zekepliskin

Let's see...

Bloodborne [PS4 Slim]
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe [Switch]
Bully [PS2 on PS3]
Burnout 3 [PS2 on PS3]
OutRun 2 SP: Special Tours [PS2 on PS3]
Ridge Racer 7 [PS3]
Red Dead Redemption [Switch]

Pretty weak stuff, Spider-Man 2 aside. I grew up in the 90s and never expected to keep seeing Sonic and MK sequels nearly 30 years later. I'll be sticking to visiting and revisiting some PS2/PS3 classics on my BC PS3 I think. Might even open and clean/repaste my PS4 Slim so I can play original Spider-Man and Bloodborne in peace as it's getting loud.

@Impossibilium You could buy the most recent copy of the game and then obtain a copy of the PS3 as an ISO and call it fair use? I ended up doing just that with Sleeping Dogs - I own the PS4 "Definitive Edition" but then grabbed it on PS3 with all the DLC and prefer playing it there as with an overclocked GPU softmod it'll be stable at 30FPS more than the PS4 is and it's quieter on either of my two PS3s than my PS4 Slim

Jordan is a legend in the game industry - I'd say among his many notable achievements working with Ubisoft to make The Sands Of Time is my favourite.

Those interested in that sort of thing should subscribe to Noclip on YouTube. Their documentary work won't net you trophies but it will teach you a lot of interesting stuff about how developers work and how much effort and pride they put into the finished product. The Dishonored one is particularly great, especially when they talk to the level designer about how the clockwork mansion was conceptualised and realised. Danny O'Dwyer is also working tirelessly to preserve video game history by archiving old video game and promo footage so that's worth a donation.

The best emulators that Sony made for the PS2 were the launch PS3s, especially the CECHA/B which had the entire PS2 custom chip set inside with some extra options for scale and smoothing on top as they passed from the EE+GS to the RSX.

Launch PS3s allow you to run OPL as well, meaning game streaming from USB or network. Plus you can use GSM which allows you to force a very sharp and crisp looking 1080i scaling which is better than the hardware upres that Sony used to go from 480i to 1080p. If your TV can deinterlace well and has some zoom control you can get a stunning wide-screen image with colours that pop, lower blur and an all round cleaner image that even my PS2 with Component cables can't manage.

I reckon it'd be cheaper to buy a good condition launch PS3, add an SSD etc than it would to pay for the top tier PS Plus for a couple of years, then you could have basically 99% of the PS2 library through a HDMI driven device.

Even the software driven PS2 Classics emulator for the PS3 beat what came out on the PS4, and with CFW can be repurposed with different games too. Main drawback is 720p limit (no 1080i/p here) and a lot of 60FPS games run at 30FPS or at least move between the two, I assume it's some kind of buffering issue due to how hard the PS2 is to emulate. Point is the PS3 still wins versus the PS4/5 here.

EDIT: I also recently tried the macOS fork of PCSX2 which uses Metal API (should run on Intel and Apple Silicon basically) and on a Mac with dedicated GPU (if it's Intel) performance can be decent with very little config. So Sony, when your PS2 games run better on a Mac than your own official hardware, isn't it time to admit there's a problem? It's the best selling console of all time and it deserves better than this. We've gone from the Ken Kutaragi years of building PS2 hardware and software emulation into the next gen to modern day Jim Ryan where it's being neglected even though the
PS5 is orders of magnitude more powerful than the PS3 and making a great emulator, although a significant investment at first, would be possible.

Control is one of the best games I've ever played, and one of the few where it made me enjoy having a current gen system (Series X in 60fps mode). So fair play to them, something to break up the endless dull "remasters" and bland Ubisoft style open worlds where it's endless pointless busy work.

Not that I've played it for dozens of hours yet, but the Switch version runs great, looks miles better than the PS3 blurriness and hasn't bugged out on ways the original didn't yet. As I consider this just about acceptable I'm happy to have it.

Getting the same game experience on the PS4 though? First of all why is there no dedicated PS5 version, second of all from what the review said there's more wrong with it than the original PS3 version. Maybe that's the spaghetti (western) code rearing it's head, that made it hard to port in the first place, but that's still no excuse.

Thankfully it's not the AI mess that The Diminutive Edition was lol.

No I wouldn't buy it for PS4, I'd play the blurrier but still fun PS3 version.

