Disc Read Errors on the PS2

I'll admit it. Somehow I became a video game junkie. My kids talked us into the darned thing, and now I'm hooked and can't get away.

My preference is for the games that resemble the classics. I love the updated Frogger and Prince of Persia games, or the Namco and Atari throwbacks. But when it came to some of my PS2 games, I found that many of my favorites had stopped working on our console.

A little observational power revealed that it was specifically any games burned on purple discs that were causing the trouble. You inserted the game and while it might have produced plenty of whirring noises from the Playstation 2 itself, no other payoff was forthcoming.

I unhappily shelved some of my favorite games, chalking it up to one of history's most perplexing unsolved mysteries, until my sister gave us her old console so that we could have two Playstations (because no self respecting family of multiple gamers can really get along with just one PS2). Her console was much, MUCH older than ours. The connections were different and felt positively ancient compared to our spiffier, newer model.

On a whim, I dug out some of those older, purple game discs. The thought process went something like, "older console, older games, hmmm."

Unbelievably, it worked! Of course, I'm no technician, and maybe our PS2 was simply defective, but I don't think so. I've had the kids take discs with them to friends' homes and try them, and they had experienced the same problems with disc read. Another question I cannot answer is how the purple discs would work in a Playstation 3. We haven't invested in one yet, although I'm not sure how much longer we can hold out.

My 18-month-old daughter celebrated the reappearance of the pretty purple games by destroying my copy of Frogger. So I still can't play it. But that's okay. It gives me more time to pass my new-found knowledge on to the rest of the waiting world.