When the Playstation 5 was first announced in 2020 I remember thinking, No! I’m not ready yet. I had upgraded to the PS4 Pro with Marvel’s Spider-Man only about two years earlier. I had so many games to play. I hadn’t even used my PS4 Pro on a 4K TV at this time. And now, about five months after its release I finally have a PS5 and I’m so happy to have it. I’ve had it for about one week now.

My original plan was to hold out until later in the year. I was waiting on a few games: Rachet & Clank: Rift Apart and Gran Turismo 7, Horizon: Forbidden West, God of War: Ragnarok. I was waiting for one of these heavy hitters to push me into the next generation. Instead, I ended up finding one online and buying it with Miles Morales.

It was only because I heard a rumor that they would be available online at Best Buy that I was able to snag one. If you want to hear more on the process of grabbing one last week, that story is here.

PS5: One Week In

It’s only been about a week of Next-Gen gaming for me, but I have already noticed so many amazing improvements. This generation gap isn’t the same as the ones that came before. When I was a kid we jumped from 8-bit gaming (NES) to 16-bit gaming (SNES) to the insane 64-bits (Nintendo 64). With the Xbox One X and the Playstation 4 Pro games already looked and ran at peak performance. There’s not much more they can do, other than small graphical changes and new advancements in technology that you would think just make small differences.

This new generation is all about convenience. It’s about faster load times (SSDs), ray tracing, instantly jumping from game to game (Xbox quick resume), truly feeling your games (PS5 haptic feedback and adaptive triggers). It’s not about making our old games look bad, but instead about making them easier to enjoy, while also adding small enhancements.

At first I started off with some online games which were of course booting up faster than they did on my PS4 Pro. It wasn’t until I first tried Spider-Man: Miles Morales, that I noticed how fast I went from the opening screen into playing the game. The game has a dynamic menu screen where Miles is riding the subway, but once you select your save you are instantly taken to NYC to where you left off.

The PS5 doesn’t have the quick resume feature like Xbox Series X, where you could have multiple games open and continuously jump between them, but games do start up extremely quick. There have even been times where I expect a loading screen, and it’s not there. I have yet to try a long loading game from my PS4, something like Ghost of Tsushima.

DualSense: Feeling your Games

Holding the DualSense in my hand for the first time felt great. It wasn’t even on yet. I just love how it feels in my hands. Actually playing with it was even more incredible though. The first game I played with the DualSense was Astro’s Playroom. The game starts off with a DualSense demo that just shows off the cool features: the haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, the speaker and microphone and more.

Another great feature of the new PS5 DualSense controller is that it uses USB-C to charge. No more fumbling with your charge cable trying to figure out which way to plug it in in the dark. USB-C works both ways and that’s great. The old charge cables would become flimsy over time and now wiggle around when plugged into my PS4 controllers.

Of all of these features, the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are the main ones, and I hope they don’t go to waste like the Touch Bar did in PS4. I know it did get some good use in some games, but it was mostly in early launch games, then it was a forgotten feature that just became the map/pause menu button.

In Astro’s Playroom it was incredible how the controller can make you feel rain drops on your fingers, or how you can experience the different terrains with the vibrations. I got some experience with the adaptive triggers while playing Destruction Allstars. Once your vehicle is pretty busted the acceleration trigger is busted and vibrating like a bad tire. I’m very excited to see what they do with this new technology.

The Unboxing

This was my first attempt at an unboxing video. I know I’m a bit late to the party (by about five months), but I thought I should record myself opening my new toy. I can’t wait to learn more about my PS5 and play some more exclusive games.