I have been playing console gaming exclusively for a long time. I don't play games on a PC because of all the distractions that come with PC gaming. I work on a PC all the time so gaming on it would be overdosing on an addictive drug. I got a super metroid snes from my grand mom in 1995 - that is how long I have been console gaming. I was amazed by a 6 button controller and assumed that more buttons would mean better games.
Ever since the PS4 Pro launched console gaming has done a nose dive in almost all areas except No Man's Sky. NMS is pretty much the only reason I would buy a new video game console in this day and age. The console gaming scheme is littered with the tears of gamers all over the world. I can watch modern console games on youtube at 4k 60fps and IMHO they don't seem all that fun - pretty but not fun. Besides pressing the buttons yourself there is no real reason to buy these new "prettier" games because I can watch a playthrough on youtube on my 4k tv and have pretty much the same experience with added commentary and the ability to skip the boring parts. I can enjoy a game for 10 years. Games should not be telenovelas. Get off my lawn
But the experience is not what we are talking about in this article. I can talk about experiences and games that really want to be movies until the cows come home. This article is about the abomination that is "Pro" consoles or "mid-gen refreshes". Whatever you might call it. Usually you see these abominations being promoted by PC-gamers- disillusioned by the constraints of console gaming. I am not even going to talk about the train wreck that is Xbox. Sony is the main culprit in its goal to create more profit, and decided to introduce pro consoles as a way to create a new SKU. A SKU which inadvertently fragmented a market place that does not handle fragmentation well. If you want configurations, performance vs quality modes, updates everyday, you should play your video games on PC. Console gaming was a place where you buy a game and you just play until you are sick of it and be done. Worse case scenario you would have a game running at 30fps because the developer chose to compromise one thing or the other. Long and short is you had the game and that was it.
A Lot of articles cry about not being able to change the wallpaper on the Switch or watch Netflix but these authors fail to realise that these things DO NOT MATTER. The only thing that matters is that the game runs as best as it can on the hardware that you bought with your money. I am not even going to debate the cost of games. As the consoles age the games that were released would get better because the developers were able to spend more time and effort optimizing their games and working out the bugs on a single SKU. With the advent of Pro Consoles, why would I spend any time optimizing for the base console? Developers get a free bump in power from new "Pro"-hardware so the base console is basically forgotten. Even at the end of the console's life cycle, why would I buy a super nintendo when there exists a super nintendo pro? The base console which would have sold millions at launch is regulated to the trash heap. Even if the install base of the pro console is smaller - why would anyone bother with the base console? Slim consoles don't really have as big of an effect.
These same articles also moan for a "Switch 2" because whether knowingly or unknowingly they want to increase the console churn. They want new pieces of plastic that they can do content dumps on for the feed. They don't really care about console gaming. Nintendo, if I follow thier thinking, will not release something that will cannibalize their own platform - I do not know how these authors cannot see this. This is what Pro-Consoles do - they eat the mindshare of the base console. And you cannot say that - "its just for those games who have disposable income". This is redirection - all console gamers play the same game - its not like the 10000 hardware setups that exist in the PC gaming world.
Console gaming used to be simple, cheap and efficient. Now you have a modern console burning 50 watts in standby and upto 200watts when running at max. These are basically PC power consumption levels! Why? The increasing promotion of graphics and resolution over other aspects not only makes for higher power consumption but also increases production costs of game development. All those pretty polygons are not cheap! I would not be surprised if these modern game dev teams weren't 90% artists and animators. I am not saying that art is not important in a game but seriously how much is too much? If you remake PONG with modern graphics- is it going to be more impressive than the original? It is the same game! You need to add something more to it than just more art.
I recently got access to a PS5, did a mini review and came to the conclusion that it's just more art on top of the same games. Now with a Pro-PS5 coming out you basically have the same games from the PS2 with PS5 graphics that are slightly better looking on the PS5-Pro. I should not be surprised after the abomination that was the PS3 but I am surprised that this pro-console practice is not discouraged by more people in the games journalism field. It is as if "shut-up and buy it" is the way of modern gaming. AAA developers need to stop making games by committee (or whatever they are doing). Stop doing day one patches. Stop with the loot boxes. Make smaller games that are simpler rather than dumping billions into the production and fidelity of skill trees and set pieces.
