Well it was only a matter of time. With Microsoft having shown me the value in a subscription gaming “rental” service, I started entertaining the idea of trying out Sony’s similar service for the Playstation 4. While I have owned every Sony console (and still do, with the exception of my original PS1), I began to fall off the Sony bandwagon during the PS3 days. Most of the multiplatform offerings seemed to run better on the Xbox 360, and once I was invested in that ecosystem, and absolutely in love with the controller, I just didn’t spend as much time, or money, on my Playstation library. Hence, I missed a lot of games that came to the system, mainly because I was too busy enjoying the vastly superior Xbox Live with my buddies.
That’s not really the case anymore, as the PS4 runs most things better than the base Xbox One (though I have an X so that’s kind of moot) and PSN is comparable to XBL in terms of stability and such. But it’s that investment, that ridiculous library I’ve amassed on Xbox that keeps me there. Well, that and the insanely sexy XBO Elite controller. Anyways, the bottom line is that I missed a lot back in the day. There are a ton of Playstation games I never got to experience, either because I missed the boat on them in terms of popularity, or because they were first person shooters or action games that I just couldn’t stand because Dual Shock 3 controller and its bloody awful convex L2 and R2 triggers. I can’t explain why, but that controller always felt foreign and uncomfortable in my hands. Like it was going to slip out like a fish. That alone was enough to keep me away from a fair amount of Playstation exclusives.
Fast forward to today, and I’m still not a big fan of the Dual Shock 4 design, but it’s light years better than the older models. At least the triggers are concave so your finger doesn’t slide right off. I can hold it and play it for extended amounts of time without it feeling like it’s fighting to get away from me.
It’s this comfort with the controller that convinced me to give Playstation Now a look. The idea of playing PS2 and PS3 games with a controller that doesn’t suck was too much to resist. I’ve been using the service consistently for a little over a week now, and while I am enjoying it, there are some things that can put a damper on the experience.
The games play great, as long as the connection holds up. I didn’t realize it for the first few times I played, but I was running off my wifi connection instead of the LAN. It did well enough; my gigabit fiber connection is more than enough to handle streaming gaming and the games were stable. Until they weren’t. I was in the middle of a play session when all of a sudden the controls became unresponsive, the picture got choppy, and all of a sudden my video downgraded to basically a bunch of moving blocks. I checked my connection speeds, both on the console and my PC, and realized my wifi was giving some really inconsistent speeds. Chalk it up to interference or whatever, but once I switched to the LAN connection, everything was fine again. I haven’t had any issues like that since, but it was enough to leave a bit of a sour taste. My LAN cable stretches nearly all the way across the house and is not only unsightly, but a tripping hazard as well. I don’t really want to always have it connected.
Don’t you dare go to the bathroom. PSNow has an idle timer on it that will disconnect you from the game if you go for too long without touching the controller. At first this didn’t seem to be a problem, it lasted a good ten minutes or so. But I’m beginning to think the time allowed varies depending on which game you’re playing. I’ve left the game to go downstairs and refill my coffee mug. Five minutes later, after preparing my coffee with sugar and cream, I’ve returned to find myself on the disconnect screen. Similarly, I’ve taken a bathroom break, and after dropping the kids off at the pool, I return to find that I’ve been dropped as well. Life happens, quite often, while I’m playing. The wife will want to discuss something. I’ll get a phone call. The cat will come in and be a dickwad. I’m constantly having to pause and put down the controller for one reason or another, and a lot of times that quick break will turn into a ten or fifteen minute hiatus. The last thing I need is for my game to automatically quit out on me, losing any progress that has not been saved. That just sucks.
Apparently there’s a wait list. The reason you get dropped is so that anyone else waiting to play the game will get a chance to do so. Apparently there are a finite number of instances of any one game that can run at a time. This doesn’t seem to be a problem right now, but I imagine if a hugely popular game like God of War or The Last of Us 2 hits the service, you could very well be waiting in a queue to play the game. That doesn’t sound like fun.
There are a lot of PS3 games, some of which have PS4 versions. I’ve noticed that the majority of the games on offer are PS3 and PS2 titles. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, paying a monthly fee to play a lot of old games when Microsoft has been offering free backward compatibility updates seems kinda lame. An easy fix to this would be more PS4 games on the list. Why am I playing the PS3 version of Tales of Zestiria and The Last of Us when there are better PS4 versions I could be enjoying?
Although there are a lot of JRPGs to choose from. One of the highlights is that the service offers a surprising array of JRPG’s, not just from the PS4 and PS3 era, but also going back to the PS2 days of Dark Cloud 2 and Rogue Galaxy. I still own the original disc for Dark Cloud 2, but I never got to give Rogue Galaxy a shot. On top of this there are a few others I want to give a go, and that’s exciting.
Streaming and capturing is disabled. While this isn’t surprising, due to the fact that the game itself is being streamed, it’s still kind of a bummer that I can’t broadcast my experiences or even take a screenshot of my game without pumping it out through an external capture device.
While I enjoy these games, I don’t feel a sense of ownership. I know this is a weird one, but hear me out. Remember back in the days of a dwindling Blockbuster, when they attempted the unlimited rentals service? I remember renting a game, driving home, playing it for an hour, and then realizing I’d rather play something else and driving back to the store. Yeah, I did that, and I’m not proud of it. But this was the first time I, as a gamer, had ever had the horn of plenty wide open in front of me, and I just couldn’t spend too much time on any one thing because there was just so much to play! The same applies here, and to be fair, it does to Game Pass as well. It’s hard to spend any amount of time on a game that you’ve so little invested in.
I have managed to do a playthrough of one of those Mystery Case Files puzzle/object finding game, which is a weird one to get sucked into. The truth is, I’ve always wanted to play them but with their limited replayability they were always one of those games I passed on when it came to spending money. But hey, with a few of them on PSNow, I can have my cake and eat it too. It’s where these services show their worth the most; the ability to play a game all the way through on a “rental” basis.
We’ll see how I feel after another week or two with it. I’m looking forward to the Yakuza games and perhaps a few of these PS2 games, for nostalgia’s sake. Whether it retains its value depends on what they have coming and going by the time my subscription renewal comes around.
