falyken cailean welborn
Bulah Landaker
In this pandemic ravaged year, I've not been able to go to E3 or Gamescom or EGX and try them, so it's been impossible to understand why these new machines were necessary. Sure, the traditional seven-year period was up, but in a generation where games have taken so long to make, did we have to stop at seven? We've had one solitary Rockstar game, and even more prolific studios like Naughty Dog have delivered just a couple of major releases. I thought I'd have played at least one new Ken Levine game on my Xbox One.
I had a recent discussion with a fellow journalist who called 2020 a "great swan song for PS4," referring to major, excellent games like Dreams, Final Fantasy 7, The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima (with more to follow). But this year didn't feel like a swan song to me. It felt more like a peak. The PS4 was firing past 100 million users, more people were engaged than ever, the games were (and are) still coming... I couldn't understand why now is the time to trade the machine in, or relegate it to the other TV so it can enjoy its retirement as the Netflix delivery system.
And the rhetoric around the launches did little to overcome my scepticism. Xbox was being open with the fact that its 'Series' devices were effectively upgrades to what it's been delivering for a while. Meanwhile, Sony was touting instant loading, 3D audio and haptic feedback, as if these things were revolutions. My Nintendo Switch has fancy rumble tech that nobody uses and games that load pretty much straight away. My parents have a surround sound system. This doesn't seem worthy of a whole new generation.
So now that I've spent a good week with PS5, what's the verdict? The game that I've spent most of my time on is Spider-Man: Miles Morales from Insomniac Games, an excellent follow-up to the equally fantastic Spider-Man on PS4. Built in two years, it's unsurprisingly shorter and very similar to the game that came before in terms of the core experience, but it makes use of all the PS5's new immersive toys -- the audio, the visuals, the fancy rumble technology. In doing so, I can see what the PS5 really brings. It's not revolutionary, but it is another big step along a journey that Sony has been on for some time.
We talk about PS4's 100 million install base as the marker of its success, but there's another one: the performance of its first-party games. Uncharted, The Last of Us, Spider-Man, Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War, Bloodborne... not only have they all been critically acclaimed masterpieces, but they've sold in numbers that PlayStation's internal teams have never achieved before. Many of them have exceeded ten million sales worldwide.
They're also in contrast to industry trends. As the rest of the business goes all-in with online multiplayer and games-as-a-service, Sony has spent the generation building largely single-player, narrative-driven, blockbuster experiences -- and it has made it work. The firm has really embraced this cinematic identity, the new PlayStation Studios opening sting looking exactly like the sort-of thing you'd get at the start of a movie. In fact, the branding is almost identical to the one used by PlayStation Originals -- the former name of PlayStation Productions -- before the largely forgotten Ratchet & Clank film.
If Xbox and Game Pass is the "Netflix of gaming" then PlayStation is cinema. Xbox wants you to pay $10 every month to play loads of different things of all shapes and sizes. PlayStation wants you to spend $70 on that single, special, blockbuster experience.
It makes sense as to why indie developers, who had a starring role at the birth of PS4, have been slightly overlooked during the promotional campaign for PS5. The PS5 story has been about God of War and Final Fantasy and Horizon and Resident Evil and Spider-Man and Hitman. Big, high-quality, AAA gaming experiences that you play on your own, with a fancy headset and controller.
Last year I spoke to someone at Remedy who speculated that their new narrative-driven, single-player game Control might do a bit better on PlayStation because "it feels like a PlayStation sort-of game." Indeed, it does, just as a service-based multiplayer game feels well suited to Xbox, which has made good business out of Forza Horizon, State of Decay and Sea of Thieves. Or just as nostalgic, family games fit well with Nintendo Switch, what with Mario and Pokmon and Animal Crossing.
With that in mind, it makes sense that Xbox Series X feels more like an extension of its predecessor, and why PS5 is full of bits of tech designed to make their games feel more immersive. Spider-Man: Miles Morales is like the game that came before on the previous console, but the extra technical touches enable it to take a bigger step towards becoming, effectively, an interactive Marvel movie. About 20% into that game there's an epic scene on a bridge that is thrilling to experience for the first time, from the story, the direction, the audio, the way it looked, and how it felt in my hands.
