One of the most beloved and long lived game consoles.
Being a part of the Nintendo crowd growing up, this was my first foray into the competition.
I was too young to have a job, but my old man gave me an allowance.
Granted he ment for me to use that on lunch money, but I wanted a ps2 so bad I’d skip lunch one or two days a week and pocket the cash. My plan was to save up for it and hope he’d take me to the store.
I don’t remember how long it took me to save, but that day finally came. the old man got a little testy with me, it was really supposed to be lunch money, but I think he was impressed I set a goal and achieved it.
Over time I grew a small collection. The gtas up to San Andreas, twisted metal black, dynasty warriors, Spyro from PS1, ffx, and my favorite dark cloud 1.
Despite some bugs and a few translation issues, I loved the weapon building in dark cloud. I did at least one playthrough where I darn near had toan’s final sword.
The gtas was were I got comfy with swearing. Fun but sometimes tedious.
Borrowed echo night and beyond from a friend and loved the atmosphere but I never got around to snagging my own copy.
It was also my first dvd player, had the remote.
So many memories and gems on this system. I only scratched the surface of the library. Regretfully, I ended up selling it a few years later when I got into PC gaming and lan parties and I needed money to build my first rig.
I left the Sony fandom after I moved to pc and never had another playstation. I know I passed up great games on the later systems.
I’m on the fence with modern systems, but I’ll always have a fondness for the PS2.
It was so great because it was the last consul gen that did not have the internet.
PS2 had internet, tho. There’s hella online multiplayer games. Some of which were only online multiplayer like EverQuest Adventures and Final Fantasy 11.
If we don’t count the Sega Genesis or Dreamcast, it was the first console generation to seriously have internet play a decent role in console gaming.
Maybe not much online gaming but I’m fairly certain it had an Ethernet port or an addon.
There was a whole Linux for PS2 thing for awhile although I never messed with it.
True, you can even run games from a Raspi SMB share via Ethernet, in case the DVD drive fails.
You’re talking about like a raspberry pi?
That’s amazing. Years ago, a buddy had the og fat model with the infamous dvd issue.
We were close to getting it working completely but the video still had some odd artifacts.
Something like what you’re talking about would’ve been perfect.
You can also run games directly off of an IDE hard drive installed with your PS2 network adapter, although only on the original “phat” PS2 models. This makes the old phat models highly desirable to collectors nowadays, along with the network adapter addons. Dead DVD drive or not. I have to admit that I have… three… of them. And at least two updated slim PS2’s in different revisions.
Yes, you can find it here PSX SMBshare.
I can share more info if you want to give it a try. You need a PS with Ethernet jack. The OG PHAT one needed an adapter for it, I believe.
I appreciate the offer but I don’t have a PS2 anymore. Thank you anyways.
It did! You are correct! I had a slim with it built in. I didn’t know what it was for. I was young and stupid and thought it was a telephone line
There was an Ethernet port if you bought the online or hard drive adapter. But I guess my point is that it was not yet wife spread and you were not expected to have it.
Games were shipped complete and online gaming was kind of “experimental” for consoles. There was a resident evil game that I had that could be played online. I think it was called outbreak.
Random nerd trivia about the PS2, specifically the console itself:
The PS2 was released at the dawn of the DVD era, and was hugely desirable not only for being the next generation of Sony’s even then mega-popular Playstation series, but also because it was for a time the cheapest way to get a DVD player in your living room. Yes, a brand new PS2 at launch was cheaper than a first generation DVD player. And also had the added side effect of, you know, being able to play video games. Sony was absolutely adamant that the PS2 should be a component of your home theater and hi-fi system and envisioned it being a complete media center experience that was also internet connected, but this did not come to complete fruition until the Playstation 3. The original revision of the PS2 didn’t even include network functionality, and to get it you had to buy a separate add-on adapter which plugged into a dock on the back. Outside of online multiplayer games (including some MMO’s), not a whole heck of a lot ultimately wound up supporting the PS2’s network capabilities.
Even so, the PS2 can natively play DVD video disks, something that neither the Gamecube nor original XBox could do out of the gate. (The Gamecube couldn’t play DVD video disks at all, at least without modern modification, and the XBox required the separate “DVD Movie Kit.”) The PS2 did have a DVD kit as well, which consisted of a special receiver that plugged into a memory card slot and a remote that looked like it belonged to a home theater component. Even so, you could still play back DVD’s and control the playback using a standard game controller and an on screen menu.
