Video Gamers Podcast - PS2 Breakdown: Best Console of All Time? - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Gaming hosts Michael, Josh and Paul are back with a long overdue breakdown of another gaming console, and this time it’s what many consider to be the best gaming console of all time. The beloved Playstation 2. We chat why it succeeded, what made it stand out, what games made it shine and much more in this can’t miss episode! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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basically everything cool. Check it out to get everything cool. Now on to the show. Hello, welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are a group of three dads who love gaming, and you can join us for episodes every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, where we break down something related to video games. Please follow us on socials at MultiplayerPod, and if you like what we do and want to help support the show and get extra content like the Squadcast, which releases twice a month, head over to MultiplayerSquad.com where you can become a Patreon supporter and unlock that additional content. Today is a bonus round episode, and we are going to be doing a full console breakdown of the Sony PlayStation 2. I am your host, Paul, and I am joined as always

by two of the best people I know. Coming up first, his beard might be inspired by the 2018 God of War, but today we're going back to the 2000s before Kratos' full beard grew in. It's Josh. I am no baby face, boy. How long have you had a beard, Josh? How many years? Let's see. I started getting old and losing my hair and then I would have looked like an eraser. So probably like around 30, I i think is when my wife was like you know you need something like hair wise going on on your head you should try to go with a beard and then i went okay so it's like a zero sum game whatever you lost on top you had to gain under the chin i out there may be pictures out there where i had like the the chin strap beard

you know the real thin like pencil line beard and mustache for a little while, because I thought it made me look cool and skinny. Nice. And then joining us, this is kind of funny, because even though he's been a very close friend of mine for many years, I actually have no idea what he might have played on PS2. I'm just taking a stab in the dark here maybe he was seen as the prince of persia in possession of the sands of time and the dagger of time it's michael you know it's funny i'm not even sure if i know what i played in the ps2 now because it's been so long all i know is that i have to make a comment that um with josh's hair um basically one could say that it's migrated south for the winter as he approaches the winter years of his life that's fair what about you

michael how long have you had your beard uh since since i shaved it 10 years ago when i had a goatee and my wife said i don't like change put it back and i said okay i'm just gonna grow the sides too and it worked out okay because i've had it since then and it's it's not a good beard but it exists so well i'm i'm here holding down the fort for the the non-bearded folk but um today we're gonna be breaking down the ps2 what a fun console i love doing these kinds of breakdowns we've done it twice before. We did a breakdown of the original NES back in February of 21. We did the Xbox 360 back in November of 21. And today we're going to deep dive the PS2. So let's just jump right into things. All right. And let's set aside individual game titles for now. We're going to have plenty of time to talk about all the great games that were on the ps2 but when you think back on the overall legacy of the ps2 console what are some of the

first things that jump out um i remember that it killed my favorite console of all time at the time which was the second dreamcast um which i still probably have more hours played on than the ps2 um but let's see what was this like it was what the year 2001 or 2000 2000s when the ps2 released yeah so so britney spears and in sync and then gran turismo 3 what more do you need right oh man he went britney spears and in sync this this show's not five minutes in and we're getting crazy already well funny enough i actually did look up to see what was on the billboard top 100 when the ps2 released oh i got a couple for you guys the number three song at the time was with arms wide open by creed i was gonna say it was not a good time it had to be a creed or nickelback song

please don't ever mention creed again on this show ever like i'll quit oh not not a good time for music uh i actually was a big fan of nelly country grammar by nelly was number 12 and who let the dogs out by the baja men now that's number 44 That's classic right there. Did we ever figure that one out, though, by the way? Who did let the dogs out? Who? I don't think we ever did. No. Who let the dogs out?

Who? It's like the who's on first thing. You know what I mean? It's who. And then people keep saying, like, who let the dogs out? And they're like, who? Who? Who?

Who? Yeah. There you go. I think you solved it, Josh. Yeah, I think the first thing I think of with the PS2 is most people would probably say it's the greatest console ever. I think if you went out and did a survey, I think you would get more responses for the PS2 than anything else. I think it was just great hardware, great games, great marketing, kind of just all the stars aligned.

And this was an incredibly well-selling console that I think most people really loved. The PS2, it's weird because when you think about what's the best console, I think people don't look back that far. Because I mean, let's be honest, we're 22 years past the PS2 so there are a lot of people alive and listening to the show right now that never have never seen one have never laid hands on one they know the playstation legacy but they're just sitting there going like it's the ps2 like why like what made that so great why is it indeed the number one selling console of all time? You know, and so like, you know, what gives?

And that's what we're going to break down today. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a perfect transition because I do have a couple statistics I thought I would share with you guys. A couple of these are going to have some guesses from you guys to see how close you can get. You're going down, Michael. Do we get to score it? Can we score it?

I think it's like two questions. I think it's a competition. We can score. But if I win, if I win the competition, can I maybe just borrow some of Josh's beard and use some spirit gum and make it my own beard? And that's my prize? And Josh can borrow the hair on top of my head. You do have some nice hair i have some it's it's very luscious up here yeah i i will buy the winner of ps2 how about that i'll take it i will take that all right so the ps2 is part of the sixth generation of consoles which might be my overall favorite. That means that it's lumped in the same generation as the Nintendo GameCube, the Microsoft Xbox, and the Sega

Dreamcast. Now, the Dreamcast was the least selling of the bunch. It sold 9 million units. Third place is the GameCube with 22 million units sold. Second place was the Xbox with 24 million sold. How many units do you think the PS2 sold, which outperformed all three? Hold on, what was the second place one? Are we doing all time? 20, yes, all time. The Xbox sold 24 million for second place.

How many units do you think the PS2 sold? 74.8 million. I'm going to say it blew it away i'm gonna i'm gonna shoot for i think it's like 100 million units dude it was insane it's some crazy number like that you're both more than 50 million short of the actual number 155 million units sold that means you know i think most of us probably remember a lot of people owning Xboxes. There were 6.5 PS2s sold for every one Xbox that was sold in stores. Yeah, that's a huge difference amongst those. Totally wild.

Now, there's a couple reasons that I think why the PS2 sold so well. So just a couple quick things about the hardware. First of all, it was fully backwards compatible with the PS1. Now, you guys know that was not something that really existed back then. You could not put your NES games

into a Super Nintendo, right? So being able to use all of your old games was a huge bonus. This doesn't mean much to me, but apparently the IO processor had a PS1 core in it and it used the exact same type of RAM as the PS1. So every single game fully backward compatible. And what's even more amazing is,

I don't know if you guys know this, but DVD players started hitting the market in 99, 2000. And DVD players often cost 300 bucks or more. And guys, what do you think the Xbox 2 could also do? Yeah, play DVDs. Play DVDs. but play dvds this is to me the fact that the ps2 was an affordable dvd player on top of a gaming console is the number one reason that i think it it did what it did because at that time i don't know if you guys remember vhs tapes man i i remember betamax and vHS and all that, but when DVDs came out, it was superior. It's true.