The PS5 Pro is out now so it's too late. The PS6 will already suffer because of it, just like how the PS5 is suffering because of the mid-gen bump of the PS4 Pro. The cycle repeats and they wonder why they are losing money. The games will continue to look less impressive if we do not allow the PC hardware to outpace the console. By constantly keeping up with the PC - which is an unwinnable race - you destroy your own market for a small term gain in profit. Why would you buy a PS4 now? All those games were remade on the PS5 with better graphics! So the PS4 as a generation becomes pointless, and uncultured. But then you flip it and ask "Why buy the PS5 when all those games are on the PS4 at a cheaper price?" The PS5 has no games! So you fall into this trap where the PS4+5 are the same thing, same controller, same games with slightly better graphics. The PS2 is unique, the PS3 is trash, the PS4+PS4Pro+PS5+PS5Pro is a blob. The whole PS5 generation the journalists complained that the cross platform PS4 ports were holding the PS5 back well. I HOPE YOU ARE HAPPY NOW!
Conclusion
To me it seems that the PS4 by itself caused the entire cross gen overlap of remakes that caused the failure of the 9th gen. All the games that were released cross gen look relatively the same and feel the same because the pro consoles bridged the gap(unnaturally) between generations. I don't know if I have any solution to this problem. I have been avoiding this modern gaming scene since the wii-U came out and this PS5Pro doesn't look any better. Maybe GTA6 will change it? Or should I dust off my copy of San Andreas on the PS2? Should I jump to the Xbox360? All I can say is just stop, please stop. These Pro-consoles should be discouraged at every street crossing.
I got a chance to play around with a ps5(x2) for a few days. I have been busy with other things on the Wii so I pretty much skipped the Xbox, PS4, PS5 console generations because I didn't really see anything new being released. Mostly movie games and cinematic experiences at high resolution. Plus the cost of games and owning a cutting edge console seems like a losing scenario in this day and age. The people I see with these consoles buy one game a year, maybe 2 then spend the rest of the time playing free-to-play shooters when the console is not gathering dust. Does not seem to be worth it to my book. It is a similar issue with the switch but at least Nintendo is still publishing games with new mechanics. I am a patient man, I still havent played Breath of the wild.
My initial impression of the now 4 year old Ps5 box is that it generates a lot of heat. I played NMS on the first PS5 - no screenshot from that because I did save them offline. On the second one PS5 I played Astrobot and Spiderman 2. The long and short is that the ps5 is pretty much the same thing as a ps4 or ps3 but pushing more polygons and burning more electricity. I played a few games and spent some time in the interface. The system has alot of menus, menus everywhere. As soon as you start up, you are browsing something like a website. The first ps5 had a user account previously set up with lots of digital content so that was how I had access to NMS. On the second PS5 I had no account so I spent a little time creating an account to only have it be deleted because I did not verify my email address. I had a whole rant about this on twitter
The games
I spent six hours in game hours playing No Mans Sky - lovely game - I have always wanted to play that game. I tried out some of the other games on the account; very pretty menus and FOV everywhere - modern gaming at its finest. Played a bit of spider man 2; a slick web-slinging adventure - too much of a beat-em-up movie game for my tastes. I jumped into fortnight and COD battle royals, died a bunch of times, ultimately pointless. I played through most of Astrobot - an uninspired Mario clone. Astrobot is ok if you have never played a 3d mario game but brough bings nothing new to the table while copying many mario-isms. Took a few screenshot screenshots and it seems like the ps5 is always recording videos in the background while you play. Clearly wasting cycles. I ended up with 230 mb of photos and video which I copied to an SD card for this article. I imagine over time this will fill up the storage space on the console. Spiderman had a whole lot of button combos which I eventually ignored and simply resorted to pull and punch combos. After skipping most of the cutscenes I walked around the city throwing sewer covers at people. The city is lovely and detailed but it did get old fast because of the overly forgiving physics - you can be on the ground then up in the air in seconds. Everything is sticky in spiderman.
