Sony General Games Thread

[Hawq]

[ian]

Days of play has PS deluxe super god tier premium ultra ultimate mega + 12 month subscription for $144.01 AUD.

At $12 a month, it's a good price.

I immediately got SandLand and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. will see if they're any good soon.

[Hawq]

[ian]

Just as I cut the subscription (to sub to Xbox again next pay to Datsun 510 Skynet and ICM into trees) they add SandLand.
I've wanted to play it for a while but didn't want to spend the $60 just to do it because I wouldn't expect to want to play it for more than sort of a week.

I loved the anime series. It's just like dragon ball without 8 million episodes of twitching and bulging or endless fucking running and filler of Z...13 episodes! It gets to the fucking point and has been one of the few animes in the past basically decade that I like. And like enough to actually play a game based on.

Hope it's still on plus when I go back to PSplus... I am aware I could get Forza Horizon 5 on PS5, But I can hardly ever bring myself to buy the same game twice, let alone pay full price for a 4 year old game.
Let alone pay full price for a 4 year old game I got for less than half that ages ago.

SandLand is at best an average game.
But it's a fantastic interactive story book.
And for all the problems it has with gameplay, including but not limited to fixed camera pseudo platform sections including Crash Bandicoot style towards the camera chases, desert walking, QTEs and boring fetch missions, it overcomes the problems simply by telling the story and looking damn good doing it, while letting me screw around with a tank!
Every time the game takes my ability to use my tank away, and doesn't progress the story I get a fraction more pissed that I'm not in my tank or watching the story, but then it gives me access to my tank again and all is forgiven.

If it wasn't for the story and looking great, I wouldn't have tolerated this somewhat platfoRole (it's a word I just invented to describe a role playing game with lots of platforming) interrupting all the fun tank combat parts.

Indeed at $60 odd I wouldn't have gotten my money's worth from it, but if I'd seen it for sale at $25 or 2 for $40 at JB/EB I'd have been happy to pay that.

Hell, if it leaves the game catalogue before I finish it, I would pick it up for $25.
And if anyone wants to make games based on the other 2 great animes of the past decade: Dorohedoro, which is also from a Manga around the turn of the millennium like SandLand is. Or Oddtaxi, I would be perfectly happy to buy and play them if they were done to the level that SandLand the game is.

[Hawq]

[Dr. Zoidberg]

The first plausible Sony handheld specs leaks emerge - but how capable can it be?

Strategically cut-back PlayStation 5 gaming looks viable.

Quietly in the background, plausible technical specifications for Sony's next generation handheld have come to light. Bearing in mind that we're likely years away from release, the plausibility of these specs has to be questioned but at the same time, the source of the leak - KeplerL2 - has proven to be a highly reliable source for all sorts of AMD information. He was also first to corroborate the PlayStation 5 Pro spec leaks and his information turned out to be very, very close to what we received as final hardware. His Sony handheld specs are unusually detailed for a project so far out, but to be fair, they do lack highly important context: the chip at the heart of the machine is built on AMD's new graphics architecture - known by some as UDNA - but nobody quite knows what it is capable of. Therefore, getting a grip on what this machine is capable of will prove challenging.

Based on Kepler's information though, the in-development APU has 16 UDNA compute units and 32 ROPs - similar in configuration terms to the Strix Point processor we'll see this year in the ROG Xbox Ally X and the plethora of Chinese handhelds built on existing versions of the same core processor. There are key differences though - and these could prove crucial.

First of all, as mentioned, the Sony handheld's use of the UDNA architecture gives it a generational leap or two over Strix Point, which is using RDNA 3.5. Secondly, memory bandwidth has historically been a defining limiting factor for AMD handhelds - it's one of the key reasons why Steam Deck continues to measure up fairly well against much more modern AMD-based handhelds. According to Kepler's information, Sony attempts to address this with two improvements: faster LPDDR5X memory (9600MT/s vs 8000MT/s) along with an additional memory cache on the processor itself: 16MB of MALL (Memory Access at Last Level) cache. This will deliver one third of existing PS5 bandwidth, but the MALL plus architectural improvements should make a difference.

