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Nintendo’s Mario Game & Watch is a choice gaming stocking stuffer

Nintendo will never stop mining its past for new nostalgia-based products, but at least it tends to do so with aplomb and occasionally even generosity. The former at least is on display with the Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch, a standalone handheld that plays the first Mario game, its unbelievably hard “Lost Levels” sequel and acts as a totally impractical timepiece.

This tiny gaming system isn’t the most practical thing in the world, but it is a charming piece of hardware that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Turn on the Game & Watch with a button on the side and you can select between, naturally, the Game and Watch modes. In game mode, you can select between playing the original Super Mario Bros. for NES, the sequel we never got in the U.S., but was eventually released as “The Lost Levels,” and a recreation of an old-school LCD game where Mario juggles balls at ever-increasing speeds.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The screen, while certainly small, is bright and sharp, apparently displaying the exact pixel dimensions of the original Nintendo game. It plays well, too — the controls are responsive, though it feels strange to play the game on anything other than an original NES controller. The buttons of the Game & Watch are a bit softer than I’d like — but they were good enough that I cleared the first set of levels without any real frustration other than my own lack of skill.

While there is no support for saving or rewinding the game — pretty much essential for the 99% of us who can’t beat it honestly — at least you don’t have to try to beat it in one sitting. The game freezes its state when you turn if off or switch to any other game or mode, meaning you can play a couple levels between subway stops and not worry about losing progress.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

You can hand it back and forth with a friend (after sanitizing it, of course) too, since player 2 uses the same controls.

The juggling game is a fun little diversion but, like most of those old LCD games, goes from really boring to nearly impossible in the course of about 60 seconds.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The “Watch” mode has a charming little landscape with the current time made out of bricks, and Mario running across the screen below stomping goombas and avoiding Bullet Bills. If you watch for a while he’ll moonwalk, mount a pipe and perform other hijinks. You can switch the background from normal to hills to mushroom platforms. I wouldn’t use it as a watch, but if you don’t want to pull your phone out while you’re playing, there you go.

For $50 it may seem a little steep, and perhaps it is. If this had Marios 1 through 3 on it I would consider it a bargain, especially considering the ability to come back to the game time after time — I’d work my way through the epic-length third game with pleasure.

As it is, however, it’s hard to justify the price — except, of course, as a gift to a Nintendo-loving friend or loved one. That’s why I suspect these will sell like hotcakes this holiday season. With no new Switch hardware, no N64 mini and no must-have games on Nintendo’s platforms, it’s looking a bit dry, but a Game & Watch is just silly enough — and decent enough — a device to sate the hunger of a retro-minded gamer for a few days.

Nintendo rips the seal off the next generation of nostalgia, but fans fret

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Demon’s Souls: The first truly next-gen game is a lopsided but impressive showcase

The next generation of gaming is here with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X — except it isn’t, because there are almost no next-generation games to play on them. Demon’s Souls is the first title that can truly be called next-gen, and it shows — even though it’s a remake of a PS3 game… which also shows.

The original Demon’s Souls was an incredibly influential game. Its sequel, Dark Souls, was more popular and improved on the first quite a bit, but much of what made the now major series good had already been established. “Souls-like” is practically a genre now, though the originals are unsurprisingly still the nonpareil.

The comparative few who played Demon’s Souls were elated to hear that it was being remade, and by Bluepoint at that (who also remade the legendary Shadow of the Colossus), but worried that the game might not stand up by modern standards.

Can an old game, the essentials of which are a decade behind its descendants, be given a really, really, really ridiculously good-looking coat of paint and still act as a blockbuster next-gen debut? Well, it kind of has to — there’s no other option! Fortunately the game really does hold up, and in fact makes for a harrowing, cinematic experience despite a few significant creaks.

I don’t want to give a full review of the game itself; let it suffice to say that, although it looks and runs much better, the core of the game is almost entirely unchanged. Any review from the last decade is still completely relevant, down to the “magic is overpowered” and “inventory burden is annoying.”

As a next-gen gaming experience, however, Demon’s Souls is as yet without comparison. It serves as a showcase not only for the PS5’s graphical prowess, but its sound design, haptics, speed and OS.

Image Credits: Sony

First, the graphics. It’s clear that Sony and Bluepoint intended this to be a truly lavish remake, and the game’s structure — essentially five long, mostly linear levels — provides an excellent platform for breathtaking visuals carefully tuned to the user’s experience.

