It only took seven (7) months, but I finally managed to get my hands onto that most coveted of items...a Sony® PlayStation™ 5. How did I achieve this, you ask? Was it the months of checking stores online for stock? The weeks of having the Target page for PS5 open every morning? Was it waiting in line at PlayStation Direct queues? Was it some sort of elaborate Fast and Furious heist, just with consoles instead of DVD players?
No, I just lucked out and got an email giving me access to get them off the PS Direct store before the free for all queue. Which is good, because not once, but TWICE I managed to get through those queues in time for there to still be stock of the Digital Only PS5, but not the one I wanted! More than anything else, even more than the Targets near me not getting stock whilst seemingly all the other ones did, that stung.
So, my months long quest finally over, and the prize in my hands, I got my shiny new PS5. One of the things I was most curious about was the size. Ever since it was unveiled, and people roughly figured out its dimensions, there were lots of jokes about it being big, but I never really know how big something is until I've seen it in person. Even seeing it next to real live humans, that doesn't actually convey scale, at least not with how my brain works, I guess. For example, last year when I got my Switch, I'd never seen one in person before, and even after years of seeing people with them online, I was still surprised at how small the thing is. So, I wondered, how would the PS5 feel to me? Would I think, “it's not THAT big,” or would I agree with the internet?
The concise version is to say that my first thought on removing it from the box was... “BIGH.”
But while I'm thinking about the physicality of the PS5 itself, I do like the look of it. I have it horizontal, for various reasons, and I like that it looks like it's floating. Granted getting it positioned on the stand was a bit awkward, it kinda slid off at one point while I was positioning it and plugging in the cables, but I got it situated right. It's a weird looking console, and I like that about it. Part of me would replace the panels with black ones, but not for whatever price Sony would likely charge for two hunks of plastic.
A console isn't complete without games to play on it, so I also got Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales Ultimate Launch Edition, and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Elsewhere I bought a 5 TB external drive, which was the biggest size I could find for a price I felt was reasonable, and also with a size that didn't feel like overkill. Of course, something always has to go “wrong,” so days after I bought all this stuff Miles was on sale for $50 instead of $70 (and even cheaper for the version without the remaster), and the literal same hard drive I bought went on sale for $30 cheaper than I paid. Granted, I already got it at a sale price, but still.
That said, I'm getting those gripes out of the way because the PS5...is rad. Was it worth the wait? Worth all those months of obsessively trying to get one without giving scalpers their blood money, or buying some silly bundle with something in it that I didn't want? As an aside, right when I set my mind on buying a GameStop bundle as the easiest way to get one, the fact that they started putting in the baseball game drove me up a wall (I hate baseball).
Personally, finally being able to play games I've been unable to for months, and having games I already like dramatically improved seems worth it to me. I know I could have played Miles months ago, and as of this writing I've only just started it, but now I get to experience it in all its 60 FPS, ray traced glory. And, on top of all this, I finally got my hands on that newfangled DualSense controller.
I've only had the PS5 for about a week as of this writing, and it is a little funny feeling it turn from this new and exciting thing to just a normal thing around the house. But at the end of the day it is a machine for playing video games, and while I think it does that tremendously well, I do have a few gripes with the UI that I should run through. Just quickly, I promise.
My biggest issue, is the lack of folders. I knew it didn't have them, but I don't think I quite anticipated missing them this much. This wasn't really an issue when the PS4 launched without folder support (after the PS3 having them), because when I got my PS4 at launch in November 2013, I had five (5) PS4 games. Three I got in a buy two get one free deal (AC IV, Need for Speed, and Killzone), and the two PS+ games (Resogun and that platformer with the shadows and the guy who voiced Jensen from the Deus Ex games).
Today, I have two PS5 games I got on disc (one of which installed two games because I had to finish my replay of Marvel's Spider-Man I started not thinking I was going to get a PS5 anytime soon), a slew that were on PS+ over the months...and basically all of my PS4 games. Of course I haven't installed all of them to that external drive...yet, but I've got a lot of them already, and it'd be a lot easier to find the stuff I want if I could manually organize them myself.
