PS2 Thread

Any thoughts if I should avoid some of these games?

I have a question. In a local retro vidya store in my area, I saw a PS2 fat for $45 and a PS2 slim for $40. Both have all the hookups and 1 controller. Should I get the fat or the slim?

Double check what the exact model numbers are for both. While most PS2s should play the bulk of the PS2 and PS1 libraries just fine, some models have issues with particular games, and depending on what all you're wanting to play/already have copies of, that might be a factor to consider.

...

Battlefront 2 is overated.

Might be worth mentioning that Second Sight and Manhunt are available on other systems, so you might want to double check those if you're the sort that wants to play the best versions of stuff. Looks like The Red Star was also set for an Xbox release but never saw a commercial one (it did see a finished press copy, but I'm not sure if that's digitally available the way some games that never saw official releases have found there way onto the internet).

Currently playing Wild Arms 3. Doing the Telepath Towers side quest.

I think I accidentally got stuck with a cut-off involving that and the game never let me actually do it. I'll have to try to get to it sooner whenever I wind up replaying it. Always did like those aliens though. The ones in WA1/ACF are surprisingly dangerous if you're not prepared, namely through their Human Experimentation ability and having an assload of health for regular encounters, bordering on miniboss tier. The Duplicators they can drop and the EXP make up for it though.

Good luck with the Arioch sidequest if you choose to do it.

Yeah I remember those guys in WA1. They were indeed a major source of exp & gold providing one could survive (around level 40 was a bit harder). I personally used to Divide Shot them with Jack.

Planning to do all of the sidequests in the game. I'm really enjoying it so far, plus it has heavy references to the first WA and it's way more western themed than the second one.

Yep it's easy to miss. You have to speak twice with Roswell in Laxisland exhausting all his dialogues. The first time when you arrive, then after you get Lombardia

Yeah, with Wild Arms, it's hard to tell whether the games are directly connected or not (Media.Vision not being clear about it doesn't help). With Wild Arms 3 though, there's enough callbacks and similarities to Wild Arms 1 that it feels like they're same timeline/world, if perhaps a much distant sequel. There's still callbacks to Wild Arms 2 as well, but they're less direct as far as outright relation (stuff like Janus being an alternate look at Ashley if he had a different personality).

The issue with the Arioch one is that it's a crapshoot to find the bastards and while it starts out easy enough, they get tougher with each encounter.

Just startet playing WA3, never played it befor. Damn, I'm over 30 and never played wild arms 3. Also watching the WA anime while playing and posting here.

I'd recommend playing it after playing the first game in some format (both the PS1 original and PS2 remake are about even in my opinion, but fans are rather divided). Here's this if you need it.

Also, from what I know of it, while Twilight Venom is stand alone, it has a lot of shoutouts aimed at fans of the first two games (as those releases prior).

Twenty-three here. First played through the series last year. One of the nice things about having older stuff in the backlog is having good stuff to still play during periods like now where the industry needs to get tis shit together, but the drawback is that there's not much of a reason to make threads on them (especially if the series is dead/dormant and there's no news). Part of why I make images like these to try to get other anons interested in various series; could use more people to talk about them with, and I think that there's probably some people that would love them and have missed out.

Enjoying Halo? Oh, that's right.

I suggest you to play them in order of release. You will enjoying them better, trust me.

Ha, the Janus similarities with Ashley were pretty cool to see.

Well it could have been nice from Media.Vision to confirm it or not. But I like to think it's just part of the charm of Wild Arms, because I liked (and still do) to play through the third game and keep recognizing stuff from the first one. Really well made.

Media.Vision's had some lore books for the series before (Fargaia Chronicle focused on WA1, 2, and Twilight Venom if memory serves), but I'm not sure if they've held true to them for those entries in particular or if things have since gotten retconned, and as stated prior, Media.Vision's wishywashy about it in general. Either way, it's hard to know, since Fargaia Chronicle was never brought west, translated, or even given proper scans to my knowledge (only fan translated Wild Arms media has been Flower Thieves; honestly surprises me a bit that we actually got every game in NA, as more popular series have missed various main series entries). Might be worth bringing up though that Wild Arms: Chronicle F has been fully scanned to my knowledge, but is untranslated (honestly not sure how often something like that receives a full fantranslation; Xenogears: Perfect Works being the main one I know of that saw that sort of effort). It's kanji heavy though from the looks of the text, and as one of the guys on the site says wasn't scanned in at all that high quality (so trying to translate off of those might be an effort in low-legibility).

