So I'm a Gen Z'er, a bit on the older end of the spectrum. Currently finishing my bachelor's degree, if that gives you some perspective on my age. My dad actually owned a PS2 when I was born, but by the time I started playing video games it was on an Xbox 360. We didn't get the first "new" console that I actually remembered setting up until the Xbox One back in 2013. Ever since then, every time we got a new console, even just regular console re-releases like the PS4 Slim and the Xbox One X, it was such a huge hassle setting those things up. I remember 2 years ago when we got a PS5 for the family room back at my parent's house, it was an entire day-long process to set that damn thing up. You gotta plug it in, wait for it to do its own set up for like an hour, sign into all these BS accounts, get a million setting set up, deal with parental restrictions if you need those.
Last week I bought a PS2 Slim from my coworker for $50 and I'm still in awe of how easy it was to set up. I decided to get up early so I could spend all of my day off doing what I expected to be the usual "new console" troubleshooting… but nope. I just plugged it into the wall, then plugged the A/V cables into a ADC (Analog-to-Digital Converter) I preemptively bought online. Then I plugged the controller in, turned it on, and voila! Literally just a working console. Only problem was that I forgot to get a memory card so I couldn't actually play the games that my coworker gave me, but hey it works!
It's just so incredible to me how modern technology is almost always such a major pain in the ass to set up. Every thing I own takes a million years and mind-numbing troubleshooting because there's always a problem. It feels like every time I use something old it might still have troubleshooting, (especially if it's from the 80s or 90s) but the set up process is 10 minutes at most. I remember the modem/router I bought a few months ago took two days of painful troubleshooting before I could even try to connect it to my internet plan.
P.S. It's also pretty amazing just how small this thing is. Even a PS4 Slim would dwarf this thing by a couple magnitudes. I set up tons of space on my side table expecting it to be as big as a PS4 was, but it's just sitting on there with a sizeable portion of empty space surrounding it
Edit: if you don't believe me then that's a you problem. I'm not sure why multiple people have seemed to think I'm making a generalization about millions of people because of my own experiences. This post is about my experiences and mine alone. You might have had better internet or never have run into problems with routers and that's wonderful. I'm so proud of you. But, this post is not talking about you, so save the ego.
I can feel the back pain kicking in reading this.
I recoiled when I read, "my dad actually owned a PS2 when I was born." Oh time, you cruel beast.
Me too man. Shit.
Yyyyyup
Was about to say the NES just plugged in and goes! And then realized that if I wrote that, people would read it.
I glance down at the PS2 in my entertainment center I bought new… damn I feel old.
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I might have just turned to dust and blown away in the wind reading this!
Seriously though, it's nice how just simple they are. Even times I've fired up my PS3 it's got just a little bit of friction in ways you don't expect there to be. The trade off for all that simplicity though is you get what's on the disc/cartridge and that is it. No patches, no DLC or expansions, and you lose/break/give away that disc you're out of luck. It's weird even now feeling like those games could be "lesser versions" because they can't be updated in any way, but as a kid at the time that wasn't even an expectation.
Probably the hardest thing at this point is remembering you need that ADC to connect it to a modern TV!
Prior to dlc, games were released in what was considered a finished state though. Today games are released in effectively beta stages and some effectively alpha. They may claim to be finished but many are not.
But these "incomplete" releases are often still much more game than a finished ps2 game. And we don't really know how finished the devs considered their games at the time. We know based on found content that many of our "finished" classics had cut and canceled content that could have been completed and released/activated on the funds from initial sales if patching had been a technological possibility. They have bugs and glitches that are just part of the game because they couldn't be fixed after release. There are old games that are or can be legitimately impossible to complete on certain platforms because they have a glitch or potential hard lock if you make certain choices. And once printed they were permanently broken games. Games have been coming out incomplete for a long time. At least now they can be fixed.
I think it's intent. Many games are apparently rushed to release while knowingly unfinished as a money grab, and uses the paying customer base as beta testers. My opinion is that I don't like that trend and loved popping in that Nintendo cartridge knowing I had a complete game.
I play MMORPG s and have for more than 20 years. I'm not stuck in the past or anything, but I do believe what I'm saying and I do not like the trend.
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That's the difference: an internet connection.
As soon as a console can connect to the internet, the complexities multiply. The 360 was a middle ground where it was equipped for the internet, but couldn't assume it would ever be available. So occasionally you'd buy a new game and it would also update the console.