There's other little things I could nitpick about the UI too. Getting to Trophies feels like it takes too many steps, and listing them horizontally instead of vertically just makes no sense at all. And I don't really like the Trophy sound as much as the PS4 one, if I'm really going to nitpick things (but at least it isn't obnoxious like getting rarer Achievements on Xbox). Really, the UI issues in general can be summed up with either, “it takes too many steps to get there,” or, “this is fine but feels like it was changed from PS4 just for the sake of change.”
Some changes are absolutely welcome, and good. The party stuff definitely has more options now, like being able to adjust the volume per person for the others in a party chat. You may be thinking, “when would you need to do that?” And let me tell you, I already have, whilst chatting with one person who sounded just a bit too loud, and one who was just a bit too quiet, both in the same chat.
Another positive UI change, is that rather than have media apps in a thingy in the main row of things like on PS4, instead they're in a separate tab. And unlike PS4 where it just shows everything and I have to button past Disney Plus every time I want to watch Netflix, here I only have Netflix installed. Granted I still have to button past a screen that shows ads for stuff (currently Disney Plus' Loki, which to be fair I do extremely want to watch but am waiting for the season to finish), so functionally it's the same, BUT. I do think the tab part is an improvement, so I don't have to go scrolling past a bunch of games I've played since the last time I used Netflix.
One thing that initially excited me, but now I see as a disappointment, is the system invert y axis option. That was a feature I really liked on the 360, and I was genuinely thrilled to see it finally returning! Sure, it isn't a big issue in most games, and even if this worked I'd still end up going into the settings menus first time I start a game anyway because that's just the sort of person I am, but... Well, to set the stage here, Astro's Playroom worked with it, which gave me hope! Then after trying out the, ahem, “STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN TRIAL VERSION,” which didn't have the axis inverted at first, I sighed. I thought maybe it was just because that's a demo, but after trying some other stuff that didn't, I realized it wasn't just that. Sony didn't care enough to mandate games actually use that feature, which shouldn't have surprised me.
But the thing that really irked me was Destruction Allstars, a Sony published game, that didn't have it inverted either!! If even games put out by the console maker itself don't use the feature, then what's even the point of it being there in the first place? Now, it worked in Miles, and I've been told Ratchet and Clank uses it. So some games will probably use it over the course of the generation, but it's still a bummer to see it disregarded so soon. Especially in a game that published by the company with the most incentive to make sure its console's features actually get used!
So, the UI still has room for improvement, but what about the games? Well, like I said, I've only started Miles Morales, and haven't touched Ratchet and Clank yet. If I have writing-worthy thoughts on either, those will get their own blogs. For this, I'm focusing on the general experience of the PS5 itself, Astro's Playroom, and a pair of PS5 enhanced games that I've weirdly played a lot of over the last week.
Games!
Well, one of them maybe not so weird, but possibly the game I put the most hours into on my PS5's first week was...Destiny 2. Really it's not weird, because I've gotten back into that game this year, largely because of one of my Destiny friends getting back into it (regretfully not the other because of his job), and because Destiny 2 has largely been good this year. But that's beside the point, because Destiny 2 on PS5 is the same game, just looking a little sharper (I don't have a 4K TV but I do feel like the game looks less aliased (thanks super sampling?)), loading faster, and running faster.
Granted, I think Destiny 2 is the best optimized on PS4 that it's ever been, with this season's Override being about the only thing all year to get the framerate to chunk up, and even then only rarely. But on PS5...it's 60 FPS. I'm sure for PC players out there, they've been playing like that for years. Well, I haven't, and seeing the game on my big TV running like that, it was wild. At least at first, now after playing it just about every day for a week, I'm pretty used to it.
The load times might not be blisteringly fast, but they're a lot better. And things that you might not immediately think about being improved by this sort of thing are a lot snappier now too. Like the inventory screen. Ever play Destiny 2, pull up your inventory, and have to sit and wait a few seconds for everything to load before you can compare something, or equip something else because you realized you aren't properly prepared? It's a lot faster on PS5!
