Games You Played Today VI (III in the west)

other things i like about the PS5

rest mode is good, being able to quick resume a game from rest mode is excellent, although you can only do it with one game and one media app at a time, not multiple games like on the newer xboxes

load times are so damn speedy on the ssd!

accessibility options galore! OS-level remapping! controller profiles! text-to-speech!

the voice recognition sucks, though. don’t turn on the “hey playstation” magic word, it will give you false positives like there’s no tomorrow

this is still true. however, my urge to play PS3 versions of those games on a streaming service is vastly diminished when they have DW8 empires and warriors all-stars in native PS4 versions!

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Games You Played Today III (US)

EDIT: Wait, did someone else make this joke with a thread recently?

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they made it higher up this thread

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Damn, this is a low point in posting for me

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I also just got a PS5—I was planning to get one later this year in advance of the two Final Fantasy games coming this year (we’ll see if FF7R2 actually makes it in the next 13 months), but I had already set aside the money, and I happened to see the disc version was available from Sony, and I know finding the edition you in stock want without some stupid bundle upsell isn’t a lock, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger. I confess, as someone who has had a PS4 for a few years, it’s about the least exciting (and somehow still most expensive) console purchase I’ve ever made. I don’t think I’ve ever waited 24 hours to set up a new piece of hardware before.

That said, I am enjoying the system. I’m a little dismayed that the internal storage is so small and you need a slightly fancy grade of SSD to upgrade it (and also that we live in an age where you’re all but expected to install internal components in a console), but it was very nice that I was able to pop my 2TB external HDD from my PS4 and run games off it with no fuss. And moving 40GB PS4 games I wanna play to the internal SSD is pretty snappy even from the HDD, so I’ll be fine for now.

It’s made me much more enthusiastic about the Sekiro playthrough I recently started on my PS4 (never finished it before, got stuck at the bottleneck boss a lot of people struggle with, but am clicking with the combat much better (though still not very well) this go-round). I can die or warp and be ready to go in about 3 seconds. It’s wild. That and the rest function actually allowing me to hop back in makes jumping back into the game real nice.

The only PS4 disc game I’ve upgraded to the PS5 version so far is Elden Ring, which does look pretty snazzy, though not mind-blowingly so, but again, the speed of loading really is kind of a game-changer. Existential anxiety can start to set in when you’re waiting the better part of minute between marathon runs at a hard boss. Makes returning to Elden Ring for a fresh playthrough sound more appealing. I didn’t realize quite how much I hated loading, honestly.

Astro’s Playroom is… cute. The exuberant love for the PlayStation brand feels tacky and cringe and overblown, imo, but I never thought I’d see Sony be the one to produce the Super Mario Sunshine sequel. It’s pretty by-the-numbers mascot platforming, but it’s not like we’re awash in those these days, so it’s a neat little diversion I’ll forget exists within a year. It does show off some of the gimmicks of the DualSense in a handy little way.

I remain in the camp that thinks the things Sony has done with the DualShock 4 and DualSense have not been interesting/valuable/used enough to justify more or less locking out the existence of a third-party controller market (at a time when I can use my 8bitdo controllers on at least 3 machines in my home). It seems like the biggest feature is the very fine tuning of the haptics/rumble stuff, but I’ll be honest, y’all, the rumble stuff has never felt all that compelling to me in any console, and often reads kinda chintzy. I think it’s supposed to help immersion, but it helps break it more often than anything for me. If you want to (eventually) port your game to PC, as even Sony does in these 2020s, why would you make any of these gimmicky features essential to a game’s interface/mechanics?

But yeah, it’s cute enough. Controller feels good. A little better than the DualSense 4 did.

Anyway, this hasn’t been all that interesting a post, because other than smoothing out some of the experience of using my PS4 (which I like!), it’s not all the interesting to talk about yet—I’m playing mostly the exact same games I was a week ago.

I suppose, having already had a healthy PS4 library, I am pretty far from meauxdal’s experience, but I can imagine that if I were coming to this from a decade or more away from console gaming, this would be a really fun experience. It’s a good system! I’m still puzzled as to why it’s been in such high demand, as it feels like mostly incremental improvements over the PS4/Pro (with an amazing dearth of exclusives, despite having been out for over two years now), but it is a damn fine system.

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The PS5 is a far better console than the PS4, but in the ways that count Steam is even better.

The biggest problem with the PS5 (and the one that’s least likely to be improved) is the pricing model. You need to buy specific hardware up front (including overpriced controllers), then the games are either $70 and virtually never get discounted, or you have to pick from a random selection that comes with a $5/month subscription.

