Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X

I miraculously scored a PS5 thru Best Buy online the other week. Picked it up tonight. It’s huge and absurd, but honestly sitting here looking at it with its lights on in the semi-dark I’m coming around to it aesthetically.

It’s a lot of things, but I like how it gives me Hopper’s Nighthawks vibes most of all.

Demon’s Souls remake is incredible so far, I’ll save that for another thread.

i don't think i've ever felt as much desire for violent retribution as i do for the painful death of scalpers at the moment

The late teens looking kid who processed my order in the pick up area asked me “Is this your first one?”

Apparently a good amount of people have rolled through openly bragging about how this is the 3rd, 4th, 5th one they’ve snagged. Fuck those assholes for real.

real q - why is this such a big deal rn? surely there are very few exclusives and few TVs that can even show off the improved gfx?

It honestly shouldn’t be a big thing right now. Unless you’re a Souls dork and are really excited for that Demon’s Souls remake. Which is me. And maybe 10% of the market.

People freak for a hyped product regardless of its immediate usefulness, particularly if it’s rare and status-y.

I never got a PS4, I want a new gen machine to catch up on stuff I've wanted to play for ages and maybe new stuff over the next few years, shd've known capitalism never comes thru when you want it to

I was also stoked on grabbing the PS5 because I have a grip of PS4 games on disc that I never completed because my optical drive shit the bed. Being able to play PS4 games on the PS5 (with graphical/performance upgrades!) is a big sell.

Reports seem to indicate the PS5 won’t be terribly hard to come by in a couple of months. Production’s ramped up hard.

Demon's Souls and Spider-Man MM is way better than most launch lineups I can think of tbh, and I hear the platformer that comes preinstalled is really fun

Also being able to play Hitman 3 with fancy graphics and no Epic games compatibility headache would be a draw for me

i have been happily playing spider-man mm on my ps4 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

B-but ray tracing!

Whatever that is

it does look slick as hell at 60fps on piss5 tbf

Once you've become a Framerate Guy you cant really go back

thats right

miss me with that 30fps shit, i’m a 16.6ms frame-pacing diehard now

I'm sure something will come up, but I've yet to play anything on PS4 that has made me think, man, I wish this ran better. The Switch? Absolutely. But the PS4? So far, so good, with the exception of storage, maybe, and PS5 doesn't solve that problem. Pretty soon I'll need to install Red Dead, and I suspect I'll have to clear out half the hard drive.

did you know you can attach an external to your ps4 via usb? works v well

yeah, but I actually have one plugged in there as my backup drive. and as far as I can figure out you can't use one drive as a backup and as storage. I could be wrong though, but it seemed kind of tricky.

lol it never even occurred to me to back up my playstation.

I forget why I did it, exactly, other than because I could, but it may have followed some horror story about being 2/3 of the way through a big game and then having something fail or crash? Honestly, if I was 2/3 of the way through a few games I've played, even the ones people play again and again, and I lost all progress, I'm not sure I would start over again.

I've yet to play anything on PS4 that has made me think, man, I wish this ran better.

Ha, I have no interest in that one. I suppose the most conspicuous bellwether will be Control, which iirc I did buy, and which I may get around to in 2021.

Would recommend getting the Control DLC, also, unless you bought the ultimate version where they're included. The Foundation adds new enemies, locations, and hidden bits, while AWE ropes Alan Wake into the Control universe. Playing with the various objects in Control made me appreciate the meta "Alan fights WORDS!" Alan Wake ending more. After fighting 'real' shadow enemies through the game, at the time, the ending didn't connect. On the second AWE mission now and enjoying it. The main game's jukebox Expedition is still kicking my butt, but other than that, have used YT to find any missing secrets and ramp up my player.

I think I bought the base game because it was on sale? Or maybe there was no DLC at that point? Anyway, don't know what Alan Wake is!

Older game with a Twin Peaks / X Files vibe. Writer goes to remote town, population vanishes, uses flashlight as weapon against shadow people.

I was also stoked on grabbing the PS5 because I have a grip of PS4 games on disc that I never completed because my optical drive shit the bed. Being able to play PS4 games on the PS5 (with graphical/performance upgrades!) is a big sell.

I'm not getting a PS5 anytime soon but when I do will i need to get the disc version of the PS5 in order to do this?

Would recommend getting the Control DLC, also, unless you bought the ultimate version where they're included

Ultimate edition is free with PS+ for Feb btw so don't pay for this now if you haven't already, you'll get it anyway in a couple of days.

I just went ahead and overpaid for a PS5 this week. It's my son's 16th birthday and honestly, if he'd asked for a PS5 I'd have gently told him to piss off. But he's not actually asked for anything at all. And 16 is a semi big deal and he's having to spend it locked down with no party or friend contact and so I wanted to get him something big and surprising and...couldn't think of anything that'd fit the bill better really. Ebayed some other stuff I had lying around to make up the difference between RRP and the price I paid and that was enough justify the expense to myself heh.

Anyway it's still under wraps but yeah it's in the house!

dad of the year! well done, totally makes sense

Makes sense except for the bit in 2.5 years where he moves out to go to college and takes it with him and then I need to buy myself a replacement! Hopefully there'll be a slim version by then, at least.

lol i didn't think of that

Being able to play PS4 games on the PS5 (with graphical/performance upgrades!) is a big sell.

