Topic: PlayStation 5 --OT--

@JohnnyShoulder I think I've given up on the idea. I might try the Edge on Black Friday if there's any good sales, though.

Lego Horizon is currently 29th most popular in the UK according to PS App 😬

Maybe I've looked too early, but usually new games from large publishers are in and around the top 5 on launch day, barring Concord sized anomalies.

Fairly interested to see how it does on PS and Switch just out of being nosey about these things and generally keeping up with what people are actually playing nationwide on their consoles 😅

@Ravix I smell a commercial disappointment brewing. I was never going to be interested in Lego Horizons, I’ve just never been into Lego, but it does seem like the game isn’t going to set the sales charts on fire.

It’s possible that Astro Bot stole some of the Lego Horizons thunder(jaw 😛). This ‘new’ Sony trying to respond to criticisms of being too monotonous and making too many ‘dramatic third person narrative action games’ has probably over-corrected in an attempt to diversify their output. Two family friendly Nintendo style games back-to-back might have been better served to space out with a nice ‘sad dad’ simulator in between. Couple that with the Concord disastrous attempt to mix in ‘online competitive first person shooter live service’ and I just think there’s an overcompensation happening. Of course, it might be just a matter of Lego Horizons not being a very good game. But I think it would have landed better if there was more distance between it and Astro. Or at least had Ghost of Yotei or Wolverine in between. 🤷🏻‍♂️

@Th3solution it moved up to 14th place... but I checked out Nintendo. There's 4 Lego games in the top 30 and none of them are Horizon.

I genuinely thought this could be a sleeper game of the year, or at least popular with young'uns and a big success, until 'Push' said it was crap 😱

Some other reviews are a bit less grumpy, but Nintendo Life hasn't even reviewed it, which seems... weird 😅

@PorkChopExpress ah, I mustn't have scrolled down far enough.

With the LEGO game coming up, it looks like they're doubling down on more real sets as well.

New system beta adds cloud streaming (without using your own console) to the PS Portal.
You might argue this should've always been there but it's very nice to see.

https://blog.playstation.com/2024/11/19/the-playstation-porta...

@Octane I might need that. Looks like it's shipping in March.

@Voltan Yeah, really excited about the Portal streaming. Almost makes me want to upgrade to Premium. But I’ll wait and see. I’m assuming the eventual plan is to offer it to everyone with a PS Plus account…? Or at least to the PS+ Extra crowd? I sure hope so, since I’m enjoying being an Extra subscriber but have no interest in any of the other perks from the Premium tier.

The need to use the cloud saves to save your game would imply that it would never be a conceivable feature for the non-PS+ folks.

@Th3solution I can totally see it being only for Premium tier subscrbers. Happy to proven wrong in this instance though.

@Th3solution I imagine it's only for Premium subscribers, as it is on the consoles - at least for the foreseeable future.
Making it "exclusive to Premium unless you own a Portal" seems unlikely.

@Voltan Ah… I feel stupid now. I had forgotten cloud streaming was a benefit already on Premium. I had never given cloud streaming a second thought because I never understood what the point was from a console which you can just download to. (Other than the weird PS3 situation where we can’t yet run the games natively or via emulation). Unless someone is really in a tight situation with their hard drive space why would they stream from their console? I guess it saves that extra time having to download the game? Perhaps some people are really that spontaneous where they can’t plan a couple hours in advance for which game to play next. Or they jump around on their games and just try out multiple games for a few minutes before moving on to the next one? Maybe I’m missing something. I stream TV and movies which are 2-3 hour experiences, but if I’m spending 20-80 hours on a game, I’d prefer to just have to best seamless experience without the risk of lag or dips in quality.

The Portal is a different situation though. With no hard drive, streaming games sounds like a perfect use case since downloading the game is not an option. And the trade off of a slightly lower quality experience but getting to play on the handheld is worth it for certain games.

@Th3solution Yeah, I feel like it's mostly if you wanna check out a game that you're not sure about or want to only run it for a short time for another reason.
Personally I mostly use it to unlock PS Stars awards lol

It does work rather well on PS5 though.

@Voltan I’m a weirdo and am obsessive-compulsive about my trophy list, so I try to avoid having games on my list that I didn’t really play. Fortunately you can delete it off the list is you don’t earn any trophies but otherwise it gets stuck on there forevermore. So I like to commit spending a couple hours with a game at least. Still, now that I think about it, I suppose it could be useful for those really quick trial sessions on a game that is a large install requirement.

The more I ponder it, I do think that this one feature (cloud streaming to the Portal, that is) might push me over the edge to just pay the additional $25/year to be able to stream directly to the portable. (Curse you Sony! You got me) Being untethered from the console would sure free things up a little, particularly when traveling. If it even allows me an additional 20 hours of gaming through the year that I wouldn’t have done otherwise then I guess it’s worth it. I’ll wait and see how the beta experience turns out though.

I couldn’t care less about the game trials and 90% of the retro library. The inclusion of the PS3 games starting to trickle in also are a selling point. That might also be worth the $25 if I just play one or two PS3 games during the year. 🤔

Score one for Canadian fans of physical games. In a bizarre decision, the Trudeau government has decided to remove GST from video game consoles, controllers and physical editions of games over the holidays. So if you’re looking to shop for such items in Canada, it’s worth waiting until December 14th! …and it’ll only cost taxpayers $6 billion.

So I just subscribed to PS+ Premium for a year now and the thing I've been most interested in trying out is cloud streaming PS5 titles. I've tested playing several games, for example Baldur's Gate III, and it works wonderfully. I've also tried streaming games to my Portal and that works great as well. It's such a useful feature, I mean not needing to wait potentially hours to play a game and avoid having it take up tons of storage space is really convenient. This definitely is the future in my opinion, especially when considering games will keep on getting larger in size.

@LtSarge It’s good to hear you have favorable first impressions. I’m seriously considering jumping up to Premium for the Portal streaming. Not sure if I’ll use the console streaming but it sounds like I actually might.

@Th3solution I actually realised something with Portal streaming that I didn't understand when I tried it out yesterday. So you're actually able to stream directly to your Portal without turning on your PS5, which basically makes the device standalone. That makes getting Premium for that feature even more worth it. You can also earn trophies while doing this. The only drawback that I can see is that you can't take photos or record clips while streaming to your Portal. Besides that, it's a very convenient feature. I also tried to stream a game on Portal and then continue playing on my TV using console streaming and the transition is seamless. Obviously the games are saved to the cloud so you can just continue where you last saved. But yeah, this also means that you can use the Portal and PS5 separately if you want. Someone could play one game on the Portal, while you're playing something else on PS5 at the same time. The Portal is not simply a remote player now, it's an actual handheld.

On a side note, the game I tested playing on Portal through cloud streaming is Soulstice. It's a very fun Devil May Cry clone with an interesting story. Highly recommend it, it plays wonderfully on Portal.

@LtSarge yeah that was the big thing about the Portal’s recent Cloud Streaming update. A gamer doesn’t even need a PS5 anymore, they can just have a Portal, a PSN account and PS+ premium. I’d imagine it will be a major driver towards the amount Premium subscribers increasing fairly dramatically over the next couple of years.

@LtSarge @colonelkilgore Do you know if this also the case for Remote Play? I don'y have much of a use case for getting a Portal as I can remote play on my table/chromebook. Even then it will be only when I'm at my parents once a month or so, and I don't always use it when I am over.