With both major consoles revealed for whatever currently counts as next-gen at the time of writing, I have to say that they both look like Alienware PCs. I don’t just say that because I keep getting Alienware ads on Twitch on the phone, but as in they’re geared towards that kind of “gamer”. So these consoles should also just come bundled with a bucket of Mountain Dew and Doritos. The same bucket, so it’s just a bucketful of gamer goop.
When I say looks, at first I mean the actual console looks themselves. The Xbox Series X, hereon referred to as the Sexbox, looks like some kind of media server that also plays games. It really just needs more pointless neon to light up the top of it. The PS5, which is easy enough to refer to as such because they’re at least sequentially naming these things, has all these fins swooshing off of it so dust can collect in there, and it looks impossible to lay horizontally yet can somehow do so. In both cases, the disc slot where applicable is also really just stuck in the corner like an afterthought, as if they didn’t expect discs to still be relevant at this time. At least the PS5 is trying to get people off of them so they can fully murder GameStop while at the same time combat the sheer amount of plastic a typical Madden release uses, but not sure about the Sexbox. Personally, I’m fine with still having disc support, at least in my current situation where I might be able to download maybe half of one of these super next-gen things before I use up my whole Internet.
The second part of the looks would be to the games themselves, where they really want to show off the graphics and all that real-time raytracing stuff. And yet it’s still somewhat easy to tell a cinematic trailer from a gameplay one. At the very least it’s the presentation of it. It also might be easy to tell if the game has obvious tells about loading screens or pop-in not yet fixed from being still in-development. But generally, if a game goes for realism or at least animated movie standards, things are going to be either really shiny or really fuzzy.
I did watch the Sexbox and PS5 game reveals in less-than-HD quality for reasons, part of which being related to needing to make sure I’m not breaking bandwidth for work purposes, the other being that if a game doesn’t look interesting in SD, it just may not be interesting. While having clear graphics helps a bit, I wanted to pull back the curtain a bit as well, and I’m not just making excuses for having to have watched the presentation on a phone while the connection was broken anyway. Long story short the connections here right now are all kinds of messed up, so anything that’s digitally-focused and yet in the hundreds of gigabytes is not an option for me. Same goes for not having any kind of 4K TV and up. Even though the prices on those have generally gone the way of all previous TVs, I don’t really justify getting a new TV or monitor unless I need one to replace a broken one.
Generally, this just looks like a bunch of expensive fancy stuff I’m not touching for years. I only just recently got a PS4 secondhand, not even a Pro for cost reasons, and a Switch (also secondhand) before that. I’m sure Nintendo will still ride out the Switch for the next few years and reveal their next comparatively underpowered yet unique console afterward, unless they get out of consoles entirely for whatever reason. If they do that I hope they don’t exclusively go mobile or it’s going to be another Konami thing where F-Zero becomes an infinite runner with gambling slot machines. The ports for recent games will probably slow way down or stop entirely after this new next-gen thing comes out, so Nintendo will need some quality games coming out to keep them going, even if they have to do it all themselves.
If I was going to get a console any time soon, I’d consider an Xbone just for Rare Replay, or a Sega Saturn. Before that though, I’m also wondering about a new gaming PC, where I could play VR, so that’s also something to save up a whole lot for. And that also requires room I don’t entirely have much of now, so of course a whole house is a hell of a lot more as well. Generally, there’s bigger things to take care of first, especially outside my microcosm. Within, things like how to go through approximately 1,500 games that also aren’t entirely games, but out of the games are also largely tabletop or mixed media stuff that requires having more friends present in some form, so as far as digital video games there’s still a whole lot, and out of those, ones I’d actually be interested in playing. Somehow it’s a charity thing.