SPECIAL REPORT COVERAGE:
VIDEO GAMER X GETS SONY PLAYSTATION 2

For a long time I have been reading about the Playstation 2 and could never really get the feel of the system from reports and articles in magazines alone. Basically, it's a lot smaller and thicker than I thought it would be in size. The size kind of reminds me of an NES in some ways. The system is about double the height of the original Playstation, the same width, and slightly longer. It can be turned on it's side like a computer tower and there are little rubber feet on the side to do this. Since it looked kind of funky having a system towering over the others like that on top of my Sony Trinitron Wega TV, I simply placed it underneath my regular Playstation between the Dreamcast and N64. Old Playstation, may soon be relegated to the closet, as it is now rendered useless since PSX2 can play old playstation games as well as Playstation 2 games, DVD's, CD's, etc.

What's a little different about the PSX2 is that you put the discs in from the front like a normal DVD Player or a computer CD/DVD-ROM. On the front panel there are some interesting things that have changed. First you have the power switch, which lights up blue, and then the Reset Button that is Green. First thing I noticed was that there were 2 USB ports and 1 IEEE 1394 Port (a.k.a FireWire) on the front of the unit. The back has the usual Power AC In, and Video Cable to RCA Audio/Video Jacks and another port for what looks to be some kind of Optical Cable. The Playstation 2 even has a cooling fan in the back like the Dreamcast or a PC.

The Playstation 2 uses 8 MB Memory Cards. I remember when the entire RAM of one of my old computers was 8MB several years back. It will also take those original Playstation Memory cards so your files can easily be played on the Playstation 2 Formatting isn't a big deal either, I didn't even really make note of how long it took because it was probably so quick. At 29.95 for the card though, I don't know, that's just a little steep in my book, but it's not like their going to do anything about it. The Playstation 2 Dual Shock Analog Controller Looks exactly the the original Playstation's Dual Analog Shock Controller. I didn't see or feel any difference. Supposedly the buttons are Analog too, allowing for pressure sensitivity. Not really any innovations that I can see here.

The Playstation 2's DVD Capability is quite adequate and it plays DVD Movies with perfection. You have many various options to choose from when playing a DVD in the system. It would seem though that "The Matrix" DVD is only filmed in 3:4 Letterbox Edition. It was okay, but it would have been nice to have it full screen.

For Playstation, I bought 4 games, Kessen, Madden NFL 2001, Summoner, and Tekken Tag Tournement. The first day I brought the system home and started playing these games immediately. The following is a synopsis of what I experienced and my first impressions overall.

Madden NFL 2001 - What I like to do here is compare this game to NFL2k1 and weigh each of these games against each other because the bar has certainly been raised when it comes to these Football Sim games. The Graphics that I've seen so far in Madden 2001 are very good. Helmets are nice and shiny (even showing reflections of the stadium lights!), players eyes blink, there's even the but one thing I noticed was that all the player's animations and AI weren't quite as smooth as NFL2k. At times they were a little bit unnatural in motion, but this occurred rather infrequently The facial detail is definietly there, something missing from NFL2k. There are more things going on around the field like coaches and the crowd moves. The ball is also very realisic of course with the Wilson Logo clearly marked on it, the creases and the laces. The stadium is well rendered, but I don't know why but I liked NFL2k's stadiums a little better, but Madden did have a couple extras that I noticed weren't present in NFL2k like a active monitor on the stadium MegaTron. The real time physics of the players is okay, but I noticed that it just doesn't seem like their tackling but rather just falling into the player to tackle him. The physics model for NFL2k series is a little better in some ways. Sometimes the players are a little jerky, but only ocasionally. The sounds are very realistic, and the commentary is a little more bland and sparce that NFL2k was. As it were, the commentary wasn't coming out very clearly over my TV. It was there yes, but no where near the volume or intensity of NFL2k. I don't know what happened to this part of the audio. The gameplay is very extensive with many plays to choose from, and a wide variety of options. This is probably the best feature overall. You can even customize your own players and there's even alternate teams and teams of the past and World Football League teams. Overall the game was good, except for a few things I would have improved to make it more realistic, and spiced up the commentary. This game has better graphics than NFL2k series, but is it a better game overall? That's a tough one to decide upon. I suppose you have to leave this to personal preferance because I could say that both achieve about the same effect.

Summoner - So far I haven't gotten too far into this one, but thus far this is probably the worst title I got for the Playstation 2. The music is bland, the graphics are not even above Dreamcast standards, and the characters that I did notice were blocky, and the environments were plain. There was nothing special in the game to really make me amazed. It was an underwhelming experience. It may get better further along and I will add an addendum to this paragraph, but so far this one is kind of mediocre.

