My PS4 had been
screaming at me for days: “FREE TRIAL – PLAYSTATION NOW!”
Seven days to try Sony's new streaming game service, no strings
attached. Now I generally have a hobbit-like disposition toward
glitzy ads promising good things for free: keep your nose out of
trouble and no trouble will come to you. Still, the fine print could
not be denied – a trial was a trial, plain and simple. So I signed
up. Five minutes later I had laid before me a treasure trove –
nay, a veritable reliquary – of selectable games. Not just demos
and trailers, mind you; I'm talking full titles, start to finish.
The mind boggled. Where to start? Yeegads, almost as much time
could be consumed browsing lists as playing! A system was needed;
some means of organizing and prioritizing this overwhelming roll of
digital distractions. I felt in-over-my-head. What followed was
several days of feints and probing assaults at a variety of games
that fell into two general categories: games I'd always meant to play
but never did and games I'd never heard of but which looked fun.
Along the way I learned a thing or two about streaming services,
about Sony, and especially about the power of time and nostalgia to
soften and blur one's memories of gaming experiences of yesteryear.
Some thoughts:
- Selection runs the gamut, but the gamut ain't always great: Here find some shooters, some sports, a few racers, a decent selection of off-brand RPGs (no Final Fantasys, no BioWare titles, no Bethesdas), numerous indies, and bundles of platform-action titles. But so many of them are merely okay, the sort that earned tepid 6s and 7s from IGN and other industry sites. Where are the Far Crys? The GTAs? Dishonored didn't get a spot? To be fair, some cornerstone franchises are there, namely the Uncharted series, the Batman Arkham series (minus Arkham Knight), the Borderlands collection including the TellTale Games Tales from the Borderlands, and all three BioShocks. There is also a healthy selection of the enjoyable LEGO games, including many (most?) of the Star Wars series and other Disney properties. But the no-shows to the party are more obvious than those who did show up, especially when faced with some of the truly pablum junk that made the cut (Dark Void, anyone, and what were you thinking, Nolan North??)
- Better Late Than Never: PS Now is, I suppose, a timely and competitive service in an age when more and more media outlets are ditching hardware altogether and going full-stream. With Xbox breathing down their neck with their silky-smooth Xbox Live, they could hardly be expected to answer the challenge in any other way. But this is also Sony's long-delayed punt on another feature absent from their tech that has been a bone of contention for years: backwards compatibility. While Xbox-ers could play all their old games on current-gen hardware, Sony hard-coded their new systems to only play fresh titles. If you wanted to keep playing your old PS3 classics, you had to keep an old machine hitched to your TV for good. It was a deal-killer for a lot of former PlayStation loyalists two years ago when the new systems made their debut, and Microsoft garnered a whole lot of new patrons as a result. PS Now redresses the backwards compatibility issue by offering a huge catalog of PS3 games, now playable via the PS4. Indeed, this almost seems to be the service's primary function: the vast majority of games offered on PS Now are actually PlayStation 3. The selection of PS4 titles, meanwhile, is much leaner, and most are not what you'd consider hot releases. God of War III Remastered seemed to be the headliner when I first started, and that's been around for a spell already. Sony promises more titles will be coming out in the months to come, but for now the choices are limited to a scant handful of aging titles, not all of them especially stellar.
- The Return of the Killer Menus: oh Sony, why oh WHY can't you make a decent menu system? Alas, if you're delighted by the prospect of revisiting your PS3 faves, your joy will be tempered with the return of another (cringe-inducing) feature of the last-gen system: hideous, god-awful navigation. Like the much-maligned X-Cross system that was the bane of PS3 users, PS Now's main menu interface is a series of long, horizontal icons arranged in dizzying, Sisyphean loops that require constant scrolling to browse. If you find a title you're interested in you have to remember where you saw it or else you'll likely lose track of where it was and have to begin your search anew minutes later. Meanwhile, transitioning to a new category requires scrolling vertically through a plethora of lists not organized in any logical way UNTIL you reach the very end where – finally – you can search alphabetically. Your thumb will have some heat on it before you play your first game thanks to all the forward, backward, up, down, back again and where-was-that-one-thing? you have to do before you finally land on your choice. On top of that, the icons are distractingly huge and consume too much of the interface to allow comfortable searching. You can only see four or five icons at once, which doesn't sound like an inconvenience until you're running through your tenth or twelfth loop of the same list hunting for the right title. Would it have killed them to have used a stacking system, perhaps with folders and sub-folders that break the library into a tree structure so you can narrow your options as you look (e.g. PS4 > RPGs > Fantasy, or PS3 > Shooters)? Yes, genres like RPGs and Shooters do have their own categories, but they are simplistic lists bunched up with two dozen other lists that look exactly the same crammed into the same cluttered screen. Plus, tons of cross-genre titles repeat in multiple lists, adding to the confusion. Ugh.
- Clear (?) as a stream: Streaming is amazing tech. When you consider that you're essentially feeding a 40GB game through your cable and straight into your system without a disc, an install, or a single bit of hard memory being consumed, it's astonishing. Netflix for games – whoa. But there's a price to be paid in graphical fidelity. I won't pretend to know all the science behind it, but it's obvious the staggering volume of data transferred causes the visuals to skew toward lower-res reproduction. Nothing is as crisp and clean as you expect it would be. It's never horrid but it's also never unnoticeable: draw distances are compromised, angles and lines are softened into waxy paste, finer details like water sprays and more elaborate lighting effects are muddled and blunted. BioShock, for example, looks considerably worse streamed than it ever did on PS3, and that's saying something for a game that uses shadows as much as it does light. It's more noticeable on PS4 games like Killzone:Shadowfall, an expansive, open shooter that never quite gets its visuals up to presentation quality. Which leads to a separate-but-related issue...
