An old PC playing a PS2 game — Image: Kotaku | Shutterstock

While last month the emulation scene was celebrating the fact that PS3 games were making solid progress on the PC, this month it’s the PlayStation 2’s turn, with the PCSX2 team announcing that every single game on their plate can now boot at least to the menu screen. Well, almost every single one.

Of the 2689 games in the emulator’s database, over 97% of them are marked as “playable”. That means you can fire them up and enjoy them largely issue-free, but there might be some slight hiccups or bugs along the way. Only 22 games are marked as “perfect”, because to earn that badge they need to be absolutely free of any kind of bug whatsoever, which is going to be rare considering we’re talking about playing one system’s game on another system that’s pretending to be that first system.

The milestone the team are celebrating today in particular is that while not everything is fully playable, pretty much every single PS2 game can now at least boot to its menu screen, which is 2688 of the 2689 games on PCSX2’s database.

The one game that doesn’t work? That needs “special controller emulation”? Why it’s Real World Golf, released in Europe in 2005 and North America and Australia in 2006. An otherwise drab golf game, with dreary menus and bland presentation, Real World Golf was notable more for the hardware it shipped with than the game it built around it.

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Included in the box was a version of the Gametrak, a 3D peripheral that used cables—attached to the player’s hands—to determine movement. It had seen use with the fighting game Dark Wind, and was bundled here with the idea that between the cables and a small plastic golf club included in the box, players would be able to swing just like they would in real-life and have their actions recreated in the game, kinda like a prototype version of Wii Golf.

To see both the Gametrak in action, and Real World Golf, here’s a 2007 review:

Which is my way of building up to the point that there is no way in hell they are ever going to get this thing working in an emulator, and so when they say it doesn’t really count, it doesn’t really count.