PS4 first impressions.

I bought a PS4 last week-end. Not quite sure why, really. I'd been telling myself I'd wait until the holidays, maybe grab a sweet deal. I think what made me do it was being on vacation last week and having all my initial plans to go traveling fall apart. That left me with way too much free time on my hands and a good part of my travel budget freed up and just begging to be used.

And use it I did.

What I got:
-PS4
-Lego Marvel Superheroes
-Killzone
-Watch Dogs
-Strider and Towerfall came free with my pre-existing PS+ status.
-I also downloaded Warframe and got me some Destiny Beta Codes


So, a full week later, how do I feel about the damn thing? Let's go over the hardware, the interface and the games, shall we?




First off, I love the design of the system. I wish it were a bit slimmer (I give Sony 3 years  or less before that actually happens, just you watch), or came with some kind vertical stand included. I don't have all that much shelf space in my living room TV set-up! I do like the light on top of the system, and it runs quieter than I expected.

I should also mention that I love the Dualshock 4. Gone are the poorly designed shoulder triggers of the DS3, the thumbsticks are fantastic and on the whle, I find the controller very comfortable. The track pad is a bit weird at first, but you quickly get used to it. I have yet to find any practical use for it in a game though, and navigating the browser or keyboard with it is something I gave up on after 5 minutes, but I imagine it'll come into it's own with time. The weirdest thing to me was that START and SELECT are gone. As someone who's been playing console games since the NES, that was really, really  weird at first. In it's place are the options button, which basically works like START/SELECT in most games and an option (madness, I say)button while in system menus and the SHARE button. I don't know what  exactly the share button does, honestly. Because I'm greedy and selfish and don't like to share. The SHARE button is a communist and should be banned from--- where was I? Oh right. The Dualshock 4's a pretty cool guy, I guess.


The interface is a much more mixed bag for me. On the plus side, all the PS4 menus and the Playstation Store now run quickly and smoothly. The downside? The PS4 menu's a mess. No, mess is too kind. It's a clusterfuck. The main bar is whatever app game or video you've used lately. Not so bad now when I have 5 or so games, Netlflix and Crunchyroll. But anyone who likes to keep a large library of games is going to be raging
when looking for something they haven't played in a while. The download progress page? It's notifications. Why? Because fuck you. Want to turn off auto cloud-syncing of save data without disabling all auto update? Hope you like searching Google and support forums (PS : That particular option is buried away here : Settings > Application Data Managment > Saved Data in System Storage > Upload to Online Storage > Press "Options" Button on controller and there you will see the Auto-Upload options. Then you can go through every game, one by one, and disable cloud storage if you don't want it on certain or any games. And cloud-saving is on by default.  So get familiar on how to get here whenever you buy a new game and want to turn off cloud saves.) Couldn't they just have made a faster, smoother XMB? I mean XMB's never been perfect, but even my technophobe mother could use and navigate a PS3 menu and find the Video and Streaming section easily amongst the games and other shit XMB had (LOL Photos who ever used that?)

As for the games, they look great! No really, Killzone was a joy for the eyes, Watch Dogs was pleasant too look at, despite the downgrade (I don't have a top notch PC anymore so while I can run the game on my PC, it stands somewhere between the PS3 and PS4 in performance on these types of games) and things like Lego Marvel and Strider run really, really well. The graphical leap so far hasn't been as big a jaw-dropper as past generation leaps, but these are by no means ugly games. Oh, and that Destiny Beta? Gorgeous!  Here's hoping that in the coming year, we get more and more games built from the ground up for the PS4, especially more exclusives (same could be said for the Xbox One on what is about to follow, btw) since this gen, for all the silly resolution and framerate wars, we see for the first time a major power gap at launch between the new consoles, which will remain largely unchanged for the next 5-8 years if last gen was any indication, and PC's, which are getting cheaper and stronger at an insane rate and already have the PS4 and Bone left in the dust.
My biggest complaint for the games? $69.99 MSRP for new AAA releases. That's bullshit when considering how a lot of those games this gen are also going for micro-transactions.

So far, I'd say I'm pretty happy with my PS4. Would I say actually say it's worth the $400 (Actually $450/$500 with sales taxes in Canada FML) ? It will be. If you're after an instant backlog at a better price, I'd say The Wii U is probably a better choice right now. If what you're looking for is a machine to play all upcoming third party games and Sony's slow to release but often excellent first party games, then yes, it's worth the price. Especially if you don't have a gaming PC

Not that I would blame you for waiting a bit.

Oh and you guys, Last Guardian will totally come out this gen, I swear!*Snickers*