There Goes The Neighborhood
May 20, 2006
I've never owned a Sony PlayStation product until now. For the last twenty years I've been a textbook loyal Nintendo customer because I absolutely love Nintendo's games. After all, so many Nintendo products are happiness packed into a game cartridge or disc. I've never wanted anything beyond Nintendo's own offerings and the occasional third party product from Capcom and Sega. So how is it that I willingly walked into Best Buy yesterday afternoon and put down nearly $200 on a PlayStation 2, memory card, and a few games?
The short answer is that it's for business purposes. The opportunity to review a certain large publisher's new anthology collection came up a few days ago, but of course the only console capable of playing this new game is the PS2. I could not resist the offer even if it did mean bringing the PS2 into my home. The Nintendo consoles keep giving it the evil eye. I've hooked it up and placed it on top of my entertainment unit, as if keeping it a safe distance from the Nintendo GameCube and its feisty little brother, Nintendo 64. Down below in the cabinets the NES and Super NES are rumbling, eager to tear this newcomer a new controller port. If my beloved Nintendo consoles ever manage to disconnect their AV cables & power supplies and get free, well, I don't have to tell you what will happen.
So the sleek slimline PS2 has found a home atop the unit along with two games. From my point of view the PS2 library is untapped, so after doing a little research into just what is critically acclaimed on Sony's console and talking to a co-worker, I chose Grand Theft Auto III and Jak II to christen my PS2 experience. GTA3 suprised me with its violence. So many guns and ways to kill people! If overprotective parents or politicians or ambluance-chasing lawyers find out about this game, they'd go nuts. Fortunately it seems to have gone under the radar for now. As for Jak, I'm amazed to find a quality adventure game that doesn't require me to rescue Princess Zelda. Surely this is just a fluke. There cannot be a whole library of quality PS2 titles that I've missed out on all these years.
What's that, you say? There are others? This I have to see. What amazing PS2-exclusive titles do I need to check out? I have Ratchet and Clank on my list of games to try along with the quirky Katamari Damacy. Platformer titles are preferred over shooters and fighting games, but I'm open to suggestions from any genre.