Ubisoft's Watch Dogs
Wednesday 11pm saw gamers huddle around their laptops,iPads,etc to watch the live announcememt of Sony's new console, Playstation 4. And as a fan who has been the Playstation since it first surfaced back in 1995, I expected to be skipping on rainbows of ecstasy like a giddy schoolgirl by the end of it (forgetting the fact im now 41.) I dont care what anyone says, there is a curious thrill about the unveiling of a new videogame console. I was stunned by Wipeout (PS1), KO'd by Resident Evil 2 (PS2) and even swooned over Motorstorm when that hit Playstation 3 in 2007. Im not ashamed by this, its what you get if you give a boy an Oric 1 for Christmas in 1983.
So it is with great sadness that after admitting all of the above, the Playstation 4 announcementleft me slightly cold. Not quite sub zero cold, (more like tee shirt in March cold) but I was certainly not overheating in anticipation of pixelated rapture. I think it was all the talk of "social media" and sharing on Facebook/Twitter that did it. Sorry Sony but I just want to play VIDEOGAMES, im not in the least bit interested in posting scores on Facebook or challenging Twitter followers to online races. I simply want to slip a game into the console and smite weird beasties to kingdom come. Balls to Facebook. Im old fashioned like that. Its nothing new of course, theres already a ton of places on teh interwebz that use social networking sites to share folks interests, and fine some people like that kind of thing but it doesn't boil my kettle im afraid. (Reading comments on forums and underneath news stories about PS4, im not alone either.)
As for the Playstation 4 being able to predict what game you might be interested in and downloading it automatically? I hope we'll be able to disable that nonsense. (Im being dragged into the future kicking and screaming Laughs Out Loud.)
Thankfully things start to look up on the gaming side of things. This is why we're here afterall! Watch Dogs got me most interested (see the trailer above) as did Killzone: Shadow Fall. I didn't notice a huge difference graphically to PS3 (even when a Evolution developer waffled about "even the suede on the car seats has a direction") but as time goes on, game designers will learn how best to squeeze the most OOMPH out of the machine. We didn't get to see any sports titles (or was I asleep?) and I can't wait to see how a NFL or golf game looks on Playstation 4.
Unfortunately we also didn't get to see what the actual console looked like either so fanboys will have to make do with gawking at the new DualShock 4 joypad, complete with touchscreen and LED tracker. Looks a little rubbery but I quite like it. The screen on the pads front reminding me of the Dreamcast's VMU. Speaking of older consoles, as a RetroHead backwards compatabilty is important to me so I was a tad miffed to learn that PS1, 2 and 3 games will be available via Playstation 4’s cloud service. So no using my original copy of Tombi or Yakuza then? Bah! Happy they will be available in some form though.
I realise this started on a downer with the Facebook sharing side of things but I am quite excited about Playstation 4. Its just (obviously) not the mind blowing transition I experienced going from Oric to MegaDrive to Playstation back in those wilderness years.
DualShock 4
Here are some games that we got a glimpse of:
Watch Dogs (Ubisoft)
Killzone: Shadow Fall (Guerrilla)
Diablo III (Blizzard)
DriveClub (Evolution)
Deep Down (Capcom)
Destiny (Bungie)
DriveClub