But when DVDs came out, everybody wanted a DVD player. You didn't have to rewind them. The picture was phenomenally better. The sound was bad. I mean, this was cutting edge technology at the time. But it's like you said, Paul, they were $300. And this is $300 back in the early 2000s, which is probably like $800 today. Somewhere around there. Yeah. Right. And so if you could – it was a no-brainer. If your family wanted a DVD player, it was like, hey, we can buy a DVD player or we can just buy a PlayStation 2, which plays DVDs for us.

Oh, yeah. And by the way, we can game on it. So now my kid is happy at the same time i like i said for me i think it's the number one reason that it was so like just worldwide in its popularity well it's funny you mentioned that too because i actually worked at an electronic store when the ps2 came out and when the dreamcast came out like, right at the very end of high school, I worked at Fry's Electronics. It's long gone back in the day, out of Houston, went to Phoenix, and I sold a bunch of stuff there. Dreamcast came out, and we couldn't keep them on the shelves, probably

because they had a demand and supply issue. But PS2 came out, and the whole thing was like, no, people come in like, which one do I want? I'm like, well, Dreamcast is definitely better, but this one has a DVD player, so you should buy that because then i don't have to walk you over to the av department and get one of those guys to steal my sale because we were all yeah like very siloed at the time and i'm like well they're gonna rewrite the receipt the whole thing and take my sale and i'm like hey you guys looking for a dvd player to get the ps2, you're good to go, gaming and DVD. And that was it. Now, this is when we were still living in the age of memory cards, which is hard to believe, because even though the PS2 is 21 years old, it's hard to believe that you still had to buy a separate memory card that you would pop into the console to save your games.

How much storage do you guys think was on your standard PS2 memory card that you would pop into the console to save your games how much storage do you guys think was on your standard ps2 memory card 16 megabytes i can't go back that far in time because i don't speak megabytes anymore 16 megabytes i just remember at the time the dreamcast controller i think itself had like a memory card slot in it in it yeah yeah it was like because memory was a big deal back then yeah eight megabytes oh i was that's all you got i was close oh i feel like game saves nowadays are like way bigger than that just for singular games pretty funny to think about uh the ps2 first console that you could orient either horizontally or vertically with the stand. Kind of neat. I don't know if most people know. Is that a thing for you guys? Because even to this day, people are like, oh, I can stand it up or I can lay it down. I might be weird in that

take, but I could care less. And honestly, I don't think I would ever want to actually stand it up versus just laying it down on a TV stand or something. TV stands have cubbies for a reason. And it's like, you've got your satellite box, you've got your AV receiver. All these things go long ways, not up and down. And so it seems weird to me that being able to stand something up and down is a selling point for people. Well, I think back in the day, it was like there was that myth that like, oh, the disc spins easier if it's up and down or whatever it is.

But it's a big deal to me now because I think, Paul, you've got a PS5 and it only stands up, right? No, it can go either way. Okay, well, never mind. That's a moot point. Because I've only seen it standing up. I'm like, I want to lay it down.

No, I actually don't. This is actually very funny because I was a little salty about this. I bought a new TV and I put up my wall stand and then I bought a little, you know, whatever they call them, the little console tables that go underneath the TV. Well, then I ended up buying a PS5. And if I try to stand the PS5 up, it's like one inch too big where it runs into the tv and i don't want it to cover the screen so i've got to keep it horizontal i used to have a roommate that used to have these house plants in front of his tv and one of the branches went in front of the

screen he used to get so mad at me when i was like can we move the plant like just two inches to the right that is and he's like but it looks great here i'm like it doesn't look great i can't see the whole tv major conflict between my wife and i is she wants to decorate the tv stand and so she wants all these plants and everything we have a really nice sound bar right that goes in front of that and the sound bar has speakers all along the front of it and out the sides and everything right she wants to put plants on the TV stand in front of the sound bar. And then the leaves from the plants stick up within an inch. It's not much, but like an inch on the bottom of the TV. And I'm like, baby, you can't do that.

And she's like, why? It looks so nice. And I'm like, no. And she's like, you just want a plain TV stand with a TV and a sound bar on it. And I'm like, yes. That's exactly what I want. Yes. That's exactly what I'm going for.

And forever it will be that way. Too funny. All right. So let's go back in time to when the PS2 released. So we're talking October of 2000. Where were you guys at in life and what was going on at the time? Oh, this was my college days, boy. Yeah. Oh, man. I was, let's see, 2000. I was probably a sophomore in college. So, you know, living the life, man. No curfews. This show here is a family friendly show. Like I said, just no curfews.

Going over to my buddy's house. The number one memory that sticks out to me on this one is going over to my friend. We just called him Rowden. So we would all he had his own house. Like we were a lot of us were in college, but we were still staying with our parents or something like that. But Rowden had his own place, which was great. And so, I mean, probably three, four nights a week, we'd go over to Rowden's house and we would play Tekken. And if I remember right, I think it was Tekken 5. And I was never a huge fan of Tekken. I loved Street Fighter. I loved

Mortal Kombat. Soul Calibur, which is a PS2 game, I thought was amazing. Really wasn't a huge fan of Tekken. But when you've got six of your buddies over at a friend's place where he's got his own house, and we're barbecuing, we're playing Tekken 5, it was amazing, man. That is the number one memory that stands out to me about the PS2 was just always chilling over at his house, round robin with the controller. Winner stays, loser has to hand the controller off to somebody else was amazing. I believe Soul Calibur was a Sega Dreamcast game and Soul Calibur 2 was a PS2 game. Yeah. Am I right? Can someone vet that?

No, you are. Yeah, that's correct. Okay. Okay. No, but you're totally right because Soul Calibur 2 was like a big deal. I remember that this time in my life, I had just graduated from high school in June or late May, early June of 2000 2000 and i had my first apartment i got my apartment on august 8th of 2000 and it was kind of the same thing it was literally we had a three-bedroom apartment right and five of

us lived there we were all we had all just gotten out of high school we were like we're getting a place and we were like hey our our buddy Brad can't pay rent. No problem. He can sleep on the couch. But he had a PS2. Oh, that's rent. You can stay on the couch rent-free. I had the master bedroom by Buddy Dan.

