Tschumi
Member
In summary, I'd say if you don't own an XSX or PS5, a XSS is a genius move.
I made a thread earlier, voicing my thoughts on the Series S and asking if GAF thought i should sell it. GAF suggested I sell via poll (so this is relevant to the majority of people who responded to that post) and I agreed. Took me a while to get my ass in gear but I'm selling it now.
I didn't sell it because I hate Xbox or anything, but it is mostly because i have a PS5 now and I haven't played the XSS since it arrived.
Anyway that was all covered in the previous thread, I'm just going to give my take on the experience of owning an XSS for anyone who might want the info for their own decision making.
Positives:
Negatives:
Aite, just closing this chapter in my gaming life, goodwill to Series and PS owners, all.
Note: why don't i like gamepass? That's for another thread. Two general reasons would be that i prefer to outright own things, and I would never play anything long if i had access to a giant library of "free" titles.
I made a thread earlier, voicing my thoughts on the Series S and asking if GAF thought i should sell it. GAF suggested I sell via poll (so this is relevant to the majority of people who responded to that post) and I agreed. Took me a while to get my ass in gear but I'm selling it now.
I didn't sell it because I hate Xbox or anything, but it is mostly because i have a PS5 now and I haven't played the XSS since it arrived.
Anyway that was all covered in the previous thread, I'm just going to give my take on the experience of owning an XSS for anyone who might want the info for their own decision making.
Positives:
- Has all the cross platform titles PlayStation has, so you're not missing out there.
- You can pair your controller to an account, so signing in and turning on your controller is better than in the so-far buggy PS5.
- The basic controller layout, including the iconic face buttons from the OG controller, remains legit.
- You have access to Red Dead Redemption 1 and the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, both of which are unavailable on the Sony store, at least for me.
- You have access to a small selection of OG Xbox titles, including the excellent Gladius and great-but-oddly-button-mapped SSX 3.
- Forza Horizon 5 is badass, nobody can deny that.
- If you are going to use Gamepass, it's pretty much purpose built for it and you'll find it to be entirely adequate.
- It will cost way less than the other current gen consoles, even when scalped, and i personally found the graphics to be a jump on the previous generation so it's objectively worth the upgrade.
- No more stacks of disc cases!
- Legally (at least, without risk of banning) use emulators like retroarch (Dreamcast, gcn, ps2, more) , duckstation, ppsspp (extremely easy to use), etc, to play all your old games in HD with graphical boosts. This includes PSP titles, Chinatown Wars was so amazing i made a thread out of it.
- I don't know much about cloud gaming but apparently this is a beast for that too.
- There's a promise of some genuinely great titles coming to the console, TES6, Starfield, and much else.
Negatives:
- I found the UI to be a bit clunky and inefficient, but this might just be because I'm used to the late generation ps4 interface, which was very polished in my experience.
- I often had "woops, try again later" errors while paying for games. Two or three times per purchase.
- If you don't want to do gamepass, the games on offer don't really justify their full price.
- Exclusives at this point entirely failed to grab my attention the way Sony ones did, including Infinite and Forza.
- The included controller feels very basic, it was actually slippery to pick up and i dropped it a few times. I think it's like this to motivate you to buy an elite controller.
- i found the sticks to be too tall, the d-pad clicks sound like the finger clickers latin dancers use.
- no more stacks of disc cases.
- this only counts if you're in my situation, but although it's easy to change your console region on the fly, you can lose access to half the games you own if you reset your console. (Additional note: i didn't just lose access to all the games from one region, i lost access to a random selection of games from both regions, still on my hard drive, unavailable)
- retroarch is fantastic, but it can be really awkward to set up, and you can only fit a few games (even after compression) in the 20gb-limit hard drive folder.
- Bethesda are having a lot of hope invested in them, but they haven't really shone reliably since Skyrim.
- The price of expanded storage is a rort, a la PS Vita memory cards, and this console has pretty small internal storage, especially if you partition it for a dev mode drive (i don't recommend this, go for whitelisted retroarch via their discord), so it'll be good to have unlimited data if you're going to be shuffling through gamepass titles.
Aite, just closing this chapter in my gaming life, goodwill to Series and PS owners, all.
Note: why don't i like gamepass? That's for another thread. Two general reasons would be that i prefer to outright own things, and I would never play anything long if i had access to a giant library of "free" titles.
Last edited: