The initial games available include the aforementioned Tekken and Ridge Racer titles as well as Fantavision (a fireworks simulator that wins the prize for most head-scratching title), Time Splitters (a time-travelling first-person shooter), SSX Snowboarding (apparently more Wipeout than the tedious Coolboarders series), FIFA 2001 (soccer), Silent Scope (an adaptation of the arcade sniper game), as well as ESPN International Track and Field, and Ready to Rumble Boxing Round 2. We're getting the units at the same time as Australia and Europe after launches in Japan and the United States. Adult gamers will be lining up this Thursday to buy the first PS2s to arrive in New Zealand. Coincidentally, Sony is pitching the $999-priced console and its game to 18 and ups and have relaunched the PlayStation - or PSOne - as a smaller, curvier, kid-friendlier unit with a new batch of games to match, including Muppet Monster Adventure and - looking like an interactive version of Twister with its play mat - Disney's Jungle Book Groove Party. A possible advertising line came to mind: "PlayStation 2 - even better when you've had a few." Oh, and kids, don't try this at home. Through the dim light of the lounge and lagered eyes, the rich graphics created by the PS2's powerful "Emotion Engine" chip finally made sense - it was just so easy to focus into the far corners and beyond of Ridge Racer V's swooping courses as you navigated them at 200 km/h-plus despite my own emotional engine running a bit rich. Just a matter of slapping the Ridge Racer V disk into the vertical disk-door and hitting the couch. It was going back in the morning, so one last go before bed. There stood the PlayStation 2, looking rather tall and sleek for a black box and doing its best to complement the decor. We'd come home late after a movie, a meal and enough drinks to leave me fuzzy around the gills. Certainly not the revelatory experience when I'd bought my original Playstation in 1997 for a wallet-worrying $500, and been hooked into the joys of WipeOut 2097, Crash Bandicoot and various other first- generation games. It had been fun, but pretty much the same kind of fun. With the console came copies of Tekken Tag Tournament (the PS2 instalment for the series that is to PlayStation games what Bruce Lee is to chop-socky movies), Dead or Alive 2 (more Jackie Chan meets WWF meets the sort of pneumatic women only seen in Russ Meyer films) and Ridge Racer V (the latest in the fine racing-car series that knows it's about stimulation, not simulation). The first evening and the day off had delivered a few hours of videogame mayhem. I'd had a test model - a "debugging unit," which unfortunately meant no DVD player, but more on that later - on loan from the previous afternoon. By RUSSELL BAILLIE It was late on the second night that the PlayStation 2 finally made sense.
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