Tough call between the Dualsense and the Dualshocks 1-3.
The Dualsense has great features, but is large enough and bulbous enough that I’m forced to use a full palm grip. That’s good some of the time, but sometimes I like a lighter finger grip that the earlier Dualshocks allowed for. I think of it similarly to claw vs palm grips on mice. A full palm grip on either can get too sweaty over time. The Dualshock 4 is a bulbous mess that fatigues my hands. On all of them, the plastic feels premium and sturdy and really fits well together. Plastic molding is an art, and they are good at it.
I have a few 8BitDo’s and they are all good too. The Pro-2, SN30 Pro, and Ultimate C (their naming conventions are flour of control). A bit cheaper feeling than the Sony offerings, but still pretty good.
The Xbox Series controller is… Fine. The plastic feels cheap, the face buttons feel cheap, it’s too big and requires a palm grip, the R1/L1 buttons feel cheap, the d-pad is one of the worst in history. The analog sticks almost feel great except they’re too tall.
Shout-out to the Steam Deck for feeling phenomenal. Also shout-out to the RetroBit Genesis controllers- they feel really good, but the lack of sticks and fewer buttons than most modern controllers makes it hard to use for modern games.
The JoyCons are awful. Most 3rd party options are better but I still haven’t found one that I really like.
The GameCube and N64 both feel kind of cheap. I think the plastic is a bit thin, and the sticks and buttons rattle around slightly.
Sony’s Japan studio’s own library was always gimmicky games that were basically tech demos- Ape Escape was for the Dual Analog controller, LocoRoco for the PSP, Gravity Rush for the Vita, Knack to be a pack-in for the PS4, and games for VR, Move Eye toy, etc. In fact it’s kind of hard to find games they did on their own because they’ve always been mostly a support studio even going back to the PS1’s launch lineup, and they are continuing that. There have been several studios that make original games that started as part of Sony Japan that have been spun off into separate teams too.
I’m struggling to think of many studios Sony has closed. Sony London studios was similar to Japan- mostly just games to go with hardware gimmicks like the EyeToy, SingStar, and Wonderbook. It’s even harder to find studios that Sony has purchased and then closed or turned into a support studio- I guess you could count that Psygnosis was purchased and merged into London studios back in the 90’s, but considering they went 20 years between that merger and closing I doubt there were many Psygnosis devs left there.
A quick search pulls up PixelOpus, a tiny studio Sony formed from 9 college grads with a couple of industry veterans to lead them They released 2 small games and were closed last year.
I don’t mean to be too defensive of Sony- they did close one of their own studios and laid off ~900 people this year. But it’s not really a comparison to Microsoft who now has a long history of buying 3rd party studios, mismanaging them, and closing them.
I’m also confused about your comment about Xbox making more single player games than Sony. First of all… I would expect that to generally be true. It looks like Sony owns 21 studios while Microsoft had 40 as of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. And while a lot hasn’t been announcedwith release dates, we know of a handful of single player games Sony has in the works- Horizon 3, TLOU3, Ghosts of Tsushima 2, and new IP’s from Bend, Housemarq, and BluePoint. Plus Wolverine, and you could argue whether Physint should count or not since that’s a partnership between Kojima and Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. If you’re trying to imply that Sony is abandoning single-player games or something that’s pretty far from the truth.
I’ve seen several articles whining about this patch over the past several weeks. They all have the same vague complaints, but the only real tangible and provable one seems to be that some mods break, and Fallout: London was delayed.
I’ve seen claims of crashes and FPS drops, but no actual data or testing to back that up. It seems like a classic case of the Internet circling around and making something into a much bigger deal than reality.
Everyone I’ve seen commenting who has actually tried it themselves seems to have positive feedback. I installed it briefly on the Deck myself to try it out and it seems fine, although I don’t care enough to put in hours of proper testing.
For a long time I’ve argued that there needs to be stronger language differences between physiological addiction and psychological addiction, especially in non-academic discourse. Academic papers usually define their terms pretty well, and often use terms like “habit forming” or “dependency” instead of addiction.
A lot of work has been done to remove the stigma of addiction to shift the blame from the individual to the product, and I have no objections at all to that for physiological addiction. Nicotine, alcohol, opioids, etc.
The problem is that zealots have co-opted that model to try to ban anything they don’t want other people to be able to enjoy. Comic books, television, videogames, marijuana, pornography- all of these have had the word “addiction” attached in news media without solid scientific evidence of physiological addiction. At the same time, you can find case studies of individuals with mental health disorders who get addicted to literally anything… I’m not saying there are not individuals who don’t have problems with these things, but a lot of the effort into stigmatizing and restricting these seems to have ulterior motives. It’s parents who don’t want to teach their children about responsibility and discipline. It’s religious zealots trying to push their worldviews on others. It’s large corporations trying to gain market share by attacking competing industries. In some cases like “sex addiction” it’s used to try to excuse or justify criminal behavior and portray abusers as victims. It’s notable that efforts usually go to just banning and shaming these things rather than helping the alleged “victims”. At the same time, efforts at harm reduction for physiological addiction seems to be constantly undermined.
