I’ve spent the past week experimenting, tweaking, cursing and crashing in my attempts to run a solid PlayStation 2 emulator on the PC. I come to you after my brutal journey with the fruits of my labor, hopefully making your imminent adventure far more enjoyable and infinitely less frustrating.

Why would anyone want to emulate PlayStation 2 games on the PC?

Simple: PS2 games look better than they have ever looked. They look better than the original PlayStation 2 and they look better than the PlayStation 3’s built-in emulator, available only earlier models. Why do PS2 games look better with PC emulation? Because you can use the power of your video card to render games at super-high resolutions. For instance, I’m currently playing Final Fantasy XII at 1920 x 1080 with x2 Anti-Alias at a steady 60-frames-per-second! It looks freaking sweet.

Here is a little proof. The first image shows Final Fantasy XII as it looks running at its native resolution while the second image is enhanced emulation. Note the crispness of the emulation shots, while the standard PS2 version is full of jaggies and pixelation.

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Native Resolution

Emulation

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Alganon is a new MMORPG that looks frighteningly similar to World of Warcraft, probably for the simple reason that too many companies lack the drive and creativity to deliver something new. Hence, yet another World of Warcraft inspired MMO for your playing pleasure. On the upside, it looks better than most clones and, perhaps best of all, the beta is free-to-play, so you don’t have any excuses to at least try it out.

Head here for sign-up and download instructions.

Back in 1938, a very young Orson Welles, along with his acting troupe The Mercury Theatre, performed a live drama on CBS radio called War of the Worlds, based on the classic book by H.G. Welles. Directed without commercial interruptions and presented as a live news broadcast of an alien invasion, many people across America were fooled into thinking an actual alien invasion was taking place.  The next day, all hell broke loose. One fringe benefit of the event was that it catapulted Orson Welles into super-stardom, allowing him to go to Hollywood where he was able to make Citizen Kane without any studio interference.

In celebration of the forthcoming movie Me and Orson Welles, a special website has been created that will air the original CBS broadcast live on the Internet on October 30th, 8PM EST.

You can listen here.

For more information and backstory on the CBS radio drama War of the Worlds, use the following links:

Wikipedia Entry

Time Magazine article

He was a Father, an actor, a soldier, and even a famous wrestler and manager in the WWF, but we’ll remember him best for being a plumber. A very large, very eccentric plumber who experimented with rubber band facial piercings.

Today we mourn the passing of Louis Vincent Albano due to natural causes. He is survived by his wife, their 4 children and 14 grandchildren. Our condolences to them on behalf of all of our staff.

As he goes towards the light at the end of the sewer pipe and moves on to the next level, our thoughts also go out to his brother Luigi and his longtime companion, Princess Peach.

On a more serious note… the person who comes up with the most creative alternate headline or opening sentence for this post in the comments below, will get some sort of Nintendo-related swag (still to be determined, but it will be worth your effort) and a free t-shirt from our sister site, GameAlmighty.

Update: We have decided we will accept poems/hiakus, and illustrations too. Anything creative related to the passing. (And be sure your profile contains your correct email address so we can contact you in the event that you win.)