Welcome to the event of the century, Sony fans. We hope you come into this block of samey programming desperate enough for something nerdy and exciting to distract you from the tragic goings-on of our world, and see-through our thinly veiled marketing strategy and see these products as a piece of art that is worth hundreds of dollars and hours over the course of your next several years, as we at PlayStation Studios plant our proverbial flag into the ground, staking our spot in the future of gaming for the next few months… Cheer for us, as you cheered at Avengers Endgame, but with slightly more muted enthusiasm, because at Sony we keep our composure, and our excitement, clinically sterilized.
Do YOU Want to make a video game for the PlayStation 5? To make a game for such a prolific, classy, future propelled piece of hardware that in no way isn’t just a sony proprietary offshoot of a two-year-old high-end PC, there are a number of things your game absolutely must-have:
Features
First off you’ll need some 4K Graphical Resolution, with scales, frame rates, and color and dynamic ranges, that won’t even be visible to the scrubs who still have the plasmas and 1080p HD TVs they bought on sale for their college apartments. Even if people decide to upgrade to 4K around the time of this console launch, they’ll still lose some of what they pay for because on average most can only afford whatever Samsung, Sharp, TCL, Westinghouse or any other bargain 4K TV they can find for less than a few hundred dollars and not even know what they’ missing out on. What? No, I didn’t use to sell TV’s, That’s ridiculous.
Also necessary will be Billions and Billions of Polygons, brought to you by Fortnite V bucks earnings, with animation and environments with details so small that we’ve reached the crescendo of diminishing returns on graphics in a gaming console, but we hope you take our word for it that they will look just as good as a movie and that our designers work around the clock to make you, and our shareholders go for a total of two seconds “wow. That looks good.”
Dazzle them with Extreme Particle Effects to show just how much dust you can throw into the air because you can, and sweat all over on the floor in the fanciest, slow-motion footage possible. And tons and tons of rain.
You absolutely have to have some Space-Time Continuum Breaking Mechanics built into your gameplay to have loading times faster than any player would bother to ask for because if the new Ratchet and Clank demo is anything to go by, prepare to get dizzy. As these mechanics clearly exist to show off the limits of a shiny new Solid State Drive that eradicates the entire point of stuffing consoles full of Ram. Because this is, after all, Sony hardware, and therefore will function great for a couple of years. After that, we guarantee nothing.
Throw in a dash of Ray Tracing to get that extra sweaty gleam on everything. It has the added bonus of making your console so nuclear hot that you could cook a Hot Pocket on it.
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You also are obliged to include 3D audio, so long as players send Tim Sweeney a photo of their ear. We don’t ask him why.
But of course you wouldn’t want any of your games to be without character and unique, vibrant personality, so here is our heavily market researched style checklist:
Style
- Cyberpunk architecture, interior design and fashion
- Cyberpunk Ghost in the Shell children
- Cyberpunk robots
- Digital cats
- Pixar fantasy character models
- Pink and purple colors because it worked for Fortnite
- Ghosts and… cyber-ghosts
- Female protagonists directed by men (no seriously, they showed like three women tops in their talking head interviews and one of them was the parody character by Devolver Digital, Y’all got punked by Devolver btw.)
- Third-person fantasy action where the trailer is edited to confuse what is a pre-rendered movie clip, and what might actually be gameplay
- Dramatic slow burns until the title is revealed, regardless of how hype the audience might be for it
- Dark Souls rip-offs
- Maps so large that reviews will have to say its technically worth the money because the game will take a minimum of 60 hours to play
- Slow, lumbering stealth sequences
- Uncanny valley faces that are so sweaty, you’d run away if they were a real person
- Bioshock / Dishonored weapons and combat
- Indie games with audio mixing that is nigh understandable over the music. The bad audio mix is either a budget limitation or reminiscent of the late 90s platformer production quality.
- And intricately crafted cinematic trailers displaying the filmmaking craft by people who make video games for a career instead because it’s more accessible less easily laughed off at parties and requires much less social interaction
The problem with a lot of the games being revealed is that, to anyone who is a normal human being without a multi-hundred dollar 4kTV OLED, or 300hz monitor, and a direct-wired feed to Sony’s hard drive that is streaming this content over the internet to even the press in the mids of a global pandemic, these games look mostly, relatively, the same to the normal consumer. The only reason this presentation would convince typical American consumer Jerry Spaghetti to buy a PlayStation 5 is that there are games only on it that he wants to play, and even then, there’s only so many, as many of these games are running comparable to that of a PC. and if the console’s exterior design is any indication (we’ll get to that in a minute) it’s not going to be very customizable.
So we know what you’re really here for. The exclusives to keep that console war train chugging:
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(TEMPORARY) Exclusives
Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Behold, a new Spider-Man game, that initially looks like it’s supposed to be their own game, but Sony backpedaled by saying it was a spin-off like Uncharted The Lost Legacy, and then, when the community of Miles fans pointed out all their minority lead games are spin-offs, non-canon offshoots or DLC, sony backpedaled again by saying it was its own, separate, but equally big game, and hope we’re probably just gonna buy it anyway.