And we had our buddy Reese, who was the apartment holder. He's the one that actually was under his name. Because we didn't have any credit. But Reese was 19. He was a big deal. We were all 18. And we had a bunk bed, a queen-size bunk bed built by Reese's dad in my master bedroom. And we'd often throw the PS2 in there and just play games on the bunk bed so no one

could see what people are doing with their controllers and so forth. But yeah, it was a great time. And that's the exact same time. The electronics store that I worked at was literally, I don't know, probably 30 meters away from my apartment. We got this apartment because we all worked at the same electronics store. Oh, how funny. And that was just life. Yeah, that's convenient.

Yeah, we'd all walk to work. We'd go to work. We'd come home. EverQuest and PS2 all day long. And that was it. Very nice. For me, since I'm just a little bit younger than you guys, I had just started my junior year in high school. So I was 16 at the time. I had my very first job,

which was at Harkins Movie Theater. And growing up, my parents never wanted me to own a video game system. And I was not a gamer growing up. The first system I ever had was a 64, which I bought with my own money when I was 15. So I had only really been gaming for about a year, but I would not even consider myself a gamer. I spent almost all my time just playing basketball and talking about the Phoenix Suns. Basketball was life back then. So this is also at the time I had just broken up with my very first girlfriend, whose name was actually Jenny McCarthy, which is very funny. No relation.

No, we know the truth, Paul. Are you sure? Don't be humble. No relation to the famous Jenny McCarthy. And I was four months away from when I would start dating Nikki, who would eventually be my wife and mother to my five kids. So very, very important time in my teenage years. And the PS2, I spent an incredible amount of time playing at my girlfriend Nikki's house at the time. Her older brother, Timmy, had a PS2. And for about a straight year we would just order peter piper pizza every single day for

lunch which a lot of you out there wouldn't know because i think they're exclusive to arizona i think so i think so it's not very good pizza but it's very terrible but people around here love it i hear people rave about peter piper pizza i'm like that pizza sucks people yeah like if i'm gonna get pizza delivered i would never consider having it delivered from there ever it's like cardboard with cheese well they had a good to go deal where you could walk out with two large pizzas and two two liters and it was like 11.99 or something so we would get that every day and me nikki and her cousins ryan and anthony the four of us just played games all day every every day, playing PS2 for the most part, but a little bit of GameCube as well, because that's what I owned.

So I would bring my GameCube over there and we would play it there. All right. So then one last fact before we start talking in a little bit more detail here, the PS2 released in 2000. They continued manufacturing it all the way until 2013. No. Which is when they started making the PS4. So guys, the whole time that they're making the PS3, they're still manufacturing and selling PS2s. FIFA 14, as in 2014, FIFA 14 released on the PS2. That's how long people continue to play the PS2. The crazy thing about that, too, was that one of the reasons that they were able to do that was at the end of its sales life.

I won't say the life of the console, but at the end of when they were still selling these things, you could pick up a PS2 for under $100. Yeah. still selling these things you could pick up a ps2 for under a hundred dollars yeah you know and so it made it insanely accessible for i can't think of a console that was that cheap can you guys no anybody wanted to play for a hundred bucks you know and and then had an amazing library of games like they just when sony did the ps2 they got so many things right like everything fell into place hey we included a dvd player cutting edge, and we didn't charge you an arm and a leg for it. It came out a full year before the Xbox and the GameCube did. Huge jumpstart.

Right. I mean, you get that generation of gaming. Like, now if you look at it, right, there's this mega race with Xbox and PlayStation. We see it with the PS5 and the Xbox Series, right? Like there's this mega race with Xbox and PlayStation. We see it with the, with the PS five and the Xbox series, right? Like where it's like, you know, Hey, which one's going to release first? We got to hurry it up and get them out there. Even if we don't have games, you want to play, we got to get our console out there because that's because of the PS two, because when the PS two came out, there was no competition at the time. And what's funny

is comparatively speaking to the GameCube and the Xbox, the PS2's hardware sucked, man. People bought it because it was the first thing out. They didn't buy it because it was the latest and greatest. And now everything's the big competition about who's got the best hardware, who's got the best graphics. Oh, this has got ray tracing and variable refresh rates and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But back then, it was just, hey, we're out and we have games. Buy us. And they nailed that. And so that with the backwards compatibility with the PS1 so that you could keep playing all of your old game library and then look forward to the new games that were going to be exclusive to the PS2, it was a home run all the way around.

Ironically enough, in 2013, when the PS2 was $100, it's just like a Britney Spears concert ticket. I still couldn't afford it at the time. But was that the PS2 Slim at the time? Did they get rid of that, the big bulky one? Because it still wasn't bulky.

If you think about when Josh brings up the Xbox and the GameCube. That thing was a brick, dude. The GameCube was hideous. It looked like a Fisher-Price Lego toy. Oh, the GameCube was portable. The Xbox. Yeah, I didn't think the GameCube looked hideous.

I liked the purple and the little carry handle. It was awful. GameCube was terrible. It was a great console. It was so small. Yeah, I know, but it was ugly. It was tall, though. It was a cube.

It did look like it was made out of Legos. It was a cube. Yeah. It was a kid's toy. But the PS2 did essentially... I mean, one could say that it did kill the Dreamcast, although I think Dreamcast killed Dreamcast because they didn't have a lot of games, a lot of titles.

They were infamously not open source at all, which is one thing that I think PlayStation did well, is they had a lot of different contracts out therestation did well is they they had a lot of different contracts out there not contracts but they had a lot of different developers creating games that were not necessarily exclusive and so forth and it made a big deal that plus you know the dvd player and the slim beautiful beautiful little fit and it wasn't big and bulky like the xbox or a fisher price toy like the gamecube so yeah and i think just the fact that it was backwards compatible was just such a big deal because at release you always have like seven to ten games and most of

them are trash you've got like a couple decent ones everyone tends to buy that one or two games so for something like the dreamcast you didn't have a whole lot to play and i think a lot of people would have even maybe decided to trade it in and go get a PS two or something like that because they had all these old games. You could even still buy used PS one games that were super cheap and play them in the PS two. So you could have that immediate instant library, which was just so neat.