The PS2’s DVD playback functionality won it a huge amount of early sales, but ironically also (much later) enabled unlimited homebrew and game piracy on the platform. How? Well, it turns out the PS2 can execute code off of a memory card, and this mechanism was used officially by Sony to apply an in-memory patch to the DVD playback software to support the remote. Enterprising nerds figured out that, in fact, the PS2 will load any suitably compiled and signed code off of a specially formatted memory card at bootup, thereby allowing the owner to make it run anything they wanted… For instance, a homebrew app launcher, or pirated game loader. The culmination of this is the FreeMCBoot loader and its associated software suite, and the homebrew HDLoader program which can load game disk images off of a hard drive (!) installed along with the Sony PS2 network adapter, on original “phat” PS2 models. (The later “slim” model did not have the bay for a hard drive and came with an Ethernet jack built in; It, however, can load games from USB or over a network instead with the right homebrew software.)
The PS2’s standard controllers actually have pressure sensitive face buttons. The system can, if your game feels like it, judge not only that you’ve pressed a button but also how hard you pressed it. Not a lot of people knew this, or at least not a lot of people who didn’t play Metal Gear Solid.
Back in the day, there was a lot of school playground bickering over whether or not you were “allowed” to operate the PS2 in a vertical orientation, with it standing on its edge. Some people said it would damage the console or your disks, others said it was downright required to keep the DVD drive lens in alignment. What few people seemed to notice at the time was that the “PS” logo on the drive tray is designed so you can rotate it 90 degrees, so it’ll be right side up regardless of whether or not your console is laying flat or is standing on its edge. The system also has rubber feet both on the bottom and on the left hand edge. Sony obviously intended for people to be able to use it standing up right from the start.
The Playstation 2 came with a pair of USB ports on the back, which never seemed to amount to much official use. Well, you can plug a normal USB mouse and keyboard into those, and they will actually work with select games. The PS2 version of Half Life, notably, supported mouse and keyboard control just like its PC counterpart.
The “towers” that appear on the console’s boot screen are not generated at random; they’re actually based off of how many different titles you have launched, and their height is based off of how many times you’ve launched each title.
The flowing circle of dots displayed on the boot menu are actually a very cryptic clock, and their layout is determined by the current system time. The radial arrangement of cylinders in the background when you go to the System Configuration menu is also another clock, with the cylinders filling up as time elapses. There are 12 of them, and each one represents an hour. Obviously the PS2 had a built in real time clock and Sony was apparently very proud of this fact.
The Playstation 2 was, in fact, the best selling video game console of all time. at 158-some-odd million units sold it beats all of the classics you can think of, including the original NES (~49 million), Atari 2600 (~30 million), and even the Wii (~101 million). Nothing, not even Sony’s later consoles, has managed to surpass it. Not even if we include handhelds: The Nintendo DS in its various guises is the only system that comes close, with ~154 million units sold across its three (!) major design revisions. The Playstation 2 was not actually officially discontinued by Sony until 2013.
You sure about the PS2 dvd thing? I could’ve sworn it had to have software installed to unlock the playback. I mean this was decades ago, so I could be misremembering.
I had the remote and it came with the receiver and I could’ve sworn there was a disk too that was needed. But yeah I totally used it as a DVD player. That thing was a rockstar.
PS2 had native DVD playback. It was a huge selling point and was definitely how most people with a PS2 first watched DVDs before they eventually bought an actual DVD player. No software install needed.
I don’t even know of anyone that had thier PS2 hooked up to the Internet. The online Final Fantasy game was probably the most well known online game. It was more of a curiosity than anything back then.
Yeah I used mine for movies. It was a long time ago so I’m probably just mixed up with something else regarding the software thing.
I never used internet on mine either.
I still play PS2 games. Just on on my PC.
Fight Night 3.
Coliseum.
FFX.
FF12 (though I prefer the updated version).
Shadow of the Colossus.
Tiger Woods.
Ratchet and Clank
PsyOps the mind conspiracy.
Front Mission 4.
Way of the Samurai.That’s just off the top of my head. I have a bunch more.