Then with XB1 they assumed you had a decent wifi connection. Now they can ship OS/firmware updates regularly, advertise to you on the home screen, have a friends list, patch games, etc.
Without that internet connection, the user experience is very predictable and has to fit on a disk/cartridge.
I'm pretty sure 360 games were also limited in how much you could patch them because they had to assume you didn't have a hard drive.
Yeah, they were. I believe it was something crazy small like 8MB per game. So if the binaries that shipped on disk needed more than 8MB of changes post launch, you're screwed. That's why those "greatest hits" versions of games came out a year or two later.
Today, there's often nothing on the disk, or if there is it's barely functional, and then you just download the latest build over the internet.
It's also a little more functional than that though, because you just need the game to be installed to get decent loading performance. At most, the disc these days can only offer a fast initial "download" and a DRM check.
Hah, with gigabit internet, it's faster for me to download a game these days vs install from disk.
But yeah, the DRM on disk has a functional purpose, I meant the actual game would often not be functional. You'd have all the bugs from a month or two prior when they first went gold, and it may not even run for very long without crashing. The build from two months prior to the game's launch often looks nothing like the build people download on launch day these days.
By the end of its life, though, more than 3/4 of each page on the 360 Home Screen was advertisements, with the remaining 1/4 being buttons you could use to get to actual content.
I’ve never met anyone who played online on the PS2 though, it just wasn’t very popular to go online back then.
I did.
Played SOCOM, and Tony Hawk…
…For like 10 minutes.
It was almost all garbage.
The ONLY PS2 game I ever really played online along with my friends at the time was Metal Gear Solid 3 : Substance's online mode.
But really… the PC was the best place for "online" until the late 2000s with the advent of the Xbox 360 and, a little later, the PS3.
I'd argue Xbox Live was better than PC online from the time it rolled out in ~2003 until PC online got better in the early 2010s. I remember StarCraft II feeling like the first time a PC game actually just had matchmaking where I could hit a button and get a match.
Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate – and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.
I remember good matchmaking in Warcraft 3 for srandard matches.
And I also remember having lots of fun on custom servers for CS, Half-Life, D2 etc. and not at all feeling like matchmaking was a required feature.
from what I remember, the Ratchet and Clank online modes were fairly fun, but even when I played, they were fairly old and took like 20min to find a match
Perhaps my gap is larger as I last played a Sega Genesis console and then a little PC gaming in the mid 2000s for Diablo and NHL, while my GF is still playing a Switch which I often call a Wii when I find it laying around needing to be charged.
She had joy con drift that she was just living with. When I asked her if it affected her after reading an article about it, she showed me game play in the latest Zelda game. I couldn't not believe the number of load and dialog screens she needed to get through for regular game play. I was bored in the first 30 seconds as she had to keep stopping to get through them. Thankfully I only need to replace/fix her joy sticks and changed out the batteries in the remotes as one of them was pretty swollen.
I don't think I would be interested in sitting through so many load screens just to play a game these days. That said I still have a Xbox 360 left behind by a friend and a hacked Wii for Sega games sitting in my entertainment center I never play either so perhaps it's just a closed chapter for me as it is.
she showed me game play in the latest Zelda game. I couldn't not believe the number of load and dialog screens she needed to get through for regular game play.
I tried Tears of the Kingdom for the first time yesterday. After what felt like half an hour of watching a movie with occasional very short samples of gameplay, I gave up and turned it off. I couldn't stick with it for any longer.
That sucks. Funny how the screens creeps in. The actual game play looks great but I suspect the hardware can't handle it?
I'm glad I'm not alone with this feeling of WTF?
They streamlined everything so it's really hands off, but it's all just loading little updates and features that didn't come shipped with the console. If you got it on christmas of release year like we did with the Xbox One then it was only maybe 1 or 2 hours of updates, but if it's 3 years later like we did with our PS4 then that's like 6 hours. A commenter earlier mentioned I'm lying unless I have a slow internet connection, and they're right. Like, in 2013 gigabit internet was far from standard. We had comcast/xfinity, paying for 100 mb/s and getting 50 on a good day. I distinctly remember my dad took a day off work just to play our new PS4 (what a legend). I left for school when he was unboxing the thing and when I came back from school it was still loading.
And yeah, this isn't really the fault of Sony, but it's still really annoying that nowadays it's even a feature as opposed to just plug and play. Same goes for retail game discs. It's really annoying buying the thing, copying it, then having to wait for gigabytes and gigabytes of updates.