The environments themselves are incredibly detailed, and the various enemies you fight very well realized, but what I kept being impressed by was the lighting. Realistic lighting is something that has proven difficult even for top-tier developers, and it’s only now that the hardware has enough headroom to start doing it properly.

Demon’s Souls doesn’t use ray-tracing, the computation-heavy lighting technique perennially on the cusp of being implemented, but the real-time lighting effects are nevertheless dramatic and extremely engaging. This is a dark, dark world and the player is very limited as far as personal light sources, meaning the way you experience the environment is carefully designed.

Although the detailed armor, props and monsters are all very nice, it’s the realistic lighting that really sets them off in a way that seems truly new and beautiful. Dynamic range is used properly, to have actually dark areas illuminated dramatically, such as the still-terrifying Tower of Latria.

Image Credits: Sony

The game isn’t a huge leap over the best the PC has to offer right now, but it does make me excited for game designers who really want to use light and shadow as gameplay elements.

(Incidentally, don’t bother with the “cinematic” option versus “performance.” The latter keeps the game silky smooth, which for Souls games is a luxury, and the other setting didn’t improve the look much if at all, while severely affecting the framerate. Skip it unless you’re taking glamour shots.)

Similarly sound is extremely well done in the game, though I’m cautious about hyping Sony’s “3D audio” — really, games have had this sort of thing for years on many platforms. Having a decent pair of headphones is the important bit. But perhaps the PS5 offers improved workflows for spatializing sound; at all events in Demon’s Souls it was very good, with great separation, location and clarity. I have reliably dodged an enemy attack from offscreen after recognizing the characteristic grunt of an attacking foe, and the screeches and roars of dragons and boss monsters (as well as the general milieu of Latria) were suitably chilling.

Image Credits: Sony

This combined well with the improved haptics of the DualSense controller, which seemed to have a different “sensation” for every event. A dragon flying overhead, a demon stomping the ground, a blocked attack, an elevator ride. Mostly these were good and only aided immersion, but some, like the elevators, felt to me more like an annoying buzz than a rumble, like holding a power tool. I hope that developers will be sensible about these things and identify vibration patterns that are irritating. Fortunately the intensity can be adjusted universally in the PS5’s controls.

Likewise the adaptive triggers were nice but not game-changing. It was helpful when using the bow to know when the arrow was ready to release, for instance, but beyond a few things like that it was not used to great advantage.

Hands-on: Sony’s DualSense PS5 controller could be a game changer

Something that had a more immediate effect on how I played was the incredibly short load times. The Souls series has always been plagued by long load times when traveling and dying, the latter of which you can expect to do a lot. But now it’s rare that I can count to three before I’m materializing at the bonfire again.

This significantly reduces (but far from eliminates) frustration in this infamously unforgiving game, and actually makes me play it differently. Where once I could not be bothered to briefly travel to another area or the hub in order to accomplish some small task, now I know I can return to the Nexus, fuss around a bit with my loadout and be back in Boletaria in 30 seconds flat. If I die, I’m back in action in five seconds rather than 20, and believe me, that adds up real fast. (Load times are improved across the board in PS4 games running on the PS5 as well.)

Aiding this, kind of, is the new fancy pause screen Sony has implemented on its new console. When hitting the (annoyingly PS-shaped) PS button, a set of “cards” appears showing recent achievements and screenshots, but also ongoing missions or game progress. Pausing in Latria to take a breath, the menu offered up the ability to instantly warp to one of the other worlds, losing my souls but skipping the ordinarily requisite Nexus stop. This will certainly change how speedruns are accomplished, and provides a useful, if somewhat immersion-breaking option for the scatterbrained player.

The pause menu also provides a venue for tips and hints, in both text and video form. Again, this is a funny game to debut these in (I don’t count Astro’s Playroom, the included game/tech demo, which is fun but slight), because one of the Souls series’s distinctive features is player-generated notes and ghosts that alternatively warn and deceive new players. In another game I might have relied on the PS5’s hints more, but for this specific title they seem somewhat redundant.

As arguably the only “real” PS5 launch title, Demon’s Souls is a curious but impressive creature. It definitely shows the new console to advantage in some ways, but the game itself (while still amazing) is dated in many ways, limiting the possibilities of what can be shown off in the first place.

Certainly the remake is the best (and for many, only) way to play a classic, and for that alone it is recommended — though the $70 price (more in Europe and elsewhere) is definitely a bit of a squinter. One would hope that for the new higher asking price, we could expect next-generation gameplay as well as next-generation trimmings. Well, for now we have to take what we can get.