At the end of the day though, this is definitely a much nicer version of Destiny 2, but it's still Destiny 2. I wouldn't exactly call these improvements transformative, but there's another co-op game I've played a fair amount of over this week...
Marvel's Avengers.
You may remember that when this game launched, I was both a Marvel's Avengers enjoyer, and defender. I stand by that, for all its faults, the core is still fun, and the main story is good! On the other hand, the game technically collapsed under its own weight in the ongoing co-op game part, and eventually the molasses framerates, blurry dynamic resolution, and interminable load times broke me.
So when I say that the PS5 version compared to the base PS4 version is genuinely transformative, I mean it. It runs like a dream, looks great, and more than anything else, this is the game that shocks me with how fast it loads. It's not always the two second loads that other stuff can manage (though it only takes about that long to load in from the main menu), but the the difference between how this game loaded on PS4 and how it does on PS5 is way bigger than the change in Spider-Man's loads. Avengers always felt like it took minutes to load into missions, whereas now it takes closer to five or ten seconds. I don't know exact numbers offhand, I'm sure the mission loads weren't consistently literal minutes, but the difference here is almost unbelievable.
As a result, the game is so much more playable, and it's great to be having fun again. I have been playing in the framerate mode, though the level of particles and destructive bits in the quality mode are cool. I just made the mistake of trying the framerate mode first, so I didn't really want to stick in the destruction mode for too long.
That has kinda been a weird effect of playing PS5 games. The framerate sickness is getting me. I've played plenty of 60 FPS games over the years, but something about playing nothing but 60 FPS games does make 30 feel...different. Here's a concrete example of this in practice:
A few weeks ago I started a new game plus of Marvel's Spider-Man. I hadn't played the game since it was new in 2018, and after watching a couple seasons of the 90s Spider-Man cartoon on Disney Plus (listen, I subscribe to that one on and off) for nostalgia, I had a Spider-Man itch. Specifically for some actually good Spider-Man content (sadly the cartoon did not hold up to watch young me thought), and a PS5 seemed like a far off dream. So, I played the game again, got most of the way through it, and then managed to order a PS5. Figured I'd hold off on finishing the game until I could transfer my save over to the new one, and instead of finishing the NG+, I spent a couple days revisiting old favorites from the generation on my PS4 (DMC 5, MGS V, and Titanfall 2 ended up being the only ones because I played each longer than I intended, haha).
All 60 FPS games, oddly enough. PS5 shows up, of course the first thing I played was Astro's Playroom (saving that for last in this write up for reasons that will be obvious), but after a few days of 100%-ing that, I finally got back to finishing my Spider-Man replay. But something about when I started it, picking up my save (being shocked at how fast it loaded in), and swinging around, it just felt kinda...sluggish. I sat there, kinda perplexed, wondering what was going on, the game didn't feel sluggish just a week before when I was playing, and that's when it hit me...
The game defaulted to the resolution mode. So I went in, switched it to performance + RT, and suddenly it felt right. I said it wouldn't happen to me, and instead it happened almost immediately. The framerate scumbag in me has gained so much power in just a week. If I'm being honest (and hopeful), I bet if I spent time actually just playing a game at 30 again, it'd be fine, and I'd realize I was just being hyperbolic about this framerate business. But for the time being...60 FPS...
Anyway, aside from the change to Peter's face and technical improvements, that's the same game it was in 2018, I don't need to write about it again. I did play through the DLC, which was fine, I didn't think it was terrible, nor was it anything really noteworthy. I did get all the Trophies in them. Speaking of, having the whole Platinum's worth of Trophies pop at once after importing my save was very funny. Highly recommended.
Okay, I think I've talked around the main event here long enough.
Astro's Playroom.
I think it's fantastic at everything it does. It's a delightful little platformer, it's absolutely adorable, it's the perfect showcase for all the gimmicks in the new controller, and the nostalgia...