However having said that, I did have the Switch version bought for me as a birthday present because I've wanted it on there as long as I can remember, and am still mystified they didn't combine the release of RDR2 with RDR1 on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One. Weird. Because if the minimal effort shown here was all it took it could have been done years ago, 2018 if you like.

Sony might well be clearly in the lead, however from my point of view neither they nor Microsoft have had a particularly strong start to this generation.

I agree with John Linnemann from Digital Foundry who recently said it feels this generation is only just starting. Even then, there aren't many PS5/XSX exclusives as they keep getting ported to the previous gen systems and/or PC, which gives people less incentive to upgrade from PS4. Feels like the generation doesn't have it's own identity yet, really, especially in light of the above-average amount of barebones "remasters" we're getting which are often just lazy ports.

Perhaps it's rose-tinted glasses but for launch and first couple of years of PS3/PS4 I remember things being a bit more exciting. Obviously the PS3 was initially unpopular due to price point and Sony's arrogance about it, but it still had a strong launch lineup and forward thinking multimedia capabilities that were ahead of it's time.

Whereas with the gen PS5 so far my memories are how good Returnal is but it's now on PC too so meh, Astro's Playroom was kinda genius but has no replay value, how many times I've had a DualSense fail on me and had to send it back and I'm not rough on controllers at all, how the UI is an even less intuitive version of the PS4 (Sony suck at menus), that it's nice to play some PS4 titles like inFAMOUS: Second Son at 60FPS... and that's about it. Hardly a glowing review.

Between all the MTX, lazy ports and pandemic caused delays I'm sure, gaming in general feels pretty stagnant and uninteresting to me. Whenever I dip into the PS2/PS3 libraries I'm reminded how much more vibrant the mid-2000s were, and how maybe that was peak gaming and it's all been slowly downhill since about a decade ago.

Either that or I'm just old and jaded having been a gamer since the Master System/C64. Possibly both.

The Crew games were well liked, so hopefully this will be another strong entry into the series. Guess we'll find out soon enough!

True about racers (and a few other genres) being under-represented for current gen, though. I still boot up the PS3 for those because I'm spoilt for choice - Ridge Racer 7, Burnout Paradise, OutRun Online Arcade, the massively underrated Blur and of course Gran Turismo 6 which is still my favourite series entry (Sport and 7 just didn't work for me). That was a great canon of titles. Forza Horizon 4 and 5 on One X/Series X get closest to the vibe of those games (where it's a good arcade/sim mix)

Plus recently a lot of Burnout 3: Revenge via my BC PS3 which looks great scaled to 1080p if you boot the game then hold triangle and X to put it into 480p which sorts out a lot of the jaggies/shimmer especially with Smoothing enabled.

As usual, the few titles I am interested in, budget wise it's more smart to pick up used disc copies rather than a year's worth of payments for PS Plus gouge tiers.

Funny thing though. I've been digging more into the PS3 back catalogue and have picked up a bunch of games that have given me more hours of fun than most of the current gen stuff, which other than the odd tentpole release worth more than a few hours like Ragnarok and Returnal has been underwhelming since 2020. The pandemic really did set the whole industry back, a lot of industries actually including mine.

I think the reason a lot of these leaks (the ones that turn out to be true, anyway) use what people are calling a "potato camera" is obvious though I haven't seen it stated here yet.

They had to smuggle in something tiny that wouldn't be detected. People seem to be assuming the person taking the photos can just breeze in with a smartphone. Don't you think wherever that thing is being developed, one of the first things they'd ask you to place in a storage locker is that?

Tiny cameras that can be hidden anywhere, although massively improved, always sacrifice image quality. And the kind you'd need to take pictures in a secure development facility would be ultra tiny.

Makes sense to me.

@Darth_Stofi They should hire him. Instead they'll probably do the idiot thing of suing him into oblivion. Big companies do seriously dumb stuff that hinders them in the long run all the time - look at Netflix recently.

@PegasusActual93 Game by game as it uses memory address register hacks I believe. I forget which DF video says that, probably DF Weekly, but it's there.

"jailbreaking your console is generally a bad idea"

That's such a loaded, inaccurate statement. For older consoles like the PS3 it unlocks a huge amount of potential with minimal risk. I have a backwards compatible phat PS3 with the PS2 GS chip inside and it means I can do stuff like run ISOs rather than put strain on the now 17 year old Blu-ray drive, and also change the fan speed curve so it ramps up more smoothly and also more quickly to help stop the console dying from heat. I'd argue not modifying your console, which is insanely easy, is a bad idea.

