Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm on the fence about Watchdogs in general as I haven't played the first two so I don't really know what their chat is. I got the second one for free on the PC so I'll probably have a go at some point, but all these individual Ubisoft games have just been replaced in my head with a single picture of a map littered with icons and bullshit.

I’m going to play The Last Guardian at 60fps.

Not as big as I expected at all. Weird looking but a bit funky. Kinda like it.

Are you going to play the Xbox with your hands and the PlayStation with your feet?

Mine in situ. Certainly very very chunky, but still fits in my shitty TV unit so I'm not bothered.

That cable tidy kit has its work cut out.

Mine's still sat in the box, not sure where to put it really. The cabinet is pretty enclosed, don't know whether to just stand it up behind the telly but then there will be a big gap where the PS4 was because that's going to another room.

Heh, that was bought years ago and never used then I found it in a bag when I moved house. Now it sits on the shelf instead and is still never used. I'll need to get a new surround sound kit soon because the PS5 doesn't have an optical out and that alone will allow me to do away a lot of the cables you see there so I'm just leaving it for the moment.

The Xbox series X doesn't have an optical out either which is really annoying. I'm not upgrading yet, but when I do, it'll render my surround sound next to useless.

What option are you looking at for it?

Does your TV not have an optical out?

My TV has an optical out but it doesn't output surround sound through it.

To be honest I haven't looked at anything in detail because I can't face it; I hate investigating this sort of thing. For the moment I'm just going to use the optical out on my TV so at least I can decent stereo audio out of the PS5, while still getting proper surround from any content coming out of my PC. After Christmas I'll look into a new amp and sub and hopefully can re-use all the individual speakers. I'll probably go into Richer Sounds and just describe my setup to the geeks in there and see what options they recommend.

Hmm, this seems a bit odd to me. I stuck the Spider-man disc in the console, copied it all over and downloaded the patches and all that jazz. At this point I've got a nice icon on the main screen to show me that the game's there. I eject the disc to put Valhalla in and the Spider-man icon disappears completely from the main screen. If I check the Game Library it doesn't show up under the 'Installed' list either. So even though it's on the machine and entirely ready to play there's no sign of it anywhere on the UI. I'm sure that on the PS4 in the situation it would still show up as normal but it would just prompt you to insert the disc if you tried to play the game?

Also, found this really nice thing (if you like stats):



The best part is that it exposes the stats for all the PS4 games you've played as well as the PS5 stuff. Fuck knows why Sony didn't expose that data before because it was obvious from the end of year emails that they always had it.

Christ, Grim's put 547 hours into GTA V!

So, Amazon told me that my PS5 wasn’t going to arrive due to circumstances outside their control.
Mysteriously it then went out for delivery and then failed. I was at home and there was no card left so I suspect they didn’t try.

Good this so far. Played the free Astro Bot game with our daughter, great stuff, looks fantastic. Having only had a launch model PS4 I'm looking forward to playing some of my old games again but with better pictures. Think I might play through RDR2 again first.

PS5: controller is amazing. Astro's Playground is super fun.
Gets a bit warm.

The controller gets warm?

Demon’s Souls: fucking terrific. So good it’s making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Nope not doing that again. I'm sure the graphics are amazing and everything but I don't think that'll stop it from pissing me right off.

After a moan at Amazon on chat, they decided they could deliver after all.

It's a result. She has awesome whiskers.

Weird. Mine came from Argos but also had one of those things with it.

Tempted to make a "PS5 attracts pussy" joke, but I'm better than that

I just saw a close up of the grips of the PS5 pad on Instagram. It's got loads of little triangles, squares etc and it looks great... Nice touch.

I’m not one for hyperbole and I think I’m generally quite critical of this hobby I love. But anyway...

ASTRO’S PLAYROOM IS THE GREATEST THING IVE EVER PLAYED.

It out-Nintendo’s Nintendoness. They’ve created a loveable character and made such a beautiful and enjoyable love letter to the PlayStation that manages against all odds not to feel like cynical product placement but just a great nod to games and systems of Sony’s past. It’s just great.

And, fuck me, I fucking LOVE the force feedback triggers and haptics. They’re just the best things ever. I’ve only done one level (of 4) but I’ve just turned it off with a big smile on my face. It’s really made me want to play the Astrobot VR again. Whoever is making these things probably just had pockets of rainbow and joy. It’s probably made by a unicorn. Made of chocolate.

More Astrobot please.

I smashed through the entire game yesterday and agree with all of this, it's an absolutely fucking lovely, lovely thing. It also underlines how much bonkers hardware Sony made that I'd never even heard of and I need to Google some of it to see what it was even for (PSP GPS unit anyone?).

Currently trying to get to the bottom of child accounts, ps plus, cloud saves and using across PS4 and PS5. Bit fucking baffled so far. It certainly doesn't all just work in the manner I imagined that it would do.