That’s why everyone is always talking about exclusives. Non-exclusives don’t count because they’re always cheaper on Steam.

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We must not be playing the same PlayStation

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this is where the controller thing comes in for me. after playing with the dualsense for awhile, there’s no way i’d rather play a game on PC that didn’t support it. i didn’t expect to have any real fondness for the haptics/triggers, but honestly i think they are phenomenal in the right contexts. what really sold me is how, in monster energy supercross and assetto corsa particularly, you are given information through the haptics and triggers that you wouldn’t otherwise have. and interesting, nuanced information, not the classic ocarina of time “rumble when you’re near a secret” kind of information that’s just been shunted to a rumble function when it could have been handled otherwise.

it’s not all the way there yet, but it gives me hope for additional improvements in the future of force feedback/haptics in handheld controllers

the speaker in the controller still sucks, though. and it is criminal how few games have any gyro support. CRIMINAL

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If we are talking about discounted PSStore ‘special offers’ to the tune of snazzy 40bucks, what a treat, i agree :tarothink:

(Maybe they really believe so in Sony Exec Land, if one ignores Steam or retailer bargain bin territory w/ less than 20 bucks, which are the reason that the PS Store can go and die a horrible death unless Sony realizes that they are competing with other companies :tronyell: )

They better ship EDF6 on wetsern shores soon, so that this totem to capitalism finally gets some proper next gen runtime under its belt.

i’m two years late on this one but wow cyberpunk is bad

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I’m ready to quit ff9…it’s nice if you haven’t played a mainline ff in a long time especially a psx one, but it’s just not that great sorry…however ff9 is so smooth and chill that nothing is happening enough to piss me off and make me quit. I’m ready to get pissed off!

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I can’t tell how sarcastic this message is supposed to be, but my perception of Sony deals from being an active PS5 owner is that basically anything older than a year is significantly discounted every 4 weeks digitally or has steep price falloff on regular print runs of physical copies (not limited run shit)

Are prices lower on PC? Pretty likely, but not enough to matter?

(note that I am especially bitter about PC gaming this week because the PC I use for fighting games no longer runs some games at a stable 60 following a Discord update so now I feel like I need to get on a fucking gear treadmill I don’t want to be on if I just want to keep playing the shit I was already playing)

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ps5 seems like a pretty solid idea if you want a console and have an existing big ps4 library i guess

(is it quiet? that was my one major complaint with the ps4 honestly and drove me to build a pc full of noctua)

and certainly not as rancid as the switch where you can pay £60 for the hottest releases from 2017

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It’s pretty quiet but I tend to play with headphones on so it’s never a huge issue.

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It’s been awhile but I’m pretty sure people still agree: I deserve a PS5.

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i’m spoiler tagging this because i definitely would not have wanted to know how hard this shit goes out the gate beforehand but have i come to understand in the first few hours of yakuza 7 that it’s about a 42-year-old man who won’t stop talking about how dragon quest has influenced his life who gets shot by his boss and left in the trash to die and is rescued by a homeless man who he then teams up with to defend local sex workers from a government “clean up the streets” campaign by threatening to throw a garbage can of used cum rags out a window at protestors because holy shit

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steam isn’t even the best way to buy pc games, it’s the last resort for when the game you want isn’t on dlsite or some other place that lets you just download a zip and doesn’t require its own special middleman program thing to install and load games

anyway, fire pro is still great. i said this on twitter recently, but it’s a game i’ll probably be playing on and off forever. a lot of games are said to allow “banging your action figures together”, but none come close to this one

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WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FUCKING PREPPERS IN HOUSE FLIPPER??? I DONT UNDERSTAND!!! my clients are either ‘37, loves alcohol and womanizing’ or 'WANTS TO INSTALL A FULL WORKING BUNKER IN THEIR HOUSE IN CASE OF NUCLEAR COLLAPSE"

like i have 8 potential buyers and THREE OF THEM ARE PREPPERS

here ill just post a bunch of them

kolkowolsky
LONEWOLF
tedarrown

like dude i just wanna install some radiators and buy furniture that matches. now i gotta supply people with a years worth of food??? i didnt sign up for this!!!