The hardware
The games I played were bright and ran smoothly on a 50 inch 4k LG television. Detailed but not particularly amazing as nowadays I can get the same experience watching the game play on youtube at the same res and 60fps. Though I like the draw distance and how everything is super high poly and shiny in Astrobot. The games loaded quickly and I imagine no lesser machine could run NoMansSky at this level of fidelity. Basically a PC pushing lots of polygons. I like the high resolution especially since I am coming from the retro era of 640x480 work on the Wii. I do feel as if some of this power could be better used at a lower resolution because you can still see artifacts and clipping. The controller is meh, it vibrates and makes sounds like a Wiimote. I had to turn the vibration down because the controller buzzed like a chainsaw. But for the most part it's pretty much the same as the controllers before it.
Conclusion
The PS5 is a PC stuffed into a console format pushing digital games on online accounts. All the problems that come with a PC apply to the PS5; high power draw, interfaces that dont work if you are not online, user accounts, passwords, crashing, deadlock states, . The same things that annoyed me about the PS3 came back again in full force. I think the PS5 is too much of a PC and too little of it is a home console. At this point if game consoles don't correct themselves they are going to fall into a trap of their own making. The PS4 Pro basically started the downfall that is currently happening to the 9 generations of consoles (except for the Nintendo switch). If you have played everything on the ps4 there is still no real reason to get a ps5. Pro consoles should never have been released. And this is why I don't recommend the ps5. The ps4 pro killed it, just like the PS5 Pro will kill the PS6.
Here is a preview of the changes coming to NewoZero version 4 releasing at some point in December 2023. This update brings some requested changes as well as some random additions that I thought up during the last year of on/off development. The v3 was last Nov2022. This update improves performance in a few ways which may not be so obvious but you can be assured that the game runs more stable and retains everything from the previous versions. This update has the same total tracks because I did not see the point in extending the start to end runtime beyond the current 30minutes. If you master the 80 tracks you can play the new "Master Cup '' featuring 16 random courses which gives the game a roguelike aesthetic.
Anyway here is the list;
- retry level option after crash out (2 continues): Continues/extra ships allows players to replay a challenging stage they may have died on while playing. This can be done 2 times before you get a game over. I have not gotten any requests for this feature but I wonder if this is the reason why many players are quitting on level 1.
- new "master" cup (16 random courses): This is a new mode which features 16 randomly selected tracks for players to overcome. It's something like a racing game roguelite. The tracks are still nice and flowing but you get a new set of tracks every race so it would be like playing the game for the first time.
- new display options: hide grid, hide track, hide decals, hide sky: More ways to customize the look of the game. If you find the decals on the track distracting you can turn them off. If you prefer a less noisy background you can turn off the signs so that you only have buildings visible. If you want to go even further you can turn off the buildings+signs+skybox to make the visual experience as simple as possible.
- new colour options: full, neon, retro, gray, green, red: Players can now play the entire game in black and white, red if they so desire. The selected colour option replaces the colours on all stages in all modes with no effect on performance.
- motion controls menu (sensitivity, deadzone): Motion controls now have a dedicated menu which allows the player to adjust the deadzone and sensitivity of the wiimote waggle. This is useful for players who like to play with motion controls
- new level select screen, and mini map.: The previous menu which allowed the player to select the start level from 1-5 has not been replaced with a mini diorama of the level.
- improved performance on dolphin, real wii, wiiu vwii: New code optimizations and reduction in loop size results in better emulation performance, less screen tearing and consistent frame rates even on the most complicated levels. Slowdowns on some levels such as hard mode level 7 have been fixed.
- updated decals, textures and graphics: Decals/textures have been updated and optimized. There are now 4 level textures, 64 facades