But what do I know, I’m just a Spider-Man fan that will consume anything related to Spider-Man to the degree that I, as someone who disliked Venom 2018, will walk to a movie theater kiosk on opening night to say “Yes, Can I please get one ticket to Sony’s Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage, Directed by Andy Serkis and Avi Arad”.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart
Ratchet and Clank, by the exact same studio as Spider-Man, causing people who are conscious of how video games are made to be concerned for the livelihood of the employees of insomniac studios to make two highly anticipated sequels to their most successful franchises at the exact same time, both on a brand new, barely tested in the wild console, with million times more detail required of them than ever before so that sony has big fancy selling statistics.
but this time with big pink angular portals that force that new custom Sony SSD to work itself like a mule. With gears of war angle third-person shooter combat, and a new female character that made all of Deviantart rush to their Wacom tablets and give twitter plenty of fanart to cringe at for MONTHS.
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Goodbye Volcano High
A Life Is Strange templated Homestuck game that actually looks really wholesome, genuine, and sweet and can service all the fans of The Land Before Time that never got to see those beloved characters be teenagers. Because, hey, it’s gotta work better than it did for Rugrats.
RESIDENT EVIL VII.I.AGE (8/Village?)
An eighth resident evil game that really just looks like a remaster of Resident Evil 7 but with a werewolf, and is also a stealth sequel to M Night Shyamalan’s The Village.
Horizon: Forbidden West
Finally, Aloy returns in the long-awaited sequel to one of the PS4’s most successful original IPs, Horizon: A New Dawn. Wait, that’s not what it’s called? I lost 20 dollars on that.
Demon’s Souls Remastered / Remade / Rebooted
Demon’s Souls, now lovingly remastered and practically like new because it came and went long before Dark Souls was ever popular and has been stuck on the PlayStation 3 ever since, but this time it has double the particle effects and, just like Halo Master Chief Collection, is constantly loading the old and new graphics simultaneously so your distracted brain can be convinced how far we’ve come in game design in the last ten years.
Sackboy’s Big Adventure
A follow up to PlayStation’s cutest IP with Sackboy’s Big Adventure, where the team behind the least good little big planet gets dangerously close to ripping off the Mario franchise yet again with it’s newest core feature: Isometric viewing angles for deeper platforming experiences.
Oddworld
Another Oddworld game that looks the same as all the other Oddworld games
And
Gran Tourismo…. Again
But besides all the big fancy showcase of software you’ll be buying and we’ll be forcing people to work themselves, we know why you’re really really here.
You wanna see. The box.
The Box
You’ve seen the controller that looks like it’s wearing an apron. You’ve seen its haptic triggers, and big fancy features like…. A USB and… a microphone hole. We’ve seen your memes. And this box will blow. Your. mind.
We’ve put a trailer together to show you what your future living room will be haunted by. Complete with Big, heady monolith allusion to 2001 A Space Odyssey but with billions of particle effects.
Spider-man 3’s Sandman effect was just peanuts to this. This is a big deal. Big wavy particle effects up the butt. So much sand in the cracks.
It looks… white
And flimsy. But matted, so no fingerprints! It has a baby bump for its chunky, expensive 4K Blu Ray disk drive, in it’s a nuclear hot oven that requires many fans. But you can also get it flat, and disc-less, so you can download all you want, stuffing that SSD to the brim.
This console…
looks like something that came off of a Prius.
It literally looks like a dehumidifier or even a humidifier.
It looks like a sandwich I bit into and the meat goods, instead of staying even, pushed to the other half of the bread, likely to ruin the structural integrity on my next bite.
It looks like this console is trying to whisper something casually to the box on the shelf next to it.
It looks Like pieces of paper or metal that got bent because you sat on it.
It’s shaped like my baking pan that springs into a weird oblong shape when it hits a certain temperature in the oven and makes me worry my mid-bake chocolate chip cookies got wrecked by physics.
IT LOOKS LIKE TWO PRINGLES WRAPPED AROUND A HERSHEY BAR.
it looks like my xbox 360, post red ring of death.
Sony, we know you needed to make a console that was capable of cooling properly, but this looks like a rejected apple design. Everything about it screams “I’m expendable” when, in 2020, it should be whispering to its players “I’m expandable.”
And, after such a gaudy reveal for something so ridiculous, the gaul to show two models, and not give a price is ballsy.
Yes, players. Play has no limit when it comes to your wallet.
Because when you pick up The Last of Us Part II next week and see just how far we’ve come with technical refinement over the last few years, and hear your launch PS4s or slim models hack and cough like a defunded NASA vessel, you’ll realize “dang, it’s been 7 years since this console came out. Gotta make sure I can keep up with the discourse on the latest hyped games.”
Because when some guy reads off a tweet to you that some egoic games media person compares The Last of Us Part II to Schindler’s List, you just gotta know what that shit is all about.
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