The Besties - PlayStation 5 Launch Extravaganza

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

The new console launches continue with the debut of the PlayStation 5! The Besties break down all the upgraded design features including the incredible DualSense controller. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

So I've been in touch with a lot of sort of gaming lifestyle nourishment companies. Your G Fuel, Gamer Grub is still around. And they actually reached out to me and I was like, hell yeah, we're finally getting that Gamer Grub money here on the besties. But that wasn't it. They need some help with this messaging project that they're working on with Pfizer, who is pretty close to getting this vaccine lockdown. They're worried about sort of the acceptance rate

of the vaccine among gamers because we're so frickin' savvy, aren't we? We always got our head on a silver, trying not to get ripped off by microtransactions or another david cage game so they're like trying to they're coming at us with like a sort of gamer vaccine idea and they want to they want they're floating like hey gamers here's a healing potion they're really wild about the idea of like here's a here's a disease cure disease

scroll do you know what i mean yeah like a phoenix down basically like a phoenix well but it's not it's more of like a a soft or a remedy um and they're looking at it like how can you up your stats with this rad vaccine and maybe tony hawk is there and he does a kickflip as he's injecting himself with the with the potion so just to confirm yes pfizer yes is collaborating with gamer fuel gamer grub and then gamer grub and then they are contracting there's some contracting you yeah yeah well they're subcontracting you're subcontracting us we're all part of sure if you want to think about it that way okay i like that because i get a little bit more of the cut um okay okay and it's lucrative boys we're talking about like

one and a half billion dollars oh okay okay okay i'm not interested sure so what do we need to do just think of the best sort of way that we can make this appealing to gamers this incredible vaccine sure it's coming i think it's easy right you just make it drinkable form you put it in one of those gamer fuels that stuff tastes so bad nobody's gonna notice if they just slurped up a good old vaccine that's probably a good point yeah what would you put on the can though to really convince people to sell chris is suggesting you put nothing unusual on the can it's. Or like not a vaccine. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best console of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and i know the best console of the week my name is griffin mcelroy and i know the best console of the decade what no my name is christopher thomas plant and i know

the best console of the podcast my name is roast roast chicken I told you fuckers about this controller and how cool it was, and you were all rolling your eyes. No one cared. Wowie, wawa. A lot of assumptions here that everybody loves this controller. Yeah, we'll talk about it. This is The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment.

It is a game of the year show that goes all year long, a king of the hill, but for video games and video game book club. It is all things to all people who care about electronic entertainment. This week we are talking about the PlayStation 5 console, a new one from

Sony. They're back, and they are bringing along this new white box, and we're going to tell you all about it. Chris, normally I would have you tell people what the PlayStation 5 is, but that's what we're gonna do i think at length so let's just take a break and then we'll get get to talking no spoilers by the way for the playstation spoiler free so it's got the triangle button still we won't tell you the specific code used to unlock the hatch on the back, which has a map.

Well, against all odds, Amazon delivered my PlayStation 5 to my home. It didn't look good there for a little while, but then it did come on launch day. I got it one day late, so I sent Jeff a real nasty email. I wanted to ask, because Justin mentioned, described this as a box in the intro and uh can we i don't think it's a box no it's it's sort of an ovaloid sort of tesseract situation it's um it's a monster um i mean we can make this part of the segment pretty quick it looks like dog shit and i don't like the way that it looks it looks completely outrageous you know no what i think it looks like is when i wear a shirt that is two sizes too small, thinking it will somehow make me look slimmer, that's what happened here.

They had a large black box that was a video game console, and I'm like, you know, if we put these Pringle white chips on the sides, that'll make it look smaller. And then they made it, and they're like, Craig, you're fired. I'll show you guys later. It looks, without the white wings on it, it literally looks exactly like my modem that came from my ISP. It's like this black tower with a rounded top.

It's literally indistinguishable from the PlayStation 5, but only it's got a sort of protective barrier around it. I kind of like it. Says the man wearing the gamer glasses. I do, I kind of like it. I mean, I don't know, I'm not an aesthetic expert or anything, but I like how novel it looks.

It feels new. And I feel like in this specific generation where it's evolutionary more more than revolutionary i feel like this is one area where they could really make it feel new and dynamic and i like i like that i mean i like i just it feels kind of futuristic and cool it's not practical but like once i put it into my uh entertainment system it you know it doesn't matter it's like a cool new box it doesn't matter uh i tell you one thing as long as we're talking about boxes. The heat on this thing is not a joke.

It's quiet. It's really quiet. It doesn't make noise. I walked past its cubby and it felt like I had just walked past the register for a heating vent. It was definitely blowing some serious... You got a mini spa going on in there. Your cubby, is it open in the front?

What's the ventilation in the cubby like? Now I'm worried about your cubby. It's a big cubby. I made it, of course. It's perfect for what it needs to be. If it needs to be bigger, you know what I'll do, Griffin? What? I'll change it with my hands and tools. That's cool. Can you change my PlayStation 5?

Is that an option? Yeah, can you? No, once electricity's into it, I'm out. Or metal or plastic or glass. Justin mentioned evolutionary and not revolutionary. And I feel like, we talked about this, I feel like with the Xbox a bit. I definitely think that's the case for PlayStation 5.

