The Story of Playstation

I absolutely love video game documentaries, but like many people have said whoever the sound engineer was for this film should never work in movies again. It's impossible to listen at some points. There's some great archive footage but at other points they'll be talking about something like the Super Nintendo from 30 years ago but they show an unboxing of a brand new Super Nintendo mini. Doesn't make sense. The young lady with the pink hair who seems to be a video game historian is easy to listen to but she makes two false claims that were obviously not fact-checked and that any person who has played video games knows are either patently false or at best, misleading.

I (think I) take my hat off to the other reviewer who gave it 4, I managed 4mins 30secs of this GCSE media studies project.

It was partly the "games dev" telling us all how the Walkman and CD Walkman were "universally taken up, all over the world" but mostly the (poor) middle school audio. Started with the cheesy music too loud, then turned the (possibly dead) narrator in to a robot. Not even the PS1 had such bad sample rates!

Wish I could say more about it but I really can't bring myself to watch anymore. Just glad it's included with a well known streaming service, really not the sort of thing you want to pay money for.

I presume it was directed by Alan Smithee?

Shame, was looking forward to watching.

This documentary offers nothing you most likely already didn't know about the history of the Playstation.

It's presented through a couple of no-bodies being interviewed and sharing their useless nostalgia stories and uncaptivating personal histories that come off more vein than anything else.

They just talk about each launch of the new systems and mention a couple of leading games, while obviously not being allowed to talk about the games consumers where really obtaining the consoles to play.

It's also got quite some misleading parts to it, in particular one of them claiming the PS1 had better graphics than the Nintendo 64... yeah, nah a umm, 32 bit system vs a 64 bit is not going to have better graphics. What they're failing to admit is the PS1 was easily chipped to run bootleg games, where as the Nintendo 64 wasn't able to be modified like that, and that's how the PS1 outsold Nintendo's 64 console. It wasn't from it being a better console or had vcd.

Also, the sound editing during this entire thing is atrocious. At points you can't hear what someone's saying because music is drowning it out, and it's annoying as bleep that way the sound goes up and down and has no constant level. Very poor job on the audio all through out this pointless documentary from the pov of a couple of nobodies.

While the information in this isn't exclusive or new, the documentary is a great history of the PlayStation and Sony. This is all absolutely ruined by the sound design. Who even edited this?

You'll get someone talking and then suddenly there's a horrible voice effect over them and you can barely hear it. The background music isn't background music at all, it's more like someone has found their favourite 80s soft-core and put that in infront of interviewee's voice. At some parts, you cant hear the person speaking at all and the subtitles don't even pick up what theyre saying either, despite you seeing the person talking.

So basically, you get 5 points for the clips and information but lose out of 5 points because I couldn't even hear most of it...

Avoid at all costs. Just don't even bother.

This isn't a "documentary". It may contain some information, but seriously just go on Wikipedia and read for it.

It's a mess of AI-generated voices, weird and pointless visual effects that contribute nothing to the telling.

Newsflash, algorithms can't make movies. Not watchable ones, anyway.

Perhaps it is supposed to cater to the Null-Attention-Span generation? Well guess what, they'd never watch a movie anyway. Unless it's good...

A good movie will catch people's attention, even if it's a documentary. But it needs to be an actual movie, and it needs to be actually good. This is neither. Calling it a disgrace feels almost laudatory.