An NPC in Wild Arms 5 speculates that there are many Filgaias, with WA5's acting as a Nexus (hence prior party members appearing as NPC drifters), but I'm not sure if that should be taken at face value. Could have just been Media.Vision being cheeky and playing with the cameos.

Yeah. I mean, every game is standalone in plot, but they do have a lot of little things that harken back to the earlier entries for fans, and Wild Arms 5 is particularly fanservice heavy (in that it has a lot of sidequests involving prior characters for fans to see again).

Also, a section of the part labelled "Illustration Gallery" in Chronicle F is devoted to the characters of the Witch Book set. Given how badly Agetec botched that part of the game (not that the rest doesn't have some issues, but the Witch Book section felt really badly handled), it strikes me that if someone were to translate at least those pages it might shed more light on things for western fans, at least as far as the characters in it were concerned.

Okay, like I said before I've downloaded everything already, I just need to put it all together.

I've got a couple hours righ tnow, so I'm going to start with the readme in the patch files.

I have to wonder what Jet is doing in some of the images in there. Not even an artbook focused on he game he's from, yet there he is.

Cool, thanks. Remember, it has to be in the right order. Only optional patch is the "EU to US" one, as the idea was for people to rip their own game files from their discs and the hackers understandably didn't want to have to make varients of the coding for multiple regions (that patch essentially puts everyone on the same page as far as the basic game file goes).

Yeah, luckily everything I need is in the read me, and I already had xdelta downloaded, so it's been simple. The patching has started. I grabbed a US version from Emuparadise earlier so no glitches so far.

My concern is how there are like 5 steps to getting the final product, and if, say, the 2nd one fucks up, I won't know it until the end of the procedure - maybe even until the game is played to a certain point.

Wow, what a pile of shit.

Makes me want to watch the movie again, but I'll just hold off because enough of my childhood sucked, and I don't need another thing ruined.

I'd say to check in an emulator after each major section (say, full numbers, as well as finishing with 5a) that it at least boots. Might also be safer to have it save the patched file as a copy instead of overwriting the original file (that likely will take more time and space, but then if something should go south you don't have to start completely over). Also, I think the readme includes sha and md5 checksums so you can make sure stuff is correct by comparing the what your patched files are with what they should be, or something like that. I'm not real clear on how it works.

What a pain in the ass.

How rude of you to not check my dubs!

Yeah, that's part of the issue with dealing with beta patches; future ones build on and/or amend issues with prior ones, and I suppose the finalized release would have redundant parts ironed out and be intended as a single patch job. Still, better safe than sorry on the off chance the effort dies or romhacking gets cracked down on (I could see either happening with TPP). Especially since the alternative is being stuck with the official localization (imagine a world where people are once again stuck with Capcom's shitty translation job of Breath of Fire II). Anyhow, take your time.

Nice twice-in-a-row dubs.

Yeah, I just booted the game after the undub > beta1. Not sure if there's supposed to be tons of dialogue in this game or what, but there was a song being sung in nip after a few minutes, which is gonna be as far as I'm going test-wise.

thx

The undub patch should patch out all the English voicing and either replace or add to the partial native Japanese dub the game originally had here for the full Japanese one. From what I hear, one of the later patches should also subtitle the opening FMV (as well as other ones in the game, I expect). Still, I'm not sure if NISA would have even dubbed over the opening song in the first place. Not a whole lot of publishers seem to do so when it comes to them (more common to just remove the lyrics altogether and replace them with an instrumental, like Wild Arms 2, or Tales of the Abyss). Of course, I'm not even sure if the opening itself for AT2 is in Japanese, or Hymnos (and in-universe language).