For me, and I'm sure maybe we'll all sort of voice our gut instinct. Griffin and I, by the way, I just want to set the table real quick. Do not have Xboxes. You just have a PlayStation 5. So no point in comparison there. I didn't get any physical games with it. So I got it in a day late. Again, I sent Jeff a real stink eye for that.

I got it in a day late. Again, I sent Jeff a real stink eye for that. And within, I don't know, a half hour, it was going. I downloaded Demon's Souls first. And miraculously, it was done in like 14 minutes, 15 minutes, which compared to the download speeds on PlayStation 4 is pretty fucking good. And then I was just like playing Demon's Souls within the hour. I didn't do the save transfer stuff from the PS4

because I don't necessarily, it's bad. I didn't really care about that part. It told me, I had just breezed through setup. Yeah. And then, because it's very quick. Yeah. And then it's like, do you want to transfer everything

from your PlayStation 4? And I was like, well, it's like um do you want to transfer everything from your playstation 4 and i was like uh well it's over there in a corner you want me to plug it back in don't you like yeah yeah yeah yeah plug it back in and hook it up to a different tv nearby i guess i don't know uh and then it's it's i started the i went ahead and did that i hooked up to a different input switched over and it was like okay well this will just take uh 14 hours and then oh you can't use the new box while so do you i'm like i'll never play those games again i'm you know i'm not i've done lying to myself i'll do that at some point like yeah that's the other thing as someone who made the mistake of doing that i i did that connection and it's like okay what do you want to

transfer over i'm like oh you know just a few of my favorite games. It's like, cool. So that's going to use up half of the entire hard drive. I was like, oh, okay. Well, how about just a few? And it's like, cool, cool, cool. It's going to take a few hours. Come back in a little bit. I'm like, great. I do that.

I come back and only one of the games transferred over. Oh, no. That's not good. So it was like, I waste all the time. I was like, I could have been playing fun things right now, but no. That is the decision I would endorse if you do that. Because honestly, like, I can't think of too many. I can't think of that much save data on my PS4 that I really care about bringing over.

If you have PlayStation Plus, it's just in the cloud. You just download it off the cloud. Yeah. So that part doesn't really matter as much to me but like it compared to previous generations and the the sort of transition between those we're going to talk about demon souls is by far the game i've spent the most time talking about and i think we're going to dedicate a whole episode to that next week but like i was playing demon souls and being sort of wowed by the big cool stuff with the PlayStation 5 within like

40-45 minutes of like starting to unbox it which for which for me is like pretty remarkable like I can't remember a level of accessibility from like the jump since like the Wii came out uh so so that is such a pain point for so many pieces of new hardware. And for the PS5, it is like wicked not. So, okay, I want to talk about specifically Astro's and I mentioned it at the top, but let's talk about the controller because it sounded like there was some dissension

in the ranks regarding the controller. I've spoken at length about how I feel about both Astro's Playroom and the controller, but I'm curious what your guys' vibe was. Astro's Playroom, I don't know that we've painted a particularly clear picture of like what it is because I thought it was like a game game. I did not know it was like a pack game. It's a game game, but it's like a pack in with the PlayStation 5 that is essentially

like a PlayStation Museum platformer that like is all a tech demo for what the controller can do. Yeah, but I want to make it clear to people, like I think, so when the PlayStation 4 launched, they had a thing called the Playroom, which was like four mini games where you like, there's a target shooter and there's a blah, blah, blah. It wasn't a game. It was just like a collection of shitty mini games, basically.

This feels like a very short, but it feels like a very short but it feels like a nintendo platformer to me well it feels like rescue bot the the psvr which no one feels it was a psvr game but it was a really good game but yeah it was i i don't think the game itself is great i would definitely not compare it to nintendo level quality but as a tour of like sony history it's awesome it's fucking it's really nice to see actually sony um sort of you know nintendo has fetishized its history for so long yeah that you forget that playstation and sony have not done as much of that and to see their sort of lineage at this point treated with that a little bit more reverence

like that was really cool like to see there are collectibles that are like old sony controllers and stuff that you get and that are like perfectly recreated in the game to look at and that was cool to see them sort of honoring that legacy in a way that they have not necessarily always been sure uh great about yeah i think my brain has also been broken by nintendo's fetishization of its history that like first party is king and at first when i was playing astros there are a number of games that are referenced that are not sony owned games yeah yeah the capcom stuff and i was like oh that just shows like they just don't have as much iconic stuff as nintendo and then i like caught myself i'm like that is a stupid way of looking at video

game history like right playstation played these games that my memories are associated with playing them on playstation that well and most of them that they show uh games like um uh you know metal metal gear resident evil final fantasy 7 for example um are games that originally came out were exclusive to playstation platforms devil may cry is another example that's in there so i think that's yeah resident evil i think that's the determining uh why they're included the third party stuff is because they were primarily playstation games first and then right came to other platforms but but it is also a showcase for the controller which we should get into because i get it i get the sense that chris is not crazy about that element of it no i i so i like the controller in general and i think in the context of astro's

