No, that’s not a serious question, but it is very close to the way my mind has been working recently. Should I play the new big game now? If I wait a bit, maybe it’ll get patched and be better? What if it gets updated for a Pro console? New generation consoles are only a few years away, and it’s bound to be re-released for those, so maybe I should wait and play something else instead? Do the questions ever stop? Why must I overcomplicate everything? Breathe… how do I breathe!?
In the old days, back when you could buy a new console for pennies (ignore the fact that a Sega Mega Drive would cost £550 in today’s money), sweets also cost a penny, and people rode around on penny farthings, a game pretty much lived on one console. You bought it for the SNES and you only played it on the SNES. In some instances a game (usually a popular arcade game) would get a later release on a newer system, but generally something like The Alien 3 would be released on all the available consoles at the same time, and that would be that. You’d convince your parents to buy the version for your console, and that was done and dusted. Alien 3 ain’t getting any better in the future. I didn’t know it at the time, but that is a feeling I’d come to miss.
Today, games move around with you or are re-released/remastered, making the decision about when to play something less obvious than it may seem. There may be even better examples, but Gears 5 (a game I think is a little underrated if you’re wondering), is a brilliant achievement on Xbox One considering the hardware, but it’s significantly better on Xbox One X, and even betterer on Xbox Series X. If you’re not someone who replays games (some of us barely have time to play them a first time), there are some decisions to be made about what you play and when.
This ‘issue’ I feel has become worse as we’ve seen the PC gaming space pull ahead of consoles in significant ways. In the 8-bit and 16-bit eras PC gaming was awkward and offered a very different experience to what we had on consoles. I wasn’t jealous of what was on PC, although I did become heavily into PC gaming for a while from the mid-90s until I binned goblin mode and embraced life (read: I stopped playing Football Manager). Even so, most 32-bit games on PlayStation/Saturn looked so ropey that PCs weren’t able to do much to make the situation better. Regardless, I was happy with my console games and gleefully played as many games as I could as soon as I could get my hands on them, warts and all.
With the Xbox 360 we even had a console that was outperforming a lot of PCs. It was a great time to be a console gamer, but ever since then the gap has seemingly widened. Enthusiast PCs can offer vastly superior image quality to consoles and open up the opportunity for high-end ray tracing that consoles can only dream of. PS5 Pro narrows the gap a little, but to my eyes there’s a stark difference to how a game like Cyberpunk 2077 looks on an Xbox Series X vs. a mid-high end gaming PC. Ignorance is bliss, I think, when it comes to console gaming, but sadly I’ve seen beyond and struggle to accept what is available now without a huge dollop of FOMO.
On a more day-by-day level, I’ve been struck down by something similar to this with the Silent Hill 2 remake. Firstly I waited for the PS5 Pro, which wasn’t a huge hardship other than to my wallet, but since then the game has been widely discussed as having graphical issues that haven’t been fixed. So I now find myself in backlog limbo, waiting around for an update that may never arrive, and that might not even fix the issue. (And this isn’t even accounting for the fact it’s a remake – imagine if I’d never played the original and had decided back in 2001 that I was going to wait for a remake built on the fifth generation of the Unreal Engine in 2024. Prophetic, for sure, but not wise.) Similarly, I’ve been playing Avowed on Series X but part of me is wondering if I’d be better off waiting for the PS5 Pro version that will hopefully clear up the game’s ugly image ghosting. I’m starting to think I might have a problem, but I can’t be the only one?
Which brings me to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. After about an hour or so with the game at launch I started to have a persistent and nagging thought: won’t this be a lot better on the Switch 2? Back then the Switch 2 seemed to have a shot at releasing in 2024, too, so it wasn’t such a ludicrous idea to wait for Nintendo’s new console, and so I made my decision and stuck with it. From what I’ve seen, that choice seems to have been a wise one, even if the wait has been a fair bit longer than I expected. I prefer playing sprawling adventures like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on a big screen, and the Switch 2 will make these games so much prettier, plus there are some neat new features coming via the updated Nintendo Switch mobile app. I’ll probably start a new save, but you can carry on with your existing save file if you want.
I did make the right decision, didn’t I? I mean, I missed out on all the excited chat from everyone playing TotK at launch, and I didn’t appreciate how good all those viral contraption videos were, and I only accidentally heard a handful of spoilers, and it’s not as if I’ll be spending all my free time playing Mario Kart World and not in fact Zelda, is it? Then Donkey Kong Bananza follows hot on its rear wheels, and then Metroid Prime 4. I should really play Silent Hill 2 at some point, too. What have I done to myself?
Maybe I’ll be waiting for the Switch 3 after all.