Against all expectations, I managed to get hold of a Playstation 5.
Website chaos
A subscription to a stock checker on Discord signaled a drop on a website which immediately crashed due to all the traffic. I kept refreshing the page and managed to put the PS5 in the shopping cart and actually press the order button in between a lot of error pages. When the fuzz was over and the website became more accessible, I made the payment and started praying.
A couple of months ago, another website also crashed when receiving new Playstation 5 stocks. But because of the crash, the website had taken more orders than Playstation 5 consoles so a lot of people got disappointed. So even though I got an order confirmation, I kept my expectations low. A day later, however, I received an e-mail my order was sent and the next day a box was delivered.
One huge and ugly console
The first thing I noticed when unboxing the Playstation was that it’s HUGE. Man, it’s almost twice the height of my first-generation fat Playstation 4. The PS5 didn’t fit in the same compartment as my PS4 so I had to reorganize my TV unit to fix this…
Also, I think it’s the ugliest gaming console I’ve ever had. It looks nice in pictures, but in real life, it’s too big to be elegant. There’s an easy fix for this, though: place it behind a door. Just don’t forget to open it when playing, I already got one overheated message when I forgot this…
The controller
In contrast to the console, the controller (three times ‘con’!) looks and feels beautiful. The HD rumble is very well stolen from the Nintendo Switch and the adaptive triggers are awesome. It’s very cool to feel a response when pressing one of the triggers. It also has a built-in microphone with its own dedicated button so you can voice chat without headphones. The chat audio comes from the speaker in the controller instead of the TV. The controller charges through USB-C so I now have one cable to rule them all!
Bye bye, Playstation 4
Setting the console up was really easy. On the first startup, I got a step-by-step tutorial to migrate stuff from my Playstation 4 and configure stuff like voice chat and privacy settings. It’s fast, it’s quiet, it’s awesome. And just in time as my Playstation 4 was reaching its end of life. Its fan was making so much noise, I barely could hear the sound from my TV. One controller had a battery life of approximately one hour and the other controller suffered from drifting. So yeah, I’m glad I got the PS5 now.