Review: Sony’s PlayStation 5 is here, but next-generation gaming is still on its way

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Amazon’s new ‘Care Hub’ lets Alexa owners keep tabs on aging family members

Amazon today announced a set of new features aimed at making its Alexa devices more useful to aging adults. With the launch of “Care Hub,” an added option in the Alexa mobile app, family members can keep an eye on older parents and loved ones, with their permission, in order to receive general information about their activities and to be alerted if the loved one has called out for help.

The idea behind Care Hub, the company explains, is to offer reassurance to family members concerned about an elderly family member’s well-being, while also allowing those family members to maintain some independence.

This is not a novel use case for Alexa devices. Already, the devices are being used in senior living centers and other care facilities, by way of third-party providers.

K4Connect, a startup bringing tech to senior living centers, closes its $21M Series B

Amazon stresses that while family members will be able to keep an eye on their loved ones’ Alexa use, it will respect their privacy by not offering specific information. For example, while a family member may be able to see that their parent had played music, it won’t say which song was played. Instead, all activity is displayed by category.

In addition, users will be able to configure alerts if there’s no activity or when the first interaction with the device occurs on a daily basis.

And if the loved one calls for help, the family member designated as the emergency contact can drop in on them through the Care Hub or contact emergency services.

Image Credits: Amazon

These new features are double-opt in, meaning that both the family member and their loved one need to first establish a connection between their Alexa accounts through an invitation process. This is begun through the new Care Hub feature in the Alexa app, then confirmed via text message or email.

That may seem like a reasonable amount of privacy protection, but in reality, many older adults either struggle with or tend to avoid technology. Even things seemingly simple — like using a smartphone, email or texting — can sometimes be a challenge.

That means there are scenarios where a family member could set up the Care Hub system by accessing the other person’s accounts without their knowledge or by inventing an email that becomes “the parent’s email” just for this purpose.

Alternatively, they could just mislead mom or dad by saying they are helping them set up the new Alexa device, and — oh, can I borrow your phone to confirm something for the setup? (Or some other such deception.)

A more appropriate option to protect user privacy would be to have Alexa periodically ask the loved one if they were still okay with the Care Hub monitoring option being enabled, and to alert the loved one via the Alexa mobile app that a monitoring option was still turned on.

Of course, there may certainly be older adults who appreciate the ability to be connected to family in this way, especially if they are located at a distance from their family or are feeling isolated due to the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing requirements that’s keeping family members from being able to visit.

Amazon says Care Hub is rolling out in the U.S. The company notes it will learn from customer feedback to expand the feature set over time.

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The Boox Poke 3 is my new favorite e-reader

There are plenty of e-readers to choose from out there, but never enough for me. I’m always questing for the one that will make me forget that there are others available, and in the Onyx Boox Poke 3, I think I have found it — at least for now. The Chinese e-paper device maker has nailed the size, the screen, and added a sprinkle of versatility that I didn’t know I was lacking.

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Josh.ai launches a ‘nearly invisible’ Amazon Echo competitor that’s the size of a coin

In the past several weeks we’ve seen refreshes and product expansions from about every facet of the smart home virtual assistant world. Apple launched the HomePod Mini, Google offered a long-overdue refresh of the Google Home and Amazon found even more speaker shapes to shove Alexa into.

Today, we’re getting an addition from a startup competitor. Josh.ai has aimed to build out a niche in the space by building a smart assistant product that’s designed to be professionally installed alongside other smart home wares, and they announced a new product this afternoon.

The device, Josh Nano, fully buys into a more luxury home-focused niche with a low-profile device that appears to be a little bit bigger than a half-dollar, though the bulk of the device is embedded into the wall itself and wired back to a central unit via power-over-ethernet. The device bundles a set of four microphones eschewing any onboard speaker, instead opting to integrate directly with a user’s at-home sound system. Josh boasts compatibility with most major AV receiver manufacturers in addition to partnerships with companies like Sonos . There isn’t much else to the device; a light for visual feedback, a multi-purpose touch sensor and a physical switch to cut power to the onboard microphones in case users want extra peace of mind.

Image via Josh.ai

The aim of the new hardware is to hide the smart features of a home and move away from industry-standard touchscreen hubs with dated interfaces. By stripping down a smart home product to its essential feature, Josh.ai hopes it can push more users to buy in more fully with confidence that subsequent hardware releases won’t render their devices outdated and ugly. The startup is taking pre-orders for the device (available in black and white color options) now and hopes to start shipping early next year.