And yeah, as far as I'm aware, Ar Tonelico as a series (as well as it's successor series, Surge Concerto) is wordy, and not for everyone. Still, it's got a decent fanbase amongst anons. Seen a fair bit of love for it over the years I've been on imageboards, but it's one of the more niche JRPG series out there.

Anyhow, since I saw in that other thread that you were thinking of working on downloading some PS2 games yourself and were looking for other sites to use for them, I figured I might mention that, as far as games (or at least versions of games) Emuparadise likely won't have (though they should have most if not all games with an official English release there, as well as JP files for some as well), Nicoblog has Persona 4 and Radiata Stories prepatched with the Japanese dubs, as well as Berserk, Dragon Quest V, FFXII: IZJS, and Front Mission V patched with English fan translations. Just figured I'd give a heads up if any of those sound up your alley, especially as they're not just ones you can burn from your friend (not having official western releases, and all; that assumes he doesn't just burn ISOs to disks himself).

I think isozone is still the only place to find Shadow Tower Abyss already patched into English. Why Nicoblog has never picked it up, I don't know.

Anyhow, since I saw in that other thread that you were thinking of working on downloading some PS2 games yourself and were looking for other sites to use for them, I figured I might mention that, as far as games (or at least versions of games) Emuparadise likely won't have (though they should have most if not all games with an official English release there, as well as JP files for some as well), Nicoblog has Persona 4 and Radiata Stories prepatched with the Japanese dubs, as well as Berserk, Dragon Quest V, FFXII: IZJS, and Front Mission V patched with English fan translations. Just figured I'd give a heads up if any of those sound up your alley, especially as they're not just ones you can burn from your friend (not having official western releases, and all; that assumes he doesn't just burn ISOs to disks himself).

I think isozone is still the only place to find Shadow Tower Abyss already patched into English. Why Nicoblog has never picked it up, I don't know.

Okay, what the fuck is up with the double posting today? I mean, this is the first time it's happened directly to me, but I've seen it in numerous other threads lately.

Sounds indeed right up my alley, in terms of things I want to save and eventually play. I just now finished compressing (7z) the beta 5a iso took it down 800mb, which I hope was worth the effort for your dl speeds and I'm leaving it to upload overnight to mega. Hopefully it doesn't glitch out halfway through or something stupid.

I see my background eraser tool failed to make the cut there.

My download speeds are bad, but upload is much, much worse (I'm supposed to be getting limitless high speed here; so much for that). I can at least download games at night (after at least rebooting the box to make sure it's at peak performance. Thanks again, just drop a link to it in the morning or something.

If you want, in the meantime I can toss together a list of PS2 games that are somewhat pricy these days if you want some ideas to look into prioritizing downloading if they strike your interest. Most PS2 games are generally still pretty reasonable in price and I'm not entirely sure what sort of taste in stuff your friend has as far as access to burning games, but some of it's getting up there a bit in price. Not as bad as the Gamecube, where a lot of stuff, both common games from big Nintendo franchises as well as rarer stuff, have shot up to $40 if not more each, but it's likely to just get worse in time to try to find stuff that's not real mainstream, or at least didn't get reprinted (kudos to Atlus on reprinting every PS2 SMT/Persona game aside from base P3). I've personally seen Kuon shoot up from $40 a year or two ago to $160 around where I live, and I'm still not sure why. I just figure I ought to have grabbed it back then, but hindsights a bitch and there's always the option of downloading stuff instead of paying ridiculous prices.

Can't wait to play it. I had to wait for years to finally be able to play the whole Wild Arms series.

The Witch Book was a really cool idea to implement (the books in Wild Arms 3 with Marivel are amazing too).

Might be a Rudy joke, but I can't read japanese so I'll never know.

Here you go, nigger. Let me know if it works.

mega.nz/#!61QkDYJQ!ntP5P7SduE98oI2ln1qf08CFsb4pNq1tK3rQBTQNQeI

Yeah I'd take a list of personal favorites, but if possible keep in mind which ones you've seen excluded from the "Holla Forums's recommended" charts - I'll likely be referencing those heavily, and more or less just clicking through the alphabet grabbing or looking at reviews for whatever catches my interest.

Bonus gift: Very high resolution image of Kirby as a fire truck.

noice.

