u/rattyhandpuppet

I used to have many, many PS2 games but I got rid of all but a few 10 years ago. These are what remain. My copy of Silent Hill 2 is a mishmash of a Greatest Hits case with a black label disc I got in Texas for $15, and I have a loose Manhunt 1 black label that I’ve probably had since it came out but still plays even though its been abused for decades. My fave in my lil stack is Half-Life 1. My manual even still has the mail-in registration card attached! A close second is my Okami copy. Can’t beat that ending song :)

I picked up this white DS3 at a game store a lil while ago, and I love it. I’m unfamiliar with the JP labels though and I know these get faked regularly. Do we think it’s legit?

So I have been experimenting with my 2014 SE hatchback to try and mitigate the shudder and general transmission weirdness on this car. I’ve had it since October 2024, and ran exclusively 91 in it for the first 10 months or so of it’s time in my care.

I knew the car had flex fuel capability but always thought it was just 85 octane garbage gas until I researched it and learned it really should be called “105 Race Corn”. Since about August of last year, I switched to exclusively filling up with E85, and the results were very surprising. The car seems to really like sipping corn juice, as the low end torque and overall stability of the car as a whole immediately improved on the drive home from the station.

As far as I know, the 2.0l Duratec in these things has a compression ratio of like 12.0:1, which historically absolutely cannot be run on 87, which the owners manual states is just fine for this car. My thinking is that Ford tried very hard to make this thing as financially appealing as possible and implemented timing changes and knock sensors to allow it to run on cheaper gas and to allow them to say it gets 31mpg average, but at the cost of component durability.

However, I also believe that most of that was corporate meddling and it caused many of the transmission issues we see today in the car. I’d be willing to bet that a vast majority of the DPS6’s that have issues are being run on 87 and driven like a normal automatic.

The DPS6 is a very complex piece of machinery and requires very stable voltage and data from all other systems to work properly. When you run 87 and go to shift, many times the engine may sense micro-knock, pull timing just a tiny little bit, and all of the sudden the DPS6 is making a shift with bad data and shudders to correct. Once I switched to E85 and made sure a new battery was installed, the shuddering went away almost entirely. Theres still some weird days where it will act up a little bit, but now the vast majority of the issues I encounter are user-error (bad gas input etc) or possibly electrical (I haven’t done the ground mod).

TLDR; To mitigate the shudder, I wholly believe that if you have the ability to run E85 in your DPS6 equipped Focus, you should do so because I think thats how ford really designed this car to operate. Also make sure you keep very up to date with your battery, oil changes (every 3k seems to be best for this engine) and possibly try the ground mod (although I’m still not convinced it’s not placebo). Also NEVER EVER creep on the brakes (letting off the brake lightly to coast forward) as it causes the clutch to slip nonstop. The rule for this car is: you are either going, or stopping, zero in-between (when possible). I think you will see a great improvement in the drive-feel just as I did.

RIP Daniel you did a funny ragdoll. Excited to play through this game again ;P

I have been hitting up every used game store I can to get my PS3 collection varied as I can. I’m looking to build a fully offline library with as much content on-disc as possible.

Hey y’all, yet another haul. This time I found some pretty interesting ones. Backbreaker has been on my list for years and I found a sealed copy. Also the Fallout 3 GOTY I found has a gorgeous shiny fold-out slip cover. How did I do?

Got these 3 today, even though its a lil beat up on the outside I’m especially excited to get the version of Borderlands GOTY with all the DLC on the disc, which means I just need the Pre-Sequel and its DLC’s to complete the PS3 Borderlands games. The Ultimate Action Pack was such an oddity I just had to pick it up. It was only $9 and I saw copies of both Tomb Raider and Just Cause 2 on the same shelf for $9 each. Also got a new shelving unit for the collection, it makes it look so small now! Cant wait to have this thing full 👾

I’m going for an essentials collection, and especially interested in the games that are trapped on the 7th gen. What do y’all think of my choices? I also have some sports slop I got for free with my 3001, and a few sad discs without a case as well as a couple of duplicates.