It's not just the technology. The boot-up sound, the UI... even the aesthetic of the console (like it or loathe it) with the lights that bounce off the white fins, looks like the outside of my local Cineworld. It feels premium.
Over the last five years, PlayStation has established this identity as the purveyor of huge, expensive blockbuster games, and PS5 is the console manifestation of that. For studios making those sorts of experiences, and gamers who enjoy those products, this machine is purpose built for them.
Thanks to the folks at Microsoft and Netflix, I've gotten the new Xbox 360 console upgrade and have started watching Netflix movies on my Xbox this morning. A couple gaming sites have been doing some reviews as well and have raised a bunch of questions, some of which I have already asked Microsoft and Netflix and will update this post if I get answers.
The new Xbox 360 console update, which will be release to the public on November 19th, includes the highly anticipated ability to stream Netflix content to the Xbox 360 console as long as you are a Microsoft Live Gold customer and a Netflix customer.
After downloading the new console update and then downloading a small Netflix update, you active the streaming functionality by entering a code from your Xbox 360 into your Netflix account via the computer. From there, you can add Netflix videos into your watch now queue and they instantly show up on your Xbox 360. Navigating through your movies is done by going to the Netlfix box in the "Video Marketplace" channel which takes you to an app that allows you to very cleanly and very quickly flip through the movies in your queue. The movies are represented by cover artwork of each movie and even when you have a hundred or so titles in the queue, the app is super fast. I would compare the experience to being almost identical to flipping through albums in iTunes using Cover Flow. The only major downside here is that movies still have be added via the computer first, before they can be played back on the Xbox 360.
Once you select a movie, you get a screen with details about the video and the ability to rate the content as well as the ability to start, resume or remove the video. When you select play, the app checks your connection speed and buffers the video. For me, the videos buffered very fast and I never waited more than about ten seconds for any video to start. That may not be the startup time for the average consumer though as I am on a 20MB FiOS connection. While most movies are in SD, Netflix has to date made about 300 videos available in HD, many of which are TV series and not actual movies. Watching the SD movies on a 50" plasma screen looked amazing and HD is really incredible. The quality of the stream is all based on your connection speed and I am waiting on Netflix to hopefully give me details on the encoding bitrates being used. But the bottom line, the video quality is really, really good and in my eyes, is DVD quality with no frame rate issues.
Netflix and Microsoft have clearly thought about the experience, the ease of use and the quality of the videos being delivered and overall, I expect users will be very happy. That being said, this hands on review leaves me with three main questions that will dictate how successful the offering will be.
For starters, what is the business relationship and model behind the new service? With three parties involved, Microsoft, Netflix and content owners, whom is paying whom to make all this happen and how will money be made? I know this is a new service to start and hence, a clear business model has not yet been established. But over time, one will have to emerge.
Second, does the availability of getting movies on the Xbox 360 now mean that more content owners and in particular, major movie studios, will start giving Netflix the rights to encode and deliver more first-run movies? Hopefully so, but they still control the content and have a big say in the success that the Netflix service will have.
So I've done most of the achievements for Netflix on Xbox but I haven't gotten any. I've watched much more than 10 episodes in a row but I haven't gotten that achievement yet. Is there a way to get the achievements or do they just not work?
Netflix on Xbox 360 is an important component of the new Xbox experience, a new generation of games and entertainment experiences that will be available on Xbox 360 consoles this fall. The new Xbox experience, also announced today at the E3 Media and Business Summit, represents the first time in history that a mass-market consumer electronics device has been re-invented through free software, giving people more fun and intuitive ways to interact, play and enjoy entertainment content.
From the Netflix Web site, members simply add movies and TV episodes to their individual instant Queues. Those choices will be automatically displayed on the TV screen via Xbox 360 and available to watch instantly. Once selected, movies will begin playing in as little as 30 seconds. In addition to instantly streaming movies to the TV, Xbox LIVE Gold members can fast-forward, pause and rewind, all using either their Xbox 360 Controller or Media Remote. In all, the user interface creates a highly personalized experience that puts viewers in control.
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