Why so little love for Radiata Stories?

Wild Arms 5 was pretty enjoyable in my opinion (if still not my favorite; hard to decide between WA2 and 3 for me), though from what I've seen series fans are pretty split on the entries after WA3. WA4 is definitely a weak point, and I wouldn't be shocked if that really turned some people off of Wild Arms 5 in turn. Still, if you're going to play the later ones, it might help to know what you're getting into.

WA5's soundtrack is also really good, despite Naruke not being present for it.

I was wondering too, but since they all seem to have the same pose in there, maybe they're just using Jet as a ready size comparison for the environment? Not sure.

Thanks again, working on downloading it now. And yeah, most of what I would mention are indeed on the Holla Forums PS2 image, but that doesn't factor in whether a game is expensive or not (where downloading would be much better on the wallet than shelling out cash, provided you have a means of playing it), nor does it have games that have translation efforts still in the works (and as such aren't playable in English just yet). Actually thought of making an image before of what PS2 games are getting up there in price for other anons to be on the lookout for if they can manage to find it cheap, but somehow I get the feeling that would be more readily abused by scalpers than people wanting to play them.

I've seen a fair amount of liking for it over the years, but from what it seems like, people are pretty divided on the quality of most Tri-Ace games that aren't Star Ocean 2 or Valkyrie Profile PS1. It's still on my own backlog, but I suspect I'll get my $10 out of it when I do get to it.

Full scans can be found here if you want them. desertmoon.org/scans.php?book=WAcF&page=0&limit=20

Thank you user

Oh well, there's always a weak point in every game series. Not going to be turned off by it and I'm sure I've played "worse" games before.

I'm curious to know why you think is one of the best for you. I might know the answer, but I'd like to hear other user's thoughts about it.

I'm working my way through the series. Finished MGS this morning. (Admittedly, I'm playing them on my Vita which has become my MGS/Final FANTASY machine).

No problem. Can't remember exactly how I found it, but it's nice to see it still up (apparently the site owners claim they can't afford to deal with potentially finding over hosting uploads of copyrighted material in court, so if asked, they do take stuff down).

The thing with Wild Arms 4 is that while solid enough in combat (if a bit broken in favor of the player; first time the series utilized the HEX system), the puzzles are a bit lacking, the balance of fantasy/sci-fi/western is much more skewed towards sci-fi, and thematically it's a bit trite. Still had fun with it, though considering I got my copy for $15 and knew what I was getting into (I went in with low expectations and found it not as bad as I'd thought it might be), I suppose my experience is different than that of someone that dropped $50-60 on hype at western launch.

The first time hearing At the End of the Wilderness was a great callback.

Like a lot of series fans, I really like the "FP as primary resource" set up for combat that both WA2 and 3 share, and in general really like the characters, story, and music for both. Only real drawback for WA2 for me is that the translation could have used some better editing for sentence flow, but even then it's usually more of a matter of some lines just needing to be reread to make sense of (and I'm not sure I can fault the translation team in regard to Liz; I've heard he uses some Japanese specific doublespeak in the original script that might not carry over to English intact well at all while still retaining the style). Granted, WA2 is kind of different in setting, but most of the series is, ranging from wilderness, to frontier, to wild west desert.

I still don't know why Substance is so hard to find for the actual PS2, at least where I live. I mean, it's certainly not expensive (no Metal Gear game is from what I've noticed, aside from the Legacy collection, though that's on account of how many games it includes) but it shows up so little hear that I can go months without seeing a single copy. Meanwhile, there's the basic Sons of Liberty version all over the damn place, and MGS3 and MGS3: Subsistence are all over too. And on top of that there's plenty of those extra print MGS, MGS2, and MGS3 that came in one of those PS2 bundle packs. But Substance seems to have either really low availability or is a game people just tend to keep to themselves rather than trade in.

(checked)
Yeah, I've seen it a few times in the wild at some local used game shops. I think they were charging a bit too much for it as well (like $40).

