What Happened to PlayStation?

PlayStation was the premier place to play your games, PC be damned. PlayStation came onto the scene in the mid 90s and blew our freakin’ minds! I mean, we’d seen 3D games on the SNES but the PlayStation was a whole new level! Rather than being relegated to a few niche genres, we suddenly had access to a wide range of games that we’d never even thought about before. 4-person multiplayer, dual thumb sticks, disk-based game storage, portable game progress, the PlayStation had it all, man!

Then the PlayStation 2 upped the ante with a processor many times more powerful then the OG PlayStation, giving us bigger and better games, worlds, and experiences than ever before. This stuff can’t be understated. It just can’t dude I’m tellin’ ya. Just look at this custom unlabeled side-by-side screenshot comparison and see if you can tell which is taken from which console’s game.

Hard to tell from here!

As if that wasn’t enough, Sony throws in a DVD player. In the year 2000. If you’re old enough to retain memories from those days, you probably remember DVDs being the hot new thing. Chances are, unless you grew up the Gates household, the PS2 was your family’s first DVD player. Convince your dad to get a PS2 to watch high quality movies, and play Tekken Tag Tournament and TimeSplitters when he isn’t looking. Pure bliss. Plus, did you know that the logo on the original PS2 could rotate? Blew my mind when I realised, and that was 9 years later!

See?

The Xbox entered the scene during the PS2’s reign, with a faster processor and better graphics, but honestly, who gives a shit? The controller sucked, even after the badly-needed redesign, and, like, the only person you knew who had one was that weird kid at school who either a) was obsessed with Microsoft and thought they could do no wrong, or b) wanted to be different so he could show everyone how much “smarter” than them he is. Well guess what, while he was languishing by himself with his Blood Wake and his Dead or Alive, we were pounding cokes piling around a fat early-2000s era CRT TV repeatedly picking our jaws up off the ground taking turns at freggin Vice City! Granted, Vice City and San Andreas were later released for Xbox, but by that time we had already moved on to Vice City- and Liberty City Stories! Hell yeah! Exclusives baby!

Late 2006, the PS3 rolled around and god damn was it a powerhouse. This thing had freggin HD graphics, a custom CELL processor, and later even supported both 3D and motion controls. Simultaneously! Granted, 3D was a pointless fad that barely even worked, but you know what did work? The Bluray drive that came stock in every single PS3 ever sold. The PS2 was your first DVD player and the PS3 was your first Bluray player! Back to back! That’s a twofer!

Xbox was… around at that time as well. The Xbox 360, as well as starting Microsoft’s tradition of giving their consoles incomprehensible names, was also failing at a rate anywhere from 25% to almost 50% of the time. Imagine that. If you and three of your friends each buy an Xbox 360, one of you is basically guaranteed to have a busted console on your hands. God damn. Other than a higher failure rate, Xbox had nothing on PlayStation in those days. PS3 had all the exclusives, it had Bluray, it had it all! Xbox couldn’t compete with Halo and Gears of Bore, and a $200 add-on that you could use to watch a handful of movies in HD.

Once the PS4/Xbox One era came around, the Xbox team lost their god damn minds. Mandatory $100 camera (that no-one wanted) in every box, a game machine’s reveal that’s focused on watching TV, and an always-on internet connection as a requirement for playing your disk-based single player games. Meanwhile, Sony played it safe and released a respectable games machine that simply played your games. As you can imagine, they enjoyed dunking on Microsoft every chance they got.

It wasn’t all roses during this time, however. The PS4 was Sony’s first console wherein they didn’t even attempt - attempt - to include backwards compatibility at launch. In 2015, 2 years later, Sony finally decided to start selling emulated PS2 titles on the PSN store. You couldn’t chuck your old disk into the console and go to town, but hey, it’s something. Some would argue that it’s even more convenient. So how many games did they release to get the ball rolling? 50? 100? More? Try 8. 8 games. They added more, and in 2021, we have a total selection of 54 PS2 games. Such a requested feature as backwards compatibility, and we have 54 games over 6 years. They’d have had more if they released 1 game per month from the initial 2015 announcement until present day. Remember that this isn’t game development, it’s emulation optimization. 1 month is plenty, especially for a monolith like Sony.

You could argue that the games didn’t sell so they quietly stopped releasing them, but that’s what happens when you release random-ass games, bury them in your digital store, and make no effort to tell people about them nor where to buy them. Did a PlayStation higher-up lose a bet? What is this? War of the Monsters? Puzzle Quest? Eternal Ring? What are these games?? Start at the top-selling PS2 game and go down the list! Wikipedia did the legwork for you! God damn Sony.

Okay that was then. Some missteps, but an otherwise respectable legacy. What then is great about PlayStation in 2021? They have a powerful console, but Xbox is more powerful. They have backwards compatibility with PS4 games, but every Xbox can run hundreds of games from any generation previous to it’s own. The PS5 is a weirdly-designed box that looks like Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh, but the new Xbox is a weirdly-designed box that looks like a fridge. Fridges stack better than Kaibas. Also black is a cooler colour than white and a box is an actual shape. Plus, you can buy an actual Xbox fridge! Sorry Sony, Spiderman’ll have to wait - those Redbulls have to stay cold somehow! Brrr! Sony got nothin’.

still funny

Okay, I’ll admit it. I was being factious. There are two compelling reasons to own a PS5, and by which I mean there is one reason, because the controller ‘haptic feedback’ or whatever they’re calling it, is crap. There’s no reason for it to exist, it adds nothing to the gameplay experience, and it shortens the controller’s battery life. The best thing they did around that feature was add a setting to turn it off.

So that leaves one thing. One reason to buy a PS5: PSVR2. Yeah baby we’re gonna take it to the moon man! PSVR2 is gonna be the primo virtual reality experience to take us into the VR future! ‘Primo’ means ‘premium’ therefore PSVR 2 will be the best VR experience out there. Get yourself a PS5 before the VR train leaves the planet for good! You can keep your weird rinky-dink backyard VR peripherals on PC - PSVR2 is barrelling down on us like a hurricane! When it arrives, it’ll reveal every other VR system as what they’ve always been: Fisher Price wannabes. Including PSVR. Man that thing was stupid! Sony obviously needed to move the millions of PS Move wands from a few years ago and had a few interns in engineering whip something up.

We have way too many PlayStation haters out there but they’ll see what it’s like when PSVR2 blows them all away. I always believed in PS5. Great console.