If you're the sort to notice regular names on the forums you hang out at, you've probably noticed I spend a decent amount of time talking about MLB The Show. In the past four years, it has supplanted the NBA 2K franchise as my go-to timekiller, a game in which the audio quickly becomes repetitive, the gameplay likewise becomes practically 100% muscle memory and 0% creativity and there is an endless drip of Diamond Dynasty content to keep fans coming back for more. As a big fan, I spent much of the past week examining how the fanbase (and curious onlookers) were reacting to the news that the game would debut on XBox as a Game Pass title rather than a $60/$70 retail product. Between the positivity of the franchise's core fanbase and the fickleness of "sports-only gamers", the results were predictably mixed.
(Here's where I'll say: I'm not going to come to any conclusions or make any sweeping predictions at the end of this blog. This is just a blog for me that I'm sharing with you. If you think that's a waste of time, I can't disagree with you!)
That's not what I found most interesting, though. What I found most interesting is that on forums like r/games and r/baseball, most of the discussion came back not to why Sony wasn't immediately offering the game on PlayStation Plus for either PS4 or PS5 as well, but that everyone (and I mean just about everyone) was comparing Game Pass to PlayStation Now. I don't know about you guys, but until this January Playstation consoles had been the only gaming system I'd owned since an ill-fated year with a Gamecube sitting idly next to my PS2. I really like Sony platforms, and I like video games enough that I'm writing this blog on the Giant Bomb forums right this second - I do not think about Playstation Now, like, ever. Does PSNow have some kind of strange market penetration I'm not aware of? Is it just an easier phrase to keep in mind than PS+ despite most other streaming-style services going with "plus" or some variation of?
I didn't care much about that either, I guess (2.2 million is the number, down 16 million from Game Pass' base) but Playstation did happen to be offering a 7-day free trial last week and so I decided to check it out. The first thing that struck me was that, and I'm sure I was aware of this at some point, the service has slowly pivoted to a 50/50 hybrid of streaming and downloadable titles. Now, there's a lot of turds in the downloadable section, but a quick scroll shows some pretty substantial titles:
- Abzu
- Ace Combat 7
- Ape Escape 2
- The Bioshock Series
- Beyond Two Souls
- Bloodborne
- Brothers
- The Darksiders Series
- Dead Island
- Detroit: Become Human
- DOOM 2016
- Dishonored 2
- Fallout 4
- God of War III Remastered
- Horizon: Zero Dawn
- inFamous Second Son
- Injustice 2
- Knack
- Metal Gear Soild V: Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain
- Street Fighter V
- Until Dawn
- Wolfenstein: The New Order
And I skipped several games after MGSV just in the interest of my time. Point is, this isn't nearly (nearly) the amount of games available to Game Pass subscribers, but a person with limited budget for gaming in a world without brick and mortar rental stores could, feasibly, reasonably justify paying for this service over buying games directly. If I think back to my childhood of begging for $6 to walk down to the nearby Blockbuster and browse the shelves for an hour every Friday evening, browsing this list isn't all that different from your average trip to the PS2 section in 2002. So, trial in hand, I figured I might as well download Marvel's Avengers and give it a shot. After all, the one consistent bit of positive criticism I'd heard about the game is it's campaign is both enjoyable and manageably brief. What's the worst that could happen?
...But first, what good is a free trial if I don't give the primary function a spin? Obviously I had to stream several games and see where we're at with that tech, right? I won't spend too much time on this because anybody reading this should be able to guess what I'm about to say here, but just in case you're terrifying optimist: the situation, mostly, is pretty bad. Tellingly, if the game is downloadable, the first splash screen you see while the game loads is some friendly advice to download that game instead. The second screen is a tip that you can also use the service on a PC, which I imagine they put upfront because you're absolutely not going to want to use this service on your primary console television. The service also seems to pose a threat to the Playstation 4 itself, as these were the games I tried over the past week (here's where I'll note I stream movies on this PS4 with no hiccups or resolution problems at any time):
- Fantavision: This game is still an unenjoyable mess to me, but it does look mostly how I remember it looking on a 17" CRT. It comes out of the gate hot, however, as I had to cut my normal volume level in half just to not fear pissing the neighbors off. A success, I guess?
- Uncharted 2: I actually didn't have issues with controller responsiveness anywhere else, but here I just kept jumping off the damn train to my death. Weird! The game also looked like a heavily remastered PS2 game which is...not a compliment, exactly (it's an interesting look if you're a doofus like me, but I digress).
- God of War: Felt great but with all the brown, red and black in that opening boat level it looked like absolute hell.
- MX vs. ATV: Danny O'D has been talking these games up on the podcast lately and I figured it'd be an easy modern game to just dive into and see how it looks. Reminded me of Dave Mirra or Matt Hoffman BMX for the PS1. Controlled great, though.
- Wreckfest: What was nice about this was I could squint and tell it was a PS4 game. I tried it with both a one-on-one and 24-car 3-lap race on a figure 8 track and it was nice to see that, relatively, the service doesn't perform any better or worse than an actual PS4. I wanted to download this game afterward, which felt like the potential of the PSNow service fully realized.
- Bloodborne: ...And then I played Bloodborne. Or, I loaded Bloodborne. See, the service will notice if you have a save for the game already, and while I suppose in many ways that makes me the idiot for attempting to stream Bloodborne when I already own and have beaten it, this was still a pretty rotten experience. See, the Old Hunters DLC is not on Playstation Now, but my save file contains that information and so the game couldn't load either online or offline. To make matters worse, it seemed I didn't have any control of either the virtual console nor my own until I could get through to the game's actual menu, which I couldn't...and the service didn't seem interested in booting me for idling too long as advertised. I left Bloodborne running on Playstation Now for two full days with the console going in and out of rest mode (thankfully) until eventually I had to unplug the power cord and cross my fingers through the database reconstruction process for the umpteenth time. Yikes.
