Things, as they say, didn't go quite according to plan. I was going to play Aqua Aqua, ATV Off Road Fury 3, Atari Anthology, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. My PS2 console had other ideas.
Aqua Aqua (Zed Two Limited/3DO/2001) Okay, I see what they were trying to do here - a 3D puzzle game where you drop walls Tetris-style to contain water. Cool graphics idea for a tech demo, I guess, but you need to have better controls! Maybe with a mouse it would have played decently. With the control sticks, it was a mess.
ATV Off Road Fury wouldn't read in the PS2. Bad disc? Maybe. I've never tried playing it before, so give it the benefit of the doubt.
Atari Anthology (Digital Eclipse/Atari/2004) Collections like this are pure treasure troves of video game historical records. Those of us grey beards that remember the arcade and Atari 2600 days are transported back to a simpler time when games only gave you 3 lives for a quarter and joysticks had just a single button. On the down side, some of the games don't hold up well to our memories; graphics don't have the same shine that they seemed to have. Were they really better than what we see now, or were they that much more impressive for the day based on what we could compare them to then? Hard to say. I thought the recreations of old vector graphics games were handled particularly well. Trying to emulate an entirely different graphical technology is not easy. I could browse the bonus content of manuals, box art, arcade flyers, and magazine ads for hours. Oh, the feels!
Avatar: The Last Airbender wouldn't read either. This was troubling. One game not working, maybe it's the disc. Two games? It's a hardware problem. To confirm, I tried Bloodrayne 2. No dice.
I'd read about tweaking the dial for the DVD signal located on the underside of the laser unit. I tried this a couple of times, first turning it a little then a lot, but it didn't help. So, I replaced the laser completely with a replacement I got off Amazon awhile back. As of this writing everything is working fine but I want to get some white lithium grease to make the laser unit slide easier. If it keeps working, it will be my first successful PS2 Slim repair. Fingers crossed.
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