IN WOODSTOCK, GA., northwest of Atlanta, two eager customers were ticketed for disorderly conduct late Wednesday night by police as they waited to buy PlayStation 2 at Wal-Mart when it went on sale at midnight.

If you re a gamer, you have to have one, said 30-year-old Gabrielle Aldort of New York, one of the many people who pre-ordered the $299 console back in February.

Sony had already warned that a parts shortage would limit its initial shipment of the widely anticipated entertainment system, which went on sale in North America Thursday. Complicating matters is that many of the stores had pre-sold their orders, leaving few consoles on the shelves for consumers to fight over on the launch date.

For some, that meant turning to the Internet, where by early afternoon, more than 100 PlayStation 2 s were listed for sale on the online auction site eBay. Some bids for the console topped $800.

PlayStation 2 signals a new generation of consoles, where consumers can eventually play DVD movies, download music, play games with their friends in another city, and do some surfing all through their TV sets.

Twenty-seven-year-old Shawn Warren of New York already owns the original PlayStation as well as Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast game consoles, but PlayStation 2 is something new, he said, before heading home early Thursday morning to test it out.

Kaz Hirai, president and chief operating officer at Sony Computer Entertainment America, said the company didn t want something that mimicked a personal computer. We want to give the consumer the experience of broadband, he said.

We packed a lot of technology and potential into this system, Hirai said. We definitely want to be the center of home entertainment.

Sony faces a double challenge next year, when Microsoft, armed with a $500 million worldwide marketing budget, launches its Xbox video game player and Nintendo unveils GameCube.

All will be battling it out in the $20 billion video game market worldwide, where Sony now is the leader.

The Sony launch, which includes 26 new game titles, is considered the most ambitious in video game history. But an industrywide shortage of little electronic processing parts has slowed production.