Which is funny for me to think about, because I haven't been a PlayStation fan since the start. My first PlayStation was a PS3. I don't even have many memories of playing PS1 or PS2 games at friends' houses like I have memories of playing Sonic games on my friend's Genesis. It's just kind of a gap in my personal video gaming experiences (one filled entirely by N64, GameCube, and even a little Dreamcast as a treat), which makes me the person where it was the PS4, and funnily, the references to old PS3 stuff that got me the most in Astro's Playroom. Well, not counting references to games that are mostly associated with PS1 and PS2 (like say, a Solid Snake Astrobot in a cardboard box). But seeing old PS3 accessories and controllers, hearing bits of the music show up in the levels, it just...They found the right, bizarre heartstrings in me to pull, haha.
You know, I'm not actually old, I'm only thirty, but the older I get, the more I realize just how sentimental I get over weird stuff like this. Now that I've got a PS5 that can play almost every PS4 game I have (sorry PT), there's no practical reason for me to keep the PS4 out, or hooked up. After I copied all my saves off it and onto the PS5, I knew I had to either get the PS4 out of the living room and somewhere else in the house, or it'd just end up sitting there. Forever. So I put it back in the box it came in back in 2013, and now it's up in a room with other old consoles.
And the thing is, I felt sad doing it. I know it's just a machine, just a conduit through which the video games flowed, but that PS4 was a part of my life for the last seven and a half years. 2013 was the year I graduated from college, the year I ended up in the hospital because of a chronic illness that has so defined what my life has been in the years since. It's been a rough seven and a half years, in so many ways, but that console helped me get through all the toughest times. Whether it was just giving me a means to immerse myself in games and be alone, escaping reality as best as I could, or connecting with friends. So many countless hours playing online with people who are now some of my closest friends. Again, the PS4 is kinda just a means to an end there, it could have just as easily been an Xbox, or a gaming PC, but it wasn't.
The point to all that being, when I started Astro's Playroom, and through sheer luck started on GPU Jungle, the PS4 era level, it got to me. And like, it's not really a “PS4 themed” level, it's a jungle level in a platformer where the collectibles are PS4 era accessories. At least until reaching the top of the mountain at the very end, when the PS4's ambient music starts playing. Anyway, playing this game has made me realize that even if I wasn't playing PlayStation games as a little kid like I was with Nintendo and Sega, it's still been long enough that the nostalgia hooks got me.
And it's not just nostalgia and fondly remembering bygone eras in my (again, not that long) life. Mostly Astro's Playroom was making me grin ear to ear. One of the first things I saw was a group of Astrobots with Monster Hunter weapons playing on PSPs. World is still the only Monster Hunter I've played, but the detail of them playing PSPs is so specific, and good, that I just burst out laughing. That's what makes the referential side of this game work, is that it's not just blatant references, they're clever. A couple of them are blatant in ways that make me think a certain company's legal team wanted them to be painfully obvious (Crash Bandicoot and Spyro specifically), but for the most part they feel like a lot of time and effort was put into coming up with neat ways to invoke the feeling of the reference.
Or, arguably to make sure that they're not copyright infringing, like the Spider-Man one. It's just an Astrobot dangling upside down from a spider-web. Enough to evoke that feeling, but generic enough that they wouldn't have to pay for the branding. I actually would be really curious how much legal work had to be done for this game. The Astrobot in a red coat keeping an enemy air juggled with his pistols is pretty obviously Dante from the Devil May Cry series, but was it obvious enough to warrant getting Capcom's approval?
Obviously just about every Sony property gets its time at some point. Aside from Tokyo Jungle, which is the only bummer about the game. Listen, you might think I joke about that game, and it certainly started that way because Tokyo Jungle wasn't actually a great game, but it was definitely memorable. And I think more deserving of a little reference than the David Cage trilogy of nonsense, with each of those games getting a separate thing. Tokyo Jungle has certainly done more good for society than that toxic hack ever will!
Ahem, anyway, Astro's Playroom. I got so caught up in my feelings that I neglected to even mention one of the most interesting parts of the game, which is its usage of the DualSense rumble and triggers. After months and months of people raving about how real and cool they are, I'm happy to report that the rumble and triggers are in fact both real, and cool. It wasn't really a case of being instantly sold on them, despite the initial controller demo still being pretty cool. First time pulling the triggers and feeling that tension was neat, and the part where the little Astrobots are rolling around in the controller really felt like there were little robo-buddies in there, bouncing and jostling around!
