my playstation four

i skipped owning a 6th generation of consoles (but played a lot of skyrim on my roommate's xbox 360) but decided to buy a ps4 for 4 big reasons: bloodborne (i'll never beat this game. don't care), until dawn, heavy rain, and the biggest reason, the dualshock controller (155 million ps2s sold! i never liked the xbox "duke" controller or the modern one. dreamcast-style face button names throw me off and the buttons themselves feel like marbles or bubble wrap). until dawn and heavy rain are no longer exclusives, which is great. i'm no fan of exclusivity. bloodborne is probably in the sony vaults for the ps6 release.

this will probably be the last console i'll ever own. i don't see myself ever getting a ps5 because there are only two games (alan wake 2 & baldur's gate 3) that my ps4 can't run that i'm interested in playing. that comes out to ~$300 a game! i payed $250 for my ps4 and it came with three big-budget games (purchased in january 2020. what unexpectedly fortuitous timing). if hades 2 isn't released on ps4 then that price is brought down to just over $200 per game. i'd rather play baldur's gate with a mouse anyhow. not that i can afford, timewise or capital wise, a gaming pc but these games aren't going anywhere. i also thought "once RE9 comes out, it'll be odd that i won't be able to play it with a dualshock like every other RE game" and then realized "wait, yes i can, but if i play on a pc and not a playstation. weird". i may be an incorrigible bean-counter but not in terms of frames per second. if i need a little counter in the corner to tell me and not my own eyes, an increased framerate is not a concern of mine.

i've been pleasantly surprised with how many ps4 games are still being release halfway into its succesors' lifespan (not just indies either! AAA games!). i thought i'd have to upgrade for resident evil village. nope. i thought i'd have to upgrade to play the remake of resident evil 4. nope.

i think this was supposed to be system specs but turned into a blog post instead. here are the specs!:

• ps4 slim edition
• 4 tb sata 2 ssd - this is extremely easy to swap out on the ps4 slim as a tray pops out, no unscrewing the face plate required. the speed is bottlenecked by the rest of the hardware but it is extremely noticable and helps greatly with my "big 3" of load times (control, witcher 3, & cyberpunk '77, the last of which has also seen great improvement w/r/t pop-in).
• a cool pumpkins-esque decal i found on etsy. if you'd like to support a kyiv-based small business, this seller has many pretty designs (for switch and ps5 as well) for sale, all $15 or less.

games i play on ps4:

• river city ransom (i know, after all that talk about upgrading my system)
• cyberpunk '77*
• resident evil (so much resident evil. all available numbered releases & remakes, revelations 2 [i have the first one on my 2ds], code veronica)
• supermassive horror games
• castlevania collections
• sayonara wild hearts*

*these games will eventually get their own full-page write-ups. level 5 ("begin again") in SWH is one of my favorite video game moments of all time. frission inducing.