PS4 console mods look awesome too, but they're still locked behind the "old firmware" barrier to entry which is a shame as the PS4 homebrew scene is maturing and it looks like a fun time to jump onboard that train.

Observations From Out Of Touch CEOs Like Strauss Zelnick "Aren't All That Meaningful" Says PushSquare.

Thats a compliment. 👍🏻

It's cute how after years of Microsoft having a "Pro" type controller and a Points for busy work type system, Sony belatedly shuffled out of the barn with their versions of both, except with the addition of much poorer battery life and lack of flagship console integration into UI/OS initially and still pending, respectively.

@Cashews "you can re sell it and you can still play your game when they shut down the shop updates, etc."

Yeah although that's becoming a little less possible now due to update patches etc still requiring servers. Case in point, a load of PS3 games I have still ask for an update, whether they're downloaded or disc copies. The complexity comes when all that gets switched off... the PS3 is getting close to that 20 year old milestone so who knows...

@deathaxe I think people have been saying this is the last generation with physical releases since tail end of PS3 era. I believe it's more because although physical releases are going away from a certain point of view including yours, there's plenty of places with poor broadband access or speeds or both where disc releases are key, and will be more readily available.

@Th3solution Well that's good, I see a "wait for the sales and the patches" mentality may finally be starting to happen. Because really, slow sales soon after launch might finally teach publishers to let developers finish them before releasing.

If you'd told me in the mid-2000s that Spider-Man, God of War, GTA5 and LEGO games were still a thing, I'd have gone "No way, there would be newer greater games by then". Sadly this is not the case. Although they're great games it's a sign that stagnation is a thing above all else. Here, and in movies.

Until this article, I didn't even know it was a thing. There's a lot of esports events out there, can't know them all.

Actually that should be a poll option.

Wait for Bluepoint.

When whatever licensing issues are resolved I'm sure they'll have the source code and assets. They made Demon's Souls run beautifully, so perhaps when they're done with Bloodborne it'll be pulling 1440p60 upscaled to 4K similar to how Returnal does it, plus all the frame pacing jank common to From engine games will be gone.

@Texan_Survivor The DualSense is such a double-edged sword because on the one hand it's super ergonomic, looks modern and the HD Rumble (or whatever Sony call it because Nintendo did the same exact thing first, essentially) is incredible, but yet the build quality and durability are pretty bad, the battery life is woeful even as compared to the DS4 and same old PlayStation stupid D-pad that fighting game enthusiasts hate.

@Dark_Knight Leaving aside that you're stating opinion as fact which is a classic Internet rookie mistake, odds are there's plenty of collectors out there who only game casually who have bought one. It's up to the person buying to decide what's necessary and what isn't, little things called choice and free will...

@Titntin This is true of all online environments, especially the "echo chamber" ones where people turn up to have their existing views validated by finding others who feel the same regardless of how niche it is. Well observed.

Funny thing is, no matter how many controllers have come since and no matter how much they cost, I have DualShock 3 controllers running their original batteries that will always outlast newer DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers.

It's that stupid light bar on the back which you can only dim not switch off, compared to the energy efficient little red LEDs on the DS3.

Still loving Sony's audacity in planning to release what is essentially a smartphone touchscreen with half a DualSense either side. It's cool when someone DIYs, for example, a GameCube controller onto the side of a Switch, less so when a major company calls that a product and puts a ship date on it.

Yes, I am still mad at Sony for giving up on the Vita. That was a proper console, premium design and feel. I agree with John Linneman at Digital Foundry - this is crap, basically. Vita means life, what does Project Q mean?

Hundreds of cheap deals on it on Facebook Marketplace in a year or two, right alongside PSVR 1/2 and future eWaste.

Disastrous launch aside, the PS3 Phat BC models (plus the 25xx series Slims) are personally my favourite Sony home consoles.

With the Phat it's the UI, the speed of having the whole OS on NAND flash, excellent smoothed out PS2 1080p upscaling (Burnout 3 especially looks great), how mature the homebrew is to allow you to set custom fan curves and run ISOs from internal SSD as well as GPU overclocking to push FPS up on a lot of intensive games including TLoU and Beyond: Two Souls.

Ridge Racer 7 was a killer launch time title as well, still looks crisp and clean with it's 1080p60 presentation too. Doesn't suffer from that full two-tone palette/excessive garish bloom effect problem common to some titles of this generation.