So I've been reading up on this, because it's not always true you'll get better visuals or performance in back compatibility mode. But in some situations it makes a huge difference! At the very least you'll be getting PS4 Pro equivalent performance (though not all games were patched to run any differently on the pro compared to the base PS4 anwyay). Beyond that though it depends on whether the game in question was using dynamic resolution (if it was, you'll usually get more consistently high resolutions on PS5) or whether it had an unlocked frame rate (eg Ghost of Tsushima does, which is why it can run at 60fps on the PS5 when it was only hitting 30 on PS4). Best title-by-title resource out there so far seems to be this thread:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ps5-backwards-compatibility-all-ps4-games-with-benefits.322747/

one underappreciated advantage is that the ps5 runs virtually silently compared to my old ps 4 pro, which perpertually sounds like a jet engine at max revs

I've heard our Joel's PS4 that was another big factor in wanting to skip straight to the 5

don't worry there will definitely be a nicer, cheaper version available in 2.5 years

https://i.imgur.com/veNpa5B.png

as the frequently annoyed owner of multiple left joy-cons that have become unusable thinks to drift (even after several self-repairs), may i be one of the first to say
NOOOOOOOO

Eh. I doubt any console has ever launched without some of its controllers doing this. The thing that makes the Switch special is that it eventually happens to ALL of them. Easy headline for clicks for now, but I’d be surprised if Sony’s fail rates are actually high enough to be a problem.

Let's see how they handle it. What also makes the Switch special is that Nintendo made it really easy to get the joy-cons repaired/replaced. Or at least it used to be that way.

They sent our one back as repaired and it wasn't repaired 👍🏻

Ugh, I'm on my third PS4 controller. One of them had phantom R2 inputs and the down D-Pad stopped working. It's such a lame thing to spend money on.

I wasn't 100% sure one of my Joy Cons was drifting, but I sent it in, anyway. So I'm not sure they repaired it, either, because maybe it wasn't broken! I did notice that the only time I ever had a real problem with drift was playing hours and hours of Breath of the Wild, and only in portable mode; my Pro has never had a drift problem. I've had no problems since, so either it *was* fixed or maybe the problem only came up when I played a game that involved virtually walking and running for hours.

My Joycons didn't start to drift until several hundred hours of gameplay, at least a couple of years. But when it started to do so, it was unmistakable - like even in something like Animal Crossing. Not sure if I want to bother sending it in for a fix tbh

I did this a few months back, it was just the left one, and it was pretty quick and stressfree. Would advise doing it.

forza horizon 5 means sony is on the clock to show me an exclusive i care about before i bail on them for this gen

xbox mentioned the other day that they are working on xcloud apps for smart TVs and putting series X hardware into their servers. with all these games seemingly coming to gamepass day 1 it's like they are bending over backwards to make sure I don't need to buy their consoles or games lol

oh huh that's interesting i guess. still not convinced it works well enough for faster action games though.

oof that Square stream was brutal. no FFXVI either :(

yeah i wasn't expecting them to have anything cool but they did worse than that by having already known stuff look worse than expected

FF16 is probably a 2023 game i think

the way PC hardware obtainability is going I'm most likely going to be looking towards consoles in the future. I do like the look of Forza 5.

What's the most recent XBox, the S?

Josh technically that's called the PS10.

Yeah, but on the street it's the PS Phat, or the Phat Stack. Everyone knows that.

Can't even remember the last time I put a disc in my PS5... glad I spent $100 to have a drive I don't use lol

Yeah I still haven't ever put a game in mine. Thought it'd be good to have a 4k BR drive though, and it sort of is, except it's so insanely loud when it spins up that I end up having to switch to headphones to stop the machine drowning out all the dialogue.

I use my drive for Blurays and it's not noisy at all except for a moment on start up

I got Spider-Man: Miles Morales on disk and it pretty much lives in my drive

As someone who only plays one game at a time, I use the disk drive all the time, depending on what I am playing. Alan Wake Remastered I just played on disc, Wolfenstein 2 I am playing digitally.

yeah, I'd read about the disc drive being noisy before buying my ps5 and was concerned but honestly it has been totally fine and not an issue.

I have however noticed recently that for some reason it can't play certain DVDs, I just get some error code and a message that it can't play that disc (DVD plays fine on a stand-alone DVD player). Not sure what's going on there.

I still mostly buy on disc (or disk? disk makes me think of a floppy disk) though. It's fun to still be able to give or lend a game to a friend once you're done with it.

I've found it fine for regular BR discs but it's specifically the 4k discs that send it into overdrive (do 4k discs spin faster than normal blurays? I mean I can imagine why they might need to but I've got no idea). It's not always loud straight away either, sometimes it'll be an hour into a film before it starts ramping up. Totally possible I've just got a duff one.

My PS5 plays 4K films pretty much silently after the initial spin up. The XBox X is much louder for that purpose.
I rarely buy any games on disc or otherwise unless deeply discounted.

I do appreciate being able to play lots of XBox 360 and some XBox games on disc on the series X as I have a good few of those.
The PS5 only seems to support PS4 & PS5 games on disc though.

I mostly rely on my gamepass or ps plus subscription for new things to play.
My backlog of games-to-play owned for older platforms and the PC is inhumanly long at this point.