Following a series of increasingly incredulous leaks on social media, Sony has confirmed the next model of PlayStation will be an enhanced edition of the PlayStation 5.
“You’ve got to play to your strengths,” said Hermen Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios. “We’ve seen incredible success with repeatedly remastering, remaking, reshuffling, and reforging our established library of PlayStation exclusives. Now, by remastering the original PlayStation 5 hardware, we’re cutting out the middle man.”
The remastered PlayStation 5, or PS5R, offers new features such as improved heat management, a new “drift-proof” edition of the DualSense controller, and no new games.
Sony insiders who’ve spent time with the new unit report the PS5R is quieter, runs cooler, and “does everything it should’ve done in the first place” (Otis Phelps, the Verge).
“It’s a fundamental, ground-up reinvention of the original hardware,” wrote DigitalFoundry’s Steve Bacon. “The PS5R fits more neatly into my entertainment center, doesn’t look like an art-deco dehumidifier, and can run all my old PlayStation 4 games right off the disc at a perfect 120 frames per second. It’s such a significant improvement over the launch-edition PS5 that I can’t believe they actually offered the launch-edition PS5 in the first place.”
Added Bacon, “Oh, wait. I owned a PlayStation 3. I absolutely can believe this.”
The standard edition of the PS5R offers a Blu-ray compatible internal disc drive which is capable of playing software from all five generations of PlayStation hardware via a custom emulation package. Old games that have been “auto-remastered” by the PS5R feature better color depth, smoother animation, and inexplicable developer commentary by Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, despite his not having much if anything to do with 99% of the established PlayStation library.
“I didn’t record this,” Druckmann said ominously. “I’m not sure what’s happening. Is that me? Am I me?”
At press time preorders for the PS5R have sold out despite explicitly stating on the listing that the launch version will randomly explode at some point in the next two years.
