A product review that might be of help to scores of gamers still in love with their Playstation 2 game consoles.
Sony's
Playstation 2, despite the release of its younger brother the PS3 and
Microsoft's Xbox 360, is still the world's best selling console at
140 million units sold (mid '08). This undoubtedly means people are
still willing to shell-out cash to experience the fun and excitement
of PS2 games even though the PS3 has already been released. Of course
this can be partly due to the fact that the PS3 and Xbox 360 sell for
a few hundred dollars more. Point is though, being a 8 years old (the
PS2 was released year 2000 in Japan), this predecessor to Sony's
original “little gray box” is still a juggernaut in the console
gaming world. That said, its safe to say that a lot of people are and
will still be playing PS2 (and PS one) titles years from now and
undoubtedly will bring problems of hardware failure due to overuse.
Which brings me to the topic of my review- USB Extreme.
USB
Extreme is an ingenious product that takes away the hassles and
frustration of lens breakdown on the slim PS2. The USB Extreme
software comes as a bootable disc that is played on the PS2 and works
in conjunction with free downloadable software. It lets gamers who
still enjoyu and are still attached to their PS2s play games off an
external hard drive through USB connection instead of using the
traditional game discs. The external hard drive is formatted using a
utility on the downloaded USB Extreme software and with a DVD ROM and
a PC, games are uploaded or installed on the USB HDD.
The
USB Extreme which by the way is a derivative of USB Advance (for the
original fat PS2), is a perfect way for PS2 owners to protect the
laser of their consoles from regular wear and tear. Replacement
lasers for the PS2 are hard to come by and cost quite a bit of money,
so replacing them every two years can really put a dent on a gamer's
entertainment budget. It also comes with advantages such as faster
load times (it eliminates the need to boot from CDs) and saves you a
lot of space. Imagine how many games you can store on a 200 gig hard
drive. Having all the games on a hard drive can also save you the
trouble of lugging-around a sackful of games on disks during travel.
All you have to bring is the console, the USB Extreme disc and your
USB hard drive.
The
USB Extreme is the perfect product for die-hard PS2 fans like me who
still find enough thrills with old PS2 titles and have no plans of
upgrading to the next generation consoles any time soon.
