At some point last year I became obsessed with getting a copy of this game, not because I’d heard it was particularly good or interesting or rare, but because of the ‘fingerboard’ controller accessory you can see pictured above.
I love stuff like this; odd little experiments and gimmicks that developers come up with for their games. Things like the Lenslok anti piracy device, the little paddle controller that came with ‘Puchi Carat’, and even Namco’s fantastic ‘NegCon’ controller that I mentioned yesterday, all have enthralled me at various points in my games collecting history.
So it wasn’t a surprise that Yanya Cabalista’s tiny skateboard deck attachment caught my attention.
I set up an eBay alert and waited patiently. Eventually, about two months after I started looking, I was able to get a Japanese copy with the board for a decent price. Weirdly, a day or two after that, an American copy was listed ‘disc only’ for a pittance so I snapped that up too.
Annoyingly, when I went to play the games, neither would load using my Swap Magic discs, so they went onto the shelf as curios for the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, however, I started having some loading issues with ‘Ridge Racer V’. I was poking around in my PS2 and realised the brake release pin on the disc lid wasn’t working properly and this was slowing the disc down. As I fixed this issue I was reminded of the Swap Magic problems, so I tried it again, and it worked right away!
Long story short, (too late!?) today I’m playing the American version of ‘Yanya Caballista’, with the fingerboard from the Japanese version, on my European PS2 Slim, using Swap Magic 3.6.
I love stuff like this; odd little experiments and gimmicks that developers come up with for their games. Things like the Lenslok anti piracy device, the little paddle controller that came with ‘Puchi Carat’, and even Namco’s fantastic ‘NegCon’ controller that I mentioned yesterday, all have enthralled me at various points in my games collecting history.
So it wasn’t a surprise that Yanya Cabalista’s tiny skateboard deck attachment caught my attention.
I set up an eBay alert and waited patiently. Eventually, about two months after I started looking, I was able to get a Japanese copy with the board for a decent price. Weirdly, a day or two after that, an American copy was listed ‘disc only’ for a pittance so I snapped that up too.
Annoyingly, when I went to play the games, neither would load using my Swap Magic discs, so they went onto the shelf as curios for the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, however, I started having some loading issues with ‘Ridge Racer V’. I was poking around in my PS2 and realised the brake release pin on the disc lid wasn’t working properly and this was slowing the disc down. As I fixed this issue I was reminded of the Swap Magic problems, so I tried it again, and it worked right away!
Long story short, (too late!?) today I’m playing the American version of ‘Yanya Caballista’, with the fingerboard from the Japanese version, on my European PS2 Slim, using Swap Magic 3.6.
