Sunday, March 26

Tag: PlayStation 2

Gaming

10 Best Things From 2022 We Can’t Live Without

What do you mean you don’t know what this is? Isn’t it obvious?Image: Impact Acoustics / Kotaku / LUMIKK555 (Shutterstock)2022 was the year I decided to get serious about my retrogaming setup. I was tired of having a 104lb CRT dominating half my computer desk and a PlayStation 2, MiSTer, and whatever other consoles I was currently interested in always in peripheral vision. After a bit of thought I concluded that the TV and all the consoles would be better off on a wheeled cart. A retro cart, if you would. It could live in my closet, or be wheeled out to wherever seemed fun. So I started speccing that out.The best form factor ended up having two lower shelves—for the consoles, a smaller TATE-friendly/PAL-compatible PVM-1354Q CRT a friend had recently sold me, and bookshelf speakers—with the...
Gaming

Every U.S. PlayStation 2 Game Manual Is Now Scanned In 4K

Physical game manuals are hard to come by these days, especially as the industry begins to heavily lean into cloud streaming and digital-first infrastructures. But if you remember those good ole times when game boxes came with chunky pamphlets for you to peruse before jumping into your recent purchase, a games preservationist called Kirkland seeks to preserve that nostalgia for posterity by creating high-quality scans of the manuals of yore. In fact, he’s just finished uploading his complete set of U.S. PlayStation 2 manual scans.Launched in the U.S. in October 2000—22 years ago this Wednesday—Sony’s PlayStation 2 was one of the most popular consoles ever. With more than 4,000 games released worldwide and selling approximately 158 million units globally, just about everyone had a PS2. Game...
Gaming

Kotaku’s Impressions Of The New Shin Chan: My Summer Vacation

Image: Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation The Endless Seven-Day JourneyIn 2000, a game called Boku no Natsuyasumi (“My Summer Vacation”) was released on the PlayStation. As the name suggests, it was about being a kid on summer vacation, and its slow pace and cruisy setting made it something of a cult classic, though one that sadly never saw an official English-language release.Over the decades a number of other games were released in the series, on PlayStation 2, PSP and PS3, and each one was largely the same experience, asking players to guide a young boy through the day doing stuff like fishing, collecting bugs and going for a swim.Based around a calendar, the best way I think I can describe the games to anyone who hasn’t played them is to imagine Persona 4's daily schedu...
Gaming

Yakuza Fan Is Fixing The PS2 Original’s Localization Mistakes

It’s easy to forget in 2022, now that it feels like we get a new or remastered Yakuza game every six months, that for a very long time the series was MIA from Western shores, in large part down to the disastrous decisions made by Sega for the original game’s release back in 2006.The whole point of the Yakuza series is that it’s Japanese as hell, from the convenience stores to the overwrought voice-acting, but for the series’ debut in North America and Europe Sega made the bizarre decision to essentially tilt the entire experience on its axis via its localisation.Voice actors like Michael Madsen, Mark Hamill and Eliza Dushku were brought in (at the expense of the Japanse audio track, which was cut entirely), the script’s tone was altered to be a bit more street and the whole vibe of the gam...
Gaming

The PS2’s Jak & Daxter Is Being ‘Ported’ To The PC By Fans

Image: Naughty DogOver the past few years we’ve started seeing something beautiful happen: fans of classic console games are taking old code and creating native PC versions of games that never saw an official release. We’ve seen it with some Nintendo games, but now we’re seeing it with a PlayStation platformer as well.This isn’t porting in the multiplatform sense that we’re used to, nor is it emulation. This is recompiling the game’s entire codebase so that Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, which was released on the PS2 on 2001, now runs as a native application on the PC. The project, which is now at around 80% done, is some incredible shit, because it turns out Jak And Daxter was “written in GOAL, a custom Lisp language developed by Naughty Dog”, which means the small team working on...