- Let's (try to) make a connection: Imagine you're in a large room filled with gaming consoles. You walk into the room, select the console with the game you'd like to play, and approach. But there's someone ahead of you in line who also wants to play the same game. And in fact, there are ten or eleven other dudes ahead of him. Might be a while. Maybe try another game? Another line, as long or longer. Plus it's a Friday, late afternoon, everyone's off work, ready to kick back with some gameage...just like you. Now almost every console's got a line queued up halfway out the door. And that room is starting to get crowded. And hot. And maybe you're connection isn't as super as some of the other dudes already in line, the virtual equivalent of needing to pee bad enough you're risking your spot in line. Maybe you end up missing your turn altogether and you'll have no choice but to get in the back of the line and try again. This was my experience with PS Now, minus the miasma of body heat and Dr. Pepper farts. There's only so much bandwidth the servers can handle, more players means more bandwidth, more strain on the 1s and 0s. Often – let's say 33% of the time because I'm feeling magnanimous – I simply could not access the game I wanted. My system would clock and spin and buffer and after several agonizing minutes I'd receive a disconcerting bloop sound and a message telling me my game was unavailable due to traffic. That was when they were kind enough to tell me what happened. As often the app would simply time-out and soft-crash back to the PS menu. Re-upping the same game resulted in a message telling me I was already engaged in a session – imagine my surprise! – and that I'd have to terminate my current session and log in again. To be fair, this happened largely during traditionally high-volume times – nights and weekends – and rarely cropped up during my early Saturday sessions. Lag increased noticeably as play-time elapsed, however, and many times I was treated to the nerve-wracking “CONNECTION” indicator (superimposed directly over the action, nonetheless), warning me I was in imminent danger of being dropped like a bad prom date. Saving frequently is a must, as any stretch of inactivity results in an automatic disconnect to ensure room on the servers for those of us not inclined to take a bathroom break (true story, by the way: pausing a game to take a brief porcelain repast, I returned to find my connection lost and my screen blacked out. This wouldn't have been half so aggravating if I hadn't been playing Bioshock 2 at the time, a game which many of you may recall only saves at the beginning of each stage...those stages which can famously take 2+ hours to finish).
- Everything old is...still old: Ah, nostalgia, that great whitewasher of games. How is it we only remember the good parts of those old titles and forget those things that made us rage-quit at 3am, howling in impotent silence at the TV lest we wake our parents? And have the next-gen systems truly ruined our awe factor at the aging graphics, the smaller sandboxes, the blocky, deformed character models? Yeah, they kinda have. It pains me to admit it, but try as I might, most of these games simply did not – could not – pull me in the way they did when I was younger, poorer, and un-besmirched by the near photo-realism we get from today's top-flight console titles. The original Infamous, such a great time-passer just a few years ago, now seems quaint. The first God of War? It will forever hold a place as one of the greatest action-platformers of all time, but it has aged. And the dearth of titles at your fingertips precludes your having to devote any real time to fighting those old fights again anyway – when it was the only new disc in your collection, you had no choice but to keep working at the one impossible spot until you got past it. Now you can simply throw up your hands and say, “Meh, I've played this before; what else is there?”Case in point: I took a trip down memory lane playing Shadow of the Colossus, a stellar title, revolutionary at the time, epic in scope, and utterly original. But I'd forgotten – oh, LORD, how I'd forgotten – about this one spot early in the game on the way to the third colossus, where you must climb a perilous column and wall-jump onto a platform over a vast lake below. Err even slightly and you plummet into the drink and there begin a painfully slow and deliberate swim back up to the pinnacle of this column for another try. Specifically I'd forgotten that spot was conceived and designed by the Devil himself during one of his especially depressed periods and that it is FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to make that jump. How my 23 year-old self ever had the patience to overcome that obstacle I'll never know, but my 35 year-old self was having none of it. I gave it two dozen tries before resigning Shadow to the dustbin of my memories, where it will remain, beaten and conquered at a point and place in my life when time clearly weighed less heavily on me.
Confession
time: I lost track of the days for my free trial and ended up being
charged for the following month. As such, I had not one week but
FIVE to experience PS Now, and my wallet is $20 lighter for the
gaffe. In the end, I never finished a single game. Mostly I tried a
handful of titles that looked interesting and ultimately decided the
best part about most of them was the box art. Other players of a
more fickle temperament might find this a plus rather than a minus –
flitting here and there moth-like from one title to the next would
appeal to the curious, the nibblers and the ADD types, after all –
but for a semi-serious completionist like myself, I found I was more
interested in finding one or two games that were actually good and
working on them exclusively. Alas, I could and would not compromise
my iron-clad rules of living a Mature Adult Life, namely I don't game
during the week, and a few hours on the weekend is hardly enough to
justify the cost of admission to this arena, this theater with a
thousand doors. I summed it up best describing it to a friend who
also had PS Now for a few months and ended up cancelling his
subscription: it's like going to Blockbuster and renting $20 worth of
random games (so, like, four or five), playing them all long enough
to find the ones that don't suck, then half-assing the rest until
it's time to turn them back in. He agreed.
