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The PS5 - Printable Version

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The PS5 - Dark Jaguar - 30th December 2020

I have one now.  Here's my first impressions.  First of all, a bunch of quality of life improvements in the OS that frankly should be back ported to the PS4.  You can actually see install progress from the disc now.  There's more options for the share button, including disabling instantly taking a picture when it's hit.  It does NOT yet support making folders.  I have no idea why it always takes so long to implement this feature every single generation, but here's hoping that one is coming soon.  It's a must on my PS4.

Backwards compatibility is very nearly perfect.  It's not emulation, it's just running fully compatible hardware and the games use an OS and driver layer to communicate on the PS4 so translating what little needs to be translated is straight forward enough.  The older games reach whatever framerate cap they've been programmed with and stick to it.  Bloodborne absolutely needs a patch to raise it's FPS cap from 30 to 60 or even 120 though.  Fans managed it on emulation, though it does require recoding a lot of gameplay elements that were foolishly tied to the frame rate instead of real time or the game plays way too fast and things don't sync up right.  To this day I still don't get how developers keep doing that.  They have got to realize that it's just plain bad design by now.  Kingdom Hearts in particular has suffered in it's future ports requiring numerous patches to resolve various elements that were tied to frame rate and had to be tied to real time instead.  Here's hoping an industry wide shift is occuring to make that kind of design a thing of the past forever.  (Admittedly that flawed design goes back a long ways, to Star Fox.  If you overclock that game it plays far faster cinematics and all, and it would need a far more involved fan patch to make all the cinematics and the general gameplay "lock" to a certain speed while still running at a smooth 60fps.)

The controller is extremely well designed.  It may just be my favorite one yet.  Now, the awkward feel of using that giant middle track pad as "start" and "option" as select is still an issue.  I never liked that "feel".  However, it's not all that bad and I do get the desire to make "share" such a prominant feature.  The HD rumble makes a big return after being put in and then ignored on the Switch.  I wonder if more developers will take advantage of it this time around?  Maybe, maybe not since MS has done absolutely nothing to their own controller's design.

Well, now there's the elephant in the room.  The console's physical design.  It's ugly and it's awkward.  They failed twice.  They put form over function but the form well... I'm sure you've all seen the jokes online already, and it's far worse when you see it in person.  The thing is a lump of misshapen plastic that calls the eyes to it, and that's considering I have it stacked up with all my other consoles going back to the beginning of time.  The thing is just... ridiculous and looks like it was designed in 1999 by Dell, not 2020 by Sony.  No, the "fins" aren't there for cooling.  Relying on plastic to transfer heat is NOT how anyone would ever build something.  It includes a little circular base.  This base is a requirement whether horizontal or vertical.  Remember the horizontal stand for the PS2?  Remember how much everyone joked about that?  Even Sony broke "compatibility" with it in later "fat" PS2 redesigns.  It was utterly pointless.  Well, this time it has a point.  The sides of this thing are curved.  Both of them.  The thing rocks around and jiggles if you don't use the stand to keep it stable.  That said, it's even worse.  The stand barely holds on with two plastic clips.  That's it.  If you use it vertical, it also has a screw to more properly mount it to the base, but if you go horizontal you have no way to screw it in at all.  In other words, if you pull the console out to do something like plug in a cable it pops right off the stand as often as not.  It gets worse.  The stand only barely makes it stable.  It STILL rocks around if you nudge it enough.  It isn't stable in ANY configuration.  Someone would have to 3D print a better solution to this thing.  Further, it doesn't "look" right in either orientation.  It looks like it's just... off no matter what.  Here's how I'd redesign it.  I'd flatten the top and bottom and tuck in those fins so they're even with the inner black curve.  That's it.  Do that and not only will it look a lot better, it'll still be distinct and it'll actually be stable when horizontal without the need for the stand.

Alright, there's one other thing.  I got the one with the optical drive.  I basically had to.  I own too many games for PS4 on disc.  If I was going to play them on this thing and make it my main way to play PS4 games, I had to do that.  Alright, so far so good.  The drive also plays all my media and the OS even supports playing custom soundtracks in games the way the 360 used to.  However, for some reason they still don't have a CD player application.  The laser IS there, I checked the specs.  It CAN read CDs.  It just doesn't have a program to play them.  That's the same oversight the PS4 had.  I don't get it.  It isn't a licensing issue.  CDs don't require licensing to design hardware that plays them.  It's an open standard.  Even if it was, SONY MADE THE STANDARD!

Anyway, that's about it.  It's a nice system, and I like how x86 has become standardized in the console space now so that we can get BC baked in going forward.


RE: The PS5 - A Black Falcon - 31st December 2020

As an Xbox Series X owner all I can say is you chose the wrong side. Starwarsbattle


RE: The PS5 - Dark Jaguar - 31st December 2020

You and your well-designed shape!  I do have a Series X though.  It's called my PC.


RE: The PS5 - A Black Falcon - 7th January 2021

At least for me, my PC cannot connect to a large, big-screen 4K TV at 4K.  They are in different rooms, I can't just plug it in.  I can stream to the TV at 1080p via the Steam Link, but that's it.  It's ironic -- PCs used to have the higher resolution screens, but now it is often the other way around...

So yeah, PC games are great and I have always loved them, but some kinds of games are more fun on a TV than a computer monitor; it depends on the game.


RE: The PS5 - Dark Jaguar - 10th January 2021

Fair enough.  I'm actually entirely in favor of MS's recent policy to make sure all of their first party titles come to Windows and fast.  They're even putting them on Steam too, which is where I'm getting them.  I mean, technically The XBox One and Series both run Windows 10 in a special restricted mode, so there's nothing keeping them from instantly just releasing those games on PC.  Sony on the other hand haven't fully gotten behind such a policy, only dancing with it a little.  So, the decision on which console to get was pretty easy for me.

Well, except I rewarded Sony for being more restrictive with their software.  That said, frankly Sony has first party titles I actually care about.  MS's exclusives are... MIA.