White PS2

Sep 22 2002

When the Zen Black and Ocean Blue PS2s came out, I was a little disappointed. Sony has the best, most popular video game console in the world, and when it was time to make a Special Edition, the best thing they could think of was to make it out of translucent plastic. This is something that, since Apple did it in 1998, has come and gone as a design trend. When Microsoft offered a Special Edition XBox for Japan that was made out of translucent plastic, it was kind of stupid. Translucent plastics were getting old even for staplers at this point, and unlike Apple, nobody else actually designed their product to look _good_ when translucent; they just filled their normal mold with a different kind of plastic that hardens clear. Anyway, It was even dumber to see Sony do this with their PlayStation 2 a year later. I thought a ghostly or iridescent white would have been much, much nicer and more original. Well, here’s a compromise: a translucent white PS2. It looks pretty neat, but the black buttons and cables, and the ugliness of the PS2’s visible guts aren’t helping much. It is my favorite PS2 design so far, though.