Ehhh, I really don't think the average consumer was that sensitive to video quality, unlike people posting on an Internet forum about technology in 2000. Otherwise S-Video and Laserdisc would've been sweeping the nation. The DVD feature was a selling point to your mom even if it was never used.

the ps2 was the only dvd player in the house for millions of people in the early 2000s.

it definitely factored into my decision to buy one (in 2001). dvd technology was still new and expensive back then. $150 in 2000 is almost $300 in 2024, so a dvd player was a fairly big purchase.

as for the video quality, it was better than everything i'd been watching up to that point because i'm not a weird fart-sniffing neurodivergent from the arstechnica forums. everyone still had CRT TVs. i had a fancy one: 32", flat screen...and 480i.

this ad is from the christmas season one year AFTER the ps2 was released and really shows the TV situation at the time:

that plasma tv is not even HD.

nah the opposite this is modern projection from a zoomer who doesnt know what theyre talking about, lots of people used ps2s as dvd players for their households and justified the expense that way

It's also an irrelevant point cause not only could PC and Xbox run DvD's perfectly fine out of the box, but there were so many different types of DvD players that most ppl had like 2 or 3 of them before buying a console

!g*mers !grillers MALElennials try to remember the childhood they worship so badly challenge (impossible)

I'm guessing you're some kind of zoomer cause every 20 something guy in the 2000s used their ps2 as a dvd player

It definitely was a factor when kids were trying to convince their parents to buy a PS2

I remember trying to watch a pirate dvd of Black Hawk Down at my friend's house on his PS2.

The dvd wouldn't work and we were too stoned to get up so we sat and watched the little dots run round and round in a circle.

Is this bait? You arent actually coping this hard right?

Is the ps4 or 5 capable of playing DVDs? Also are they high quality?

Maybe people remember it like that since it was absolutely a factor for the PS3. Blu-ray players were stupidly expensive at the time so an extra $50 for a PS3 instead with an interface that wasn't dogshit was a good deal.

Idk how one could tell the difference in DVD picture quality between players

On a crt

Everything looked like a ss

Yeah there are a ton of European stuff available in addition to great stuff made in the US. Just picked up a bunch for a party tomorrow... got white stilton with cranberry, roquefort, camembert, some regular cheddar, and this tequila and habanero infused cheddar that is really good:

Look, maybe some semitic beings such as yourself obsess over the "deli" section and its "real cheese" but a proper man knows he ain't gonna find any real cheese in America, its all cheese product, not any none of a pure made cheese

That's the kind of minority we can all hate.

i have no idea what any of this means but i gotta say american cheese best cheese

The build up to the invasion of Iraq really was a magical time

Saddan Hussein and PS2

Gran Turismo 3 is also a gas. !carlos

There was a version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms released in English only on PS2. I really resent having to set up the emulator just for this one game. Which wasn't that good. IIRC you spent 90% of the time dealing with the minutiae of your espionage network.

RTK 11 is when they finally got it right. One of the best games ever made. Everything before and after can't compare.

I would always create my own characters and start my own faction in Guangxi but I needed about 3 other people at least. So !animalposters I tried putting in the names of my pets. But how to you rate them? Sasha had huge charisma and WAR too. (I saw her and some b-word have a fight in mid-air once. At the end there was a lot of cat hair to sweep up, but one of them was the victor as she was in control of the battlefield.)

But INT? If I could rate Sasha in WIS she was off the charts but let's be honest, she wasn't gonna run a complicated spy ring behind enemy lines. She's a goddarn cat. It's very confusing trying to map cat personalities onto Chinese generals at the end of the Han Dynasty.

I totally still have mine along with an old HDD too full of about 100 games I need to beat, like shitty resident evil knockoff x-files game lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files%3A_Resist_or_Serve

X-Play praised the voice acting, the story, and the dialogue, but criticized the graphics, awkward camera angles, poor control, and "recycled Resident Evil-style gameplay," including "frustrating" limitations such as "being able to move some objects and not others," as well as "having to search every square inch of a room and kill every creature, just to make sure you didn't miss some obscure object or key that ends up being necessary to move on." Miller wrote that the graphics "are unimpressive, but don't particularly detract from the overall experience. The voice work is so good that it's a little disconcerting to see it synced up with the odd looking character models that make up Scully and Mulder." Miller concluded that "X-Files fans will be more forgiving of Resist or Serve when it comes to the hokey gameplay, but even casual acquaintances of the series will appreciate the effort Black Ops put into the package as a whole. True, this is basically a toned-down Resident Evil with X-Files pasted on top, but Resident Evil hasn't been this interesting for a long time!"

I don't fault David Duchovny for his acting skills but lets be honest with ourselves he was built for VGC (video game characters). Total deadpan king.

@BWC agree with me for once

Ngl, pirated PS and PS2 games were so ubiquitous in the UK that I never saw a legit PS1 game until I met my wife in university. A Russian contractor I hired told me it was the same way in Russia when he was young

i think i still have a big binder with dozens of bootleg ps2 games in the attic somewhere

i'm pretty sure i gave away my modded console that could play them, though

Don't forget the DS with an R4 and GBA flashcart for fun on the go

Cope Nintendie, PS5 is outselling PS2

https://www.gamesradar.com/ps5-on-track-to-overtake-the-ps2-and-become-sonys-most-successful-console-yet/

Tbf this isn't them bragging about the PS2 specifically. It's part of a 30th Anniversary celebration where they have detailed pages for each generation of Playstation systems. The PS2's sales were just part of that.

The pre-release hype for the PS2 was completely insane, never seen anything like it since. I even remember seeing a report that Saddam Hussein was going to use the PS2 to fire missiles or something since it was so advanced

No this is life to date. Production ceased in 2013.