I have been using computers and tech since I was super little, and I've actually noticed a trend toward simplification over time. I remember just to play dos games with sound you had to configure the sound card every time to use the correct channels and IRQ and what not… Now a days, everything is a simple button press to install and get going or plug n play.
The main difference between the setup of a PS2 and a PS5 is the internet stuff; the PS5 has more things to configure, but it's not particularly difficult to do (updates are time consuming tho). But if you had the modem/tried to play online with the PS2, the internet setup is more complicated than the PS5's since it requires manually forwarding ports on your router.
I mean you're probably older than me but I'd say the process is more streamlined, it just takes way longer since it seems like there's just so much to do. I doubt you had to make an IBM account to use your DOS computer, right?
I doubt you had to make an IBM account to use your DOS computer, right?
Just the thought of that made me vomit a little. lol
The big thing I've run into is regular use vs occasional use. I only use my PS4 as a Blu-ray player these days, and each time I turn it on, it has to figure out if it shut down correctly last time(of course not). Then, after a memory check, it boots. I sign in, and then it yells at me that it has a mess of OS updates to install, which I don't want to wait for because I just want to watch this damn movie. Plus, my controller barely holds a charge anymore, and if I don't use the right USB controller plugged into the PS4, the controller doesn't pair and control the damn thing. If I were using the PS4 every day like I did back in 2016, a lot of these problems wouldn't be there, but because I boot it once every 3 months, it's a hassle.
I would love to be able to just slide in a disk and watch in the rare cases I've decided to. As it is, I'm about to buy a dedicated Blu-ray player instead of using the hardware I already have.
If you're genuinely not using it as a gaming machine, you could take it offline for use as a blu-ray player. That would at least let you skip the OS updates. And mine only complains about the shutdown if it comes unplugged or we lose power while it's on or in rest mode. It never complains if I fully shut it down from the menu.
Is that why I had no sound in redneck rampage sometimes?
The boot sound of the ps2 activates me like a sleeper agent.
That and the sound when the PlayStation 2 font comes up.
I miss my PS4 because you could install a PS2 theme that came with the sounds
Sucks you can't change it on PS5 yet.
For me that's the two intro screens for ps1. I can still hear it.
this is just… not true or at the least extremely hyperbolic
Yeah I really lied about how I had to plug in 4 things and buy a memory card to be able to play my PS2.
They probably wanted to say that it shouldn't take an entire day to set up a new console today, unless your internet is extremely slow.
they probably wanted to say
We have this cool thing in English called words. Instead of wanting to say things, they could have literally expressed those ideas using words and removed all ambiguity.
And sure, I also lied about that, because that makes sense. It's a thing I just had to lie about.
Can you explain what takes so long then when setting up your devices, because I really don't get it.
Playstation 5 setup should be a single login, then download and install firmware updates and before playing a game install another update. Everything else should be optional.
And two days to set up a router is not normal and something only very few people would have to deal with. For the most part it should either be connecting the router and it setting up automatically or connecting it and putting in your login data.
In general I would argue that it has become a whole lot easier to set up tech nowadays. The only thing that is more annoying today than in the past are mandatory accounts for tech that doesn't need them so they can gather/steal your data. That shit sucks.
Not everybody has good internet. I'm done explaining this. I've explained it in multiple comments now so if you don't get it then that's a you problem.
This would be the strangest thing to lie about of all things. I dunno what clout is gained by saying it took 2 days to set up a router lol
Yeah I really lied about how I had to plug in 4 things and buy a memory card to be able to play my PS2.
Only problem was that I forgot to get a memory card so I couldn’t actually play the games that my coworker gave me, but hey it works!
That's an interesting take on "works" for a game console. Being able to play games seems like a pretty important piece.
You could still play most (if not all) ps2 games without a memory card. You can't save your game obviously, but nothing stopping you from playing.
I remember when I first got mine, I played like 8 hours of MGS2 before I realized I forgot to buy memory cards. So I had to leave the system running overnight until I could go out and get 1.
Yeah, I figured OP meant they didn’t play them yet because they didn’t want to get invested and not be able to save. Not because they wouldn’t actually work.
Edit: I did not see their comment below until I after I posted this.
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They actually didn't come with memory cards. Sony back then was just as money hungry as they are now. You had to buy them separately. They were around $20 or $25 for a Sony branded one, but you could get 3rd party ones for cheaper.
oh ok my bad
I believe the consoles came with 2 memory cards back when they were released in 2000.