Powering these devices is a product the company calls Josh Core, a small server which basically acts as a hub for everything Josh talks to in a user’s home, ensuring that interactions between smart home devices can occur locally, minimizing external requests. The startup will also continue selling its previously released Josh Micro, which integrates a dedicated speaker into the wall-mounted hardware.

Though Josh.ai partners directly with professional installers on the hardware, the startup has been scaling as a software business, offering consumers a license to their technology on an annual, five-year or lifetime basis. The price of that license also differs depending on what size home they are working with, with “small” rollouts being classified as homes with fewer than 15 rooms. In terms of hardware costs, Josh.ai says that pricing varies, but for most jobs, the average cost for users works out to be something like $500 per room.

Massive tech companies naturally design their products for massive audiences. For startups like Josh.ai this fact provides an in-road to design products that aren’t built for the common needs of a billion users. In fact, the selling point for plenty of their customers comes largely from the fact that they aren’t buying devices from Google, Amazon or Apple and hard-wiring microphones that feed back to them inside their home.

Though 95% of the startup’s business today focuses on residential, going forward, the company is also interested in scaling how their tech can be used in commercial scenarios like conference rooms or even elevators, the startup tells me.

Smart home startup Josh.ai raises $11 million to offer a home assistant alternative to Alexa

Mirror founder Brynn Putnam on life with Lululemon — and whether or not she sold too soon

Brynn Putnam has a lot to feel great about. A Harvard grad and former professional ballet dancer who opened the first of what have become three high-intensity fitness studios in New York, she then launched a second business in 2016 when — while pregnant with her son — she was exercising at home and couldn’t find a natural way watch a class on her laptop or phone. Her big idea: to install mirrored screens in users’ homes that are roughly eight square feet and through which they can exercise to all manner of streamed and on-demand exercise classes, paying a monthly subscription of just $39 per month.

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Review: Sony’s PlayStation 5 is here, but next-generation gaming is still on its way

The new generation of consoles is both a hard and an easy sell. With a big bump to specs and broad backwards compatibility, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are certainly the consoles anyone should buy going forward. But with nearly no launch content or must-have features, they also fail to make a compelling case for themselves beyond “the same, but better.” What we’re left with is something more like a new iPhone: You’ll have to upgrade eventually, and it’ll be fine. Just don’t believe the hype for the new consoles… yet.

Disclosure: TechCrunch was provided consoles from both Microsoft and Sony ahead of release, as well as a handful of titles from first and third-party publishers.

In accordance with an elaborate (and ongoing!) series of embargoes for different features and games, impressions have been trickling out about the new platforms for a month now. For a launch that’s already lacking impact, this may have further blunted excitement: Few gamers will get excited when all anyone can write about is the exterior of the console itself, or the first level of the pack-in game. Some features wouldn’t even be available before launch, or are prohibited from coverage until long afterwards, leaving reviewers wondering whether day-one changes would make obsolete any impressions they had. (I’ll update this review when new information comes to light, or link to future coverage.)

But whatever the case, the shackles are finally removed and now we can talk about most (but not all) the new consoles have to offer. Unfortunately it’s… not that much. Despite the companies’ attempts to hype the next generation as a huge leap, there’s simply no evidence of that at launch and probably won’t be for many months.

That doesn’t mean the new platforms are a flop — or even that they aren’t great. But the new generation is a lot like the old one, and compatibility with it is actually the biggest thing the PS5 and Series X have going for them for the opening stretch. Here’s what I can tell you honestly about my time with the PS5.

The hardware: Conversation piece

As you can see, the PS5 is CONSIDERABLY larger than the PS4 Slim. Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The PS5 is a strange-looking beast, but I’ll give it this: No one is going to mistake it for any other gaming console. Though they may think it’s an air purifier.

The large, curvy device likely won’t fit with anyone’s decor, so it may be best to just bite the bullet and display it prominently (fortunately it sits comfortably vertically or on a stand horizontally). I look forward to getting custom shields for the side to make this thing a little less prominent.

The console is fairly quiet while playing games, but you’ll probably want it at least a few feet away from you, especially if you’re going to play with a disc, which is much louder than normal operation.