playroom it's incredible i mean this is the stupidest little detail there's all these fancy things the controller can do with the triggers and yada yada yada but there's one moment in uh astro's playroom where you spin up a giant flower and it sprouts CD or DVD discs and you jump on those discs and there's this the lightest lightest quick tap on the very front of your controller that feels like flicking a disc yeah and I I just did that for like a minute just because I could not believe how much it felt like in my head what that very specific thing is supposed to feel like that is incredible yeah if they do that in more games like actually it's not even the haptic triggers it's all the weird rumble stuff that the controller does

that's the stuff that i like when you run on a hard surface you get the footsteps that are so light and i i you know i was running around for like an hour not noticing it and an hour in i realized like oh my god like when you run around on steel or glass and you like hear the echo of your footsteps on it like you feel little pitter patter in the controller and the fact that you don't even notice it speaks to the kind of like promise of haptic feedback of being like this thing that accentuates the experience without you realizing it. And I never liked the sound coming out of the controller on PS3 or 4. I thought that was silly. Here, combined with the controller,

it all works, finally. I get why that needs to happen. I actually think, yeah, I think it enhances it. I think it's worth using it when it doesn't bother you or the people sitting around you because I think it ties in with what uh griffin what you were just saying about the haptics so when you can hear the tip

taps along with feeling them in your hand i mean the example that i think of there's a level where you're in the rain and uh astro sprouts an umbrella hat and the rain is like falling on the umbrella hat and you can feel all the raindrops in your hand like across your entire hand and hear them in the controller like that illusion is so consistent and like convincing that you really like it's a fucking platformer this is not what i would call an immersive game but you feel placed in this world in ways that i've like never felt in a mario game which i absolutely love mario games but i've never felt've like never felt in a mario game which i absolutely love mario games but i've never felt that level of immersion in a mario game because you didn't have that direct connection okay but the triggers though yeah so here's yeah this is where i separate from

fresh a bit i mostly found the triggers annoying and even even in astros the like loading the spring thing one the loading loading a spring and then shooting a character to move around, not fun at all, pretty annoying. And then having it resist me doing that is like, hey, I get it, I don't want to be here either. We can both agree to part ways. And it's really hard for me to imagine, especially as more games go online and are

more competitive people keeping that turned on that said do i think it would be cool to have that in last of us for things that aren't shooting yes but anything where i need like immediate responsiveness i i am skeptical i will say um to this exact point uh i on spider-man when you swing you there's differing tension depending on where you're at in your swing right so if there's more tension on the line because of your arc it's harder to pull the trigger to to sort of replicate i guess the difficulty of like holding on to uh the web the first few times that happened it was like really it was neat i mean it's really neat um but i'm somebody who as a uh ancient 40 year old man i'm starting to have

some like joint pain like like repeated stress pain. And some of those from woodworking and stuff, but like, uh, I got pretty bad carpal tunnel syndrome and some, a little, the call of arthritis is kicking in there. And I found it like painful.

Like after I did it for a while, like pain in these, in these joints. And it's something where like, it does like a lot of things like this, it blends away after you've done it a little bit and i don't think like i think the novelty of it wears off for games games where it like was used a little more sparingly i think it would be interesting but

where it's like automatic constant i think that it's gonna wear a little quick a quick anecdote about using it sparingly though uh i'm going to talk a little bit about Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls doesn't really use it. Demon's Souls doesn't really use the feedback triggers except for when you're shooting a bow, which sucks because like if you're in a very, very tense situation, which in Demon's Souls or any Souls game is like constantly and you're like,

I need to shoot off a bunch of arrows into this big monster before it reaches me. And then you start pulling it back. And there's like a halfway point where once you pull it past that halfway point, then you've like cocked your bow ready to fire it. And you forget like, oh, that's right. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. It makes it really hard to get into the rhythm of just like launching off arrows in the way that you want.

And it's so it's bizarre to me to have that experience of just like forgetting that that's a thing that this controller does if that's the only thing the game uses it for so i agree with everything that was just said i think the the important thing about the controller is uh sparing you specifically with the triggers is sparingly like if you're doing if you're using it for something that you're doing constantly i think it is generally annoying spider-man is like the best example i agree with you justin like that was not fun um i don't play with an arrow class that much so uh griffin the the dark soul demon souls thing didn't really affect me but i think there are a lot of points in astro where it's just used a little bit occasionally um and in those scenarios i think it's cool and fun like i liked using it with the

bow and arrow that you find in astro's playroom yeah but i agree like it could get a little old i think the haptics though um are probably the most game-changing aspect of that and i've been playing a lot of games on xbox series x and playstation, the same games. And the games that use those haptics in smart ways like really do elevate the game on PlayStation 5 in ways that I would actually consider deciding which platform to play on based on whether they're supporting them or not. Can we talk about some system level stuff? Because I have spent a lot of time playing PS5 again, mostly just, you know, playing through Demon's Souls because I like that series a lot. And I'm still kind of like finding things that are built into like the main UI that

like I just didn't, I did not like sit the thing down and explore all of its many, many doodads and features. But like I was playing some Astros and I was like, all right, I'm gonna play some Demon Souls. And that was the first time I used the game switcher. And it's just a little thing you press the playstation button once and you get this little basically crossbar thing that has like you know your friends list and settings and power options and all that shit but there's also a game switcher and you click that

