Tuesday 19 November 2013

PlayStation 4 review: Sony's best console yet is off to a shaky start

Sony's latest console is a powerful, intelligently designed gaming machine without a game to recommend it. It's poised to perform well in the years to come, but it's an underwhelming proposition at launch.
The PlayStation 4 marks a turning point for Sony. It’s a humble gaming machine designed to integrate into your living room, a far cry from the pomp and circumstance with which the company debuted its predecessor, the PlayStation 3.
That’s a good thing, since the PS3 proved a prohibitively expensive box that was more difficult to program for and less online-friendly than its competitor, Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Sony’s suffered some well-deserved criticism in the seven years since the PS3’s debut, and seems to have taken that criticism to heart.
The PS4 is a beautiful piece of kit. With ample power under the hood, a controller that’s a joy to hold, and excellent system-level support for social sharing and streaming, Sony’s latest console is poised to perform very well in the years to come.

But right now it’s a little underwhelming. For one, the interface is obtuse. Plus, useful features like DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) streaming are missing. And few of the games you can play on it right now are worth paying attention to, much less buying the system for. It’s a strong base to build from, but Sony still has a lot of work to do if it hopes to conquer the console gaming market.

Another black box

The new PlayStation’s rhomboidal black chassis is deceptively small, and sleek enough to slip unobtrusively into your existing media center. It plays well with most receivers, but forget about composite cables—the PS4 kicks out video via a single HDMI on the back of the box.
That back panel is predictably sparse, sporting just the single HDMI jack, a digital audio out, a port for the power plug, an ethernet jack, and an auxiliary port for the PlayStation Camera (sold separately, naturally). Inside are a pair of radios, one for Bluetooth 2.1 and the other for 802.11 b/n/g wireless, but that’s it as far as connectivity goes. Unlike the Xbox One, which has a back panel festooned with extra USB ports and an HDMI input that can suck up signals from your other devices, the PS4 is ill-equipped to dominate your living room.

I like that Sony built a dedicated jack for the camera on the back of the machine, because it allows you to mount the accessory on top of your TV or media center while keeping its assorted cables tucked neatly out of sight. It’s a nice change from the PS3’s USB PlayStation Eye camera, which often had to be plugged into the front of your console, leaving an unsightly black cord dangling in front of your media center.
The PS4 also sports a pair of front-mounted USB 3.0 ports, and that’s it. It’s a bare-bones box that could charitably be called “streamlined,” so you’ll have to do some port juggling if you want to charge more than two controllers at a time or hook up a flash drive.
While the PS4’s 500GB, 5400 RPM internal hard drive can be replaced, there is no official support for external hard drives. Plug in external storage and you can save screenshots, videos, and saved games, but not store the games themselves. The PS4 currently lacks support for a lot of fringe uses, actually. It can’t play music CDs, stream media over your home network, or run Linux, all of which the PS3 could handle with ease.
Of course, most people—myself included—don’t need their game console to do any of those things. They need it to play games, stream Netflix/Hulu Plus/Amazon Instant Video, and play DVDs/Blu-rays, and Sony’s latest console makes doing those things a breeze, nay a pleasure, thanks to a simplified interface and a vastly improved gamepad.

A better gamepad

The DualShock 4 is the best controller Sony has ever designed. At first glance it looks like a modestly evolved version of the DualShock 3, with a goofy light bar where the four-LED player indicator used to be and a big ol’ clickable two-point capacitive touchpad on top, pushing the PlayStation button down a few centimeters. Flanking the touchpad are the Share and Options buttons, which have replaced the venerable Start and Select buttons. There’s also a mono speaker on the front, which could be really cool if developers use it wisely instead of, say, suddenly squawking out bad audio logs late at night.
The touchpad and lightbar seem like frivolous additions—few games or apps use either in interesting ways. Free-to-play shooter Warframe requires you to swipe and click the touchpad to select and use your powers, for example, while Killzone: Shadow Fallchanges the color of your controller’s lightbar from green to red as your character gets hurt. It’s a neat trick, but seeing as the last thing you’ll probably want to do while playing a really awesome game is look down at your hands, it probably won’t meaningfully improve your gaming experience.
For that kind of evolution, look to the DualShock 4’s sticks and triggers. Both are significantly improved from the DualShock 3, a controller that caught a lot of flak over the years for its rounded analog sticks and lightweight triggers. While I never had much trouble using the DualShock 3, I’ve found the DualShock 4’s sturdier and slightly larger chassis, concave triggers, and redesigned sticks feel significantly better in my hands. Building a small circular depression on the top of each stick makes it much more comfortable to rest your thumbs on them for extended gaming sessions, though I wish the sticks themselves were a little tighter and offered more resistance.
he DualShock 4 still charges via a USB cable, though it charges via micro-USB rather than mini-USB this time around. It’s a nice touch; since most non-Apple smartphones and tablets now come with micro-USB charging cables, you should have no trouble finding extra charging cables lying around. You’ll need ‘em, too. During testing, my DualShock 4’s non-replaceable lithium-ion battery ran out of juice after 7 hours of gaming, a depressingly brief battery life that inspired me to keep my controller plugged into my phone charger so I could refill the battery without having to get off my couch to hook the controller up to the console.

You get a cheap headset, and you get a cheap headset, and you get a cheap headset!

Sony also packs a cheap mono headset into every PS4 box, and you can jack it into the stereo headset jack below the PlayStation button to participate in voice chat or voice control. This headset is perhaps the chintziest piece of technology I’ve ever used, with a single earbud, a mutable mic and an impractical plastic clip connected by a single audio cable.
It looks cheap, and it is cheap—it’s essentially a free pack-in, after all. But there’s a silver lining: While the earbud’s output is muffled at best, the built-in microphone performs remarkably well. Friends in party chat and those watching me stream games complemented the audio quality of the voice chat, but more importantly, they didn’t complain about the mic rubbing against my shirt or picking up extraneous room noise.
Most gaming headsets that connect via USB, optical audio, or 3.5mm audio jack will work with the PS4, though you may need to download a system update first. I tested both thePlantronics Rig and the Astro A50 headsets, and both worked perfectly.

Remote Play works, but it’s not worth buying a Vita for

If you happen to own a PlayStation Vita, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how well the PS4’s Remote Play feature functions—when both devices are on the same wireless network and in close proximity to one another. I streamed both Killzone: Shadow Fall andResogun to my Vita via Remote Play while I was sitting about twelve feet from the console, and both games looked fantastic on the Vita’s 5-inch OLED screen. I noticed no appreciable input lag or graphical distortion while playing either game—as long as I stayed within fifteen feet and didn’t let any major masonry get between me and my PlayStation 4.
As soon as I took the Vita into the bedroom or the bathroom of my cramped one-bedroom apartment, both games started dropping frames and suffering noticeable graphical distortion. They weren’t unplayable, per se, but they weren’t terribly enjoyable under those conditions. Your mileage may vary based on your own network setup, but if you don’t already own a Vita I wouldn’t recommend picking one up just to play your PS4 games remotely—there’s very little leeway for an ideal experience.
You can also use the Vita (or a smartphone or tablet running the PlayStation App) to do some second-screen stuff with PS4 games, though none of the games available at the time of this writing take compelling advantage of that feature. You can set waypoints inAssassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, for example, or check stats and modify your loadouts inCall of Duty: Ghosts. Again, it’s a neat touch, but nothing worth shelling out money for

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