I picked up a few Japanese PS1 games - mostly Tetris titles - at the start of the month, and upon telling an old friend I was lucky enough to have him offer up his Japanese ceramic white PS2 Slim as a means of playing on them.
But after talking about playing TGM at the arcade he also gave me his Namco Arcade stick!
I couldn’t feel more grateful right now - I’m smitten playing my Tetris games with this hardware! (Memory Card was 200 yen at a Book-Off)
The PS2 box design is timeless - so much better than the PAL one I have for a silver model.
Played some Tetris Plus today - puzzle mode is amazing! Bit gutted about how the audio is handled though - it’ll restart the same audio track every time you level up, which is often, and distracting. But the looping audio - a symptom of the CD format - sounds really strange in a 90s Tetris game with an arcade soundtrack for some reason.
I find that box important for other reasons - namely how the PS2 could sell on brand and logo recognition alone.
But I don’t find the PS2’s logo (and its Tron-esque almost stereotypical futuristic straight lines) to have aged that well compared with the classic PS emblem, so that’s where the Slim box, with its side - and to scale - view of the hardware and the iconic face buttons, goes some way to making up for that.
It will be nice to have a (presumably) 480p image, that’s for sure! I probably should have picked up some 60hz NTSC games in Japan, so far I have Arcana Heart though, which I plan to play with the Namco PS1 Arcade Stick.
Is it worth getting an official component cable? The only one I can find it quite pricey, and without the packaging I wonder if it’s even legit.
I’ll probably shell out for an official one if it means avoiding going through some bad cables.
I did order an official boxed S-Video cable for really cheap last week which will tide me over until I find component at a better price. Anything but composite!
My TV and Projector both have really good deinterlacing so it’s not noticeable on the whole.
In fact, I’ve only noticed it with 4P Downhill Domination when things get hectic somehow the (de)interlacing goes crazy in that game. Will try on projector to see if there a difference and try to figure out why/what is going on.
My NeGcon arrived today as mentioned in the swag thread. It’s a pretty cool controller and I appreciate a chance to learn new controls - it does feel like a cross between moving a steering wheel (well an F1-style one that doesn’t rotate a lot) and the handlebars on a bike or something.
But what really made my jaw drop was putting in the Turbo disc that came with my NTSC-J copy of R4: RR Type 4, and playing it with the NeGcon. It’s unbelievably slick, with drifting that feels almost as sublime as my fondest memories playing Rave Racer at the arcade. The 60fps, though, is as impressive as F Zero X on the N64. Amazing.
