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Picking a games console is confusing now. I'm too old for this shit.

Written by Random J •
Picking a games console is confusing now. I'm too old for this shit. | Yes. Everything is Rubbish. Written by Random J (?J)

Maybe I'm getting old, but this upcoming generation of gaming has me confused. It doesn't take much to confuse me, to be frank. But I remember the olden days when a console would release with one model. One SKU. You would just buy the games. Put them in the console. And play them. Now Microsoft and Sony have new X-Stations coming out, both with two models, and these new game services where you pay a subscription for stuff, in addition to all of the other subscription services from EA, Square Enix and that French company who make the Assassin Creed games, who hate women, Black people and allow its staff to be sexually abused. I have no idea what any of this shit is because it feels like hard work to get to grips with it all. I am also lazy, so I guess there is that too. 

But picking your console of preferences these days is no longer a case of brand loyalty how it once was  where [HARRY POTTER SORTING HAT REFERENCE REDACTED] team Sega or team Nintendo. Brand loyalty only means so much now. I used to be about Nintendo's consoles on day one, but I don't yet have a Switch. I fell in love with my PS and my PS2, and yet I never owned a PS3, and it was YEARS until I got a PS4. When Microsoft entered the gaming arena, I told myself I would never buy an Xbox, but then I bought myself an Xbox 360 over a PS3.

Nintendo is off doing their own thing. They can sell a console on the power of Animal Crossing, Pokemon, Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, and they know it. They can just announce a new console, do one of their cute lil' Directs, show one of these games and that is all the fuck they need to do. Whether you want to buy a Nintendo system or not is so easy. But with Xbox and PlayStation, it feels like work for me. I need to look through tables of specs and service offerings, and price points, get the low down on each of the SKU's, and then read the detailed accounts from gaming websites of each of these for the fine print. And then there's the things that I don't care about, but should, because they dictate the futureproofability of the console. How many terraflops of data can it process? Is the GPU clocked to ray trace the max amount of vertices whilst the system is clocked to lock the frame rate at 60fps? Is the CPU capable of upscaling to run games at 7680×4320. I don't know what I'm saying. But this is picking a new console in 2020. It's like picking a PC.

I just wanna know when a game is coming out and if they look good, and so this is what is going to be the defining factor for me. Because let's face it. Spec wise there isn't a whole lotta difference between the XCube S-EX and the PlayHouse 5.

I probably am getting old. I have less patience than I used to for pretty much everything, not just games. I value simplicity. And I do feel that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo could do with being a bit more simple in how they market their systems and their offerings. It could all be so much more simple than they let on.

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