Tag Archives: Playstation 4

PlayStation 4 One Year On – The Good, The Bad and The Downright Ugly

Posted on by

Happy Birthday Desktop BackgroundYes indeed, the PlayStation 4 celebrates its first year’s birthday this week. But one year on has it managed to live up to the hype or has it even earned the title of a ‘next generation’ console? I, along with many other gamers are not truly convinced. I am going to attempt to give a rundown of this much anticipated games machine with my overview of the past year.

The Good:

The Sales – Few can argue with the PS4’s sales. We might as well say that it was a two horsed race; the Nintendo Wii U was never going to stand a chance to begin with so the only other ‘real’ challenger was going to be Microsoft’s Xbox One console, which despite having what some would say were better release day titles thanks to some momentous delays from the Sony camp and the fact the PS4 machine was released some 8 weeks later than the Xbox One, the sales of the Playstation 4 still kicked ass month after month in terms of the numbers of the machine which were ‘reportedly’ flying off the shelves. Now before the Xbox fan boys start blowing up my phone, I’d like to say of course we all know statistics can and are often fiddled but one year on and one thing is evident, the accountants of Sony are very happy as sales of the PS4 continue to trump the opposition from all corners.

The Graphics – Now I’m going to say the graphics of the PS4 aren’t as earth shattering as the original expo’s made out, (see the ‘Bad’ section below) and there appears to be less of a ‘step up’ in terms of graphics between the last and this generation, but one thing is for sure, PS4 runs faster and smoother for practically every game than its counterparts and that includes all but the most powered up PCs.

PS Plus – One of the finest things about the PS4 which many owners have reported is that it encourages them to take advantage of the PSN and PS Plus network. With the PS3 this deemed largely ‘non-essential’ but with the PS4 it is a no-brainer. Why? Well, being a PS Plus member provides numerous benefits particularly if you own more than one Sony Machine for example the PS3, PS Vita or both. If you are a member every month you can download ‘for free’ 3 titles for each machine on your ID. Far from being the crap games no one wants to play some of the games have been pretty huge. For example, over the past year titles offered have included Crysis 3, Bio-Hazard Inifinte and even Uncharted 3. With the early release of the machines you had a free one month’s subscription so you could try it out and I have to admit, I even thought about purchasing the PS Vita as I would have had a complete games collection by now. The PS Plus PS4 freebie games have not been that great if I am honest, but if the servers had not gone down last month PS Plus members would have had a cut down version of Drive-Club.  No, I’m not kidding you.

Nice Hardware Touches – If you look at the PS4, there are some really nice innovative touches which show that the architects truly thought about what they were doing. If you put the PS3 and PS4 controllers side by side for example you can’t help but notice so much has just been chopped off the latest iteration, yet it still feels natural in your hand. The touchpad strikes you as a bit of a weird concept at first but in use increases immersion in the games as does the miniature speaker in the centre of the controller; as you play the game shots ring out, radio crackles or ghostly voices echo in the palm of your hand. Different but very nice indeed.

Share Play, Remote Play and Playstation TV – This is yet to truly surface but if Sony pull these off (and internet speeds continue to rise) what we will have will be incredible. I tried out the Share Play option a few weeks ago. You need a PSN account to do it but it means you can ‘share your game’ with people who don’t even have the title. By pressing a button you can ‘hand over’ your joypad and your friend can take over, thus helping you get through a tricky part of the game. Coupled with Voice chat this can be incredibly fun and with the time levelled at two hours before you have to start the whole process of ‘linking’ again, this could be the key to making games more social. This sounds great and it is, in practice though, my friend’s internet speed wasn’t as good as mine so although I could share with him, he could not share with me which was a shame. Remote Play too borrows a similar principle and allows the player to switch to another TV as long as their PS4 is on and they have has purchased the PlayStation TV box (around £80). Again in theory this is really exciting although it owes a great deal to internet speeds to whether there is noticeable or unplayable lag between the time you press the button and the time the character does their action. Racing games are when this really creates problems. The chances of most players having a fully LANed up house with high speeds in all rooms are probably quite small. A normal/high video quality option has been added, but come on who really wants to play a game in low resolution, those of you with ‘buffer faces’ may just switch the console off and wait until the guests have left.