And, uh, wasn't the PS two actually more backwards compatible than the ps3 oh yes yeah absolutely yeah because the ps3 it was like only certain titles will move over like that's still a big deal and that's something i think that needs to be talked about is that's still a big deal today like when the ps5 came out one of the first questions i raised my hand and said was can i play ps4 games on the ps5 if i get one you know and of course now it's it's a yes and it's but it's funny because that was actually a little bit anxiety for me because like i own like

a hundred discs of the hard discs because i don't buy them digitally i'm like paul i'm old school you know i want to go to blockbuster rent the console and rent the discs and so forth you know but the whole thing is like is this backwards compatible? And the PS2 was a pioneer at the time, even so that when PS3 came out,, but I think you could also, for many games, you could plug the PS1 controller into a PS2 and you could play most games with it. Now, the PS1 controllers did not have the dual analog sticks, but as long as the game didn't require those, you could actually plug that into the PS2 as well. You're 100% right, because we actually used, I used one of each one time we were playing a game the controller broke in that apartment brad's ps2 and we used one of like will this

work and it actually worked but only on certain games and you probably hit the nail on the head it was only certain games that didn't need the actual analog sticks that's when you tell brad hey brad if you're gonna live here you need to go buy another controller well yeah later on um when brad's ps2 licensing ran out where we thought you know ps2 is not good enough he actually started power leveling us in everquest for free joe and that was that was it we were like say no more brad the guy literally move into the guest room at this point and that that was it like literally brad would he would actually at one point towards the end of everquestest, like 2002, when it started

to kind of have a downfall, he actually got paid real life money to power level alts of Afterlife, which was... Oh, people made so much money on that game. Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. How funny.

Your own personal power leveler slash gold farmer. Yep. All right. Now, did you guys own a PS2? Because I did not. I did not own one, but i had multiple friends that had one like i said my friend rowden had one and i was at his house almost every day so it was kind of like i didn't really need to own one yeah at the time and then you know not that i'll go down this road but i that is also about the time that i got involved

in everquest and and so at home, I was playing EverQuest. If I was out with friends, we were playing PS2. None of us owned a PS2. There are listeners right now that just stopped playing the podcast. No, because you didn't need to because everybody else had one. Exactly. I didn't need a PS2. All of my friends had one.

From 2002 to 2005, I think i had three or four roommates at the time you know just different parts of life different jobs different places and like hey i need a place you need a place let's well get an apartment together whatever every single time one of them had a ps2 and i was like cool awesome i don't have to get one we just we non-stop yeah i had a gamecube at release that i bought and then later i ended up buying an xbox in order to play halo but i i even went back and bought an old ps1 at some point just to like play some old ps1 games i owned a ps3 a ps4 i have a ps5 currently but never had the best-selling ps2 which is wild all right now i think it's time to start talking

about some games so let's just let's just take turns we can throw some games out and talk about it ps2 sold something like 1.5 billion games i mean there were so many available a lot of them were garbage but a lot of them were also great so So what do you guys want to talk about? I'm going to come in with a hot take just to make this a little spicy. The PS2, I don't think anybody questions that it was an amazing console. We've already talked about what made it successful, why everybody in the world owned one. I'm coming in spicy, and I'm saying that the PS2 did not have the best lineup of games. Like, yes, it had some amazing games, and I'm sure we'll talk about those. But comparatively speaking, I think the lineup of games for the PS2 specifically,

not backwards compatible to PS1, I think it was a little weak. That is a hot take, and I disagree. I still have to fight the complex that I have, because when I owned an Xbox, and my friend Curtis had a PS2, and Grand Theft Auto were exclusive to PS2, and I could not play them on Xbox, that still to this day in my head, I still think, oh, of course Sony has the best exclusives. And if you actually stop and look at it, that may or may not even be true at this point. But I remember just feeling salty that I was so missing out on games on PS2 that I thought PS2 had by far the best lineup of games for that generation.

Okay, so one exclusive to put the ball or put the points on Paul's side, God of War 2. Yeah. I'm not saying they didn't have great games. I'm not saying that it didn't have amazing exclusives because it did. So don't hear what I'm not saying and saying that all the games sucked. What I'm saying is if you take, let's just take the N64 game lineup, right? And put it up against the PS2 lineup. N64 games are a million times

more memorable. I think if you put it out there and said, hey, this console had the better games, I don't think many people would argue that. Now, some of the exclusives for the PS2 are miles above Grand Theft Auto 3, for instance, right? that game yeah i mean you know people would buy a ps2 simply to be able to play that game if they didn't have one already uh as well as well yes san andreas yeah well that is san andreas right wait no that's not san andreas is it san andreas oh i'm thinking vice city too because vice city was on the ps2 so yes metal gear solid you know uh you know there's the shadow of the colossossus, which I never actually played. These are the best games of all time.

No, I get it, right? But I'm saying, but comparatively speaking, number of successful or great games, I do not view the PS2 as the console that had the greatest game lineup. Like, did it have some absolute mega smash hits? Yes did you know but it's like at least for me i do not equate the ps2 with best games of all time yeah ironically enough i i was thinking more in terms of its generation do you think ps2 had better games than xbox oh yeah or would you oh yeah yeah for sure all right so you think it was the best of the generation just not the best of all time exactly right and i'm not comparing that that to the PS4 or something like that. I'm kind of keeping it in the same time frame as far as that goes.

But like I said, I don't equate the PS2, when I think about greatest console of all time, equals greatest games of all time. Yeah, see, I think that for its limited tiny little run, Dreamcast actually had better exclusives and better games than the PS2. Crazy taxi. Soul Calibur. Crazy taxi.

Shenmue. That was a big deal. Shenmue was great. What was the shooter at the Night of the Dead with the shooter gun? The little optical gun? House of the Dead. Is it House of the Dead? Yeah, that was a great little

shooter to play with friends. But then you go back and look at PS2 had Kingdom Hearts 2, so it's like, okay. So you never played it. That was a big deal, actually. You know? But I don't know. For its time, of course, we can't talk Dreamcast, which, you know, obviously judging by the last

35 episodes. We'll have a Dreamcast episode just, you know, obviously judging by the last 35 episodes, just for you, Michael. We'll talk about every game that released on the console, because it's only like 12 games. I was going to say, it would be a short episode. Yeah, it's a big deal. No, but yeah, it had great games. You're right, though. So, Paul, I came in spicy.

What's the best game for the PS2? Oh, the very best game? Yeah. All right. I gotta go. Snake? Snake! I don't know about you guys. I heard that 7 million times whenever Snake would die.

