Playstation 4 Officially Announced!

Oh my goodness!  The internets are all aflutter about Sony's press conference this week as they officially outed their shiny new next gen console, the creatively named PS4.

Hey!  Wanna hear an angry, cynical, baseless opinion on how the conference went?  Well, too bad, you’re gonna hear it anyway!

This gong show of a press conference was a dismal, awkward failure on so many levels.  Let’s start with the hardware itself.  They showed the fancy new controller, that’s all well and good, but they said nothing about how and why the fancy new controller is awesome.  Hey look, you can share video clips on your Facebook page with a press of a dedicated share button!  Wow, that adds a look to the game experience.  What’s up with the camera sensor type thing they very briefly mentioned?  The one that tracks the motion and position of the controller?  What is that for?  How is going to apply to new games, if at all?  The touch pad, how is that gonna work?

The actual “console” itself was nowhere to be found.  I put “console” in quotations because in my mind, the PS4 is still just theoretical.  If seeing is believing, then I am having a crisis of faith right now.  All the specs they did showcase falls squarely into the “no shit!” category.  Lot’s of fast memory, copious amount of cores in the CPU, new graphics chip, and a faster Blu-ray drive.  Was anybody shocked and surprised?  Anybody at all?  Basically after all this time in design they just said ”fuck it” and made a PC with a custom interface.
What’s the price of this bad boy?  When is coming out?  Where is the damn thing?  What does it look like?  I have a lot of unanswered questions.  A lot of people have come to Sony’s defense on this one, stating that they need to leave some details for E3.  Here’s what I say to that, “no they fucking don’t!”  The cat is already most of the way out of the bag, just let the damn thing go.  You think anyone is going to go crazy at E3 when they stand up on stage at the press conference and say, “you know that console we told everyone about months ago?  Well, here’s the last few little tidbits of info that we inexplicably left out, for no discernable reason.  Yay.

What does it matter what gets shown where?  What they should have done is flushed out ALL the hardware details this week, and not bothered with those shitty tech demos and 7 month old trailers.  Then when E3 comes around, blow everyone out of the water with all the excellent eye popping software.  That’s what gaming is about after all, games, the hardware is secondary, just a means to a end.  Now, if Sony doesn’t have any killer software to show off by the time E3 rolls around, then I think it’s time to pack it in.
The software that they did show, stuff like Killzone and Watch Dogs was very much a “been there, done that” sort of affair.  Not to mention that they looked very current gen to me, as did the new title “Knack.”  Everything else was nothing more than cutscenes and tech demos.  I’ve heard some argue that developers need some time to figure out how to develop for the new system.  Well, if a developer can’t get a game to work on what amounts to off the shelf PC components, then the whole industry is in a hell of a lot of trouble.

I really don’t give a shit what the possibilities of the system are, I want know what it is ACTUALLY doing.  Most of the presentations were desolate at best, devoid of any real substance.  Square-Enix was particularly lugubrious.  They showed a rendered cut scene that they’d showed months ago, stating that that was what their goal was.  Then they had the audacity to stand up on stage and say, “oh yeah, one more big announcement!”  Everyone watching leans forward, curiosity piqued.  “The big announcement is that there will be a big announcement at E3, LOL!”  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Yo dawg, I hear you like announcements, so we put an announcement in our announcement!

A quick word about backwards compatibility.  There is none.  That quick enough?  Ok, to be more specific, none of the software is backwards compatible, that includes PS1, 2, and 3 games.  Not as of yet.  They coyly hinted that they might be at some point.  Translation: “We have no idea what we are doing.”  Old Dualshock Controllers are also not compatible.  However, move controllers are.  Sony.  Stop trying to make move controls happen, they are not going to happen.

On the plus side, this leaves Microsoft plenty of time to figure out what not to do.  Sony put on a damn clinic about that.  The victory is there for XBOX 720 to simply reach out and grab.  That is, assuming MS doesn’t fuck it up somehow.  I guess we’ll all get to see in a few months how this all pans out.  Rest assured, I will be there to spout, angry, cynical, judgemental, obscenities.

-jer

P.S. Blizzards announcement of Diablo 3 coming out on console deserves nothing more than a post script.