and it shows you like recent games and favorited games and you just click that and y'all is it's not a joke this thing loads fast as hell oh my god it loads so so so fast like it switches between astro and demon souls in a few seconds and you're just like on the main menu of demon souls it's pretty remarkable when i talk about evolution versus revolution like that is the the just experience of using it is really i mean it that feels next gen to me and i mean it's like it's quality of life stuff like i'll tell you the one that got me uh that i really noticed was loading up the store which used to be like and it's not a long wait right like it's all uh it's not like exponentially different but when you when I went to load in the store, I just kind of assumed that it was when it would take a while on the PC, PS4, it was just like, well, it's the network.

It's like talking to the network and then it's loading it from the network. And that's why it takes, it just go like, you're just there. Like you hit the store and then the store is open and you can look through the store and it feels like you're just navigating the same system. Well, it's not the like taking forever to process. And at least from my experience, the the connectivity, like the download speeds are. Yeah, it does seem a lot faster. I don't know why that is. I don't it's not like it needs a process.

Well, that's the thing with a store. Why would it be that way? Like, yeah, I don't know. But it's just it was happier. Are you are you using a direct i'm over wi-fi i'm direct connection but i was also that on ps4 so that's yeah that is not different either yeah uh that is the stuff to me that feels like holy shit like that really uh it felt like a very big change it's it's hard to like put a specific face on it even though i tried earlier of just like everything is everything makes sense i feel like it is so usable it feels

like an extension of everything is where you think it should be like the store was not this like really really painful thing to explore to find demon souls and spider-man and the games that i wanted to download and then getting them downloaded super, super quick. I don't know. I just, I found it all so, so easy to use. I want to get more into that, but how about we do that after a break? Sure.

Yes. Fine. Yes. If you're tired, I don't get tired. I love games. So Griffin was talking about the idea of everything being where it just should be, and then it's really easy to use the PlayStation 5. I agree with that from a UI perspective.

I think the way they broke it up when you turn on the system is there's games and media, and you're in the games mode, and you can find everything there, and then you switch over to media, and then all your apps are there. I was thinking about the comparison between PS5 and Xbox because I really enjoy the Xbox's navigation system. And I think the comparison is PS5 is to Apple, what Xbox is to Windows. So by that, like PS5, it just works. If you are not going to modify anything, if you're not going to customize anything, you're going to to customize anything you're going to know where your games are you're going to know where your media apps are but that's about it with xbox with all the pin systems and being able to create your own

collections and like effectively completely redesign the ui around however you like to use it it is way better but with one huge caveat most people i don't even think know that you can customize it so i didn't until this exact moment yeah what good are those features if you don't know they exist um i i i like where i'm at with with my xbox now but i it took me years before i realized like oh hey i hey, I can make this usable. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Because otherwise you're just drowning in squares, essentially, on Xbox. Exactly. Speaking of squares, I

did want to talk about one aspect of the PlayStation UI. I am not a huge fan of the PlayStation 5 UI, I'll be honest. Like, I think it was next to perfect on PlayStation 4 for the most part. It wasn't 100%, but 95% of the way there. And I think they made a lot of changes, Apple-esque changes, I agree with you, Plant, that simplified the visuals.

It makes it like a much cleaner looking experience, but make it more complicated. An example being the PlayStation 4 at some point in its life cycle added this sidebar where you could do all the sorts of like microphone adjustments and add people to parties and all sorts of stuff now they have that on playstation 5 it's the crossbar that griffin mentioned earlier it appears on the bottom but in this case um just like as a simple it's just icons so you kind of have to remember what the icons even mean some of the icons only show up if they're inactive use. So for example, if you wanted to see your downloads list, there needs to be something downloading for you to actually see your downloads list, which is kind of a weird thing

because if you're not sure if something's downloading or not and you're not seeing the icon, you're still kind of left in the dark. Settings also isn't on that bar, which I desperately wanted to be on that bar. It feels really weird that wanted to be on that bar it feels really weird that it's not on that bar i think they will make a lot of changes to on those aspects on the clarity aspects over time the one thing that i don't think they're

going to change i think it's going to be with us for a while that i really don't care for when you pull up the crossbar uh you just hit the playstation button once and the little crossbars on the bottom. But most of the screen is taken up by these giant squares that are like activity square. I don't even remember. Yes, activities, activity boxes, whatever. And these are like, here's a trophy you earned. Here's a trophy you could earn. Here's a screenshot you took recently. None of this stuff is stuff that I want to see let alone take up the vast majority of my screen i really don't care yes i but at the same time though i think there absolutely will be cases where the activities are a defining radical thing for not the system level

stuff but for certain games like if you set a um the the the astro Bot game has like a bunch of sort of like speed runny challenges or little high score challenges. And if somebody on your friends list like surpasses your time or whatever, and it shows up in that activity bar, like you can go directly back to that shit. I'm not saying that that matters for fucking Astro Bot, but I am saying for like, I'm thinking, i was thinking specifically about uh like geometry wars when we were like i remember being like super competitive with my friends about geometry wars specifically two and three so like having a game where i actually give a shit about that kind of stuff and having it like appear in my activity bar or showing me like hey some people are raiding in destiny like that's the promise of that is really really cool i know i agree it's annoying when it sort of obstructs the for example big big demon that's fucking running i mean like demon souls but i think it's a neat idea and concept yeah that