You'd hear the screaming over the earpiece. I gotta talk about Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3. Both were exclusives for the PS2. I've said this on the show in the past. For me, there's only two leaps in technology that really stand out in my mind. It was the very first time I saw a DVD. Comparing that to VHS was unbelievably a step up from VHS. And the first time I saw Metal Gear Solid 2 at Fry's Electronics, they had a demo set up where you could play it. And there was a line of 20 people wanting to play

Metal Gear Solid 2. I don't think it was on any kind of timer. You could just stand there and play as long as you wanted. And I didn't even play it. Yeah, I was actually the timer. I was just like, Paul, you have to go. You've been here for three hours. I just stood on the side watching. And I remember that people would restart the game because they just wanted to experience from the beginning. And it's got opening credits like a movie. You've got like a 10 minute opening cinematic where there's rain, Snake's in this invisibility suit, he jumps off

a bridge, he starts infiltrating a boat, and you start running around in stealth, shooting guys with tranq darts, and then hiding their bodies. I mean, it was like seeing the old video games as much as I loved the Nintendo 64, and I really, really did like you can't even compare what you were seeing in metal gear solid 2 still to this day if you look up the graphics they're not that bad despite being 20 years old i mean it's really hard to talk about how revolutionary that game was and i think you make a good point about the graphics too because as much as i've been talking of dreamcast on our ps2 episode like the dreamcast was very cartoony looking with a lot of their titles the ps2 like it looked like that was the first time that we sat down as human beings and said

can we replace actors like real life actors in movies with video game technology because you're looking you're like this looks right now of course you look back now it looks terrible right but at the time though that's when we first started thinking as people like could we replace actors with like cartoons and polygons and stuff because it looked really really good you know that was when the whole 3d modeling thing came in like really really came to play ironically, my most played game at the time was probably Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which I think was on every one of them. But my wife and I, to this day, we still play it. That's why I like...

What's the Divinity Originals 2? Marvel Ultimate Alliance is the same game, just with Divinity Originals 2 has the role-playing part where you actually get turn-based combat and so forth but yeah i for for me some of the games i mean i already touched on like grand theft auto 3 that was revolutionary and honestly i think every grand theft auto since then has kind of been revolutionary they started the trend on that one like resident evil 4 you know one of the best in the series right and paul you made a really good point i think one of the best in the series, right? And Paul, you made a really good point. I think one of the things that the PS2 did is it did revolutionize

a lot of the games that were out there. I don't know if it was because, see, the hardware was a little bit behind, but then again, it came out a full year ahead of Xbox and GameCube and all that. So it's like, I don't know if it's maybe that IO process report thing that you mentioned where developers were already familiar with the PS1. So they had like a leg up to just say, hey, we don't have to relearn everything. So we can continue with what we know and expand upon that big time. Or maybe Sony was really just figuring out the exclusives and dumping tons of money into development for that kind of stuff. Who knows? Maybe it's that there wasn't a competitor on the horizon so they could take that extra time to develop these games and they didn't feel like they had to rush a whole bunch

of stuff out. Because let's be honest, the game lineup at launch of the PS2 was lackluster. Now, a couple of years in, boy, did it explode at that point. You know, Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero didn't come out until 2005, which is five years after the release of the PS2. But everybody in the world knows about Guitar Hero because that was revolutionary at the time. You know, God of War. Michael, you touched on it. Now, I was late to the God of War game because I didn't play the actual PS2 version of the God of Wars until, I don't know, probably six years ago, as far as that goes. But man, God of War with over-the-top action, the gigantic boss fights, cameras move in that game, it was revolutionary. Right. And that's like I said, I've never played Shadow of the Colossus. I know that that game is beloved and did kind of the same thing with these absolutely incredible sized beasts that you would

have to conquer and stuff like that. And nobody had seen that before either. So I don't know if it was the processing power. i don't know if maybe the developers had time to do this so there are a lot of games that are insanely memorable for what the ps2 was were the gran turismo and tony hawk games exclusive because i i think they were maybe i think gran turismo tony hawk definitely was not Tony Hawk. I know definitely on Gran Turismo. I think Gran Turismo was like whichever Gran Turismo Tony Hawk was. It was always better on the PS2. Yeah, at least I recall it that way. Now we just listed off like 40 games. Are we going to circle back to some of those or let's do it because I was

going to say just like half of the best-selling games on PS2. We're just long-listing. I will go back and say one more thing about Metal Gear Solid 2. Not only was it technologically and graphically advanced, but even the storyline is really ahead of its time. It addresses things like social media, memes. Even before people knew the word meme at large it addresses it in the game artificial intelligence censorship totalitarian governments fake news a lot of stuff that we see

going on in the world today is actually addressed in metal gear solid to talk about being ahead of its time and metal gear solid 3 you can eat poisonous frogs and uh it's great snake eats it and says tastes like poison which never failed to make me laugh whenever you did it all right so michael how about you go next is there a particular game you want to break down and talk about oh man i think i think i just listed all of them but um i think wasn't it soul caliber 2 when they brought in Darth Vader and Yoda? I believe that was a big deal, right? That was PS2, I think, exclusive at that point because Dreamcast had already gone under. This is probably 2004, so pretty far into PS2's run.

But that was a big deal because it was a fighting game that was beyond whatever Mortal Kombat was doing at the time. Street Fighter was a big deal because it was a fighting game that was beyond whatever moral combat was doing at the time. Street fighter was a thing of the past, but it was kind of cool to see that. Actually, this is a big deal because it was a licensing thing. Like soul caliber had licensed with PlayStation to bring in Disney. Well,

now they're Disney, but at the time Lucasfilm characters and they had Darth Vader and Yoda who would fight. Oh, wait a minute. I think that was, hold on. Someone's got to get me on this because I think if you had one console, you had one of them.

That's exactly what it was. And if you had the other... Yeah. So which one had Yoda? That was the PS2. I think the PS2 had Yoda, if I remember right. And the Xbox had Darth Vader, right? Actually, I don't even know if it was Vader, was it?