With all of that being said, there is a separate issue that applies to this case- consumer protection. History has clearly demonstrated that without regulation and enforcement, corporations will engage in all manner of activity to screw over every stakeholder (consumers, vendors, employees, lenders, etc) in order to enrich ownership.
Looking at videogames in particular, there are definitely marketing practices and pricing structures that need to be banned. I just hate this idea that “videogames = bad” when the real issue is corporate greed, and a lot of these issues apply to other industries too.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve played through games with it and it’s really great. But there’s a ton of glitches and games that don’t play well. In another 5 or 10 years (hopefully I’ve upgraded my hardware by then) it’ll probably be great. But today it’s reserved for enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with settings or playing less demanding games.
PS3 is a strong, strong contender for reliability and repairability reasons. You could replace the CMOS battery and hard drive today. You have to jump through hoops to add funds to your wallet, but once you do the store still works for the moment. The last time I looked there were even some decent deals from a couple of publishers.
No memory cards to worry about. The physical discs were expensive enough that people took care of them and are more inclined to sellt hem than toss them: it’s still really easy to find discs on eBay, and they’re new enough and most games have been remastered so they’re usually less than $20. It’s impossible to find Sixaxis or Dualshock 3’s, but fake ones from AliExpress are super cheap and almost identical except for the almost-never-used motion controls. You can also use a lot of USB controllers, or use something like a MayFlash adapter to use just about any controller you want. I think you can pair Dualsense too, though I haven’t tried. If you have original OEM’s, I don’t remember them ever having drift problems. The only real problem with the original controllers would be battery life (you can replace them if you’re handy), USB Mini-B, and how they needed a handshake and could only charge plugged into certain devices or special power supplies (another reason to just use counterfeits).
With a fat model you have full backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2. With the online store you can get a lot of PS1, PS2, and PSP games. Not sure if this counts, but you can do remote play with a PSP too. Some of the online multiplayer probably still works, depending on the game. It has an HDMI out and the old AV out, so you can hook it up to almost any TV with cheap and a sailable cables. You can also load up video and audio files for playback, saving wear on the disc drive. I remember briefly experimenting with using mine as a media server back in the day.
The drawbacks are few. I’m assuming no hacking or modding, so no Nintendo games. No Xbox either, though I don’t think that’s anywhere near as important. A disc drive is always just a matter of time before it fails. The fat model has PS2 compatibility, but also was less reliable, so that’s a trade-off. The digital store is not long for this world. I used to use mine for Netflix, YouTube, HBO, etc and I’m guessing those apps have probably been shut down at this point. You lose out on modern games too. The PS2 and PS5 are both good options too, but I think the PS3 has the edge. If they ever add a PS3 emulator to the PS5, or if the PS5 library grows in general, it could still overtake the PS3 in the future.
If you lean more Nintendo I think the WiiU was better than the switch until they shut the e-shop down, and might still be better if we open this up to modding and hacking. It’s just easier to work with a WiiU because Nintendo stopped caring about protecting it. It’s also better for playing DS and Wii games for example. A ton of Switch games were also released on WiiU, and the Switch’s legacy content is mostly locked behind the online subscription - how long will that be available for? Still has the disc drive issue and can’t play Sony exclusives, but a strong option.
I’m not usually an Xbox guy, but they’re usually the easiest to mod, the emulate things well, and even without modding the Series X is probably the best option for pure backwards-compatibility with a good chunk of the libraries of every Xbox generation ever. The problem is you get neither the Sony nor Nintendo exclusives. And Xbox exclusives really aren’t all that enticing to me. Maybe if you’re into HALO or Gears or Forza Xbox is a more appealing option. The best IP’s Xbox owns are often released on other consoles, like MineCraft. Which is great for the industry, but hurts Xbox’s ranking here.
Almost every mod out there is addressing some (real or perceived) deficiency in the base game
Emphasis on “perceived”. In my experience, the vast majority of mods are for things that I would never have asked for or expected from the developer.
Like Thomas the Tank Engine being everywhere. Or the other day I visited a friend and he was playing Civ 6 as Luigi from Mario. Or adding guns to Skyrim. Or adding tons of sexual content.
Should that content just not exist (licensing issues aside)? While I’m grateful to the noble people making and giving away mods for free, if I could start a decent side gig with it I might start making mods myself.
I can’t imagine myself ever buying a mod, but it seems like opening the platform up to allow creators to monetize is better than closing the platform entirely, or relying on the generosity of a few enthusiasts. Seems like this closes a gap on the spectrum from making your own indie game, getting a job as a developer, or using some DIY creator like Dreams.
They usually start out selling for a loss, but Sony reduces costs and scales production so they’re usually profitable (or at least even) after a couple of years. As far as I can tell the PS3 took the longest, releasing in 2006 and not breaking even until 2010, still 3 years before the PS4 launched.
I’m looking forward to the ward between factions posting the two quotes in comments sections every time a game gets delayed for the next several decades