I bought Forspoken on PS5 for £5. I didn’t want to play Forspoken at all, but I had £5. Forspoken on PS5 has sat on my desk (complete with character cards) sealed since November 17, 2023. Yes, this was a waste of £5. I’m an idiot who does stuff like this (, but in recent days this pristine copy of a middling PS5 exclusive from Square Enix has started to haunt me. I no longer have a PS5 with a disc drive, so of course I want to play Forspoken more than I’ve wanted to play any other game in my life.
OK, hyperbole much? I’ll admit that I wanted to play Gears of War 2 more than I currently want to play Forspoken. Happy? Back to the point that I’ve yet to make: I don’t think I’m happy with the prospect of an all-digital future for games consoles. When the PS5 Pro arrived my OG PS5 got shipped off to a nice farm I’d heard is wonderful, and things seemed great. I didn’t hear anything from the old girl, but me and the Pro were getting on brilliantly. That new console excitement has reinvigorated my desire to play games (that aren’t Balatro), so I’ve been going through my library and checking out loads that I’d never played or bounced off for whatever reason. I was happy. Or so I thought.
Very few people will know what I’m talking about here, but I’m going to briefly talk about the 1989 film “How to Get Ahead in Advertising.” In the film an advertising exec, played by Richard E. Grant, grows a boil on the side of his neck, and eventually this boil starts to exhibit personality of its own. Long story short, the boil takes over, completely changing the person he was. His wife ends up leaving him because he’s become a nasty, cruel, obsessed man. I’ve got a boil and it really wants a PS5 disc drive.
I can hear it chuntering away, relentlessly mocking me for not having a way to play physical media on a PS5. And it’s got a point. It’s not just Forspoken that now lies unplayable. I’ve got about 40 PS4 games on a shelf and a smattering of PS5 ones. The boil’s right, isn’t it? I do need a PS5 disc drive. A future without a drive in a console feels restrictive, and gated in a bad way. It’s not a private estate with a fancy gate that opens when your massive Porsche approaches, it’s a £160 train ticket to Sheffield because there’s no other option. What an idiot I’ve been, again.
It’s not helped, frankly, that the Black Friday sales have started. Final Fantasy 16 dropped to £15 and Lords of the Fallen to just £13 – the latter supposedly a gem on the PS5 Pro. Both of these are at least double the price on the digital PlayStation store, and the same runs true for loads of games. I’ve essentially locked myself out of the physical library I own and the ability to cheaply buy plenty of games I want to own. On an impulse driven no doubt by some kind of Black Friday frenzy I bought FF16 and LotF. That was it. I now had to buy a PS5 disc drive. And that, dear reader, is giving me the blu-rayge! []