But it wasn't until actually getting to scenarios in game that it really clicked for me. The monkey climbing part of GPU Jungle was the first moment where it felt like my eyes were opening to the triggers. It just felt cool, and I wish there were more of the fragile handholds that need the light touch, or they break, because that was the most interesting part. And then there was the springy frog in Cooling Springs, where the rumble really felt like a spring moving back and forth, I just don't know how else to describe it!
And the rocket in SSD Speedway! Feathering the triggers, feeling the resistance as the rockets boost up, navigating tight passageways, it's just cool! Really, the rolling ball in Memory Meadows was the only one of those controller gimmick interludes that felt like it was just a gimmick, and not a great one. Not that it's bad, but the DualShock 4 had the touch-pad too. Even if this one is better (and I have no idea if it is), sliding a finger across it like rolling a trackball wasn't clever or neat like the other ones. But that rocket, that was so cool!
All these sections, and really the game as a whole, are pretty easy. Like, if I have any legit game play complaint to make, I wish there was more of a challenge, but I get that this isn't that sort of game. It's a tech demo combined with a love letter to so many great games that all share a connection to PlayStation. Plus even if it's not a kids' game (I'd argue the target audience are people my age and older, and specifically those who had PlayStations in the 90s), it's definitely a kid friendly game. And having that be the game pre-installed on every PS5 is brilliant. This could have easily been some grizzly game about killing dudes, but instead it's an adorable game about running and jumping around while cute robo-bunnies frolic and a giant GPU with a pixelated face sings in the distance.
And the music! GPU Jungle is absolutely the standout to me, but SSD Speedway is a fun one too. Most of the music is jaunty platformer fair, not anything that is amazing. Aside from that GPU song, which I just keep absentmindedly singing bits from. “I tessellate, and animate these dancing sprites and sunlight skies, for you...” Also I can't think of any other catchy songs that feature words like tessellate, or rasterize.
Then there's the load times. They're fast! What impressed me the most is how snappy it is to be in one level, select a totally different one from the pause screen, and then you're basically just there in the other level. I mean, it still takes a couple seconds, but it's just so fast! It's so fast!! It certainly made going back in to find the few things I missed a lot easier, and faster than it would have been if this was a PS4 game. There were definitely some PS4 games that had really fast load times, but the only examples that come to mind immediately were either based on previous gen games (stuff like Rayman Legends, Persona 5 Royal), or indie stuff that almost certainly didn't have much data to load in the first place.
Same feeling I had loading into the remaster of Marvel's Spider-Man for the first time, just flabbergasted at how fast it was. That though, is straying from Astro's Playroom, but suffice it to say that I'm certainly an SSD believer now. Not every PS5 game I've tried loads that fast, so clearly it's still something that has to be properly optimized for. But it's definitely got me excited for when I get around to Ratchet.
Now that I'm just writing about the PS5 generally again, I guess that means I ran out of stuff to say about Astro's Playroom. It really is one of the most delightful games I've played in years, and one of the ones to have me smiling the most. It feels corny to feel nostalgic over a game that has photo realistic renditions of branded PlayStation hardware as collectibles, and real silly to see those juxtaposed next to cutesy robots, but I adored my time with the game.
I can't really sit here and say everyone should play it because getting your hands on a PS5 feels nigh impossible, and I only managed it through sheer luck. Never mind that how one reacts to it will correlate almost one to one with how much you like the PlayStation brand. I'm sure diehards who spent the 90s with the PS1 were even more over the moon with it than me, but I could see the game just flopping for a lot of people.
I'd say anyone reading this already knows how they feel on that front, but it wasn't really until getting into it that I felt it, so who knows. All I do know is that I had a blast with Astro's Playroom, and despite some quibbles with the PS5's UI, I think the future is bright for this console. I'm looking forward to more years of making memories, and having fun through the help of this weirdly shaped, bizarre console.
And, of course, thank you for reading!
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