NEXT GEN Gaming Console, PS5 and Xbox Series X news/upates

I'd mainly use it for PS4 games, my backlog is huge.

 

That's what she said? Idk, I don't watch the Office.

Haha, there are a lot of incredible PS4 games, that's what I'm doing also.

 

I purposely didn't buy Tshushima until after PS5. I got Spiderman & Ghosts at the same time. Ghosts wound up receiving 97% of my attention. Amazing, beautiful game. Not as good as Breath of the Wild, but also very much better in other areas. Looks breathtaking on my OLED.

 

Nice i've heard nothing but good about that game. Still need to play it. Let me suggest one for your PS5, Days Gone. It has a PS5 update (and is free with plus in the PlayStation collection. The game is underrated and graphically stunning.

 

It seems everyone is still sold out of Xbox Series X. Unbelievable.

 

The scalpers aren't.

 

There have been drops by Best Buy and Walmart this week.

 

Supposedly there was a restock at Costco today but I never saw it. It was sold out every time I checked. I'm starting to think it's a myth and everyone is just ****ing with me.

 

For those buying the Series X, what do you plan on playing? (not being sarcastic)

 

Played the f out of it last summer, one of the best PS4 games for sure and a breathtaking world.

 

I have an X since November. All-Access with GamePass Ultimate came with it. The Visual boost that has been done on Many games is impressive. I play mostly Madden (current Gen because league...Next Gen for M22) and FIFA. I finishing up Shadow of the Tomb Raider (with has a mode that does 60fps now and looks great). I have so many games I need to play with their visual upgrades. Gears 5 may be next for me. GamePass is great.

Got an Elite 2 Controller and just received the new Xbox Series X Wireless Headset from MS. You have play with the EQ, but it is great for the $99 price after that. Firmware should improve this.

 

If I'm going to grab a $700+ Xbox bundle from Gamestop I might as well give in to the scalpers. I just want the console. No extras that I won't use.

 

Okay brehs I finally got the PS5 order through after trying since October.
Info sites said that it would be available on one of the bigger online stores today and I refreshed like a madman for 2hrs straight, finally netting it directly at the start of the sale.
My order went through and it was sold out like literally 30sec later.

Will arrive this week, can't wait,

 

Yall bozos STILL don't have one yet? Geez.

 

Germany really ain't blessed with em somehow, many of my other Euro friends got one weeks or months ago.
Pretty much every sale is sold out after a few seconds or 1-2min, and they are usually not announced beforehand.

 

A bit of news and follow-up.

That one out of 4 controllers that worked perfectly for me? Started getting progressively worse stick drift a month or two again, which to be fair was only noticeable in Genshin Impact for me... but apparently a lot of people were having stick drift problems on PS5 controllers.

Well... there was a patch for controllers today, and... it seems to have fixed the stick drift, at least from my testing so far. Woot.



Also, unrelated, but Sony can go die in a fire for shutting down the PS3/PSP/Vita stores. I can't imagine their cost for running that is all that high. And *for now* they're saying downloads will still remain available after the shutdown, but it's probably only a matter of time before that too goes away, just like Nintendo did with the Wii's store.

All this digital future stuff is great until you get to 10-15 years down the line, and you find out that those things you "bought" were really a decade-long rental, not a purchase. As a serious gaming enthusiast, there's little that could piss me off more than making some games *literally unobtainable* because they never got physical releases and you shut your online store down.

 

Meanwhile, Xbox is selling games from every generation of Xbox.

Shutting down the older PlayStation store stuff is probably related to them not wanting to deal with its vulnerabilities anymore. You can download anything you want from it and use them on hacked CFW consoles (look up NoPayStation).

I've got a hacked Vita and PlayStation TV with 512 GB microSD cards (using the SD2Vita adapter). I can play pretty much any Vita, PS1, or PSP game on them, it's great. Also have my XStation + HDMI modded PS1. Ideally you'd be able to play the older stuff on the latest hardware but Sony doesn't seem too interested in that, unlike Microsoft.

 

That's the funny part, since in the 360 era I strongly felt Microsoft was being the bad guy as far as being customer-friendly. As soon as Phil Spencer jumped on they flipped the script to being the good guys in my eyes, whereas as soon as Sony took their big sales lead with PS4 it seems like they stopped trying to be nice.

Nintendo on the other hand, I don't so much view as not caring about gamers like Sony... more like they just remain wildly incompetent at digital marketplaces in general.

To be totally fair to Nintendo and Sony though, one can at least say that due to architecture similarities and also less generations to go back to, Microsoft can do backwards compatibility for all their games with *much less effort*. Sony has their hard-to-emulate PS3 games and Nintendo has it even worse with many games that depend on things like touchscreen devices or motion controls.

That said, Microsoft wasn't putting forth even that relatively minimal effort on backwards compatibility until Phil made it a priority, so I still give them credit that they're doing it now. Also, I get that PS3 game emulation may be hard, but PS1/2 and PSP emulation *totally isn't*. I can't decide if it's more down to some delusion that selling streaming of old games could be profitable, or that it'd cannibalize newer game sales, or if it's just down to sheer laziness / not giving a crap.

So yeah, pretty annoyed that Sony seems to have gone from pro-gamer good-guys in the PS3 era to the evil empire in the PS5 era. Sucks for me that I still like their game options better than Xbox.

 

You probably know this, but PlayStation's leadership has changed quite a bit since then. A lot of the people that helped push the PS4 off to a good launch are either no longer at Sony or have a reduced role. Only exception is probably Mark Cerny as the system architect.

I don't think Jim Ryan is *horrible*, but he definitely doesn't seem to have the same ideals as Phil Spencer or some of those running PlayStation earlier. Definitely more business oriented and not interested in things he thinks are niche (like backwards compatibility). They do have other people that I think are good (mostly on the dev side I think), but the business guys at top are not the best IMO.


I can think of some reasons why they'd shut down the online stores (the non-technical ones are probably the influential in the decision), but it is obviously a bad PR move. I wonder if they could just partner with another company (maybe even a PC distributor like GOG or something?), and have them take over and maintain the sale and support of older titles. They could even just roll access into a PS+ Premium option if they were really worried about the maintenance/support costs. Lots of different ideas that would be pretty cool for gamers, but yeah this doesn't seem like something Jim Ryan bothers to spend much time thinking about.

 

Oh man, this pisses me off even more:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021...switch-lurking-in-aging-playstation-hardware/

Essentially, the tiny internal battery in PS4 & PS3 that keeps track of the time even while the system is unplugged is going to die sooner or later, and when that happens and the battery is replaced, currently the system is designed to require a one-time check-in with PSN servers for even PS4 disc-based games to operate at all, as well as all digital PS3 content. Meaning, Sony turning off PSN for PS3/4 could turn those systems into bricks even if they are still operating fine. They could fix this with a firmware update, but who knows if they actually will.