literally happened to mike mcwarder where he was like finishing up his demon souls review on one of the final bosses and then like right in like at the most crucial point ping somebody just beat your time in astro's uh playroom it's like yeah no yeah no thank you please please yeah and i think i think the most likely scenario is that you played a challenge once and then completely forgot about it and do not give a fuck that people are beating your challenge scores yeah griffin's scenario i think is a rare scenario and generally speaking you should probably just turn off the notifications which i did i like dug into the menus and found it um and just turned almost all of them off i actually turned like trophy notifications

friend like all that stuff off just so i could like be in it and uh it's nice that you can do all that stuff it's just really buried in the settings another little thing that i like that uh is good for people who are not going to take the time to customize it ps4 had those uh adaptive skins or whatever they were called custom themes that you could download to make your thing look cool for ps5 instead when you scroll over a, it takes over the entire screen and it starts playing music from the game. Kind of similar to a Netflix autoplay. Yeah. I dig it.

I like that it feels like I'm shifting between moods as I switch between games. I am curious. Will I get tired of this in two weeks? I turned it off. I turned it off on Netflix. We'll off. I turned it off on Netflix. We'll see. I turned it off on PlayStation 5 already. It was fine, but yeah.

We have not talked about sort of, and I imagine we haven't talked about it because it'll be an incredibly short discussion, but the games look real good. They look real, real good. And maybe that's not such an astute observation because they look real, real good on the Xbox as well um not that this is meant to be like a we're helping you decide between these two boxes but i am i am i have a really really great pc so like i

i the i did not think the generational leap would matter as much to me from a like graphical perspective but then i'll be playing demon souls and or even astrobot is not the most sort of um i don't know it's not the most obvious game to be like a graphical sort of like sales pitch but the amount of stuff happening on the screen uh is like kind of incredible i found myself like really really impressed with how fucking astrobot looked i think i think we this i'm i'm dumb about i had to write an article about teraflops and it took me like eight hours to figure out what a teraflop is i'm not a smart man right so this is but take this for what it's worth. But for me as a lapsed game critic, I think it's probably useful.

It occurred to me while I was playing Spider-Man. It's probably useful for us to stop thinking in terms of better graphics and start thinking in terms of more graphics. And I know that sounds insane, but when I was playing spider-man it like looked really good the ps4 though looked really good but there was like a plan for almost everything i would do everything i could do is like tied together you know what i mean or like in a uh

there was a conflict late in the game where i was fighting like literally a hundred different people on eight ten different rooftops that was all happening simultaneously that i was like flowing between this gigantic battlefield basically um and it's again it looked great but not in a way where you're like i mean we, we all have those memories as kids, I think, as the first time you played the next generation of consoles where you're like, holy shit, this is, my life has changed. you don't feel in still images, I think, or even like in videos, but in the playing of it,

I think you feel how much more expansive, uh, the, the, the games can be. And most of the things we're talking about, save for Astro and Demon's Souls and Astro is kind of a weird sub case. Um, we're not,

we're designed to work on both. So like, we're not even really seeing, I think the full, the full power of of the box i i definitely think that's true i actually think having spent a lot more time with both consoles now this generation is maybe a bigger shift than we're giving it credit for because i i go back and i think about you know like how perfect dark zero looked right or i think about how assassin's creed black flag looked compared to you know it

was launched on both systems and valhalla looks fantastic on on series x and ps5 like i i think there is definitely more of a leap in terms of quality for valhalla than there was for black flag i actually don't don't agree with. I think Valhalla looks very good, but it also looks like a game that absolutely could have run and does on PS4 and Xbox One at 30 frames a second. I think the only real difference here,

and it's a big difference, don't get me wrong, is that it runs at 60 frames a second on next gen. That's the bigger thing by far. And that's a big deal. Like I really do care about like running games at 60 frames a second.

It makes a big difference. But I think visually speaking, just a screenshot does not look like a quote next gen game. The only game that I have played that is like visually this is a next gen experience is Demon's Souls. Right. Nothing else has come close to the lighting, the environments, the like quote next gen ness that Demon's Souls does. But I think that the reason that maybe it doesn't feel like the biggest leap is because it is cushioned by the fact that most of us have pretty good game. I know Justin does like pretty good

gaming PCs, where I remember the first time I played Destiny 2, which is maybe the game I've not played more of a video game in my life than destiny 2 and i played almost all of it on playstation 4 where it runs at 30 frames per second uh at you know whatever visual quality the ps4 can pump out and then i played it on my pc at 60 frames per second and it is an it is an indescribable yeah like leap like it is a completely different game same for uh sekiro i fucking adore sekiro that i played i pretty sure at 30 frames per second on ps4 and then i bought it again on pc because i wanted to play it at 60 frames per second and it is that is the next gen leap like for me that that

