Playstation Now: Days of Future Past

So after listening to Danny on the last Alt F1 podcast I decided to give Playstation Now a look and see if anything caught my eye. I signed up and jumped into the catalog immediately looking at everything and of course jumped into F1 2014. Below is just my first impression of Playstation Now and not indicative of the entire service.

Games Catalog:

The games catalog is something of a trip down the PS3's memory lane. Except some of the nightmarish memories rear their ugly head here. Sony leveraged their catalog alright with a mix of first party games but honestly thats what should have been here in the first place as Sony's best interest is to do just that. The non first party games are mostly mid to low tier games like Bound By Flame and Rise of The Guardians. A 2014 game and 2012 movie game respectively. Thats not to say that its all crap. Bioshock Infinite, Batman Arkham City, and Saints Row IV are present and accounted for but they are some of only a few major non first party games available. Its also not surprising that God of War III is absent from the service while every other one is there as they are about to launch a PS4 remaster. My only other gripe is the filter selections. The Horror filter only has 2 games listed, Alone In The Dark (horrifically bad) and Dead Island (horrifically hilarious if you count that one TNT) Not Siren Blood Curse which is listed as Adventure. Sure I'll give you that but it is a horrific adventure. Also under Party there is but one game Pure Chess. Because when I have a group of friends over the highlight of the night is watching two people play chess against each other for a while. Yeah our parties can get weird so what? Another head scratcher is why Infamous 2 is listed as a Puzzle game. These are just small gripes however. Sony also leveraged some Japanese ass Japanese games as well like Arcana Hearts 3 and Hakuoki: Stories of the Shinsengumi so there is a little bit for everyone including fighting games. Which brings me to my other first impression.

Streaming Quality and Input Lag:

This is a big one because even a good game is shit if it looks and plays horrible remotely over the internet. However that isn't the case. I have a really good connection so the quality is typically very high and I could argue the input lag low. Sony recommends at least a 5mbps to stream however I assume that on a 5mbps connection you wouldn't be able to do much else while streaming. The lag while noticeable is very minimal and even on F1 2014 it wasn't enough to screw me up more than myself was screwing me up learning to drive at least from what I could tell. I can't speak for the fighting games yet that require super exact precision but I would suspect that it might be the most noticeable there.

Overall First Impression:

I think if someone missed several first party Sony games like the Last of Us or the Uncharted series then it is definitely worth it at least until you beat them. The catalog has some duds for sure but it also has a few games that if for what ever reason you missed years ago or have the urge to play again but don't have access to a PS3 anymore then the service is fine. However Sony needs to expand the library greatly to keep subscribers longer than a few months. It would be great to see that what ever came to PS Plus for PS3 also made itself available on PS Now that same month. I'll definitely stick around for a little bit and finish up some of the games I didn't get around to but I urge you to look before you leap into the futuristic world of playing 1-5 year old games again.