So, What about the PS2 this Christmas?

December 3rd, 2008

Actually, that’s a good question. Even with the migration to the newer consoles there is easily a greater density of active PS2 gamers than Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and possibly Wii players combined. Yet this year’s Christmas coverage and buyer’s guides are hardly falling in the console’s favour eh?

I guess it’s one of the staples of getting old, people forget about you. Still retirement has its perks, and the PS2 has showcased a few interesting gems over the past few months. Furthermore, PS2 games are super cheap at this stage in its life, so they make for easy to buy, fun to play stocking fillers, alongside your Fallout 3, Gears of War 2 and Little Big Planet. Really, you can’t go wrong with half-price, quality assured games this Christmas and the PS2 has a number of good selections. Here are a few suggestions in a friendly list format, fill me in if I am missing anything significant:

Key Titles

Persona 4
Yakuza 2
Eternal Poison
Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
Soul Nomad & the World Eaters

Compilations

Mortal Kombat Kollection
The King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga
World Heroes Anthology
SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1
Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 1

Port Downs

Sonic Unleashed
WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009
Quantum of Solace: The Game
Lego Batman
Guitar Hero World Tour

Singstar

SingStar Disney
SingStar Boy Bands vs. Girl Bands
SingStar ABBA
SingStar Pop Vol. 2

Posted in Editorial | Comments (0)
Tags:

Are Coloured and Transparent Consoles Dying in the Era of Modern Technological Sophistication?

April 23rd, 2008

multiple coloured playstation 2 consoles

Remember how awesome it was playing Pokemon Red or Blue on your old Transparent GameBoy Pocket? You could see right through the plastic into the guts of the machine. ^_^

It was a few years before the release of Pokemon though that Nintendo first introduced a range of coloured GameBoy Pocket consoles including my aforementioned transparent GameBoy Pocket. Actually I can’t quite remember if the GameBoy Pocket actually launched with the colours or not. In anycase this release was teamed with the equally awesome ‘Stick it in Your Pocket’ ad campaign.transparent gameboy pocket

This was historically a turning point for coloured consoles and was followed on by Nintendo with subsequent GameBoy Color and Nintendo 64 colour variations. Sony later jumped on board too with transparent PSone Memory cards. Since the release of the previous generation machines (Playstation 2, Gamecube and Xbox) it appears as though coloured and transparent consoles have been on a slow decline replaced by the idea of slick, sophisticated pieces of modern technology designed to outshine the DVD player and TV.

Coloured consoles are still around the place though, albeit severally withdrawn for the sake of tech. The three most popular colours of modern day consoles are jet black, pure white and metallic silver. See the problem? These colour variations fall into the 3 primary colours of consumer tech (household phones, kitchen electrical, home entertainment etc). There is as much variation here as there is between Sunbeam kettles. Even though they are pitched as colours, truth be told; they aren’t, they are just different shades of grey.

The portable scene appears to have faired much better with examples like the red and yellow PSPs and pastel coloured DS Lites. With the DS though once again we see a lack of anything truly colourful with the lightly hued pastels, demeans the point really.

Several brave attempts at coloured consoles have appeared in recent years namely they are:

Also in recent years coloured consoles have been released as part of special edition packs designed to suit the pack-in game or have often been limited to a Japanese only release.

So Why No Love for the Coloured Console?

I briefly touched on this before, the main reason for this move comes from a push by console manufacturers in favour of viewing video game consoles as tech devices instead of “toys”. Game consoles have been designed to sit next to the DVD player and TV so hence they should be designed to appear to belong in within that group of devices (again, the 3 primary colours of consumer tech). Since the inclusion of built in DVD players this has become even more apparent.multicoloured nintendo 64 consoles

With the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 offering numerous multimedia facilities, consoles are now in reality swallowing members of the same tech group, or at least attempting to. Sony and Microsoft want their video game console to be the multimedia hub of the household. As the generations have progressed and as this video of technological cannibalism has become has become more and more apparent, consoles are no longer allowed to look like toys.

Portable consoles are exempt from this classification as you ‘Stick them in Your Pocket’ and not underneath the TV. These products are now grouped with mobile phones and PDAs so it is okay for these consoles to change their colour slightly. Even so both the PSP and DS the coloured offerings have been disappointingly limited, the pastel coloured range of DS is as weak as water in my mind. As for the PSP the red and yellow colours are distinct and make for fantastic colours. But I can’t help but feel disappointed when I can reference at least 5 awesome colours which have not seen a western release.

The Future of Colourful Consoles?

I believe that coloured consoles will remain on the path it is currently on, tied to special editions and girly pink variants with the occasional console with a splash of saturation. There is still plenty of opportunity for coloured consoles, the Wii itself disproves the idea that consumers want a multimedia PC in their lounge room. But will that change as more consumers enter our medium?
pink playstation 2
There really are too many variables to toss around in both the video games, multimedia PC and home entertainment industries to accurately make a solid prediction as it would first require a firm idea on the future of home entertainment.

In anycase, colourful consoles are eye catching, unique and attractive, for it’s marketing impact (as well as the nutters like me) there will always be a spot for colourful consoles. I wonder though when will we see another transparent console?

Side Note: Xbox 360 Faceplates/Modded Consoles/Console Skins

As a final thought to ponder, how do you think the above console modification process affect the situation?

