written by owen on 2024-Oct-28.

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.

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