As for performance, it’s really impossible to say. The only “next-gen” (really cross-gen) game I got to play much of was Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and while it looked great (more impressions below), it’s incredibly hard to make any substantive comment on the machine’s computing and rendering chops.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The prospect of gaming in 4K and HDR, and of advanced techniques like ray tracing changing how games look, is an exciting one. But in the first place you need a TV setup that’s capable of taking advantage of these features, and in the second — to be perfectly honest, they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. A high-quality 1080p TV from the last couple years will look very nearly as good despite not supporting Dolby Vision or what have you. (I know because I got a new TV during the review period. They both looked great.)

Load times — a factor of the much-lauded custom SSD in this thing — are similarly hard to evaluate, though certainly going from menu to game in Miles Morales was fast, fast-traveling faster, and the previous game was faster to load than on my regular PS4. This benefit will of course vary from game to game, however — some developers are announcing their performance gains publicly, while others with less impressive ones may just let sleeping dogs lie. Without more titles to get a feel for the console’s performance improvements, right now you’ll have to take Sony’s word on things.

The controller: DualSense makes sense

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch

One place where Sony is attempting to advance the ball is in the new DualSense controller.

Not in the shape and color and slick, transparent buttons — those are not so hot. It feels like a DualShock that’s let itself go a bit, and I’m definitely not a fan of the “PS” shaped PlayStation button. This thing feels like a grime magnet.

And not in the built-in speaker and microphone, either; I struggle to think of any application for these that wouldn’t be better served by a headset or avoided altogether.

What’s actually a clear and impressive upgrade is the triggers, which feature incredibly precise mechanical resistance that serves all kinds of gameplay functions and sets the imagination running.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The new triggers are connected to a set of gears that impart actual pressure against your fingers, from a very light tap to, presumably (though I haven’t experienced it), actually pushing your fingers back.

The range is wide and it can impart the pressure anywhere along the trigger’s range, giving interesting effects like (the obvious one in violent games) resistance while you pull a gun’s trigger, which then clicks and releases when it fires. In Miles Morales, the triggers act as a very sensitive rumble, but also give you tactile feedback when you’re swinging, telling you when you’ve made contact and so on.

Honestly, I love it. I want to play games that use it well. I don’t want to play games that don’t have it! Hopefully developers will embrace the variable-resistance triggers, because it genuinely adds something to the experience and, if I’m not mistaken, even has the potential to make games more accessible.

The UI: More is more

The PS4’s interface had the illusion of simplicity, and the PS5 continues that with two steps forward and one step back.

For one thing, separating out the “games” and “media” portions of the machine is a smart move. As OTT apps and streaming services proliferate, they take up more and more space and it makes perfect sense to isolate them.

As for the games side, it’s similar to the PS4 in that it’s a horizontal line that you click through, and when a game is highlighted it “takes over” the screen with a background, the latest news, achievements and so on. As before it works perfectly well.

Previously, when you pressed the PlayStation button, you’d return to the main menu and pause whatever you were playing. If you held down the button, it opened an in-game side menu where you could invite friends, turn off the console and other common tasks.

The PS5 reverses that: The long press now returns you to the home screen, while a short press brings up the in-game menu (now a row of tiny icons on the bottom of the screen — not a fan of this change).

The in-game menu now sports an in-depth “card” system that, while cool in theory, seems like one of those things that will not actually be used to great effect. The giant cards show recent screenshots and achievements, friend activity and, if the developer has enabled it, info about your current mission or game progress.

For instance, in Miles Morales, hitting pause told me I was 22% of the way through a side mission to rescue a bodega cat named Spider-Man, with an image of the bodega where I accepted it. Nice, but it’s redundant with the info presented in-game if I pause in the ordinary way. There’s more to it, though — the cards can also be used as “deep links” to game features like multiplayer, quests in progress, quick travel locations, even hints.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Sony showed off these advanced possibilities in a video of Sackboy: The Big Adventure, but since that game isn’t yet available I can’t yet speak to how well it works. More importantly, I can’t make any promises on behalf of developers, who may or may not integrate the system well. At the very least it could be nice, but I’m afraid it will be relegated to first-party games (of which Sony promises many), and be optional at that.

It’s hard to call the new UI an improvement over the old one — it’s different, in some ways more busy and in some ways streamlined. Where it may improve things is in reducing friction in things like organizing voice chat and joining friends’ games. But that capability wasn’t ready for launch.

A couple nice things I want to note: Setting up the PS5 to your own preferences is super easy. I downloaded my cloud saves in a minute or two, and there’s a great new settings page for things people often change in games: difficulty, language, inverting the camera and some other things. There are also accessibility options built-in: a screen reader, chat transcription and other goodies I wasn’t able to test but am glad to see.

