User reviews

Nice little story about the Playstations history which gets to the core subject surprisingly fast, without dragging it's heels. But it suffers 2 major flaws:1) this annoying modern documentary need to swap between nobody's offering 10, 15 seconds of dialogue one after the other. Just give us 1 presenter who we can associate with! 2) the sound editing. It is utterly dreadful, to the point where you can't even hear what the nobody's are saying. They no doubt feel this adds an edge to it, an interesting twist. It doesn't. It completely ruins what could have been a nice little documentary. 3 out of 10 is being generous.

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...

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.

Quite interesting content, and I wanted to enjoy it, but completely unwatchable die to the sound. Sometimes the background music drowned out the people talking. Awful.

I don't know why the sound was so bad. Watching view a Bose soundbar with rear speakers, but had to turn the rear speakers down otherwise there was an awful echo on the narrator's voice. Also, the actual quality of the sound is tinny and distorted.

I managed to watch about twenty minutes before it became too irritating. Even changed tge sound settings but it didn't get any better.

Very disappointing in what could have been a good documentary.

I think I managed about 10mins before I gave up due to the quality of the sound editing. More often then not you cannot hear what is being said as the awful music is drowning it out. I hope whoever did the audio editing and then whoever signed off on the release of this documentary were fired for this monstrosity of a show. I am pretty confident I could have done a better job on the editing and I know absolutely nothing about video and audio editing.

In short, don't waste your time watching this. If you are that interested in the history of the PlayStation you would be far better off and go Google it.

I don't know who thought it be a good idea to release this documentary in it's current state.

No build up, story is rushed and all over the place. Narrator sounds like Ben Stein. The console comparisons of the time barely, if at all, mention main competitors like Xbox or Sega. It seems to really focus on Nintendo the entire time, and with little mention of a main competitor, N64.

Probably the worst audio mixing I have ever heard. There are amateur youtubers who would do a better job then they did. It really is atrocious. Double audio, echoing in speech, music drowning out interviewees, random music in odd places, volume level fluctuations.

Take a pass on this one. Or watch video game historian on YouTube to see how a real video game doc should be done.

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.

When I saw this suggested to me on Amazon Prime, I immediately dived in, eager to see what it had to offer. As an avid gamer since the '80s, the premise seemed right up my alley. However, my excitement quickly turned to disappointment due to the abysmal sound quality. The background music was so overpowering that it completely drowned out the dialogue. It was frustrating to the point where even the subtitles couldn't capture what was being said. How this glaring issue was overlooked and the show released in such a state is beyond me. This major mistake significantly impacted my viewing experience, making it difficult to enjoy the content.

I am disappointed and surprised at the same time that such an underground bad quality is published. Sometimes you can't understand the dialog because the music is so loud. Sometimes it even skips, the music stops abruptly or doesn't fit the situation at all. Some dialogs are accompanied by music, while others are accompanied by annoying silence. The conversations are sometimes heard twice, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right and sometimes in absolutely miserable quality. Some of them are cut off. There was no concept for the music and interviews in this work, nor was it implemented well. I had to stop watching because of this miserable work. A real shame!

What could have been an interesting story about an iconic product has been rendered muck by laziness, lack of talent and lack of basic production knowledge. You watch the open sequence not quite sure what it is you're feeling as the narrater struggles to be heard over the poorly mixed in background soundtrack. Not two minutes later and we have a number of frame glitches. The red flag was the exceptionally poor openiy sequence.

You'll want to watch this for the subject matter, unfortunately in the hands of this production team, you won't be able to stand 5 minutes. Shame and reminds us of the modern standa of quality in so much programming.

What you don't know, as Japan after defeat in WW2 - Sony infiltrated into the Western world. I've had all the PlayStation and spent countless hours on them. Tomb Raider - admittedly made by Eidos in Derby, UK, with Lara Croft modelled on my friend.

352 characters left before I can submit this review, what do you expect me to do? £100 cheaper than some zoo that you control and police by some AI? Do you know how much effort it takes to produce user generated content? I keep writing this drivel until the word - or rather letter - count comes down to zero.

I am not your journalist so let me be succinct.

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 was really looking forward to watching this. The sound is terrible. The music is too loud. It plays over people talking making it so hard to hear what the people are saying. The voice-over sounds like bad A. I. It sounds so robotic. It is a terrible film about an interesting subject. They seem to have got this so very wrong. I persevered with watching the whole thing but.if I'm being totally honest then I'd say that it's not really worth doing. Unless you decide to watch it on mute. Even the interviews seem really wooden. This is definitely not going to get a rewatch and I'm only giving it 2 stars.

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.