Cassidy @cassidyjames@mastodon.social

What sort of things would be handy to throw up alongside your video game on a console, besides the obvious like game guides?

Like, say a game console let you pin stuff to the side alongside your gameplay. What are you putting over there?

Welp, night zero of taking the pacifier away from the toddler cold turkey. Wish me and the wife luck and ANY amount of sleep this week…

It’s only a ping if it’s from the TCP/IP region of the Internet, otherwise it’s just a sparkling notification.

PS5 feels like the most well thought out *gaming platform* that I’ve seen. It’s deeply integrated and offers opportunities for games to shine on PS5 in ways they really can’t on any other platform. Super smart differentiator on Sony’s part—the key will be getting devs on board.

Oh, I remember one of the things that blew me away and demonstrated leadership in the space that I hadn’t seen anywhere else: PS5 has system-level game preference defaults! Things like default difficulty, joystick preferences for first-person, and accessibility defaults.

PS4 was a regression in my book. PS5 feels like they have really worked through the interaction and made things quick to get to while not being overwhelming. It’s absolutely different than both PS3 and PS4, but in my opinion, in all the right ways.

Anywho, this was a late night thread from memory. I will have to sit down and take screenshots some time to really dig into it. And to be clear, I really liked the PS3 UI—at the time, it managed the complexity of what all a console could do better than others.

The UI leans into light refractions which pairs well with the ray tracing abilities of the console. It also plays well with the hardware—especially the glass-like buttons on the DualSense controller. But it doesn't feel like LOOK IT IS GLASS like the Windows Vista era.

The overall aesthetic (lightweight glass and lots of light play?) paired with the sound design is REALLY nice. It feels modern without being overly trendy; its own intentionally distinct style, but not different for the sake of being different.

The PlayStation Store being integrated into the main UI is a lot nicer than waiting to load a separate UI. I feel like the PS3 or PS4 *used* to do that, too, but then they made it a separate “app”?

Capturing gameplay also captures your mic if it's not muted which was jarring at first but actually pretty cool. I'll have to dig into the settings and see if you can remove the mic track later or turn that off or what.

Off the top of my head: the new quick menu on PS button press is smart, and I like it better than the PS4’s press-and-hold menu. The capture/share stuff for screenshots and video clips is SO nice and well done; they’re flexing the headroom of the console with this.

I got a PS5 and ended up playing it most of the evening (before and after Comcast broke my Internet). I mostly like the new UI; Sony is doing some really interesting and smart stuff here. I kind of wish I had waited and livestreamed the initial setup and exploration of software!

Imagine if you were someone whose internet just stopped working one day and the Comcast support person just told you, “ah yeah your modem must have stopped working, but we have this fancy one you need to upgrade to!” and then you are roped into paying another $13/month forever.

Honestly, this smells like some disgusting ploy to push their proprietary modems rentals on unsuspecting customers even more forcefully. They already advertise their routers all over your account and try to constantly upsell you.

So I just had to go into my Comcast account and tell them to reprovision my modem—again, the modem I own and have owned and used with them for years. Then magically everything started working again. Wtf.

Spent an unreasonable amount of time resetting my network… apparently Comcast decided to block the MAC address of the router I own and have owned and used on Comcast for months, via the modem I own and have owned and used on Comcast for literal years now??

Pre-stream is live! We’re chatting in the comments. https://youtu.be/m9_aqgCxIn0

Okay less than an hour to go, and I've been tweaking to make it go a little more smoothly.

Getting set up! Two hours and counting down.