Sony PlayStation 2 - Charocal black

The Play Station 2 has many nice functions and tons of games available for a reasonable price. It is available in jet black or silver (which is harder to find but looks really nice and matches my Sony Vega TV!). I have over 100 games for this console and I think it is the best console for under $300 right now for these reasons:

Advantages: Hundreds of fun and popular games available and are easy to find at any game store (unlike the less popular GameCube), many accessories are easy to find at any game store like wireless controllers (always a great first upgrade for any system!), doesn't cost a fortune for each game like the new PS3 or X-Box360 right now, is backwards-compatible with the older Play Station games, is easy to mod to play burned (copied) games, plays DVDs flawlessly and works great with my Logitech wireless controllers. I highly recommend them!

Disadvantages: The graphics capabilities are very good but aren't quite as good as the X-Box, there are only two controller ports compared to X-Box's 4 ports, and the load times are still longer than I want to wait but still faster than the older version...thankfully.

The bottom line: I would say that the Sony Play Station 2 is a great all-around game console. It can be easily modded to play burned games and it doesn't have disc reading errors like some older version consoles had. I think that the Sony Play Station 2 is the best all-around gaming console for under $300 right now, and other consoles such as the X-Box and GameCube don't quite compare to the quality or overall value you get with this one.