I have a couple games that have a blue bottom (2 are from Blockbuster, 1 is purchased new from Best Buy) On all of them, it makes it sound like the drive is working doubly hard in order to process stuff. I can actually hear the disc spinning, whereas I can't with the silver bottomed discs, is this an abnormality? (My PS2 is relatively new, purchased it in June)

That's normal. Blue discs are standard PS2 CD format, silver discs are DVD format. The drive spins the blue ones at higher and more variable speeds so the unit makes more noise.

Ok, cool. I had been avoiding playing them as a result, now I don't have to

Careful, I sent my PS2 to Sony cause it eventually stopped playing PS2 BLUE CD format discs, as well as PSOne CD discs (essentially the same). I had no noise as you speak of, but go to the point where horizontal or vertical it wouldn't play.

Blockbuster puts stickers on their discs, so you might be hearing the sticker hit the drive mechanism everytime it spins. You would think that it doesn't add taht much thickness but i rented a game and it was louder than my Dreamcast because of the sticker noise.

Blue discs make a horrible noise in my PS2. I did some research and realized that the blue discs (CD Roms) are lighter than the silver discs (DVD Roms), and some PS2's, as a result, have problems with the blue discs. I found a solution. Whenever I buy or rent a blue disc, I just take clear packing tape and put one strip on each side of the hole on top of the disc. This gives the disc more weight and eliminates the noises. Hope that helps....beats paying Sony $120 to fix it.

Mine makes noise both on blue and silver discs. But they all play well, I don't really care bout the noise, as long as it plays.