and if its not preppers its dudes like

trusk

traitor

i dont know about you but i feel like JIMMY TRAITOR isnt gonna give me the whole story of his fix-up job

ive been just doing normal stuff like painting and busting down walls. im avoiding actually flipping houses because the customers are all nutjobs and stand over your shoulder while you’re cleaning out an abandoned property hissing ITS SO DIRTY HERE!! like no shit!! thats why im cleaning it!! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING HERE ITS NOT OPEN HOUSE I JUST BOUGHT THE PLACE

then i get this email and i guess im going to trap someone’s mother in law in a prison, but its supposed to LOOK like a bunker so his wife thinks its for safety reasons

i literally thought id be walking around helping those weird twins (this game has HGTV DLC) or doing bad interviews with identical newlywed couples looking for a baby, you know, like how they DO ON TV??? but no, this is the real america baby. we’re all killers looking for a safe, secure, radiation-proof, underground dwelling to hide out from the police in. I GUES THE BUNKER DUDES DONT BREATHE DOWN MY NECK WHEN IM CLEANING SO THEY HAVE THAT GOING FOR THEM

haha the books in this game rule


ARIZONA ROGUE: ROAD TO HELL

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i probably will just play ffxii zodiac age on switch bc playing in bed feels Right and… 4x speedup ?? :sweat_drops::sweat_drops::sweat_drops:

but maybe i will just focus on the jrpg im already playing… digital devil saga. the brutes base isnt toooo bad at all… i do find the game a bit less compelling than nocturne… like the karma board isnt as fun maybe as the traditional recruit + fuse thing… the dungeons dont have that sort of like monolitithic singular art installation vibe nocturne dungeons have… its also just so much easier i feel like i have tbh been sleepwalking thru large portions of this bc it doesnt actually push you much to use kaja / kunda spells and almost none of the bosses have reflect or null phys (in what i assume is the second to last dungeon) so ive mostly just been terrorising them with a massively minmaxed phys build serph…

plus i am not getting much use out of any party members but serph and agrilla!!! i dont think it does much of a good job at pushing you to use more than 3 guys. serph eats em up and everyone shares in the exp and atma gain anyways so its not even a matter of making sure theres an even spread.

anyways none of that is to say i think the game is less than excellent and it does i guess generally just feel like the first half of a larger experience which it is obvs… but there’s a reason i made nocturne my fucking life when i played it and that i picked up this like 30 hour jrpg summer 2022 and still havent finished it.

i am really glad they ended the sort of classic series on a series of high notes… nocturne → dds → strange journey is really a goated sequence of rpgs i feel like the ps2 was kind of the last hurrah for a good like… 15 years of jrpgs being sick as fuck. tri-ace auteurist logging on

i also really appreciate that they had like… some novel settings in there. doesnt dds2 take place in america?? raidou in taisho japan… strange journey in antarctica. i found smtv to be perfectly inoffensive generally i didnt really finish it or anything tho… i mean it has maybeee the best ost of the series which is saying a lot tho…

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sorry, I should have added more context there, doing so now:

I’ve gotten my hands on a PS5 (disc version) myself in december, and have been sitting on a PS4 (fat original version) since 2014ish, so lots of legacy discs to play on the 5. I had a fair share of time watching how pricing of deals on the PSStore somewhere went out of touch over almost a decade, when compared to physical discs and what other platforms do/did, MS included.

Maybe it is a yuropistan thing, but there has been a trend that big releases now hardly or never dip below a waterline that has been going up to 20bucks, and smaller titles also not make it below 10 for a long while/never, and even during promotions where you could get a good deal before (e.g. big in japan deals), you do not get discounts like that (e.g. less than a fiver for games like Vanquish) — also ftr, am not using any of the streaming abo services of Sony/MS, so if i don’t want to pay full price and it is not on Xbox/Steam, playing the waiting game for a discount.

Sure, it may be my fault for not circling above the store more often/each week to get these deals if they still exist, but there was a time when it wasn’t pure luck to get my hands on a good deal, and when you have alternative platforms like steam/Xbox available, platform choice is dictated by pricing/availability, and my money has consistently been going elsewhere … leading to less game time on the PS4/5, which in turn means less chances to notice there are deals that might fall into my perceived price range.

And, finally, add to that the crappy PSStore design where you have to dig to find out what a sale is going for if you have already bought a game, so i don’t know what Sony is asking for e.g. Last Guardian or Rez at the moment.
(also, add a five to ten bucks premium on PS5 disc prices over Xbox in the first two weeks, although the Xbox disc aisle has been shrinking to 1/4 or less compared to PS4/5, so that’s that factor as well).


So all in all, consider me pretty unhappy with Sony price gauging in Europe since at least 2017 onwards, deals exclusively went the way of HTPC or Xbox whereas PS3 over Xbox360 was at least 90/10 ratio, if not more.

Yeah, i’m fully guilty of sounding like a jaded boomer or gamer-granddad here, sorry for the rant :servbotsalute:

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