The Bad

The Leap into this Generation – Now, I realise this is going to make me sound rather old but I remember the ‘birth’ of the last generation and that of the one before. I remember big releases such as Wipeout and Ridge Racer, games that really wowed the crowd in terms of graphics and sound revolutions. When the Wii was released and the Wii U they both had a modicum of ‘lets bring something new to the table’ type attitude. Now this is going to sound harsh, but this generation has been, well, rubbish in comparison. What do we have? A variation on the PlayStation Eye, is that all? What happened to the 3D games? What happened to Project Morpheus? The big release by Sony promised a big change to the way games were played – well that is yet to happen

The Quality of the Games – Despite the promise of what next generation hardware should ‘bring’ with it in terms of games, what we have had over the course of a year has largely been re-hashes of old titles brought up to date with new skins, better visuals and little else. Take some of the games releases of late such as Watch Dogs, Need for Speed Rivals and Wolfenstein and run them on the PS3 and PS4 and you will not see giant leaps of difference in terms of actual graphical quality. It has taken until Destiny and The Shadow of Mordor; games released nearly a year in to take advantage of even the basics of this generation’s hardware and both too were released on the PS3 – Shadow of Mordor in a few weeks’ time. There is just not a feeling of quality.

The Downright Ugly

Console Parity – One of the things to have surfaced of late within the gaming industry is console parity. It is purposefully underutilizing the available technology and power in a superior console so that a game looks and plays the same on inferior competing consoles.

When was the first time I became aware of this? When Watch Dogs was being hyped the night of the PS4 release and then it later emerged that it was running on a suped up PC, a version which never actually made it to the market. Why would developers do this? Well, to maintain a balance between versions; a balance by the way, that has never been actually requested by gamers or console makers.

It’s ugly because it really is an insult to gamers who invested cash on their console or PC, buying the machine hoping it would give you the best quality of games out there. In terms of the PS4 everyone knows it is a more powerful machine than the Xbox; developers have even bragged about it, yet the common practice seems to be to use the powers of the limited competing console, namely the Xbox One and base that as the ‘standard’.  Now, some are saying that there have been ‘financial incentives’ for the developers to dumb down the PS4 and PC versions of games, others are saying that the developers are lazy, others have gone further by saying that if developers don’t do this then Microsoft have threatened to remove a games licence all together. For me this is just ugly, it’s monopolising the market as it means we are not truly in a next generation of gaming unless either Sony or Microsoft develops a title ‘in house’ where they can effectively ‘take the brakes off’.  Overall it is very, very worrying and it makes you wonder what else do we not know about.

Testing the Playstation 4

Posted on by

Recently Frost was lucky enough to attend an event held by Argos showing off some of the top gifts for this Christmas. Among them was the much anticipated Playstation 4 which we were lucky enough to try. Unfortunately there were no games available but there was a demo showing off some of the potential of the machine.

In the demo I’m shown I sit down to see myself on the screen in front of me! The playstation camera which also acts as a motion sensing device beams me onto the screen but there’s also a floating robot head sitting next to me. What’s really clever is how the motion sensing device picks up your depth of field. I can interact with my robot friend my tickling him for example.

ps5

The demo also shows off the new controller’s capacitiative pad. By flicking the pad i can bring out more interactive robot heads and do a whole load of different things. I can even hoover them up and make them laugh.
Games are getting more real as the capabilities of the hardware grows. I was also lucky enough to try Oculus Rift recently which really blew my mind but that’s another story. It’s undoubtedly an exciting time ahead. It was very absorbing and a little overwhelming at first. I totally lost myself in it and in my excitement I smashed the glass of orange juice sitting next to me! My bubble was broken and I returned to the real world. It was clear to see this is a very powerful piece of hardware and I can’t wait to see what software designers are going to do with it but there is definitely tremendous potential.

