Semantic Nonsense: A Blast from the Now

Playstation’s no longer at now, now

Sony’s merging of the two Playstation subscription services, rumored since last year, has come to pass. PS Now and PS Plus have combined to form… PS Plus.

Granted, it’s an expanded PS Plus with new tiers to the service incorporating both subscriptions’ feature sets.

The original PS Plus plan remains the same in all but name; now “PS Plus Essentials,” it still allows online multiplayer, two free games a month, cloud saves and occasional PSN discounts for $10 a month.

The middle tier of the new combined service is “PS Plus Extra.” Which is… more. $5 more, specifically. At this tier, the service strikes a middle ground. You gain access to hundreds of PS4 and PS5 games, but only as downloads like the two monthly freebies. No streaming going on here.

The top of the heap is “PS Plus Premium” for $18 a month. This tier adds in the full PS Now service as was: The ability to stream certain games from the PS1,2,3,P and 4. Understandably left out is the PS5, oddly left out is the Vita. As in the Extra tier, these games can also be downloaded with the exception of the PS3 titles, which are streaming only. Apparently, even Sony can’t make an efficient emulator for the Cell architecture. Games can be streamed on any PS4, PS5 or a PC, just like Now, but is still limited to markets in which PS Now was available.

There is a catch for Extra and Premium users, though. They’ll be waiting an unspecified amount of time before big new releases from Sony land on the service, explicitly to avoid cannibalizing sales of new games during their launch window.

Previous users of both services come out of this transition smelling like roses, while those who used only PS Now are getting asked to shell out for the highest tier of the new service to maintain what they used to get for the price of the lowest tier. Not a great look, though only Sony knows how many people used to get PS Now just to stream Playstation games on their PC. Everyone else could theoretically see some use out of the PS Plus services.

As far as the competition goes, what Sony is putting out is more expensive and less flexible than the much-touted Xbox Game Pass, with fewer legacy games available. The time-demo feature on the highest tier, though, can’t even be a no-brainer switch for a Sony-only customer of Gamefly given that first-party titles won’t show up for some time and not every new title is even going to make it to PS Plus to begin with.

So yes, it’s far from perfect for a number of reasons, but it also seems plenty good enough to do well.

And speaking of Gamefly…

Cruis’N Blast review

This one’s coming in much too late to rate a solo review, so it will continue the time-honored tradition of late reviews sneaking into Semantic Nonsense and presented in an abbreviated form.

Cruis’N Blast looks like a lot of fun. You get a lot of fun and off-beat cars for a racing game. The tracks have some crazy backgrounds. There’s a lot of interesting-looking stuff going on.

But… that’s pretty much all it has to offer. It’s great to play for a short while, but it has all the depth of a budget title. You’ll see the same handful of tracks over and over again, reskinned. And while those skins are lavish in their differences, it’s still the same track.

It’s nice that Nintendo took the franchise out for some air, but at the end of the day, it’s a port of an arcade racing game (yes, it’s in arcades, too), so keep your expectations managed of what’s being accomplished, here.

If you find it on sale, have fond memories of the series and want to recapture the experience of dropping a few quarters in, moving on with your life and playing it again next time you have time to kill in the mall, this game’s for you. If you need a Switch game purchase to do heavier lifting, there are plenty of other designed for home racing games that can ably carry the load.