Oh no, they did not my friend. I’m just a bit older than you so I remember when my family got our PS2. They were an optional accessory. Yes, it was optional to be able to save your game.
Edit: Also, my older brother and I (faithful younger sibling backup) convinced our father to get one soon after launch, as it was the cheapest DVD player available when it released, at least here in Australia.
I got my PS2, with GTA3, for Xmas. No memory card though, so I stayed up all night to play it, not realizing I could just left it on. I bought the memory card 3 days later, when shops reopened, the PS2 was never shut down.
I just got an Apple TV and I’ve been struggling through the setup. Connecting all the accounts, logging into everything and updating everything. I would think by now there would be some way to link accounts and have things manage themselves better.
Every now and then I remember how simple things felt back then. The internet was new and exciting, we didn’t even have cell phones yet. Technology was built with innovation. In some ways we’ve fallen a long way from those days.
"There's no step 3."
It depends on the apps. Stuff that takes a username and password isn't really bad on the Apple TV if you have passwords saved.
The thing that gets me is fucking half assed QR codes. A QR code is a quick, easy solution when everyone has their phone. But there's absolutely zero reason to use a QR code on the TV, then to still make me manually enter your pairing code. Just making the link complete is so much less than trivial that not including it is very obviously intentionally annoying.
So this is what being old feels like. I don't like it. But seriously that's the benefit of stuff not automatically having to connect to the internet and download a bunch of updates, you just plug it in and you're good to go. I mean stuff like updates and patches are extremely convenient, but it is nice to just put a disc in a console and have it work without having to sit through a download. PS2 is a great console and one of the last where you could just plug and play without having to deal with online accounts, updating apps, and all the stuff that goes along with modern consoles.
SMH when the Crash Bandicoot & Spyro remaster trilogies required you to download an “update” with the second & third games when you had a physical copy.
The PS1 even boots straight into the game, the PS2 boots into a small menu. I feel like there was a way to have it skip the menu though but I don't remember. …But hey, you've got one in front of you lol.
usually my ps2 would just boot into the game if the disc was in the slot already, otherwise it would go to the menu
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Alright maybe my memory is just off. Or… maybe I'm from a parallel reality that was slightly different.
I'm 32 and this thread has started to make me crumble into dust.
Lol glad you had a good experience with the PS2 OP.
WRT how small it is, this video comparing the OG and Slim PS2 could be of interest to you, just so you can see how Sony was able to make it that much smaller back then.
I'm about as old as OP, but every time I remember that my generation grew up on mostly 360/PS3 it reminds me that I was weird, my dad got an Original Xbox when it came out, which was the year I was born, and even though we had a Wii, I think we actually played games on OG Xbox more (we relied on the Wii to access the internet through neighbors' unprotected Wi-Fi for a while though.)
Welcome to retro gaming! The PS2 is really the first console with much of a setup at all, depending on if your TV supports progressive scan with component cables. There is an options menu where you can set that stuff up. Most games don't use progressive scan, but the ones that do look nice and sharp, especially on a high definition CRT TV. If you have some DVDs, the PS2 is actually an excellent DVD player, too! It's easy and does what it's supposed to do. I really love PS2. There's a reason it's the best-selling game console ever. It's really just that good.
Hrrrgghhh routers! The last two I've dealt with were a Netgear and an ASUS and… well, at least the ASUS got out of my way relatively quickly? SSH'd in and crammed it full of OpenWRT 😅Did the same to the Netgear but that one fought so hard to force me into using some admin-through-their-website kind of horsecrap that I hate. All' the docs I wanted/needed were lies, BS, broken links, contradictory… it was a proper mess. I don't want a singing, dancing bird-robot tweeting all night (to some corp's servers), just gimme a damn router that's mine!
… I may be a little bit old-headed about some tech things <.< I guess things are moving on to "your own hardware as a service" now :-\
For me it was the Xfinity router. I knew I shouldn't have bought one and should have gone for a third party one, but I did it anyway because it was cheaper when I was setting up my Internet plan.
Stupid thing forces you to download an app to get it to work and sign in. Apparently if you buy any other third party combination modem and router, you just log into a default web page and sign in with default credentials. But no, for the Xfinity one you need to connect on the app and let it search over 5G for the thing, which took ages. There were multiple times where I set it down to load, came back, and the app said it failed to find it. When the router was sitting within inches of my phone