So yes I'll definitely watch this and enjoy how they turned a car crash into a winning result over time.

I recently opened up a bunch of DualShock 3 controllers to see if I could do a case swap on one of them but discovered Sony changed the design so much over the years that it wasn't that simple. Even the plastic construction for the case - it went from shiny piano black to more of a matte. The 2006-2010 controllers seem to be built the best whereas the coloured editions (I have one from 2012 in blue) are cheaply made in a way that's actually pretty shameful. Not the same level of durability at all. The analogue sticks on later ones seem to wear out and acquire dead spots/stiffness of movement so easily, rendering them useless for precise inputs as one might need for an FPS or racing game.

Anyway, my point is that all of them have something in common - it's really not difficult to change the battery, and you don't have to fully disassemble the controller and remove it from the case to do so. It's 5 Philips head screws to get the back off, then the battery is one lead and usually has little plastic clips to make it sit in the right spot (later ones used an adhesive strip and a much cheaper battery, which is why I assume my older ones still hold charge while the newer one doesn't).

I wish the Vita had had the same construction, but it doesn't. It should have. The one Vita I opened years ago that has a failed battery was so fragile that the terminals came right off the board. It's very well built in some ways, not so much others.

Perhaps it'll be like when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and Pixar, where it starts as a gradual decline before hitting a point of maximum free fall, destroying previously good IPs with shovelware sequels.

"After all, we’re all viewing this deal through the lens of being PS5 and PS4 owners, so it’s worth discussing." - Actually, no, I'm viewing this through the lens of being a console gaming enthusiast in general, owning a Switch, PS4, several PS3s, a couple of Xboxes including a One X, PSP, PS Vita etc. I own mostly Sony stuff (not just consoles but AV equipment in general including 3 of their better TVs over the years).

Personally I think this will be one of those things where everyone makes it out to be a huge deal at the time then a year later when no serious waves have been made, Microsoft haven't single-handedly killed the video games industry etc.

It stuns me that in a world on the brink of a major possibly irreversible climate change that could lead to even more drought and disease on this planet, that there are people out there who are expending all this angst (woke entitled angst I guess) over... a video game statuette.

Kinda glad Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground; it's been a rage-fuelled playground for the bored and entitled for about a decade now, by my reckoning. There's a reason I came off it and never went back about that long ago.

Stagnant. That's how I'd describe things in pretty much the entire tech industry recently. Whether your thing is games consoles, GPUs or MacBooks it seems like there's been no real forward movement and innovation for a couple of a years now.

I think this might be the tail end of the pandemic lockdowns filtering through - as things in all those spaces are planned and executed years in advance, it stands to reason the real result of the whole world grinding to a halt is only showing now. Xbox are regularly criticised for having no games, well, now I guess Sony is welcomed to that party.

@Amnesiac Totally agree. Beautiful game, well made, good gameplay variety, should be something I'd love... nope, it's not interesting to me at all. Still has some of the same issues with lack of enemy variety etc as BotW.

Can't believe I'm the first one here to say I thought the headline meant it was launching broken and will require a Day One patch, like most big budget triple A games these days. If people would stop buying them full price and broken, if everyone took the mentality of buying a game on sale for a third of the price and in a much more optimised state, maybe it would incentivise devs and publishers to release stuff working in the first place.

@danlk1ng Well they didn't murder anyone, but they sure did make a killing.

Scarcity, whether natural or artificial, makes a product more desirable. And therefore more expensive, often tempting people with access to that product to sell at an inflated rate, because they can. That's a lot more sensible and easy to explain than saying "Sony priced the PS5 below what the market would pay". No they didn't, they just couldn't make enough of them.

Yet another cross-platform game that seems to have "skipped the optimisation pass" as DF themselves put it.

This seems more and more common these days - when developers run out of time and have to meet the deadline, they skimp on getting it running well for whatever reasons.

I see it as literally the worst thing to skimp on - if your game runs with stutters and crashes, no one is going to want to play it. They'd be better off doing something like making the later levels/endgame a little unpolished while concentrating on the overall game feel and making sure it plays well on everything it can run on.

Or, they could just do what previous generations did and release the game in an all-around finished condition, or delay the release until that's the case. There is no shame in releasing "when it's done" as "a late game is only late until it ships, a bad game is a bad game forever" as I think Seamus Blackley and several other devs have repeated over the years. Otherwise you're shooting yourself in both feet because even if gamers don't know why a game is running poorly, they will feel that as part of the experience and quickly move onto something else.

