Physical VS Digital

 

            This whole Sony going discless is still affecting me more than I thought it would. I’m probably more of a digital/PC gamer but it still is a shit move. The more time goes on the more I hate that I’ve sold all my old consoles. I took care of my shit so when I buy second hand stuff, like Wiimotes, they’re not great, buttons kind of stick, yatta yatta. I’ve bought games multiple times, either I had it on the 360, sold it but then got it on PC, probably on a sale, but I have bought games two, sometimes even three times. I’ve bought Monster Hunter World and Iceborne on PS5 and PC, I almost think I bought it on release, returned it and bought it digitally on PS5. I’ve wasted SO much money on re-buying things. If I had kept my old stuff I probably wouldn’t buy some other remakes/remasters as well. If I still had my original Crash Bandicoots I probably wouldn’t have gotten the N. Sane Trilogy because there’s nothing really added. I never played FF7 back in the day because it wasn’t what I liked to play. When Rebirth came out I got it because it’s more up my alley. I’ve bought Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag at least three times and have no real interest in getting Resynced. I’m seeing that there are some things added where you go to several of the other AC games? I only saw a thumbnail so I don’t know but that there is a good addition, good enough for me to get it? Probably not. Will I kick myself in the future for not getting it, want to experience it and get it eventually? Maybe.

            The thing about a physical library versus a digital one is you can actually see everything you have. I only have a handful of things installed on my PC at a time, some things are kind of there forever just in case but between Steam, Epic, Battle.net, less so EA and Ubisoft, I sometimes forget what I even have. What annoys me, even as a kid it was annoying, is having games of a series on different platforms. I have a lot of Assassin’s Creed on PC because of some Humble Bundle sale, I rebought the “colonial” games for PS4, got Origin and Odyssey on PC, Mirage and Shadows on PS5… Kind of hate it. I remember loving the Oddworld games on PS1 and hearing about the third game and e-mailing the developers when the next game was coming out for PlayStation or PS2, whatever was around then, and they were like “It’s not, it’s coming out on Xbox.” What the hell is an Xbox? Achievement hunting has kind of fallen off for a lot of people I think, it used to be a big deal but I don’t think most people care anymore but even when I was young, even before achievements I was a hunter. Talking about Crash; I had all of the Naughty Dog’s Crash games completely done. It was cool to look at your memory card and see 100%, 102%, 108% done. I went so hard getting all platinum relics on CTR I gave myself some carpal tunnel from holding the X button so hard. It was nice to be able to say I did this but with achievements and trophies you could more easily prove it.

            The reason I bought a PS5 in the first place was so one; I could watch DVDs/blu rays and two; so I could play my single player games on it. I still would very much rather play single player games on the PS5 and multiplayer on my PC since there’s no extra fee to do so but I do still end up buying some single player games on PC. Going forward that’s probably just going to be what I do. There are a couple games coming out that I was going to get on PS5 but maybe I won’t now or I’ll wait till I find a used copy somewhere. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is coming out next month but I have so much I can play right now and Splatoon Raiders is coming out at the end of the month so I can wait and look for a second hand copy. I was considering getting the Tomb Raider remake coming out next year on my PS5 but I do have the other ones on Epic so maybe I should just get it on PC. I’ve been trying to play my PC on my TV, I had tried streaming from my PC to the Steam Deck via a dock and it does work but the colors looked a little off from what they are on my PC. I then installed the same game on my PC and Deck and checked just my docked Deck and it was still the same so maybe it’s the Steam Deck I thought. I have a really long HDMI cord that I had got when I thought I might try streaming so I connected that from my PC to my TV and the colors were still meh so it’s not the Decks fault, I just have to play with the settings on the TV. I’ll play with the settings some more but yeah, maybe that’s what I’ll do when I want to play on the TV. And it doesn’t really matter, I don’t know why I do this, I could just sit here and play it on my monitor, it’s fine, I don’t know why I want to play on the TV with some games. It’s the same with what I choose to buy digitally or physically for my Nintendo games. Pokemon Legends games, digital, mainline Pokemon, physical. Metroid Dread, digital, Prime 4, physical.

            It’s crazy to me how the PS5 was bundled with Astro’s Playroom and it showcased all the things Sony and PlayStation had done and for them to be like, “Nah, that’s not really cool, digital is cool.” I see it just spiraling. Storage is going to become a huge issue, I see it turning into like Xbox Game Pass or even Netflix where you don’t even need to worry about storage or buying a game. You’ll buy a subscription and just stream games from their servers and one month they’ll just be like “All these games are no longer playable, you can play these ones instead” and I see people being okay with that. As for the immediate future, PlayStation’s exclusives have never done anything for me so I doubt they can make anything that will make me even consider a PS6. Sure I got the God of War and the Horizon and the Spider-Man but that was because I had gotten a PS5 so I might as well get try these games not I really want to play Spider-Man so I’m running out to get a PS5. If for some reason there is an exclusive that I want to experience on the PS6 I might just watch a streamer play it or wait for a playthrough on YouTube.

            Watching the end of Dunkey’s video made me really nostalgic and just sad. Seeing all these same scenes that I got to experience as a child and knowing that kids and even young adults never got to experience any of that and never will is just so fucking sad. The thing that keeps coming to my mind is secret codes you could input in games for cheats or demos or changing the music or whatever. I remember Crash 3 had a code at the title screen for a Spyro demo. I don’t even know how I figured it out, probably in the manual, back when games had that. I think the last thing I ever did that even came close to that was buying Crackdown to get the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Like, these things were how you got people interested in other games. I was super into Halo at the time so yeah I’ll get this game and then I completely fell in love with Crackdown too. It’s just, again it’s just sad that these things are lost to time now. I wish I didn’t sell my stuff man.

            So that’s that again. Leave me some comments on your thoughts. Check out these videos of other peoples opinions. Jon from GVG has a great quote in his video; “I don’t need to have infinite choice when my time is already limited.”

    Jon from GVG, Kit & Krista, someordinarygamers

@AztecSauce