Yes, a PS2.

I've been fighting this for a while now. And although I consider buying a PS2 in 2007 a pretty stupid thing to do, I felt kinda backed into a corner. It was a well-considered decision, I can assure you.

My PS2 was dying. This was my second PS2, which I bought just before they introduced the slimline edition (fuck!) It stopped playing DVD movies several months back... it would start clicking and eventually freeze up. Note that the PS2 has always been our primary DVD player, so what little DVD-watching we did do was now shut down.

Throughout this period of slow decay, I managed to play through Bully and Guitar Hero, so it hadn't really affected my game time. But then Chulip came along and started clicking all over the damn place. This was the sign to take action.

Obviously, EB gives you less for a busted PS2 than for a working one. I learned this the hard way when I finally traded in my Launch Day PS2 just last year. You can't fool them; they boot it up while you're standing there, the clever punks. So the clock was ticking: decide what to do before it craps out completely.

The decision, of course, being: pick up a PS2 on the cheap... or go all out and get a PS3, available everywhere to anyone with money, like a hooker with her own limo. Here was how it laid out...

CON PS3 - Even with the kind of pile of trade-ins that only I could assemble, I'm probably not going to get more than $100 or so out of EB towards a PS3. So we're still talking $400 to $500 outlay. And that's before adding in anything extra, like, say, a PS2-to-PS3 memory card adapter so I can play Chulip, goddammit. $500 is well above our comfortable level of spending, especially since we're saving for a new house.

CON PS3 - The PS3 is ugly. And big. And doesn't have anything that I'm dying to play at the moment. Oh sure, there will be some fresh consideration once MGS and GTA show up... but that's this fall at the earliest. And who knows, maybe by then they'll drop the price, offer a sweet bundle, redesign the monster's hideous case, or lop off the damn blu-ray and sell it for $300. Right now, the PS3 library looks exactly like the 360's launch library: barely-different shooters and the same old sports shite. Nothing compelling at all.

PRO PS3 - I feel intensely stupid buying a PS2, and will likely feel even stupider if I end up scrambling for a PS3 in eight months when GTA4 comes out.

CON PS3 - I'm still pretty annoyed at Sony's attitude during this whole deal. The insulting quotes, the cocky dismissals, the bungled launch. They're third place and they deserve it right now. Why should I vindicate them with an additional $600?

PRO PS3 - Well, there's always the cool new features: the WiFi, the online stuff, the wireless controllers, the hard drive, the media center... I mean, yeah, I would enjoy that. And I'd have to get a game, probably one of those barely-different shooters, sadly.

CON PS3 - You know what though? I have plenty of PS2 games to play... both new games (I just added the Ghost Rider game to my get-it-when-it's-cheap list) and our old favorites. With a new PS2, I don't have to worry about any backwards compatibility issues, or about the PS3 making my old stuff look lousy, as I've heard some people complain. And, I have a Wii.

So, the Two won out over the Three. Fourhman.home now possesses a slimline PS2. The silver one. We have our DVD player back, I can play Chulip and Guitar Hero no problem, we didn't dump a ton of cash (used two gift cards!), and I still plan on trading in the dying model (and some games) to recoup even more of the cost.

As seems to be the standard as of late, I did some more rewiring of our entertainment center. When I first got a PS2, I was super-proud of the optical audio and s-video cables. Now I don't care so much, so the slimline is chuffing along on good old fashioned RCA. Someday, when I get a kickass new TV, I'll do a full upgrade and move to component or whatever is better when that happens.

I also realized that I don't know where my Multitap got to.

Ironically, this slimline edition - that comes with an ethernet port built-in - simply would not attach itself to my network. I devoted a couple hours to figuring it out and then gave up in disgust. The 4.0 "wizard" that came with it is just as terrible as the 1.0 version from when PlayStation debuted online play. Heavy on nerdspeak, awful menu navigation, an unusable soft keyboard, and a complete lack of progress meters of any kind. I let it sit on the Test Connection screen for twenty minutes, and it never displayed any hint of whether it was actually doing anything or not. It never even timed out.

I haven't done any online PS2 stuff in quite some time, and quite frankly, I'm probably not likely to do so ever again. It sucked. But it bugs the hell out of me that I couldn't get it to work.

You watch, Mike will call me tomorrow and want to play World Championship Poker again.