News 3: Next-gen PlayStation handheld specs rumoured:



Unfortunately, Sony hasn't chosen to use a 256-bit memory interface - the mystery processor described by Kepler uses the same 128-bit interface as current AMD handhelds - but 16GB of memory is mooted for the handheld. That's the same as Steam Deck, but more pertinently, the same as PlayStation 5. Beyond that, it's suggested that the processor is fabricated on TSMC's 3nm process. That's very expensive for now, but likely to be more affordable for a console manufacturer a few years down the road.

If this sounds like an amped version of the Z2 Extreme found within the ROG Xbox Ally X, Kepler begs to differ, suggesting that the new graphics architecture within the handheld has "way way way higher perf/CU". The 3nm process should also offer density and efficiency advantages over Z2 Extreme. Combined with further leaks that development PlayStation 5 hardware is receiving a mode with reduced bandwidth, the implication is that game makers will be able to unify their PS5 game development to support the new handheld and to start work on this sooner rather than later, using existing console dev kits.

There is another benefit for this handheld over all others - the UDNA architecture, said to a be a unification of AMD CDNA and RDNA graphics (though Kepler refers to it as just CDNA 5) should, in theory, be the only handheld using Radeon graphics to support AI upscaling, such as FSR4 or Sony's homegrown alternative, PSSR. Assuming a 1080p screen, this could be a highly useful feature to have, especially bearing in mind some of the results we've seen from DLSS on Nintendo Switch 2.

Right now, it's extremely difficult to come up with any kind of projected performance level for the handheld, but the mooted "reduced bandwidth" mode for PS5 dev kits would seem to suggest that Sony intends for the handheld to run current generation software, almost certainly at lower resolutions and/or lower frame-rates. This sounds somewhat like Sony's own take on the Series S, the difference being that we'd expect to see the handheld arrive in close proximity to Sony's actual next generation console - the PlayStation 6. You'd imagine that the platform holder would also be looking at the handheld to run variants of PS6 software too. This may sound optimistic but PS6 will be using the same architecture, leaning heavily into machine learning features, which the handheld should support.

Where this leaves the competitive landscape remains unclear. Kepler believes that the upcoming Z2 Extreme found within the ROG Xbox Ally X will be AMD's last major handheld processor for some time, with nothing using UDNA on the current roadmap. Meanwhile, reports continue to suggest that Microsoft has left the conversation - it will rely on third party companies to create devices instead, like the Ally X. However, Valve continues to bide its time until an actual generational leap in mobile hardware is available for a potential Steam Deck 2 - and there's no reason it couldn't tap into the same AMD technologies as Sony. Perhaps the UDNA architecture is the way forward?

Meanwhile, based on the remarkable efficiency seen on the Switch 2, I wouldn't count out Nvidia in delivering a highly potent PC handheld - assuming x86 to ARM CPU performance is on point. Intel, too, shows promise based on the performance of the Lunar Lake-based chip in the MSI Claw 8 AI+. I'm looking forward to seeing the competitive landscape shift - and the sooner we learn more about UDNA, the better. After all, it's likely to form the basis of the next generation console hardware created by both Microsoft and Sony - and therefore the same technology that Xbox reckons will deliver "the biggest technological leap ever in a generation".

Source: Eurogamer

[Dr. Zoidberg]

PS3 -$4b jeepers...

[pixel]

PS3 -$4b jeepers...

Goes to show how expensive that launch PS3 hardware was. Sony charged a lot for it and still didn't make any profit. Blu-ray was not cheap back then even in a standalone player. The PS3 was probably the last system we'll see with custom bleeding-edge technology because it's so damned expensive for a company to build its own hardware infrastructure.

But I wonder how much Sony has made off of Blu-ray movie sales? And whether the $4B investment into the PS3 was recouped by the movie division by destroying HD-DVD?

[Hawq]

[Hawq]

maybe better in the emulation thread? nt sure

[Hawq]

[melancholy]

Holy cow, I’m going to have to add this to my Proxmox server. That is awesome!

[Dr. Zoidberg]

That is pretty cool.

[Hawq]

[Hawq]

https://romhackplaza.org/romhacks/castl ... aystation/

[Hawq]

[Hawq]

[Hawq]

well OK a good few are on the xbox as well

[Hawq]

[Dr. Zoidberg]