The PlayStation 2 is a video game console produced by Sony from 2000 to 2014, which is known to support a fair few console spinoffs in the Sims franchise. The console's name is very often abbreviated as PS2.
The very earliest versions of the PlayStation 3 could play the PlayStation 2 Sims games to varying extents, but both the full hardware support (on Japanese and North American models) and the software rendering (on European models) were not applied in the PlayStation 3 Slim models in order to reduce what was deemed to be extremely high costs at the time.[note 1]
Supported games[]
- The Sims (console)
- The Sims Bustin' Out (console)
- The Urbz: Sims in the City (console)
- The Sims 2 (console)
- The Sims 2: Pets (console)
- The Sims 2: Castaway
Specifications[]
It had support for:
- 2 regular controllers (Expandable to up to 8 with the Multi-Tap accessory).
- 2 memory cards (Also expandable the same way).
- A dual-purpose DVD+CD drive.
- 2 USB ports.
- Resolutions: Circa 576i@50Hz and 480p@60Hz.[note 2]
- Sound: Stereo (2-channel) sound during gameplay, and many games paid licenses to Dolby to use the Dolby Pro Logic II upscaling codec that could handle 5.1 surround sound.
- While the PlayStation 2 was also capable of Dolby Digital native 5.1 surround over S/PDIF, the console was unable to make use of it during gameplay, and was only known to be able to use it in prerendered cutscenes or when playing DVD video.
- ("Slim" models from 2004 onwards) Ethernet port for online gaming. Earlier models required an accessory to add an Ethernet port to the back of the console.[note 3]
The console was able to render playable 3D environments at 60fps and without much reliance on polygons, both of those aspects huge improvements compared to the PlayStation 1.
The DVD drive's support for CD discs was primarily intended for support with PlayStation 1 games and music CDs, but a small handful of PlayStation 2 games were also distributed on CD discs, with The Sims (console) among them.
The specs were somewhat similar to those of the Nintendo Wii that was released in 2006. As such, The Sims 2: Castaway was released in 2007 in mostly the same form on the PlayStation 2 and Wii.
Console accessories[]
Various official console accessories were released for the PlayStation 2, whether through USB or with a special connection in tray on the back of pre-"Slim" models. The 2 most relevant ones to the Sims games are:
- PlayStation 2 Expansion Bay: Added a 40GB hard drive and an Ethernet port into the pre-Slim models. Used by the North American and Japanese versions of some Sims games as an alternate place to store savefiles, and/or to store a cache to speed up loading times. Not supported by the Slim models.
- EyeToy: A camera that supported rudimentary motion controls and webcam functions. Known to be supported in The Urbz: Sims in the City (console) and The Sims 2 (console).
Differences from computers[]
Being among the first wave of devices that the franchise received spinoffs on (alongside the Nintendo Gamecube and the 2001 Xbox), there were multiple differences between computers and consoles at the time. This meant that many features in the Sims PC games was deemed to either be costly to implement, or were prohibited by the console producers altogether:
| Feature | Notes and likely factors |
|---|---|
| Mouse and keyboard support | The PlayStation 2 did have native support over USB, but only circa 24 games had native support for it. |
| Patches | Almost no games supported patches to memory cards over Ethernet. Games that were eligible for Greatest Hits re-releases sometimes had the most critical bugs fixed, but they required buying the entire game again. |
| Expansion packs | A select few very-high profile MMOs like Final Fantasy XI received excemptions from it. |
| Reliance on RAM | With 32 MB RAM, it in fact had less RAM than the requirements of The Sims base game on Microsoft Windows. |
| Large savefiles. | Memory Cards on PlayStation 2 were infamously overpriced, and many players could only afford 8 or 16 MB across all their owned games. Very few, if any, games allowed saving to USB either, and the Expansion Bay was not released in most countries. |
| Game mods | Console producers were, and still are, opposed to any theorethical exploits being found that would let consoles sideload the console's games. |
| Versatile objects | Mandated rigid playtests meant that PS2 games had to be reasonably game crash-safe to be allowed to be released. |
As a result, the console spinoffs were entirely different games from their PC namesakes, with less focus on open-ended gameplay or house building, and more focus on maingame stories. The extremely low RAM also resulted in the introduction of object limiters for the purpose of the console games.
Gallery[]
Notes[]
- ↑ The PS3 launched at US$600 in North America, and at the equivalents of US$800-1,000 in Europe and US$1,800 in Brazil.
- ↑ The Japanese and North American versions of Gran Turismo 4 had 1080i@50Hz support, but this was allegedly only an output signal workaround for glitches on very early HD televisions.
- ↑ The earliest models instead had a 4-pin FireWire port for LAN, but few games used it, with Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec among the few high-profile ones.