It's about $6-15 where I live for a complete copy, just depends on the store. I'd definitely say $40 is too much for the places around you to be asking. Biggest issue is just finding a copy that's available if you don't care to buy online (in pretty much any case I'm going to need to pick up a used copy of a game, I try stores first since I stand a good chance of finding stuff cheaper there than online). Admittedly I'm not all that familiar with Metal Gear myself, but maybe MGS2: Sons of Liberty was so divisive that Substance didn't sell well in turn, while MGS3: Snake Eater was so well received that Subsistence also sold phenomenally as well? Tried asking in various threads before but have gotten no solid response.

Of course, I suppose if you're playing with the Vita, there's a native port of the HD collection of MGS2 and 3 on it already, though I think I've heard it doesn't include some of the bonus features the extended rereleases on the PS2 had for them. I could be wrong though.

I doubt there are many scalpers on 8/v/, unless you also post on cuckchan or something (which I really hope you don't)

I'm not too into physical collecting anymore, either. Only for a few of the games that I have nostalgia about, but ultimately I now consider the digital medium superior. Down the line I want to mod a PS2, and then that will be the end of any emulation worries.

Wondering if I should delete that upload of AT2 right off the bat (MEGA is now full) or if I should leave it for a few weeks in case other anons are interested in it.

Okay, so I made a list of some things you might want to look into as far as possible games to prioritize downloading due to prices/rarity or needing them in a digital format anyhow due to patches. Granted, a lot of these are still ones I need to play (I can vouch for the Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts games at this point though, provided JRPGs are your sort of thing), but still. Better to look into whether these sound of interest before downloading. While it was only recently that cartridge based games started to get rather large filesizes, disc based games since fifth gen have been prone to taking up a decent amount of space per game. PS2 games in particular can range from a few hundred megabytes to multiple gigabytes (the largest PS2 discs could hold up to 9 GB, though I'm not sure off the top of my head if any fully used that much), and while multidisc games had mostly been phased out for Sony consoles aside from demo/OVA discs, there were still a few games even then with multiple discs of actual content (Shadow Hearts: Covenant, for example).

I haven't been back there since I came here, what has it been now, two years ago? Even stuck it out while the site was shitting itself horribly. Every so often in buyfag threads though, you get people opting to switch to pirating and wondering how much they can scalp their games for, so I'd wager they are at least lurking.

I'd say to leave it up a few days. Unfortunately I can't test it right now myself (family member order some parts for setting up my PS2 to play stuff digitally and never shipped them to me; going to be sometime next month before I get them). Maybe drop a link to it in the JRPG thread that's up? Strikes me that it might be of interest to people there too, and hopefully one of them can say whether it works or not.

Can I be off assistance? This torrent is seeded very well, however the .iso's are wrapped up in 7zip archives for some reason and as the title gives away it is only the US version.
My Sony PlayStation 2 (USA) Collection
8517b29d393c291aa331e9f479b3767321b200ed
It has all of the items listed in Expensive/hard to find.
*cough*login2.me*cough*
Done . Yes I know what shit my post is.

I assume you want to add it to the torrent or something if it works, given that while a fan translation, it's made to use the US ISO as a base?

As said above, I can't test it myself, but I can confirm that the downloaded patched ISO's SHA-1 checksum matches the one in the readme file in the actual patch dump mega here . For what it's worth anyhow. I'll see if I can into checking for the other numbers for 5a as well.

Let me get the md5 for iso I uploaded. Should've done that earlier.

The MD-5 and CRC-32s also match for those listed with 5a, checking off the patches ISO I downloaded earlier. I assume that should mean it was indeed patched correctly since all three are matching, but I could be wrong. Still not real experienced with this sort of thing.

9394b9a5457763e734cdea66cd11822e

This is the MD5 I got for the iso I compressed via .7z and uploaded to Mega

Not really. I was just poiting out that that torrent has all of expensive/hard to find games, so that can focus more on patching and testing rather than trying to find them.

Same one on my downloaded end. I'd like to assume that if all three match up with the ones here for 5a that it should be properly patched all the way through, but this has honestly been the first time I've tried running a check on something. Still, I can only imagine the reason the checksums were provided in the first place was to make sure every beta tester was on the same exact page; wouldn't do to have someone finding bugs that no one else could confirm due to an improperly patched file, or something.

