Maybe a bit late to the party (and I did try searching for a dedicated thread) for MasterChief Collection. While I have been looking for a good story or narrative rich experience to play, I decided to try MCC and started with Reach.
The game starts off great with an awesome intro scene and while I love a good sci-fi experience this was feeding into that for me. The game (or rather the remaster) looks awesome and seems to be building up, then came the combat… now I dunno if this is just my set up or environment as I am playing on OG Xbox One with TV speakers but I was left rather underwhelmed by the experience and somewhat offputting. The gun sounds seem to be very flat with no real ‘kick’ to them, they seem to lack any substance. The rest of the audio from voices to music sounds awesome so I’m wondering if it’s me or poor balancing on their part.
However, the nature of the port to the left of the HDMI output that remains a mystery. Brad Samms suggests that it’s some kind of diagnostic port that may not appear on final hardware (this unit is clearly marked as a prototype). However, although purely speculation on our behalf, we wouldn’t be surprised at all if this eventually turns out to be an expandable storage bay for NVMe PCI Express drives, perhaps encased in some kind of stick-like cartridge configuration - an idea mooted by our very own John Linneman when the Series X was first unveiled.
It definitely looks about the right width for a NVMe card…
Maybe the slot goes pretty far into the case, and the card works much like SSD cards do at the moment with a push to insert and a push again to release.
I saw a breakdown somewhere of leaked specs where they suggested GPU power alone isn’t everything. PS5 will have a stronger processor and more RAM. All in all it boils down to the exclusives, of which Sony always kills every console generation.
I will most probably be buying a PS5. Reason being is that Microsoft is doing a good job of making their prime exclusives (Gears, Halo, Forza) available on PC these days. That means my PC (which will inevitably be better than an XBOX) will be better equipped to play the games.
But seeing as I recently got a Switch Lite and haven’t had much time to game, with 99% of that time being on the Nintendo console, I’m questioning even the PS5 decision. All I play is Zelda BotW these days and I’m nowhere near done. When I am, Super Mario Odyssey will be waiting for me. After that, a sequel to either (or both?) will be available. With my limited game time (mostly half an hour before bed every other evening) the Switch Lite suits my current lifestyle perfectly.
