Remember when the og ps3 had back compat except everything ran like shit and then they ditched it entirely in every subsequent model.
1 Like
I definitely had stuff I played on it that my last comp couldnāt play well. But literally the only game on it I care about that I canāt play on PC is Bloodborne.
So itāsā¦lost a lot of itās luster.
3 Likes
There were two backwards compatible versions though, right? As I understand it, the original fat 20/60gb (with 4 USB ports) had the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer chips from the original PS2 for true compatibility. Later models had software emulation of the PS2 with serious compatibility issues for some games. Then I think they dropped it altogether? Certainly for the slims.
1 Like
I like PS4 a lot more than PS3 or Xbox360. it isnāt particularly exciting but no one outside of nintendo has been offering exciting hardware for the past two decades lol
and yeah there was a brief time where it was great to play games that I couldnāt run on my PC.
5 Likes
honestly it was probably like the best no bullshit console with the most interesting library since the PS1 which was iirc exactly their stated goals, but itās not like it has any personality, because it succeeded in bringing forward the consoles-are-PCs era where indies can ship &c. &c.
none of this makes their strange confidence in the PS5 any clearer
4 Likes
both xbox4 and ps5 just seem full of bullshit tbh
Iād rather just buy a fancy video card. are there even any untimed exclusives for either at this point?
3 Likes
The confidence is simply, āwe were worried about this in the last console transition for even clearer stormclouds (the unstoppable growth of mobile and F2P business models), but proved a dedicated game box is still a solid businessā. The upcoming upending force is streaming and the Netflix-ization of games Microsoft is foretelling but those are all hypotheticals next to Sony consolidating its first-party studios and shipping tens of millions of PS4s a year. Itās a box. It plays games, as well as any consumer product. That right there is worth 100m lifetime sales if you execute it well enough.
Itās that same old business story: consoles are a mature market so itās quieter and stability can be misread as decline.
9 Likes
Is this about the PS4? I know the major Sony studio exclusives arenāt nothing, but were those really enough to compare to the bevy of weird, great and interesting-but-bad games that were released on the PS2, or even the PS3? I can appreciate that this generation brought a lot of the variety that indie games almost exclusively gave to the PC in prior generations, but the big games were just so similar and I think this generation has definitely been the least exciting in a long time.
6 Likes
Oh hmm i didnt quite know these details. In any case i had the very first 60gb ps3 and even that barely worked for most ps2 games. Like, u couldnāt play jak and daxter without it crashing every 10 minutes
Weird. Never had issues myself with OG 60gb but maybe I got lucky with the games I played. Just remembering now how they nuked the software emulation feature on the models that had it with a system update at some point lol. Still, kinda cool they all run PS1 games I guess.
What i didnt know this. Thatās tight
Iām familiar with this critique ā both from @AutomaticTiger locally, and Michael Thorsen on twitter, and while I agree with them on lots of other stuff, I have to admit Iāve never really understood it, because it seems specifically to be an argument about:
- variety burying a lot of new stuff (more of a curation problem)
- AAA being better-organized and a lot of expensive broken stuff not being released the way it used to (fair, but thereās lot of much more interesting small games)
- putting old japanese titles on a pedestal
3 Likes
I think itās the discussion in the āfavorite consoleā thread: do we want these boxes to be small and distinct, with games built around their technical and market limitations, or do we consider them as an abstraction between the games themselves and the player?
Iām happy with our modern world where I can play most anything most anywhere, but I have a nostalgia for the old world that I must mistrust because plastic cannot love me like a game alive in its loops and world can.
10 Likes
Thatās the ticket. But seriously,
it was in this generation that identity of the console ecosystem and each console individually seemed to not really become relevant. Every console, with the exception of a couple homogeneously designed Sony studio exclusives, and Xbox games no wants to play, just became a the game station you play the same games everyone else plays on their own game station. This is ultimately a fine thing, but it makes this generation very difficult to compare with the past generations because I think purpose of consoles is not the same. If generation is still going to be tied to hardware cycles, staging conversations in the boundaries of console generations is going to be way less interesting, or useful, than trying to discuss by other means the past 10 years of games and the ways we encountered them and actually played them.
The only thing which survives this change, I think, is the discussion about console exclusives. And in that case I would argue for myself that this has been the least interesting generation of Playstation or Xbox exclusives.
9 Likes
ps4 has been very good as this relatively affordable box you can buy that runs near every contemporary game, itās about as good as you could expect anything from the 2010s to be
if it didnāt sound like a large aircraft i might not have built a pc in 2016
agree, i struggle to think of a compelling exclusive beyond bloodborne
you know i was going to post āis there a way i can put āwhat exactly do you find exciting about nintendo hardwareā without reading dismissive or snide lol Ā£330 android tablet etc.ā but the more i thought about it the more the switch stands out as this kind of weightless low commitment thing i can pick up without thinking about Ecosystems and that kind of bloated ui everything else has
7 Likes
I liked PS4 and Switch with PC for the PC-centric stuff. Switch basically replaced the PC as an indie playspace for me. PS4 is the most straightforwardly ātraditionalā console and PS5 seems the same way. I think the lack of distinction between the generations of consoles are becoming a bit smartphone-like. Faster load times and streaming is basically the only thing that really matters for this jump and Switch or a decent PC have pretty fast loads already.
2 Likes
the PS4 has my wife and her game and therefore is okay
even ignoring that Sony bumped her a month because The Last Guardian finally coalesced and then the game bombed
9 Likes
Yeah I was considering getting one for Horizon Forbidden West. I wonder how well it will perform on my non-Pro, SSD-modded PS4ā¦
Thereās a lot of fine aiming so resolution matters, and thereās a lot of fast travel (stressing loading times)
2 Likes
I have an SSD in a USB3 caddy and also a stock PS4 so Iām looking forward to finding out
3 Likes
donāt know what region ps3 you had but none of the european versions got that hardware, not even with the original model. it was kind of an ntsc exclusive thing
1 Like