| Product: |
Sony PlayStation 2 |
| Date: |
01/01/02 (676 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Play DVDs, Superb capabilities, Longevity assured
Disadvantages: Initial layout, Games can be costly
The flagship consumer product of the Sony empire at this moment in time is the Playstation 2. It was released in late 2000 in Europe, following successful launches in Asia and America a few months earlier.
The PS2, as it is more commonly known was developed and built after the runaway success of the Playstation 1, which was around in the late 90s, and is still very predominant in the gaming lifestyles of millions today. Indeed, Sony's confidence in the original playstation is such that to tie in with the sales of the PS2, the PS1 has been rebranded and repackaged in a new smaller casing. The Psone as it is now known will continue to be sold and marketed alongside the flagship PS2.
Anyway, the PS2 has within it some very impressive specifications. Admittedly the forthcoming consoles from Microsoft and Nintendo, namely the Xbox and Gamecube respectively do have better specs in some areas, but the PS2 has had a year or more to build an impressive installed user-base, which I believe has already secured its success, certainly for the next few years anyway.
That said, the console market has always been big enough for a couple of machines to exist together, for instance remember the 8 bit days of the Nintendo NES and Sega Master System, or the 16 bit days of Nintendo SNES and Sega Megadrive. Both machines survived the tests of time in their days and did very well, both having good support from the public and more importantly support from software houses to develop quality games.
So, whilst the PS2 is very impressive, and I'm very pleased with mine, (which was purchased as a joint Xmas pressie, helped along by a shedload of Goldfish Credit Card points converted into Dixon's vouchers!!) its worth watching the 128bit console market over the next year to see what happens!
Anyway, I digress. It's the PS2 I'm talking about today. For the technically minded the PS2 contains within its slender black casing, the
se wonderful chips and bits.
128 Bit RISC CPU core.
300Mhz Clock speed
32Mb main memory
6.2 GFLOPS Floating point performance
Capability to display 36 million polygons per second
MPEG2 decoder
DVD playback capability.
Collectively the PS2's insides are known as the Emotion Engine, and in short, this is Sony?s way to describe how detailed and lifelike the PS2 can reproduce graphics, artificial intelligence and feeling within the software, if written well. "IF" is the word to note here, as software house do sometimes rush-release software, much to the disappointment of the buyers.
The PS2 did cost £299.99 when originally released in the UK; thankfully the price has now dropped to £199.99, with some retailers knocking another fiver off that. This base price gives you the PS2 unit, 1 dualshock controller, S-video leads and a scart adaptor. You don?t get a memory card included in the base pack, and you do need a memory card to properly play almost any game. Expect another £25-27 to get yourself an 8Mb Sony branded PS2 memory card (make sure it's PS2). Avoid the unbranded memory cards at all costs!!!
Software on the PS2 is widely available, on the Internet, high street electrical retailers, high street game stores, and even most supermarkets too!
It?s wise to shop around though. For example if you want to play Gran Turismo 3, which is an absolutely superb game, then you can expect to pay between £32 and £44 depending on where you buy it. One of the best places would be www.play.com, in my opinion. Typically new releases are £35 to £44, but you can get some good deals on older titles, for instance I noticed Toys R Us has a few games at under £20 this weekend, including Crazy Taxi, which I fancy getting.
There are a great number of games available on PS2, and this can easily be seen by going to any store or site that sells software. The console is widely supported by
many worldwide software houses, so new games are released almost every week.
Indeed, a point that may interest. Sega, whose last console was the Dreamcast a couple of years back, have now stopped producing consoles or investing further cash into new machines. They have however begun to develop games for Sony's flagship!
The PS2 is also a fully functional DVD player. Some people have slated this facility, as can be seen on some Dooyoo opinions. Personally, having experienced DVD playback on my PS2 I have to say I cannot fault the machine. Maybe if I had a super wide screen TV I could fault it, but on my 21-inch bargain TV from Asda it really is crystal clear, with no jumps or breaks in the flawless picture produced. I do know the latest PS2?s have slightly different software drivers inside so maybe this has corrected any problems reported on the early PS2s?
For me anyway I am now proud of my PS2 and will begin to collect DVDs and rent my films on DVD from now on!!
As a games machine it is superb and having played around 25 hours of GT3 in 3 days, I can only assume that me and our PS2 are going to become very well acquainted, and Sony will be getting some more cash out of me via games purchases too!
Finally if you have any PS1 games, then almost all of them will work fine on the PS2, and you can continue to save games and so on, but you must use your PS1 memory cards for PS1 games.
For further reading try;
www.scee.com
www.gamespot.com
news.alt.games.video.sony-playstation2
Cheers,
Alf
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