The main thing though is Minecraft is now buttery smooth even around her twelve storey "horse hotel" with its hundreds of guests that I think nearly killed my PS4.

I worked out what happened here and I'm not sure whether it's a very weird feature or a really shitty bug.

Basically, if you put a disc game in the console and let it copy/patch itself but then don't actually launch it before you remove the disc then all content is deleted from the console. So yesterday I got Spider-man and Valhalla both all copied and patched but as soon as I removed the discs all traces disappeared. When I put Spider-man back in again I had to repeat the whole fucking mess all over again before I could actually play it. It's such a weird thing to happen that it seems as if it's deliberate, though I can't imagine why they'd think this was a good idea.

There’s something magical about these haptics too.

When I’ve been playing Demon’s Souls I’ve turned off the mic on the controller - just a preference thing for me since I don’t think there’s that much to be gained by having sword noise emanating from my hands.

But for the Tower Knight fight the haptics are doing some cool shit. For all 3 of us who ever got to the second boss you’ll know he’s got a big Tower Shield. He’s a big fucker too about 5x the player character and he’s got some weight to him. Anyway, he slams down his giant shield on the floor and the haptics are rumbling away and creating this “bell noise” like a clang as the shield hits the floor. It’s fucking marvellous.

Pretty impressed with this controller all things considered. It’s proper next-gen somehow.

Apparently it was developed by the same people who developed the Joy Con's.

Got a source for that? It seems unlikely on the surface of it.

Yep..

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/ ... c_feedback

Fair play. I'd always wrongly assumed that companies would jealously control every aspect of their hardware but in retrospect it makes sense that they wouldn't be necessarily be designing or producing every tiny, especially when it comes to peripherals.

I played a bit of Bugsnax.

It’s Muppets meets Pokemon, of a sort.

Again, the best thing is the bloody controller. You’re playing with a PlayStation pad but suddenly you’ve got those GameCube triggers that click-in. Crazy.

I had zero interest in it, partly because the name is so fucking awful, but the reviews made it sound more interesting than I'd expected so I'll probably give it a shot at some point.

Is there a resogun equivalent yet? I recall that being one of the jewels in the PS4 lineup.

Equivalent in terms of what? I mean Bugsnax is I suppose a smaller title that showcases some of the console's new features but it's not an ace little shmup like Resogun was.

I don't think it's going to be long before I'll be SSD shopping for it. Gobbling up that 667GB at a fair old rate already. It's a slightly less big deal now we've got quicker broadband but still.

Yeah poorly phrased. A shmup. I was thinking in the mould of launch titles like reso gun and geometry wars on the Xbox.

I might be wrong, but there’s not really any PS5 indie titles out at the minute. And any decent undies that are coming out sometime soon will be playable on the PS4 anyway; certainly no exclusives on the horizon that I’m aware of.

So I never got the One X or the PS4 pro, making the decision to squirrel money away for the next gen at launch instead. Then rather recklessly, and feeling rather depressed by lockdown and everything I decided to punt all my money away on the big three console launches of this month for early xmas and birthday presents...



And I gotta say I feel the PS5 blows the xbox out of the water in terms of feeling like a proper launch. Astrobot is incredible, the controller is a proper revelation, and I never really played Demon's Souls so the remake is huge game for me. It's like playing concept art. Nuts.

Bizarrely, and unexpectedly, Mrs Lave actually really likes the aesthetic of both of 'em, but especially the PS5. And I've got to admit, it's really grown on me. It looks so weird in a good way.

Yeah, I like the looks and the fact that they at least did something. Can't say the Xbox Sries X is ugly but you can't really say it's pretty either, it's just a black box

I tell you this about the PS5 (vs the XSX). Man alive the disc drive is loud as fuck and every time you turn it on with a disc in the drive it spins the disc for a while and makes a racquet. It’s probably louder or softer depending on the surface you’ve got it resting on but I had to swap my PS5 & Xbox positions cause it was doing my tits in. The ostentatious look of the PS5 is nice but I prefer the understated aesthetics of the Xbox. I’d prefer if neither were ‘on show’ in the living room so having just a black box sitting quietly out the way does it for me. And the Xbox unboxing experience felt special whereas the PS5 was just a shit box with the stuff in there.

But for everything else that matters, the PS5 games & controller blow the Xbox out the water right now. It feels next gen, exclusive and something that you can’t have, say, by paying through the nose for a PC rig.

The Xbox vertically looks amazing. Yes it looks like a moody GameCube that’s grown up and hit a goth phase, but in a good way.

Horizontally though, it looks like garbage.

I’m still going to put it horizontal as it’s only a matter of time before the toddler drops stuff in the holes.

Aye, the PS5 disc drive is just as annoyingly loud as it was in all the previous generations. At least it's only for a few minutes as a DRM check because everything's running off the internal drive, but still.