My ps2 is still going strong that my parents got for my birthday on release day; though, I haven’t used it in quite a while since my main tv only has hdmi. My wife has the slim ps2 which is nice, but I’ve always preferred the bulky original with the slide out disk tray.

I remember being somewhat blown away about having a DVD player on my console, and I used to think movies looked so good on it as I only had a vcr in my room before that. Many fond memories of watching Lord of the Rings on that thing. I did mess something up and somehow activated parental control though, and I never could figure out how to undo that.

I remember excitedly awaiting FFX when adds for it started playing on Toonami all the time. I thought it looked so cool, and I did actually enjoy it quite a bit. Kingdom Hearts was my main go to game though, and it’s still kind of a comfort game for me if I’m ever feeling depressed or something. I also have some pretty fond memories of my cousin bringing Vice City over which my parents never knew about. We’d spend hours just driving around and listening to the radio or playing around with some of the cheats.

The big standout series for me was Xenosaga though. I didn’t know what to expect, but I loved the characters and the story. I was actually all for the super long cutscenes. It was also the start of me disliking game preorders as I preordered Xenosaga 2 through Gamestop pretty much as soon as I could. I was so excited for the game despite the weird changes to character design, and I was really anticipating the promised preorder bonus of a dvd that contained cutscenes and (I think) begins the scenes stuff from the first game. Gamestop told me they didn’t have the disk though, and that I could check the one across the street. That Gamestop said they did have disks but it didn’t matter because they only had enough for the people that preordered and kind of hinted that the employees may have just taken the bonus disks for themselves if they ran out. I didn’t shop at Gamestop again for years after that.