that um i know there's people who don't give a shit about that but for me like that is the thing where it's like this is a whole new thing people who don't have that pc who play a destiny 2 on ps4 and then play it 60 frames per second 4k on on ps5 like that is a fucking gigantic leap that is like nintendo 64 to gamecube quality leap if you have an original xbox one or ps4 yeah the game looks the holo looks nothing it is not a matter of frame rate it looks nothing like that game i mean maybe if you have a series x or a pro you're getting close and you're getting checkerboard resolutions but how that game looks on i i don't know did you all see the comparison of cyberpunk on series x versus xbox one x no i I didn't watch it, no. It is on YouTube. I'll make sure that I link it

when we tweet out the show. It's a real interesting thing, especially when you consider they still haven't shown that game on original hardware. I think it's going to look like a Switch port. Like, I don't know how they're going to make that thing run.

Anyway, do we want to get into questions? We're going to be talking about both these consoles a lot more of the next few weeks as we actually talk about the games. Yeah. Um, sure. Uh, wait. Yep. Can I complain about something?

Sure. Yeah, please. My front, this is not an opinion. Fact. Fact. My, uh, my front charging port, and apparently this is not an uncommon thing. The front USB port on my PS this is not an uncommon thing, the front USB port on my PS5 does not charge my controller.

Huh. There was two or three times I left it plugged in and came back overnight or whatever, or a few hours later, not in rest mode or anything like that, just came back and it was not charging. Is it supposed to be charging from there? Yeah. Sorry? I was curious if it's supposed to be charging from there. sorry i was curious if it's supposed to be charging from there the reason i ask is because the ports in the back of the console

are different usb ports i mean they're the same shape i did i moved and apparently that remedies the problem so i'm hoping it will i just tried that this morning so i switched to back over and i've i've always used the front port on all the the previous ones. It's weird. I mean, whether or not it's working as intended, it sucks. Yeah, no. So it's like either it's a bug or a feature, it blows regardless. That's it. Xbox wins. That's it, folks.

We were waiting. Well, Xbox doesn't actually have a port on the front of it to plug in USB, so. Damn, I'm back. PS5 wins. Damn, it does. Doesn't it? No, there's no port on the front of the Xbox. It's just a black square.

Now Russ wins. You're going to pull up a front of the Xbox. It's just a black square. You're going to pull up a picture of an Xbox. I'm just so curious. Let's get into questions. This one is from Sarah. For those who don't have as much money, do you think any game bundles could make getting a PS5 worth it if you have the PS4?

No. Definitely not. It's a good question for what it's worth. I think it's valuable good question for what it's worth yeah it's valuable but i think that like if you are seriously considering like saving money at this point um there is zero reason to buy either of these consoles the games are very good as we've discussed but also they're not that many of them and right yeah not that much better you just wait just wait this is what i would say for all console launches is if you can wait a year and a half to two years do it because what will happen is over

that course of time they'll release one or two pretty great games and then there will come a holiday bundle where they'll give you like three games plus a hundred dollars off the console and you really get your money's worth if you can't wait go for it like you know spend your money how you want but uh especially with this generation where most games are still gonna run on your old console i would wait yeah can we get can we get check we didn't talk about this did everybody get the disc drive version or the disc drive full version mine has a disc drive-full version? Mine has a disc drive. Yeah, mine did too.

But at the same time, like, I don't I don't foresee I'll ever use it. Well, no, no, no. You know what? I might use it for like Blu-rays. Watching occasional Blu-rays. Oh, yeah, I guess that's fair. But that's, I mean, that's what? $100 cheaper for the version without the disc drive? So that's a good option. You can get a decent Blu-ray player for $100.

Yeah, just something to keep in mind. You can get a really good really good one for 100 bucks probably i have heard and i haven't experienced this personally because i haven't put a lot of disks in there but i have heard that like the one thing that gets very very loud is that disk drive uh when you're installing stuff or it's pulling data off of a disk it will get like jet engine loud. Not when you're playing necessarily, but yeah, that's something to keep in mind. This is a question from Mike. I play on a PC with a NVIDIA 1080 card and I haven't bought a new Sony Microsoft console since 2006.

Is now the time to jump back in? Take it away, Russ. This is awesome because as I've discussed on the show, that is the video card I have. So I'm the exact use case for this my recommendation if you can get one this is a great option to uh get a next gen gaming console and basically buy yourself a few years i think i talked about this last year last week too but uh the 1080 right now is really having a tough time dealing with games that are like open world 3D games like Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed.

And if you want to play those games, buying a console for $500 is going to basically buy you two years, three years, maybe even four years of playing those sorts of games pretty well. And then at that point, you could probably upgrade your PC. If I was this, if I was Mike, I would buy a PS5, and then I would use my PC for whatever your Microsoft needs are. And you could play indie stuff on your PC as well. Yeah, exactly. But I think if you were able to actually have a choice, which is not really a starter, I would go PS5 on that.