I thought it was Vader. No, I think you got somebody else that was kind of lame with the Xbox. The PlayStation 1 had the better character by far. I never played any of the Soul Calibers, believe it or not. Oh, they were great, dude. I'm looking on Wikipedia. Soul Calibur 2 released simultaneously on GameCube, PS2, and Xbox. And the characters include Cassandra, Raphael, talim maxi young soon talky charade

i'm not seeing oh it says uh it was exclusive link no link was on the gamecube that's what it was you got a dude from tekken his name was uh mishima hai hachi mishima from tekken was on ps2 was that soul caliber 3 that am i getting my console switch because i i swear i know i know exactly what you're talking about yeah i do because i remember thinking like that's a really cool character it sucks that that character's locked to like this console that i didn't own at the time either because i loved soul caliber all right well then let's uh let's drop that and just talk about the amazing physics and gran turismo 4 guys oh man yeah i i just never got around to soul caliber i was too busy playing mortal combat and street fighter i you know i did a little bit of tech in absolutely no soul caliber whatsoever just never never played it all right josh there game you want to bring i was

gonna i mean as a whole the other thing too was that i think a lot of us are kind of just tired of sports games right now you know there's not really because i think they kind of ruined themselves right because it was just all these like basic iterations of the same game but back then if a sports game came out it was pretty incredible at the time like there was a big deal for, you know, Tony Hawk to release a new pro skater game or, you know, they had the SSX tricky games. Um, I still, to this day, like every time they had that, it's that song, like it's time to rock. It's time to rock around the clock. It's tricky. And like, that's, I'll, my brain will forever equate that to, to SSX,

uh, because that was a theme song. I already talked about playing tech in five with my buddies. Um, but I mean, this is when you started getting, you know, the ESPN footballs, your, your grand Turismo games. Uh, you know, it's just, I think that we, there was a heyday. I won't even get into the fact that they had twisted metal black on the playstation y'all know i love that series it's just there's a lot of games that are are memorable in that regard i mean since you brought up football i have to mention this i could not believe i was shocked because in my brain the ps2 released 28 years ago like if you just asked me what how long ago do you think it came out i would have said like 28 years

i was watching commercials for the release of the ps2 and they were highlighting that madden was one of the release titles and guess who you see in the commercial for the release of the ps2 throwing the football please say tom brady tom brady no patriots no and i'm like dude he's still in the nfl like it's so incredible to me that they actually have him in videos before the ps2 even released and he won a super bowl two years ago yeah like that's insane yeah it really is but the uh and the the nhl games were incredible i feel like that was kind of the golden age when even if you didn't like hockey you would still play nhl some of the hockey games were great dude yeah because that was fun that was one of the first times where like truly having all the axes actually worked out really well. And instead of being a side-to-side type of hockey game,

you could go all around and do all those jukes and so forth with all the different angles and so forth. That was a big deal. And that's kind of like when you talk about Soul Calibur 2 versus, what was it? You mentioned Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and so forth. I just said and so forth like 19 times, by the way, guys. Killer Instinct. Yeah, but the way, guys. Killer instinct.

Yeah, but like the whole thing was like the seamless ability to, and hear me out on this, the seamless ability to actually spin the camera around and move in a truly three-dimensional space that in a third-person view, that's what those hockey games really got down. And the soccer games too were incredible.

Yeah, they absolutely were. What about Max Payne? Did you guys play that back in the day? down and the soccer games too were incredible yeah they absolutely were what about max pain did you guys play that see i never paid i never played max pain and i know it was so much awesome but i just never yeah i never got into it man for some reason especially being mr matrix like clearly they just said let's take this concept of bullet time and make an entire game out of it so yeah out of all the three max pain games, that's how many there have been, right?

Three, I believe you never played any of them, Josh. No, never. I've heard of them. I've never actually, I don't think I've played a single minute of max pain.

Yeah. I remember the first one being very neat because it was also highly cinematic and they were trying to make a game kind of feel like you were in the matrix and it actually worked really really well a funny one that i thought i would bring up that might surprise you guys i played the sims on ps2 no all right i bought the sims on cd-rom for my computer my computer could not run it i had too bad of a graphics card and i ended up selling the sims to a friend of mine and then like a year and a half or two years later it ended up

releasing on ps2 and nicky's older brother bought it for his ps2 and we used to set timers and just take turns and watch each other play the sims on, that's actually where I got a lot of my early game time in on The Sims was actually on PS2, believe it or not. If I remember, I'm pretty sure that the first Splinter Cell was a PS2 game, wasn't it? Yeah, the Tom Clancy Splinter Cell series started PS2. I was going to say, because I played the heck out of Splinter Cell, and I'm not generally one that's into stealth-based games, but man, was Splinter Cell a great game. And I don't remember where I played that because I didn't own a PS2, so I don't know if I borrowed a buddy's or maybe I just lived at my friend's house for a while. But Splinter Cell was another one of those games that I felt was very much a in like creating a genre almost like i mean i know that metal gear had the stealth segments and stuff like that but i feel like splinter cells that one where it's like

they really kind of perfected a lot of that to where you really felt like you were sam fisher you know oh yeah and like and just really like you were that secret agent guy doing all that stuff. That one stands out to me a lot. And then Silent Hill 2. Did you guys ever play Silent Hill 2? No, I didn't. Man, that game was good. I mean, everybody's heard of the Silent Hill series, right? And it's like they've been trying to recapture that ever since then.

But the Silent Hill 1 and Silent Hill 2 were absolutely phenomenal horror games. And again, that was exclusive to the ps2 as well yeah you know one of the funny things is my wife and i have arguments all the time because she's a couple years younger than i am and around 2000 i was still playing goldeneye a whole bunch and she at the time did not really play goldeneye but she played time splitters do you guys remember that oh yep that was a good shooter game yeah time splitters 2 is one of my all-time favorite fps's yeah and she to this day is she's like no time splitters was better it was on ps2 it came out right at launch and your golden eye was terrible so that's it wait she said golden eye was terrible well uh yeah because it's it's pretty much like it was our high school experience. Like her and her family played

TimeSplitters. Now granted, she's a couple years younger than me, but we always have that argument. I'm like, no, Goldeneye is way better. And she's like, it's trash compared to TimeSplitters. Goldeneye was like four years old by that point. And the technology back then was improving so fast. TimeSplitters had really cool stuff. I remember playing

in TimeSplitters 2. We would always do four-player split screen, and you could pull out your bow and arrow and touch it to any fire source, and it would become a fire arrow, and you could shoot people, and they would have to jump into a water fountain, which was in the wide-open middle of the Mexican mission. That was the name of the map. And so you kind of just knew you could light people on fire and just follow them as they would run to the water fountain. But then of course, you could also sit around with snipers and just take out the people trying to run to the fountain. I love TimeSplitters. It had where you played across different time eras. Very cool series.

I know that they were talking about releasing another time splitters a couple years back but it must have fallen through because i don't think it ever actually released oh i i really wish they would they won't probably but i would love to see that he played so many different characters too over the over that journey which was great but yeah yeah that's absolutely a great one you guys ever played like it's it's funny to me because maybe this was, maybe I can blame all this on EverQuest, but like Ratchet and Clank never played Ratchet and Clank. And that was huge for the PlayStation two.