Tekken Tag Tournament - Well, it's definitely Tekken, and there are many characters to choose from. The detail in the characters is very nice, but there's just something odd about the backgrounds/fighting arenas. It's like some of the ground moves while the rest moves differently and it lessens the realism on the game. The play control is totally tekken. The one thing I've always complained about the Tekken games is the lag time between moves or kick and punches after you press the button. It's and odd feeling playing a game like Tekken after Soul Calibur, which still reigns king of fighters in my book. It's a good fighter overall, but there could be some better things. The sound is on par with where it should be.

Kessen - I guess you could say this was my "Sleeper" title because I judged a disc by it's cover and thought it was going to be a bummer of a game before I played it. As it turned out this game was the best one I bought. First off, let me just say that this game reinforces my faith in the Playstation 2 after Launch. The quality of the Graphics is simply breathtaking. I saw effects and things that I never thought possible on a game system until now. There were engravings on armor plates, there were tassles on clothing, the tiniest detail was paid attention to. The movment of cloth or flags in the wind was indistiguishable from the real world thing. When one of the characters unshealths a Katana, it was the best metal effect on a game I've ever seen. This was all rendered in Real Time by the Playstation 2. Very very nice. This game contains entire battlefields of hundreds of warriors with full Japanese Medieval armor and Shoguns fighting it out. It's pretty amazing to see several dozen troops fire a Triple Barrage at an oncomming Cavalry. You can watch as they line up a bunch of canons and fire away killing like a 1000 guys at once! Then the girls on horseback whip out the muskets and pop some serious lead into your army. Then there's the duel where one of your Officers and another Officer trade insults and battle cries and then enguage in hand to hand combat all done by the Playstation 2 in real time with epic camera pans. You can have several views of the battlefield, the closer you get the more detail you see. I saw soldiers running guys though with thier swords and others clanging spears and katanas. Some of them if you choose Special Manuvers will form a Spear Wall and pike happless troops and cavalry as they attempt to siege you. This game is beyond the scope of the word Awesome! It's truly and Epic War and the storytelling that goes on between battles is very entralling with action packed sequences rendered in very high polygon counts by the Playstation 2. The Female Ninjas kick ass! It bests Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive 2's detail by a rather wide margin. It's simply a beautiful site to behold this game. The game storyline revolves around the historical account of battles fought in Medieval Japan during the late 16th and early 17th century in Japan. You take control Tokugawa Commander of the Eastern Forces. The storyline plays out as you continue to win battles. The music in the game is EPIC all the way, with that invigorated driving ochestral flare of war and fighting. There is narration between the main events that carries and tells the historical true referance to the actual wars that took place in 1600 A.D. in Japan. The characters speak verbally at all times and there are many battle cries and things like, "Ready, Aim, Fire!" and so forth. The events that happen during the battle that cut to scenes from the main camp show high detail and quality paid to maintaining the continuity of the story conveyed though character development and involvement. It's a psudoRPG in ways where you get to peer into the lives and roles of the officers representing this campaign. This is the War Sim to end all War Sims. In general this is a series of games that I tend to loath, but this single game made me a believer. This beats the living piss out of anything I've seen on PC in this Genre. I advise getting this one if you want to watch the stuff of that movie BraveHeart for hours upon end to your heart's content. I give the graphics on this title a 10 out of 10, absolutely stunning! Gameplay is pretty good, but sometimes I found myself a little overwhelmed with micromanagement of my units and their abilities. Once I get used to it, my familiarity with it may increase. If you buy a Playstation 2 Launch game, get this one for sure.

Here's an even better thing, Playstation 2 can improve the graphics/texture mapping of regular Playstation 2 games. During the boot up process you can choose to select an option to turn Texture Smoothing on and games like my Vagrant Story, improved significantly. I was pretty impressed by what I saw.

I have to say, that I was sufficiently pleased with Playstation 2, and most of the games I received at launch. If you have any doubts about the system, then they are unfounded, it was well worth it overall. I hear all this talk about how Sony will crash and burn when GameCube and X-Box come out, but if the First Generation graphics in Kessen and Madden 2001 were any indication of Playstation 2, then Sony has a lot of ground to stand on and if they keep the good tiles rollin' in they will remain very competitive. The quality of these systems bodes for the kind of games that were once only dreamed of years ago. Kessen alone made me truly anticipate what games like Zelda, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Castlevania will look like.