The Old and The New
The release of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One prompted quite a lively exchange between Microsoft and Sony fanboys, made only more apparent at the E3 expo during June 2013. With Xbox One up first and its features a little less than satisfactory, Sony Computer Entertainment took the opportunity to bash on Xbox One’s shortcomings with its more superior and retro approach to gaming, most notably the used game play and sharing feature on the PS4. (One fine example of said bashing is through this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA). However, the disputes between which consoles are better shouldn’t just be limited to corporation vs. corporation. The PS3 was a huge success to Sony, reaching 80 million units sold worldwide (as of November 2013). The PS4 has some pretty big shoes to fill, and the question on the minds of those planning a potential upgrade to their PS3 is: Is Sony going to give a bigger bang for my buck?
So without further adieu, here are some awesome new features in the PlayStation 4:
Next Generation Graphics: The best thing about the PS4 (and the selling point of any gaming console really) is its amazing graphics that give you a sort of euphoric feeling of adrenaline from gaming in an almost life-like environment. How does it do that? The PS4 houses a main single-chip custom designed processor together with an AMD APU of x86-64 consisting of 8 Jaguar cores and a GPU of 1.84 Teraflops with 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. In layman’s terms, there is some seriously good hardware in the PS4. Couple that with advanced real-time lighting, shaders, texture mapping, more system memory, a large 500GB hard drive in every system, and all sorts of other technical jargon under the sleek PS4 casing and you have seamless silky smooth gameplay that is a tough competition for even a $4000 gaming PC rig.
DualShock® 4 Controller: The new DualShock® 4 controller for the PS4 has exciting features that every single person will notice the moment they get their hands on one. It features a clickable touchpad, new analog sticks, new shoulder buttons, new larger look and feel, new light bar, new integrated speaker, integrated headphone jack, new Share button; basically new everything! But don’t let this discourage those who are used to the old PS3 controller. Sony has kept most of the original form factor of the old PS3 controller and the positioning of the buttons and analog sticks are pretty much the same.
Stand-by Mode: When it came to powering the PlayStation 3, it was either on or off. And who would blame it? For the most part, every gaming console of during that day was pretty much like it. The problem? You had to always get to the next checkpoint/save destination in order to save your game progress. A troubling thing indeed for games that had poorly positioned their checkpoints, which served as an invitation for the gamer’s rage to enter the playing field. With the PS4, we say good bye to all of that. Finally, you can press the power button and walk away with the content thought that you really didn’t turn the entire system off completely and once you get back, you can pick up exactly where you left off. On top of that, the DualShock® 4 can be charged via the USB connector to the PlayStation 4 while the system is in standby mode. No need for that extra charging dock any longer!
Multitasking: Although this isn’t exactly a brand new feature to the PS4 (having already been introduced in the PS3), the multitasking experience on the PS4 is a definite step up from the PS3. One can easily play a game and then quickly switch to opening a browser to look up helpful gameplay tips, explore the Dynamic UI of the PS4 in search of gameplay video clips from friends, go download a game they were interested in one of those videos from the PlayStation Store, and then jump back into the game you were playing moments ago while your new game is installing, all fluidly with little to no lag and loading screens in between. A demonstration of this feature can be seen on this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__B8RmkuVpU
So what do you think about the PS4? Did Sony deliver to your expectations? Was there something that was a wow factor to you? Or was there something you were disappointed that you didn’t see? Let me know in the comment section below!
Work Cited:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/playstation3-sales-reach-80-million-units-worldwide-230771611.html
http://ps4daily.com/2013/09/top-10-most-exciting-features-of-playstation-4/