BTW we spell color as colour in Australia. Same with favour etc.
Posted in Editorial | Comments (1)
Tags: , ,

The Playstation 2 Story

June 20th, 2007

slim line playstation 2 australia

How it (tradgically) went down

I haven’t posted about this yet and I really should. Basically I’d been meaning to buy a PS2 for probably 2/3 years now and I finally got around to it the other week. I have been keenly looking for one for about 3 months and found and pretty good deal at Harvey Norman. That was:

-Playstation 2 console
-Extra Controller
-8mb memory card
-2x Platnium titles Total price – $299

So I worked that out to be about $170 or so just for the console by itself. Which was close enough to my target goal. The deal had everything that I needed to get started so and I was getting a bit anxious of just watching a few decent sales go by. So I decided to get it.I was assuming that they may have a few other titles that I might want to pick up down at my local Harvey Norman so I was prepared to maybe buy a few more games. Unfortunately their range of games were pretty average infact I was more impressed by their PSP bargain bin. Out of the limited range I chose Burnout Revenge and Tekken 5 as my 2 platnium titles, they also had the Prince of Persia Trilogy for $50 which was too good to pass up. Especially having played the original on the old C64. 😀

All was well until I had to actually pay for the lot. This is where Harvey Normans payment procedure collapsed into itself. Chris(my brother if you haven’t caught on) and I went to the checkout and had the girl scan all of the items, we pointed out that it was a part of the deal and showed it to her in their catalogue. She didn’t seem aware of the promotion and spent several minutes staring blankly at the page. She then scanned up all of the items and looked back at the catalogue for a few minutes. Chris and I had a bus to catch, unfortunately Chris had been slowing me down(as always) before hand so we didn’t have much time on our hands. So we explained the deal to her again and kindly tried to hurry it along.

She then said that she would need to do an invoice for the package which seemed a bit bizarre. So we grabbed our goods and followed her around the store until she could find a spare staff member to do the invoice. She found one quickly enough and we sat down and this other guy went thru the products, once again looked at the catalogue for a while and then proceded to discount each item on the computer. He then wrote the discounts down on a piece of paper and led us back to the front of the store so that the other chick could finish off(or is that start?) the sale. After another customer went thru we got our goods put thru and our ‘invoice’ was printed out an overally large reciept printed from a printed that wouldn’t look out of place in the 80s.

This whole ordeal took about 25 minutes and as you may have already guessed we missed our bus. Now I can’t help but feel sorry for those poor sales people. I mean I don’t blame them for any of this as its not their fault. Except for not knowing that you have a major special in your catalogue that has been running for 4 days or not knowing how to take a few %s off a few products.(why would you employ someone that couldn’t do that?) You see its the POS(point of sale) procedure where the fault lies. There are many many Harvey Norman stores around Australia and yet they don’t have a database system in which they can scan an item an it will come up as a reduced price. What we noticed was that any price reduction has to be entered manually. Now what happens in the ‘invoice’ case is that each item must be marked down individually by a certain amount(%) and those calculations would be sent to the checkout staff to process. This is a ridiculus system of time wasting for the customer and makes no common sense.

I spose its no surprise really I very rarely(infact I don’t believe that I have even bought something from their before the PS2) shop at HN. Infact bfore I bought the PS2 I despised them for their -ve comments on the Nintendo Wii, seemingly morotic staff and well…they just plan annoyed me. But (thankfully) I have a real reason to hate them now. Ain’t gonna shop there again.

I haven’t had a retail bitch for sometime. So thank you for letting it get off me chest.

What else I snapped up

I bought the console a few weeks ago and hence in the time of me wiritng this to back then I have had the time to buy some games for it. Luckily for me its been a great time to buy games. Being the end of the finanical year numerous retailers are having great deals on some stellar games. Everything that I’ve bought has been reduced. ^_^ Here’s the list of games:

-Tekken 5
-Burnout Revenge
-Prince of Persia Trilogy
-Super Monkey Ball DX
-Soul Calibur 3
-God of War
-Final Fantasy X
-Final Fantasy X-2
-Kingdom Hearts 2
-GTA: LCS
-GTA: VCS
-Sega MegaDrive Collection

I’ve been trying to stay focused on certain games and here’s my brief impressions:

Burnout Revenge

This game is totally apt, fantastic production values, gameplay thats fined tuned to perfection. Its just too good. I love playing this game as its such a rush. I found it a wee bit tricky to settle in but now that I have its totally awesome. Soundtracks great too, go Junkie XL.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

Some people think that this series is the series of last gen, but I have to disagree. The games reek of Ubisoft quality but I can’t help but feel that its not as refined as it could be. Specifically the combat, I often find myself become more and more frustrated with it. The acrobatics are definetly very impressive. The game is the perfect 3D conversion of the old 2D PoP games in terms of design. Which is very reminiscent of the older games, I can’t help but dig the nostalgic value from my old C64 version.

Soul Calibur 3

I haven’t played any single player of this game yet. Chris and I have been furiously duking it out in the Vs mode. This game is a true step up from SC2 which I wasn’t expecting. The gameplay flows more beautifully than the silk that drapes the walls of some levels. This game makes Tekken 5 feel like something from the stone age.

Sega MegaDrive Collection

I wasn’t expecting to buy this game for a while but it was price at EB($25) which was too good to pass up. The best part about this collection is that it does justice to the old MegaDrive. That is the emulations are faultless, presentation is slick and the additional options such as saving anywhere are just downright handy. Oh and nothing beats playing some co-op Golden Axe. 🙂 Once again this one brings back those oh so lovely nostalgic memories, from playing this console at my cousins place every weekend when I was a young chap.

Conclusion

Its about time that I bought a PS2. I’m glad that I’ve decided to do it now as its at the perfect time in terms of software range availability and price. I’m also pleased that I bought it now instead of holding off. Thanks for reading. ^_^

Posted in Editorial | Comments (1)
Tags: ,
« Older Entries