Just three weeks ago, I bought a second-hand Playstation 2 thin console version. An officemate of a friend of mine needed money for his new-born baby girl and decided to give up on the machine.

It was offered for only P6,800.00 (or roughly US$123). To me, this seemed like a good deal. It included 2 controllers, 20 DVD games, and was already "modified" to accept non-original DVD games.

To those who aren’t familiar with the Playstation 2 "modification", essentially this meant that a "mod" chip had already been attached to the machine. This chip allows the device to play non-original DVD games. It is an accepted practice here in Manila to do this and a number of businesses offer the modification service for around P1,400-P2,000.

I really hadn’t planned on buying it but my sister said she would pay in the next months if I bought it. So I did.

Upon taking home, we immediately tested it. We tried loading a couple of DVD games. For a brief while, we saw some opening sequence of Tekken 5. We tried some other DVD games and soon found out that they would not load. We returned the Tekken 5 game and discovered that it wouldn?t load anymore!

My brother and I were dumbfounded. We kept trying various configurations throughout the test period but the machine still didn?t work. I sent an SMS message to the seller. He said that the MOD chip might be grounded. He had tested it before selling it to me. He claimed it worked.

The next day, we tried an ORIGINAL DVD game. ? It worked flawlessly. We were able to get Grand Turismo on the playstation 2. We even had the steering wheel controller.
My sister, however, was agitated at the situation and wanted to return the machine. Her boyfriend said, this is still worth it but now she had to factor in the modification of the machine.

We soon discovered some other quirks of the machine. For one, it heats up easily. Maximum recommended playing time would be only 4 hours. My friends indicated that I should get a fan for it to keep it cool. I found this quite annoying and was agitated that I didn’t do my homework on this.

PS2