The games: Well… the PS5 is the best PS4 you can buy

The chief reason for buying a new console is to play the new games on it. When the Switch came out, half the reason anyone bought it was to play the fabulous new Zelda. Sadly, the selection at this launch is laughably thin for both Sony and Microsoft fanboys.

As I noted above, the only game I was provided in time to get any real impressions (that I’m permitted to write about) was Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Having recently completed its predecessor on PS4, I can say that the new game looks and plays better, with shorter load times, improved lighting, more detailed buildings and so on. But the 2018 Spider-Man still looks and plays very well — this is the difference you’d expect in a sequel, not from one generation to the next. (To be clear, the PS5 version does look considerably better, it’s just not the night and day we’ve been led to expect.)

As far as a review goes, I’ll just say that if you liked the first, you’ll like the second, and if you didn’t play the original, play it first because it’s great. I also want to hand it to the new game for its commitment to diversity.

But that will also be coming out on the PS4… and Xbox One and Series X… In fact, almost all the big games of the next year will be.

They will, of course, play and look better on the PS5 than the PS4. But it’s a hard sell to tell someone to pay $500 so they can play the next Assassin’s Creed or Horizon: Zero Dawn in 4K HDR rather than 1080p.

Meanwhile, the few games you can only play on PS5 are for niche players. Sackboy looks to be a fun platformer but hardly a blockbuster; Demon’s Souls is my most anticipated title of the season, but a remake of a legendary but little-played and controller-bitingly difficult PS3 game isn’t going to break sales records; and Destruction All-Stars, an online-only racing battle royale game, got delayed until February, which suggests it’s not playing well.

Adding them all up there really isn’t much reason in terms of exclusives to pick the PS5 over the Xbox Series X or, at least for 2021, a PS4 Pro.

The good news is that the PS5 is now without question the best way to play the huge catalog of amazing PS4 games out there. Nearly all of them will look better, play better and load faster. Sony as much as admitted this when they bundled a dozen of the best games from the last generation with the PS5. Honestly, I’m looking forward to finally playing God of War (I know… don’t hassle me!) on this thing more than I am Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

Unfortunately I can’t speak to whether these PS4 games have much to speak of in terms of real improvements yet. As mentioned above, a lot of that depends on support from the developers. But as a simple test, loading the Central Yharnam area in Bloodborne took about 33 seconds on the PS4, and 16 on the PS5 (as you can see in the shots above, the game looks identical). I didn’t time them, but anecdotally other games showed improvements as well.

The verdict: The must-have console for the 2021 holidays

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

No, that isn’t a typo. The PS5 (and I am joined in this opinion by our review of its rival, the Xbox Series X) simply isn’t a console anyone should rush out and purchase for any reason. Not least of which because it will be near-impossible to get one in the next month or so, making the possibility of unwrapping a PS5 a remote one for eager youths.

Review: Microsoft’s Xbox Series X is ahead of its time

The power of the next generation is not much on display in any of the titles I have been able to play, and while a handful of upcoming games may show off its advantages, those games will likely play just as well on the other platforms they’re being released on.

Nor are there any compelling new features that make the PS5 feel truly next-gen, with the possible exception of the variable resistance triggers (the Series X has multi-game suspension at least, and I’d be jealous if there were any games to switch between). For the next 6-8 months, the PS5 will merely be the best way to play the same games everyone else is playing, or has been playing for years, but in 4K. That’s it!

The rush by Sony and Microsoft to get these consoles out by the holidays this year simply didn’t have the support of the publishers and developers that make the games that make consoles worth having. That will change late next year as the actual next-gen titles and meaningful exclusives start to appear. And a year from now the PS5 and Series X will truly be must-haves, because there will be things that are only available for them.

I’m not saying buy your kid a PS4 Pro for Christmas. And I’m not saying the PS5 isn’t a great way to play games. I’m just saying that outside some slight differences that many gamers don’t even have the setup to notice, there’s no reason to run out and buy a PS5 right now. Relax and enjoy the latest, greatest games on your old PS4 in confidence, knowing that you’ll save $50 when a Cyberpunk 2077 bundle goes on sale in the summer.

So don’t feel bad if you can’t lay your hands on a PS5 to keep you entertained this winter — a PS4 will do you just fine for the present while the next generation makes its lazy way toward the consoles it will eventually grace.