- inFamous: The game booted without sound, and originally I thought this was a funny flaw in the service. I played through the intro (the game launches with inverted Y axis controls!) that doesn't allow you to pause and when I finally could paise, realized the game doesn't have audio controls at all! I dipped out to the XMB and realized I had no audio, period. I had to go into the system settings and switch to Digital Out and back to HDMI to get audio again. The game looked about as good as God of War did. I was done streaming games.
The TL:DRof it all is this: overall I think the games play perfectly good over streaming, look slightly worse than they either do currently or I remember them looking, and eventually I ran into issues that had me worrying for the safety of my entire console. I can see a significantly small use case for playing these games on a much smaller screen where the graphical issues would hopefully be diminished, but considering those last two games, I'm not sure that's worth $10/month. Right?
Anyway, Avengers!
I've already written a lot here and we all know the deal with this game so I'm going to try to limit myself to just a couple of paragraphs, but I did want to talk about this game a little bit somewhere and this just felt like the best place to do it because it sat comfortably alongside my experience with the greater PSNow framework in my head. For the low price of nothing, I finally got to experience this game beyond it's beta and see the launch campaign through to it's conclusion. You know what? This game has so much potential that I can see why it still has fans. But it also so clearly should've just got to focus on its campaign and suffers greatly from not having been able to do so. Through the five main Avengers Crystal Dynamics was tasked with summarizing the entirety of modern game development in a single six to eight hour campaign. You've got a ton of Tomb Raider in there, a lot of Destiny, a frankly daunting amount of Diablo, just a smattering of Sekiro (or whoever we want to blame for health/stun-based combat since Jedi Fallen Order also came out in 2019) and not enough polish to make any of it feel as good as it should.
But it's also a pretty charming homage to the beat 'em up arcade classics of the Avengers' earliest forays into gaming (lovingly highlighted in an arcade during the opening A-Day sequence) if you can contort your brain to interpret it that way. All of the characters feel good and just unique enough to develop personal preferences (IMO, anyway) and the combat threatens a complexity it thankfully never fully demanded, at least during the campaign. The performance of Kamala Khan is a huge highlight in the first half of the game, and while ultimately a weird hard rock remix of the MCU's Infinity War story filtered through different characters (this time it's Thor who rescues Iron Man from dying in space, and you'll never guess who's along for the ride!) on a dramatically more brief timeline, you can see that the Crystal Dynamics team really tried the best they could with the limited time they had to make a game on par with the Marvel's Spider-Men of the world.
Unfortunately, I enjoyed my time with the campaign just enough that I figured I'd give the endgame a shot and...the endgame sucks, lads. There's some vague notion of what to do immediately after besting the big bad thanks to power requirements and some hint-laden VO, but it's immediately clear that these missions are just the same mechanics you'd been tutorialized throughout the campaign. I figured matchmaking and getting to see some gloriously overpowered superheroes fighting alongside me would dull the numbness I felt hovering over each activity I was leveled enough to attempt, but in all three missions we were loaded into one of the game's bland vacant city overworlds, tasked with a mission and then given no enemies to fight. That's right buds, the enemies just didn't load in! We ran around opening chests, solving light puzzles and running in circles around Inhumans supposedly held hostage by AIM bots (heh, remember AIM bots?) only there were no AIM bots to be found. Sure, they'd load up at random elsewhere in the level as we scrambled about, but the game seemed to get these weren't the bots we were looking for and showed no interest in granting us progress for robots destroyed purely out of a sense of duty. No, it was the droids what held the hostages or nothing, and those droids seemed to have lost their RSVP.
Am I mad I played Avengers? Hell no, it was free! Would I have been mad if I'd paid the $9.99 PSNow typically costs? I suppose I'd tentatively say no to that, as well. Having experienced it first hand, I'm reinvigorated in my belief that the Anthem of Marvel games is not gonna be my bag any time soon. But I also scroll back up to that list of games and think...if for some reason I had just bought a PS4, and was otherwise fairly strapped for cash, I'd probably strongly consider the subscription for the downloadable games alone. And it made me realize that PSNow really isn't that far off the Game Pass service, as it heavily favors Sony first-party and Sony-funded third-party games, or games that are at least broadly associated with the platform due to their communities or countries of origin (again, I skipped over a good chunk of games, like Dark Cloud 1+2, the God Eater series and Valkyria Chronicles Remastered).
Which, hey, brings me back to baseball! While David Jaffe has hewed closer and closer to gaming's equivalent of...some fallen comedian I can't think of (I was gonna go with Dennis Miller but couldn't decide who that was less fair toward) these days than a treasured voice in games, he did decide to ruffle some feathers this week insinuating he knew a guy that knew a guy who knows Sony's own version of Game Pass is on the way sooner than we think. And despite being widely mocked at the time, Jim Ryan did say just this past winter, "there is actually news to come, but just not today. We have PlayStation Now which is our subscription service, and that is available in a number of markets." I see where he's coming from! Playstation Now is a lot more similar to Game Pass than I'd ever thought it was, it just lingers on in my mind as the muddy, buggy streaming service that it is rather than the curated rental platform that it's slowly expanded into being as well.
Like I said at the top, this is truly as bloggy as a blog can be so I'm not arriving at any conclusions here nor am I throwing out predictions or hopes for what Playstation Now can be, but I had a really interesting, sweet-and-sour kind of week with a trial of it and simply felt like sharing! Cheers!
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