Um, you had the devil may cry came out on PlayStation two, never played that. Um, and then psychonauts never played psychonauts, you know? So it's like, there's all these series that began with the PlayStation 2,

and I've not experienced any of those. Well, I would also confuse those in my head, because a lot of them were just two names that didn't mean anything to me. So you had like Ratchet and Clank, Jack and Daxter. Wasn't that another series? Yeah, Daxter and Jack, yeah. Yeah, and I never knew what they were because, to me, they were just like, oh, yeah, I've seen that cover in the store. Or Banjo-Kazooie.

Like, that was a thing for a while there. Combo games. You had to have the combo. Yep. Well, I think that's one of the biggest things about the PS2 when you look back is there was so many games. So many games that came out. And, and like you could never point in the direction of which one you wanted to play it's just like my friend plays this one right now so i'll put that too but now looking back at all those games that overlapped so much on release you're like how many

great games and great series now and sagas and uh franchises came out of the ps2 well we just named like a hundred of them so you get it yeah well it was also a very brief time when you had games based on movies that were actually really good because nowadays you hear about those and you just shrug them off because you know it's going to be terrible if they come out with you know like they were coming out with like the godfather and scarface and like those games never come out good but spider-man 1 2 and 3 they had games that released on ps2 timed with the spider-man toby mcguire movies and they were incredibly fun those were like the first really really good spider-man games and at the same time they were also releasing lord of the rings games

that's all right two towers and return of the king which all all of those spider-man and lord of the ring games had all the real life actors record additional lines for the games so you had the real toby mcguire voicing spider-man you had ian mckellen recording lines as Gandalf for Lord of the Rings. And so I feel like even PS2 even struck gold by getting some of those really good movie adaptations as well. Which at the time, movie actors did not care about two things, TV or video games. And to say that you've got Sir Ian McKellen,llen well now not at the time doing voice lines for a video game as an exclusive or non-exclusive launch whatever it is for the ps2 that's a huge thing yeah well we've mentioned that before as well where the gta games started bringing in movie

like triple a talent oh yeah to record so that was another huge revolutionary thing here, because I know that I've mentioned it previously, but the PS2 is what turned me into a gamer. Before that, my 64 really just sat unused unless I had friends over. And then when we got tired of playing basketball or it got too dark and the light wasn't working or whatever, then that's when we would play Mario Kart or Pilot Wings or whatever. But then when I started playing GTA 3 and GTA Vice City, and I started seeing that, oh, you can actually have these 40-hour long campaigns that are just as compelling as a movie with top-line voice talent, that's what really sucked me in. That's when I started buying all kinds of games like True Crime, Streets of LA. Fantastic game. Probably no one out there

has even heard of. I was buying every game like that because this console is what really got me into gaming. If the PS2 was not out, I probably would have been converted at some point. But for me, this was the channel that really gripped me and brought me fully into where gaming became like my number one hobby. All right. I'm going to take back what I said earlier because I've been scrolling through, dude. Like the games on PlayStation two were actually incredible. And here's why I'm going to say that I've been looking through Metacritic's list of like best PlayStation two games. I'm 300 deep,

literally 300 games deep. And I'm not under a Metacritic score of 80. Like, and so I think that's the thing is like, while my brain initially goes, yeah, there was only a few mega blockbusters for the PlayStation 2. I think the issue was there was an insane amount of games

that were still just really good, you know? And so it's like, I think that gets a little bit lost in the sense that like, when you went to Blockbuster and rented a game, you had an amazing chance that that game was going to be a lot of fun for the weekend or the three days that you rented that game or something like that. Because I'm just scrolling this list. I'm 300 deep and I'm finding games where it's like, oh yeah, that game was a lot of fun.

14 years of games is a lot. Right, exactly. And so I take back what I said. I don't know. I'm not going to say that it had the best games, but the offering of great games that it did have, I think is probably second to none now that I'm actually looking through

this insanely comprehensive list. Yeah, maybe it's recency bias. People think the PS4 and god you know the remake god of war and red dead and stuff like that but man when you have just this many incredible games to choose from that that says something didn't the ps2 have the most games of all time oh i mean probably is that a stat that paul said earlier i'm not sure if he said that or not. I brought it up when we did a tournament of the best console of all time. Okay. Because I picked PS2 in the first round, which did not win.

We crowned the 64 as the best console in that tournament. Really? And I remember having a lot of stats. I mean, the 64 is great. 64 is great. PS2 had by far the most games and the most game sales. When I said 1.5 billion game sales, I'm pretty sure that's accurate. And no other console even comes close. By the way, we didn't even mention some of the really popular games, especially amongst kids.

Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, which are both now owned by Microsoft, which is hysterical. I was never a fan of Spyro i could not get and i love dragons man i was a dnd nerd growing up my wife i could not get into spyro yeah i wanted nothing to do with it all right so last question of the podcast now that we've broken down the ps2 in more detail do you think the ps2 is the best console of all time what do you guys think no right or wrong answer personal opinion it killed the best console of all time which was the dreamcast here for the first 20 minutes of this show are you more sad that the dreamcast went bankrupt or that elite dangerous is so low on our leaderboard i i'm gonna leave that to twitter later on i'll post a poll um no is the ps2

the best console of all time it's so hard to say like what how do you want to base it off of you know like your sales your basis uh games yes i'm it's rhetorical i'm not asking you guys i'm saying like how do you want to base it off of like yes it had the most sales by what like seven times the xbox which blew my mind just now it probably had by far the most games it was revolutionary it had a dvd player before the ps3 had a blu-ray player man they followed that up well didn't they uh it was backwards compatible you could use the same controllers nobody was doing this at the time. Is it the best console of all time? Quite possibly, yes.

Ironically enough, it's perhaps the one that I've played the least of, which is why I can't really answer it that way, because it's a hard one. Arguably, yes, it's the best one of all time. Do I think it is? I think it's the one that I had the least experience with, though it's not crazy because same with me i like i said i know i don't i don't recall owning one if i did it was an old dusty dirty one so that i could play whatever game at the time um this one's tough because i we we did crown n64 because, man, I mean, you know, Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, Golden

Eye, you know, some of the Banjo-Kazooie, Mario Kart, you know, I mean, it's hard to argue with those types of games. Go ahead and put an asterisk next to your Wii because I wasn't part of this at the time. That's true. That's true. You know, I'll say this. I think the smartest thing that the PlayStation 2 ever did was including that DVD player. I said it at the beginning of the show. I'm going to say it again.

