was bring low budget games from Japan and sold them. Hell, Blast Entertainment's bread and butter was to acquire licenses from well known stuff to try and entice people without the video game knowledge and peddle them awful, horrible games that don't even use well the licenses they are based on.

I mean, Phoenix Games alone released 69 "things" on the PS2 (and I say things because most of them couldn't be even technically called games), imagine if you start adding all these companies how quickly the number of this type of software goes up. And the biggest problem is, that you can't just put these publishers or developers on a black list and call it a day, because if you check them, the quality of their output can vary a lot, between several Shovelware titles they may release a couple of actually decent games, sometimes a very suspect publisher may get the rights to publish a well known good game too, making combing the library in search for honest to good games a rather annoying work, specially if you aren't used to recognize the red flags that many of these games usually have.

Thankfully with the Internet this stuff has become easier to manage, but wow if it wasn't a problem back in the day...

The PS2 startup was rather interesting. The more different types of games you
had saved in your Memory Card, the more buildings would appear!

The other big thing to consider with the PlayStation 2 are the Multiplatform games. A good number of times you will find out the PS2 version offers the least good graphics and performance, and the longest load times (after all, the system was the oldest so it only makes sense), and the differences can be really big if the lead system in the development of a game wasn't the PS2 itself, something you can easily see with games made for the GameCube and then ported to the PS2, like Sonic Heroes, Super Monkey Ball, Viewtiful Joe, Resident Evil 4, Killer 7, Tales of Symphonia, Beyond Good & Evil and such being some of the examples I can get off the top of my mind.

Of course, many Multiplatform games are just fine on the PS2, but you should always check before you end up disappointed. Yet even with the Shovelware and the Multiplatform things in mind, the PS2 still holds a gigantic number of games that play well on it, and it has many, many games only released for it, so even if you'd rather play Multiplatform games elsewhere you'd still have dozens if not hundreds of games to play in it.

And that should be the bottom line, I suppose. Even as of today, I find the PS2 to be a worthy system to still have plugged. Not only it gives you access to lots of games to play still only available to it, but you also get access to play pretty much any PS1 game, and that's a great combo. In fact, as far as retro gaming goes it's hard for me to think of a better combo of Nintendo Wii + PlayStation 2. These two cover so much stuff that it's crazy. Just be sure to get a PS2 in good conditions.

That should be enough, I guess. Now if you excuse me I have to make some tests to see if my PS2 is going to behave from now on and stop destroying my discs. Toodles!