Oh, yeah, I suppose that might indeed be useful to him for it. Though, given how much room PS2 games can take up (decompressed patched AT2 is 4.42 GB alone), it might be wise of him to do a bit of research on what all he wants to download considering how long and how much space it can take up compared to downloading everything in bulk at once. Then again, I'm not real familiar with how torrents work myself, so I'm not sure if that's an all-at-once deal with some giant ass PS2 folder compressed for transfer (full romset style), or allows for picking and choosing individual games.

If the client in use isn't complete shit (AKA Utorrent) you should be able to pic and choose files. Embed is both an example of invidual picking and my client suggestion.

Ah, that would make sense. I'm more used to direct downloads with places like emuparadise, and for stuff like full romsets on those you don't get to pick and choose (thankfully with older systems those don't come out to be too horribly big in filesize, but it's still a lot of pruning you have to do).

That's a big list.

Why do these lists never indicate whether I can bring friends?

This is correct. I used md5s extensively for the first time when cracking my 3ds. Byte for byte, the ISO is what the patchers intended.

Whether or not there are game-breaking glitches, typos, etc. in them, you'd have to play it to see.

Yes, I had saved that magnet link previously. Right now the machine I use to torrent has a full hard drive, and I'm stressing out because I absolutely hate leeching, but for some of the anime I'm grabbing, I just can't compete with the seedboxes.

Tell me about OP, why does he fuck the fags?

Because mentioning multiplayer possibility for every game would take more room. I'd likely have to redesign the tab layout to accommodate for that, and/or make some icons to toss on them somewhere. On the other hand, thanks to Codemonkey expanding the maximum filesize limits, I'm less cramped for space, so it's something I have actually been considering.

Ah. I assume that would be how they double checked and confirmed the bug in base Beta 5 and quickly put out Beta 5a a few days later. Considering there's been nothing posted to the main site since then (which was late August) I assume that either any more bugs have been of the minor type (in that gamebreaking ones actively hamper ability to progress and possibly find more bugs), or there haven't been ones found.

Any recommended guides on softmodding a fat ps2?

Any recommended guides on softmodding a fat ps2?

Find a compatible hotswap game or just buy a freemcboot memory card - some forums have members willing to do it for free/cost of postage.

Find a compatible hotswap game or just buy a freemcboot memory card - some forums have members willing to do it for free/cost of postage.

Should I play Persona 3 before watching the anime?

Is that Christ-chan?

That's Virginia Maxwell.

I honestly haven't heard a lot about the anime adaptation, but I get the feeling that unless a company was willing to do a full length season, an OVA or movie adaptation isn't likely to cut it. You might want to ask in an SMT thread; I think one was up earlier.

It's actually 4 movies that are over an hour each…but I'll ask in the thread anyway. I'm interested in the lore and want a good intro, without having to sink hundreds of hours into a game before I can tell if I want to get involved. Thanks.

Those were the days, when you could walk up to a random yard sale and pick up a sealed copy of a recent release for 20 bucks. Can't really get shit like that now, unless it's something like classic xbox, fuck.

Also PS2 games were getting reprinted all the time, it's why, say, MMX Collection isn't anywhere near as expensive as the gamecube one. But for some games it simply either just wasn't enough, like Xenosega 3, or just could not be reprinted.

I wouldn't think anything that involves the internet to be superior, if only because there's always (((someone))) out to destroy it or just fuck it up for everyone.

Yeah, with the more niche stuff, print runs being lowish is to be expected, though I still would prefer companies to at least put in the effort for marketing (niche games need word being put out more than AAA shlock, and not just word of mouth or "here's a website that barely explains anything" type), and choose the right release frame (looking at Midway and their decision to have Shadow Hearts launch just before Final Fantasy X; they're sadly not alone in that).

I've done pretty well on picking up Gamecube stuff on the cheap, but it's a slow process (last pickup I had for it was Pikmin 2 for $2 complete at a yard sale). I've had more luck with finding otherwise expensive PS2 games cheap (Wild Arms ACF for $18, Yakuza 2 for $12, etc), probably because it's not being treated as the SNES v2.0, as far as how scalpers treat the Gamecube.