And while I hate bringing this first installment of my day with the PS2 to a close on negative notes, the unit does hit a few more sour ones before you boot it for the first time. First, as we feared earlier, there is no packed in disk of any kind. Now, we understand that Sony is already losing about $100 on each of these sophisticated units, which surely it will make back in game licensing fees by…oh, let's see now…next Friday, maybe. We know that the age of the packed in game for a newly launched console is long behind us. But still, would it really have hurt the bottom line not to pack in a demo disk? Again, it seems downright cheap and a tad bit cynical. With only one launch title of its own available, Sony seems to be saying to gameplayers and even third-party game developers that it suckered you into purchasing this machine. Sony's job is done. It's up to the rest of you to figure out what this machine really is for anyway.

Oh, and speaking of cheap. Wait until you get a look at the disk drive tray, which spits out at you. I admit to liking the cute blue light that the Eject button flashes when you activate the tray. (I really wanted to see more of this blue theme, frankly). The tray itself is much less sturdy than those you'll find on many DVD players. We have visions of thousands of PS2 drive trays being inadvertently snapped off by pets, babies, side-swiping vacuum cleaners and overeager gamers putting in the latest PS2 disk.

One hour into my PS2 ownership and I'm already sounding jaded. Maybe it's just sinking in now that I lip-kissed a FedEx dude a short while ago. Let's fire up this hunk of hardware and see if it can ease my pain.

Steve Smith
Contributing Editor