May 30, 4:03 pm
I got a new T-shirt in the post! And it’s pink! YAAAAAAAY! It’s always nice to break down female stereotypes.
Funnily enough, my postman has been the object of much flutterings from myself recently. Was it because he bore a striking resemblance to Terry Wogan? Well, sadly no - my flutterings were due to a shiny Sony PIN code that landed on my doormat. It’s purpose? To get me onto PS2 Online.
Yes, you read that correctly. Who’d have thought it, eh? Having been a Playstation 2 owner for years, like most people I’d heard the whispers of the PS2’s online capabilities. I saw the network adapter sitting a couple of shelves up from that shiny Dragon Quest box (yes, I’m still playing it.) I asked around to see if anybody else had taken the leap into online play… and to be honest, I didn’t find anybody. PS2 Online seemed as mysterious and impenetrable as a Flemish translation of ‘Naked Lunch.’ However, not to be deterred, I set out on a challenge to get myself connected to Sony’s Central Station (different companies have different systems within PS2 online, y’see?) It’s all for SOCOM 3 - the PS2s answer to shooty-shooty-jump-bang Halo. I think. Well! It has little men running around shooting each other anyway, and that’s good enough for me.
As I have a “Who Ate All The Pies?” PS2, I had to purchase a network adapter first. You put the little network disc in, follow the instructions - it’s all pretty straightforward. Then you need to wait for your registration code (that’s the PIN). Admittedly this was a teeth-grinding two week wait - but, slap that in, and voila! Rather astonishingly you find yourself online with pretty much no hassles. You get friend IDs just like Live gamertags (though not persistent across all games), a free second account, access to discussion groups, clan registration, and of course the actual game itself. It’s not Xbox Live, and it’s foolish to pretend it might be - but for all the bad mouthing PS2 Online gets, it actually seems quite straight forward! At least going by my experiences with SOCOM 3.
So now Frag Doll Jam is about to embark on the next part of her epic journey - learning how not to get shot repeatedly on SOCOM 3. It’s pretty weird using the shoulder bumpers instead of the Xbox’s triggers, and I keep pushing in the analogue stick to zoom in, but I’m fairly confident I’ll get there. Who knows - this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. The start of the Frag Dolls branching out into PlayStation Online territory.
Feel the Fraggy lurve.