Because here we are in 2022, right? And they're still doing this to this day, where they're trying to make a console an all-in-one entertainment system, right? And the PlayStation 2 is what started that. When they went with the, hey, you can use this for your family and for your gamers, that changed the industry forever. And I remember when the Xbox 360 was coming out and the PS3 or the PS4, and everybody was really homing in on this entertainment system, they wanted to call it, right? Where it's like, hey, you can stream Netflix to this and you get these menus and you can set up profiles and your wife can have her own profile and her own little icon when she wants to watch TV. And it was like, I'm buying a console to play video games.

I personally don't care about any of that other stuff. But I get, as a household purchase, if you can convince your dad or your wife or whoever needs to be convinced that this is a good purchase for your house, that's a win. But I feel like the PS2 is what started all of that. And man, that says an awful lot. And some crazy irony irony since you brought in the fact that we want all in one now right like they're there and we we talk about this all the time in our discord which by the way if you're not in our discord i'm sure this this chat here that we're having is going to fan the flames of a lot of discussions so you know join our discord um but the biggest thing is like there's a lot of console versus pc and so forth. Did you know that, speaking of all-in-one,

PS2, I believe, was the first one to do this. There was actually a Sony Bravia TV that had a PS2 built in. Built in. It was a KDL22PX300. Yep. How smart is that? The base is the PS2, and the TV sticks down on top. It was like a 22-inch TV.

Nothing special. It was a 22-inch. It was awful. And it didn't sell well inch tv nothing it was a 22 inch it was awful yeah yeah and it didn't sell well if you can find one now it's probably worth a lot of money or no money it either goes on one end or other end but i'm gonna i'm gonna change my answer man i mean just like i said looking at a list of you know just the top 300 games what it did for getting consoles into your household and getting your parents to accept, you know, I mean, dude, if your mom or dad walked over to the PS2 and put a DVD in to watch a movie,

you felt good about that. Yeah. You know, so I think it is. I might have to change my answer. Well, Sony was just so smart because the PlayStation 1 could play CDs, so you didn't have to buy a CD player. Some people may not know you used to have to spend a couple hundred bucks on a CD player. PS2 played DVDs. PS3 played Blu-rays. PS4, they still squeezed by on all the exclusives, but they didn't really offer you anything groundbreaking in that regard. PS5, same thing. And now we're seeing where Microsoft with Game Pass has really kind of taken the mantle for best console right now.

And I'm curious to see if Sony can maybe refine some of that old magic. PS4 did release with HDR, I think, which nobody else did at the time. Yeah, that's not as revolutionary as playing a blu-ray that's correct but did you know but there's a little fact out there that's that's actually very very very true lots of varies the ps6 is actually bringing back betamax boom oh i i i think we can shoot that rumor down um nope right now you heard it here first since since we're talking about it you know do you guys remember when it was blu-ray versus hd dvd sure dude josh the xbox 360 like the special edition yeah there was also super audio cds versus dvd audio there were these big wars between the

audio and the video formats do you guys think blu-ray won in large part because i was gonna say a hundred percent blu-ray is the adopted because i remember this insane war because i was siding with hd dvd because at the time i was kind of leaning like more of like an xbox guy but that was the big thing if you remember nobody wanted to commit because it was like, wait, is Blu-ray going to win or is HD DVD going to win? And I think Blu-ray won very much because of the popularity of PlayStation. It's funny because we're getting way off topic because Blu-ray. And for one reason, one reason alone is because Betamax was also Sony and that failed for no reason other than, I don't know,

the general public is dumb and Betamax is way better. And so I said, you know what? This time, Sony, you're going to win. And so I was at, yep.

I've never felt like Michael's been so old to hear him rave about Betamax in the Dreamcast. My grandfather. Michael's also pro-open reel players over streaming or over slows. I may or may not have one. No, my grandfather, back in 1994, when Star Trek Voyager came out, was sending me. I lived in Missouri at the time. And he was sending me Betamax tapes, which at the time and he was sending me betamax tapes which at the time were archaic they were 10 years old time he was sending me betamax tapes with star trek voyager recorded on them because there was no cable back then

anyways long story short go sony sony fanboy for life um unfortunately not anymore about a year ago i went to war with sony on twitter and i'll never buy a sony product again so oh boy even as you're trying to buy a ps5 so that's different that's just because it's superior tv okay okay some some some uh yeah cognitive dissonance there but that's okay i'm gonna say i'm gonna say ps2 is the greatest console i think it did not even have the best hardware within its generation gamecube and xbox were both better. Xbox had Xbox Live, which revolutionized online gaming. But the PS2, man, you can't argue with 155 million sales. They just absolutely crushed the games, the marketing, coming out a year early,

playing DVDs. I think you've got to say it's the most successful, no question. And so I'm going to say, yeah, best console, I would say, is the PS2. You know, I'm really glad we all agree on this because I'm in Team PS2. It definitely is the best console ever. I'm very happy that a week ago when we recorded, or a week ago when our last episode released, we were not in agreement on the best game of all time, let alone the best space game of all time. But you know what? I feel like we've healed together with the PS2, and what a great thing to heal together, even though y'all are wrong about Elite Dangerous.

I mean, really, the Atari 2600 was the best console of all time, but we won't go back that far. No. was the best console of all time but you know we won't go back that far no 150 million 150 million sold or 150 sold hey it got it got consoles into people's houses michael no that's true that's true all right well if those of you out there are curious to know our next deep dive game is going to be v rising so as as always, we have our This Week in Gaming episodes on Thursday and our Quick Takes on Saturday. But then our next hour-long plus episode a week from today will be on V Rising, which I think will be an absolute blast to talk about. I know that we have spent a ton of time. We did some of our first castle raiding. We're going to be able to talk about all of that a week from now. Can't wait to get into it.

Please join our Discord. It's free. Link is in the episode description. And once again, if you want extra content and to help fund our show, MultiplayerSquad.com is where you want to go. You can see all of our Patreon options, which start at $5 a month. And we're all done. So I hope you guys enjoyed reflecting back on the times of the ps2 and there's still some great games you can play out there on emulators or if you still have your old console sitting around and i think that's it for today on top of all this one more thing if you follow the tweets and the twitters and the twitter action i'm gonna put a poll out that asks is the ps4 or ps2 the best console of all time let us know what you think

follow us at multiplayer pod wherever um consoles are looked at online and by that i mean only instagram and only twitter um because we're not we're not doing the the tiktok because that's a lot of work and also we're we're old so we're old we're too old for tiktok exactly all right we'll see you guys next time happy all right cheers everybody