This question is from Pete. What future title on the ps5 are you looking forward to based on how you envision them using the tech and the controller this is a great question actually this is a game that i did not really care about until i actually went hands-on and played games like astro and demon's all etc i am now super super excited for Ratchet and Clank in ways that I was not previously yeah I hope I hope they do as much justice the controller as Astro's Playroom does and if they do I think it's going to be an amazing experience I like the Ratchet and Clank games I've played a bunch of them but they did kind of lose steam for me after a while I think with the interesting controller

stuff and the crazy load times and stuff like that, I think this game is going to be really special. So I'm very pumped. I stand Tango Gameworks and I cannot wait for Ghostwire Tokyo. I think that game, I don't know if that game is going to be good and I don't know if that game is going to be bad,

but I do know it's going to be fucking buck wild and I cannot, I absolutely can't wait to play that game. Justin, how about you? Probably, wild and i cannot i absolutely can't wait to play that game uh justin how about you um probably well i think god of war 2 is going to be really cool um although i think before that earlier than that i think hopefully the the next horizon game i think we'll use this in a lot of i can think of a lot of cool ways and of of course, whenever Kojima decides to roll up on, I could,

I wish I could have been with him the first time he learned about haptic triggers. I imagine him just like dragging his entire desktop into the trash and like, start again. Start again. I can make the triggers hurt. They're gonna fucking re-release Death Stranding with amazing

trigger. Oh yeah. They have to re-release death stranding with with amazing trigger oh yeah and you they have to re-release that game on ps5 or like do some update also you know for a 100 fact that quantic dream is like yes please i cannot wait i can make the triggers hurt let me do it daddy please my real answer let me make the triggers hurt dad my answer is resident evil 7 just because i seven or eight yeah i love seven man which one what's the village the new one's eight okay wow that's the one that i i'm i'm super curious what they do with it i feel like there will be um it's the closest we'll get to a Kojima type of goofiness I expect with the controller anytime soon

my fake answer is Gravity Rush 3 which I do not think will ever get made but I think could do all sorts of great things with it but hey who knows Gravity Rush 2 didn't think that would happen and Gravity Rush makes a cameo in Astro's Playroom so it's

not fully dead. I didn't know we were allowed to pick fake games. Can I do Blasto 2? Deathloop is coming out on oh no, it's a timed exclusive on PS5 too. That game looks rad as hell as well. That does look very cool. What do we have next week, Justin?

Syphon Filter. Yeah, I was surprised too. But apparently we can pick fake games. Has anybody, well, before we end it, anybody been playing anything else, or has everybody just been all PS5 all the time? Yeah. I got something. I want to talk a little bit about Call of Duty,

actually. Plant played it too. So I have not finished the campaign in Call of Duty. If you've been paying attention, this is Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. Certainly, I am very concerned about how this is all going to play out politically speaking. You think? I don't know.

I like hold out hope for there to be some crazy twist where Reagan rips off his head and he's a robot. That'd be great. But as a game, I think it does a few things like really interesting. For one thing, as a Call of Duty game, it does like weird side missions, which haven't been very common in Call of Duty games, where you have to like use stealth and collect like clues to solve like weird passkey codes

and stuff like that. There's like an interesting metagame that hasn't really happened in a Call of Duty game. But the thing I wanted to talk about are surprise surprise the playstation 5 features with the controller this is the only third party game that i've played that uses the controller in like really really wild ways um it does the trigger stuff the trigger stuff for one thing is very weird because it based on how heavy the gun is that you're picking up it's harder harder to aim the gun so if you're holding like a heavy machine gun i could like barely squeeze the trigger all the way down it was so fucking heavy

um that's fun but it also but it also does um environmental haptics as well so for example when i'm in a helicopter i can fear the feel the chopper blades of the helicopter in my controller um which feels really cool and helps for immersion and all that stuff um so i think i was just really impressed that they took the time to um add all those features that are very much specific to playstation 5 and make it like a unique experience um i've been playing destiny 2 beyond light i mentioned it last week and make it like a unique experience. I've been playing Destiny 2 Beyond Light. I mentioned it last week and I've had a bit more time to like finish the campaign part that was in the expansion. And if you haven't been following the game or you haven't played it

in a while, they have shifted out of the way that they used to do expansions for the game. Like Forsaken was the really, really big one that added a bunch of story stuff and subclasses and like three new big zones and all kinds of stuff they don't do that anymore now they have a seasonal system where beyond light drops and you get like you know 20 of what is actually going to be in the expansion and every week they meet out like a little bit more of what is new about the game and that's cool like this week i haven't played it uh since the new stuff dropped yesterday but like they added a whole new character and a new bounty system and a new quest line so it makes sense from the perspective of And that's cool. Like this week, I haven't played it since the new stuff dropped yesterday, but like they added a whole new character

and a new bounty system and a new quest line. And so it makes sense from the perspective of like, there's always stuff for you to come back to. But the launch itself is kind of a calamity a bit because while there is really big, cool stuff they've added, like a new element, there's this stasis element that has new subclasses for all the different types of guardians that you can play. And it feels cool. It's like ice powers. a new element there's this stasis element that has new subclasses for all the different types of

