After waiting eagerly for the PS4 announcement last night, what can I say?
No really, what can I say that won’t sound like I’m just not bothered?
Besides the disappointment of the Dual Shock 4 controller (yep, it really does look like an old controller with a touch pad and light gaffer-taped on), and the fact that we didn’t actually see the beast (my bet is it looks like a PC at the moment BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT IS), the demos were mind numbing. Pretty, but mind numbing.
We had ‘Knack’, which looks like Kameo on steroids. Cute, but no game changer. We had another Killzone, which looked pretty, but is just another FPS judging by what was shown, and worse that that the opening scene was SO clichéd it was beyond parody. We had Drive Club, a Gran Turismo replacement launch game to show off shiny cars.
OK, Media Molecule has some wacky sculpting and puppetry tools that looked fun, and Second Son looked like a well put together demo, but what’s new?
There was a lot of talk about ’emotion’ again (hasn’t there always been at a PS launch?), and nothing getting between the player and the game. It seems to me that Sony’s willingness to take risks and truly push gaming is long gone. The recognition that their unique console architectures are just too expensive and hard to programme and reverting to a PC-like architecture seems like an admission of defeat. And the nervous, stumbling presentations didn’t have the swagger and humour of previous launches (I still talk about the ‘rubber duck’ demo for the PS3).
The graphic power is clearly up there, with some nice character demos etc. but that’s not really enough any more is it?
The bit they started with, the ability to share video and your screen with some nice quick compression/decompression seemed to be their only attempt at a ‘USP’. And would that make be buy a new console?
This could be the first Playstation I don’t buy. Which given the happy hours that I spent the One, Two and Three I find a bit sad.