Look out for the PS4 at Christmas from £349 $399

ps4

 

Playstation 4 – Finally Announced

Posted on by

So it’s finally going to be here – On Wednesday night at 23.15 GMT Sony officially announced the Playstation 4 which will be available “holiday season 2013”.

In a live online broadcast viewed by over 16 million Sony Computer Entertainment president and group CEO Andrew House took to the stage at the Hammerstein Ballroom at Manhattan Center Studios in New York to reveal the name of Sony’s next-generation console.

The exec said Sony’s “most powerful platform ever” will allow “worlds to come alive with greater fidelity and intensity than ever before”.

House also noted that “ease of access regardless of location or device has been a priority” in the system’s development”.

“Our vision for the future is consumer centric and developer inspired,” he added, stressing that Sony is keen to enable developers to utilise “new business models that enable more flexibility including episodic and free-to-play”.

Lead PS4 system architect Mark Cerny was up on stage next. “We wanted to make sure nothing would come between the player, the platform and play,” he said. “Our main goal was to architect the system so as to support a breadth of experiences.”

Boasting 8GB of unified system memory, PS4 houses a “highly enhanced” PC GPU “containing a unified array of 18 compute units, which collectively generate 1.84 Teraflops of processing power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two”.

It is also “centred around a powerful custom chip that contains eight x86-64 cores and a state of the art graphics processor”.

Cerny then showed off the new Dual Shock 4 which will include many new features such as enhanced rumble, a touchpad, a headphone jack and a new Share button, which will allow players to record gameplay or screenshots and share them instantly. “Our goal is to make the sharing of video on PS4 as popular as the sharing of screenshots is today,” he said. PS4 will also support cross-game chat.

Then came the games. Games of note included Killzone: Shadow Fall was first; a First Person shooter which showed the main character in an epic shoot out in what seemed to be a shopping mall only to leap on to a wire being dragged along by a helicopter matrix style shooting out both adversaries on the ground and in the copter only to land on a building where the action cut and the share button was used.

This was followed Sucker Punch’s Infamous: Second Son. The demo showed a heavily-militarised city where citizens are closely monitored. However, people have started developing superpowers and revolting against big brother. There was no sign of series protagonist Cole.

Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono appeared on stage to demo Capcom’s new engine, Panta Rhei, which is being used to develop a new IP for the PS4 called Deep Down. There was raw response though when he said he was not there to talk about the next Street-Fighter game or the eagerly awaited Tekken vs Streetfigher – Missed opportunity I thought!

Unfortunately in the whole event the actual machine was not shown which lead to speculation that there would not be a physical machine at all as the majority of the software would be accessible via cloud gaming platform Gaikai. However since the launch this has been dismissed as the console’s actual specs have been announced.

This is really exciting news I think, if games players are truly honest games have been getting stale – although there have been original ideas and the PS3 has had a terrific run, it simply needs more power open to developers. You can always tell after a while because games tend to look the same across the genre.

Every life cycle of the Playstation has brought something new – for the PS1 it was games on CDs – its amazing to think now that a measly 700mb could power a game but it was the case back then and Ridge Racer was one such favourite. With PS2 it was games on DVDs. It is arguable now that the PS2 brought DVD media into the family home. Then we had the PS3 and with it not only did Blue Ray Dual layer Discs enter the home but HD TVs and gaming. They didn’t just arrive but was there to stay because now with the right TV you could watch HD Films and play the games without forking out on the expensive players. It doing so it beat the Microsoft brand in establishing itself as the High Definition disc brand of choice. Lets not also forget about 3D gaming that really the PS3 became a reason to don the specs outside of the frankly rubbish channels and over-expensive Blue-Ray players and 3D movies available.

I for one am really excited about what is yet to come. The price of the new console has been placed £400 (cheaper than the PS3 at launch but more expensive than the PS2 was). Even without a physical machine to view, it is already on pre-order from most stockists. Have a look at the trailers and view for yourself. I think the leap in technology is not as shocking as the transition from PS1 to PS2 but if you look closely the devil is in the detail. Not only that but as every gamer knows, it takes time for the best games to surface and it is still very early days yet.

Enjoy!

 

Drive Club

Watch Dogs