I'm glad the PS5 has outsold the Switch. Nintendo lazily shovelling Wii U ports onto it at full price (games I've owned for years) while conversely not offering a full GameCube Virtual Console library for me to buy really hacks me off. Big part of why I sold mine.

Although I don't approve of a lot of current PlayStation profiteering and gouging fans, at least the PS5 has truly next gen looking games. As much as I didn't want to believe the hype and it's crossgen, Ragnarok looks amazing, Returnal is already a highlight of this generation and Demon's Souls is one of the best remake/remasters of all time.

Having said that though, I'd still take Series X over all of them 🤭

@GamesVanDerBeek well yeah but just this one time they could do a free patch. But they won't reward loyal fans like that when they know they can make money from them again. They used to make really good games, it's just sad that for a couple of devs doing a couple of days work both the PS5 and Series X could have 4K60 versions of RDR2

@solocapers well yeah you're not wrong, just that them both leaving was the final nail and a good signpost of the actual end of an era, finally.

@carlos82 There is checkboarding. Go watch the Digital Foundry two part tech review from release time. It's most noticeable on trees and hair I think they said, and zoom in to demonstrate. Almost all PS4 Pro era games used checkerboarding in some way shape or form to approximate a 4K image.

It's just really sad how many old 360/One games have been patched to take advantage of the hardware on the Series consoles, and how many PS4 ones haven't on the PS5. And don't get me started on the fact you can't play PS3 titles natively...

@Westernwolf4 It's noticeably blurrier than the One X version due to the checkerboarding. I have both versions and have played both - the One X/Series X version is noticeably better.

Same with The Witcher 3 actually. Plays like crap on the PS4/PS5 - locked to 30fps, poorer visual fidelity in general, horrendous input lag. One X version is 4K60, responsive controls and in fact the places where it used to drop below 60FPS (Novigrad for example) on the One X it's rock solid on the Series X, I'm guessing because it's no longer CPU limited. Those AMD Jaguar processors of the previous gen were glorified laptop CPUs after all.

Here's a story about how Rock$tar operate, and how there won't be a 4K60 patch for the PS5 without paying.

GTA V still has long load screens even when playing on a Series X or PS5. But why, I asked myself as I waited, this isn't the PS3 era any more.

And then I realised. It was obvious - the loading screens were billboards to sell you more "content". That's why it didn't instantly load the game. They wanted me to buy more digital content. They needed me and everyone else to see these lame little bits of overpriced DLC for this decade old game, and go buy them with an unreasonably high amount of real world money.

Because that is their business model.

RDR2 got abandonded as soon as they realised it wasn't generating as much revenue as GTA5 and never would. Chances are they're only making a GTA6 because the income from GTA5 has either plateau'd or is slumping so they only invested in a new one to get it to rise again. Otherwise - and you know this is true - they'd happily have kept it running for another 10 years with that same 720p30 thing and by now very dated version of the Rockstar Advanced Gaming Engine underneath.

Post-Hauser brothers Rockstar as run by Take-Two is just a shell of itself now. The golden age is long gone.

Wow, even the PS Store sales are more expensive than Xbox Store ones. Besides using the PS5 to play Spider-Man Remastered, with A Plague Tale: Requiem dropping for free on Game Pass - Digital Foundry have confirmed the Series X locks to 30FPS more than the PS5 version - it's the green corner firmly taking the lead for me this month.

@KaijuKaiser They did make another PSP. It was called the PS Vita. It was amazing hardware but then Sony gave up on it and poured all their effort into the then-new PS4 instead.

Having watched the Digital Foundry analysis of this, I thought Alex basically concluded it was a moderately lazy PC port with not enough settings to tweak, plus some visual bugs that may or may not be fixed on the retail version. I wasn't impressed and by the sounds of it neither was he.

Perhaps it's just not a big enough improvement to warrant serious interest from PC players. For me it's just Sony doing the usual thing of trying to keep up with Microsoft and not pulling it off (the overpriced DualSense Edge is their version of an Elite 2 for example).

Yes they should have ported the trilogy first and its senseless that they didn't. Then port 4. Then do a quadrilogy collection at a discounted rate. That seems like simple business sense to me, but Sony run more on senselessness and hubris these days so it's not surprising.

Seeing them next to each other makes me realise how much I like Hideo and how much I dislike Jim.