I have had my eyes on the Playstation roughly for 10 years, every time with the “Last of Us” game as the backdrop – starting from PS3, and then with the remastered version in PS4 and when PS5 came out was surprised that they reworked on the Part 1 again, but never thought of buying it. Once I got my gaming Laptop and managed to play few PS3 games on them (Uncharted 1-3) I was again interested in the playstation. I then managed to run the first few minutes of “Last of Us” and was convinced that I would be buying the PS5 someday to just play this game.
I had bought the Nintendo Wii in 2008 and had a blast with it till 2018 when I got the Nintendo Switch. So I was actually thinking of PS5 in 2025 or so and was in no hurry – anyway it was always out of stock (worse in India compared to US). So when my wife wanted to gift it to me (Believe me I am not making this up :-), I just gave it a shot and to my utter disbelief was actually able to snatch one in Feb 2023 sale. It is a sophisticated piece of hardware running a polished software and so the user experience from something like a ‘Switch’ is way ahead. I was quick to download the digital version of ‘Last of Us Part 1’ which was on sale and found myself looking at spectacular 4K graphics with HDR to boot (My Sony A80 supports VRR as well). Most of the times I was not sure if the cut scene had ended and the actual gameplay is on – the game looks so good. I will create another post specifically for the game. Astro was the first one that I finished though and for someone who was coming from the Nintendo (Mario) universe the history of Playstation as depicted in this game was both fun and informative.
The Controller is something entirely different and unless you actually hold one, it is difficult to explain the feel.
How for example can I convince you that you could feel that you are walking on glass (or snow for that matter) just though the haptic feel of the controller (even the grass blades can be felt). The adaptive triggers which can harden up for a shotgun and bounce back for rapid firing is another tech that needs to be used to be believed. Just mind blowing.
Everything is super fast – with the SSD (no more noisy whirling hard disks) and zero loading times. The cinematic experience of the games gain massively due to this one improvement – you just keep moving into various zones without the game stopping and making you realize that it is just that – a game. Instead you feel more immersive, almost as if you are there in a movie as it is playing out, but with the added ability to control the protagonist.
Since the PS5 is backwards compatible to PS4 and adding to this the fact that several PS3 blockbusters are available for dirt cheap on PS4, for someone who has just moved in to the Playstation universe – I am staring at a huge library of quality games which are also reasonably priced. Take the first three games of Uncharted (1, 2 and 3) for example which I got for 799 or Tomb raider collection which is another trilogy of games for 649 and Resident Evil 2 remake for 642. Even quality titles like Horizon – Zero Dawn or God of War are available for a few hundreds which is just brilliant. Recent PS5 games though are all 4000+ and I will have to wait for a while or get it in deals (Disc deals are higher than online) but there is a huge backlog of games that will keep me busy for a long time and then there is PSVR2 for later – much later.