Forget PS5 Pro, PlayStation's console design team is now making wooden blocks with an absurd $80 price tag
Shapes of Play? More like Shapes of Pay
It's PlayStation's 30th anniversary, and to celebrate Sony has put its console design team to work creating Shapes of Play - a series of absurdly priced boxes full of, er, various shapes.
The big one here is Shapes of Play: Create, an $80 collection of 13 magnetic wooden blogs that form the four shapes that have defined the face of PlayStation controllers for 30 years. As the store page puts it, these blocks were "created by the team behind the design of PlayStation consoles." Clearly the PS5 Pro must be ready for launch if the design team is doing side projects now, right? The gimmick with these blocks is that they can stand upright on their own, and you can use the magnets to stick 'em together in various configurations.
If that's a little too expensive for you, there's also the $45 Shapes of Play: Battle, once again created by the PlayStation console design team, according to the store page. This one's a four-by-four tic-tac-toe variation, with players differentiated in black and white. I guess they could have just gone with Xs and Os but then square and triangle would've felt left out.
Finally, there's the $35 Shapes of Play: Recharge, which is apparently the one thing here not made by the console design folks. Here we've got "four soft touch silicone shapes," which the store page promises will give you "a new way to recharge your hands between games, especially those tough boss fights."
These products are all exclusive to Sony's own PlayStation Direct store, and will be released on December 9. And look, as much as I'm making fun of them and their absurd price tags here, I can admit that deep down in my heart there's a part of me that wants them bad. Do I want them $160 bad, though? That's the part I'm not so sure about.
All I'm saying is that you should read our Astro Bot review before you decide how to spend your PlayStation nostalgia money.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.
Marvel Rivals joins Manor Lords, Palworld, and Helldivers 2 as one of Steam's best-selling and most-played new releases of 2024 despite launching at the end of the year
Hideo Kojima offers another Death Stranding 2 update and a demonstration of his unique PS5 controller technique: "Building the game"