guardians that you can play and it feels cool it's like ice powers you can freeze people and do all kinds of cool shit like that uh the big story of what they did with this expansion is sunsetting where they took a lot of guns like a lot a lot a lot a lot of weapons and basically made it so you can no longer upgrade them to like keep up with what is the current power cap so it basically renders i don't know the exact number of guns but a huge portion of guns popular guns staple guns completely obsolete yeah and another cool new feature from destiny right and then it's delivering the fun it's kind of a it's only bungee can it's a recognition of just like we don't we there is no way for us to incentivize you to keep like playing with new shit so we're just going to like make the old shit

not necessarily usable in you know it's also wild to think of how much they have to keep balanced i mean as systems continue to evolve like i'm willing to forgive a lot of that because it is i genuinely believe the hardest video game to make currently in the world um but that that in and of itself kind of sucks right like i spent so much time grinding for the mountaintop which is this great grenade launcher that you had to play a billion matches of pvp before i did that and now it's like i think that's one of the game guns that got sunset they also made it so like a lot of those guns that you did have to grind for it you can now go to this one terminal in the like main tower and spend a little bit of like of in-game currency and just like get it for free so it's like what the fuck am i playing this game for if that's what you're gonna do but the bigger problem is that

they added virtually nothing loot wise to the game so they sunset all this loot like go play with new stuff but there's no real new stuff like the world drop pool is i've got nothing like no guns have dropped for me in the game that like are meaningful at all all of the vendors in the game that you can like buy stuff from they didn't refresh those at all oh that's so they removed right they removed like all this shit and they didn't replace it with anything so it's like the story is cool the new uh they did some ui changes that's cool the stasis stuff is cool but then they fucking removed you know a lot of guns that i used constantly and i'm like okay i'll play with the

new stuff what's the new stuff and like here's like four new things that aren't very good and it's like what the fuck are we doing and maybe that will be fixed by the again rollout cycle right the new raid isn't out yet there'll be a new batch of raid weapons i'm assuming there will be new exotics that they add here and there but holy shit talk about like a terrible first impression like i i i play i love destiny 2 i played this new expansion for like two or three days and have not come back to its ends because i finished the thing and i was like well what do i do like there's i guess i could grind out some nightfalls or whatever but like for what because nothing's gonna drop that i give a shit about it is it is it is so it is such a bad decision it just feels like i i i don't know why they made it the way that they they did but yeah who knows

maybe maybe by the time the next season drops there'll be like enough chunky stuff that's what i'm counting on but right now i do not think it is worth coming back to justin how about you uh very briefly i will mention that grifflans has added a third character uh that i did back in for smith is a uh a brawler kind of with a fist fist based combat the combat in smith is unique combat mechanic is really cool because he can drink uh to give himself special abilities he drinks beer to give himself special abilities and uh will space beer you know sure but he drinks to give himself special abilities and then uh after you drink an empty bottle card is uh put into your deck so the more of those you have

the more stuff you can do with them. Like there's guns that shoot empty bottles. There's like, you can throw empty bottles. It becomes like part of your inventory, I guess, after you drink stuff. How are those load times? And he's got, oh, well, it's on PC, but so they are just speedy as all get out.

SSD powered. Got their cards loaded up uh oh yeah i'm fresh mentioned that i played the new call of duty i'll make this very quick uh it is uh problematic to say the least um so i'm i'm hesitant to say that the very good thing about the game because it might be snowflake too many people to play it um hey if activision is ever going to i think do they still have the jam and spawn license let's pretend they do if they do and they want to make a spiritual sequel to goldeneye uh this amalgamation of developers is the one to do it um because there are some levels in this game that are just modern goldeneye

like yeah flake like They just went and said, hey, what if we just did that? And then I went, sure, I don't know. We have to ship something. It is hilarious and very fun when it finally gets into that zone. All the sneaky

spy stuff that Fresh talks about, is it impressive? Yes. Is it why I play Call of duty no do i want to just walk around the hallway shoot people with my pp7 silence pp7 and my uh my fancy magnum yeah i do you can do that in those stealth missions that you don't insta fail if you get spotted well that's true that's true it is true you you do get a i do like in the game the way you mark people is you put your cute little camera and you take photos of them.

70s camera. Real quick, just out of curiosity, I want to go around. Don't think about it. What year was the last James Bond video game released? Go. 2004. Russ? It was probably the GoldenEye

remake. I want to say that was 2008 2012 Plant gets it on the nose 007 Legends PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 I don't know what that game is it was a bunch of different James Bonds

doing different things I don't remember that at all it was a Call of Duty style bad game. No major outlet gave it above a 5 out of 10. Yeah, probably. I'm sure he did.

Alright. This is your tombstone now, dog. That's rough. That's going to do it for us. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. Be sure to tell a friend about it. Besties. Fan.

The year is heating up and we're the game of the year. Debates are just over the horizon. I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure you all are too. Mail at besties. Fan is our email address at the besties podcast is where you can follow us on Twitter. There's also a link there to sign up for our mailing list. We have a shirt at McElroyMerch.com.

Anything I'm forgetting? Next week is Demon's Souls. Yes. Next week is Demon's Souls. Catch it. If you don't have a PS5, just play it on PS3. Because it's pretty similar in a lot of ways. It's basically the same game, but not as pretty.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll be sure to join us again next time for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. by Ben Harsley.

And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!