We are going on a personal ramble today. Throughout my gaming life, I have mostly been a PlayStation fanatic. I have owned other consoles through the years: Game Boy Advance, Sega Mega Drive, Nintendo Gamecube, but my main choice was Sony. Ever since picking up Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy 7, Digimon World, and a host of other nostalgic classics on the original, I stuck close to that brand.
After the PlayStation 2, I picked up an Xbox 360 for one single game: The Last Remnant. I adore that game so much. I must have brought it about three or four different times across the years, and thanks to the Switch, I have it on the go now. Throw in the likes of Resonance of Fate, Lost Odyssey, and Infinite Undiscovery, and I dabbled with Microsoft for a bit.
Then, Bleach: Soul Resurreccion dropped on the PS3, so I bought that console and returned to the light of Sony. I stayed here for a while, slowly building my collection on the PS3 and the PS4, before managing to snag a PS5 from Very during the dark times when they were selling out as soon as stock arrived. That’s when we hit a problem; there weren’t that many good PS5 games at the time.
I bought it mostly out of habit, a new shiny piece of tech to scratch that itch for a bit. Sure, it made me happy for a while, and I did pick up a few games and had fun, but it stalled quite quickly. Plus, there was another, quite massive, issue that had been building for a while. Playstation Plus sucks.
A bold claim, you might say, so I will specify. The free games you can claim per month aren’t categorically “bad” in any sense of the word, but most of the time, they just weren’t worth keeping. When I subscribed, it was more for the PS2 era back catalogue. Jak and Daxter, Dark Cloud, and the Worms series, when I fancied a laugh. Stuff like that.
It was an expensive subscription to enjoy some classics, but I would have been happy to pay it if not for one huge issue: the streaming quality. Too many of the games can’t be downloaded, so you have to stream them, and whenever and wherever I tried, the connection constantly lagged or straight out dropped. I’ve never liked cloud gaming, but even so, I was getting disillusioned.
Then came 2023. Starfield was coming out on Xbox, and you could get it on Game Pass day one. Now, I do like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, overhyped as I believe them to be, but I’m not the biggest Bethesda fan. Even so, the idea of a space RPG where you explore planets, build ships, and engage in space combat proved too enticing.
I bought the Xbox Series X, subscribed to Game Pass, and within the week, my life had changed. Starfield has got its critics, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, however, the revelation came squarely with Game Pass. It is an astonishing service, and has even single-handedly changed my mind on cloud gaming.
Don’t get me wrong, I still want to own games and hardware – hint hint Nintendo – but just wow. The quality and sheer scale of what is available on Game Pass is amazing. I fell in love with Cassette Beasts as soon as I played it, enjoyed a third job with Power Wash Simulator, visited the Lake District in Atomfall, and recently rediscovered the fun of Skyrim thanks to Oblivion Remastered being incredibly underwhelming.
I needed a new TV recently, and I picked a Samsung one purely because it has Game Pass built in, and it works flawlessly. I switched between my Laptop and Xbox to play Starfield, almost flawless except for some slow date syncing issues. Remote play on my phone worked like a charm. Sony needs to do some corporate espionage to learn how cloud services should be done.
During this time of falling in love with the Game Pass, I also discovered something I never thought would happen: I prefer the Xbox Series X over the PS5. The PS5 literally blew my mind when I played Final Fantasy XIV, with its instant loading, the software is insane. The hardware, on the other hand, is not. I am not a fan of the design, which is made worse but how fiddly it is to move around. Also, I can’t get behind the controller, it just doesn’t feel right.
The Series X, on the other hand, is basically just a box, and is all the better for it. I can pick it up with one hand, easily pop it down elsewhere, and we are good to go. There’s no messing around with stands if you want to lie the console down. I imagine you could just kick the Series X onto its side, and it would keep going. The PS5 would roll around like a turtle.
After a bit of adjustment, I even started to prefer the Xbox controller, although that was never going to be a hard ask. It has a good feel and connects to a computer much easier than the PS5 controller. Even the official headsets are better. Why does the PlayStation 5 headset need a USB stick to work?
The console wars have always been a rather stupid construct, Sony and Microsoft fans shouting across the divide. I am not even convinced it was ever a thing. I never saw any bad blood. For me, it was always just about the pattern. I played Sony across generations because it was Sony. I never thought I would properly switch, but if there is a war, I have well and truly crossed over into the enemy lines and with a great big smile on my face, and the best streaming service under my arm.
