The first thing that came to mind after watching a stream of Sony's PlayStation 4 presser yesterday afternoon: well, that's two-plus hours that could've been better spent. I kind of hate to say such a thing, but for me, at least, it's the truth.
It has to be said that a good part of that reaction is due to the horrid quality of the stream I attempted to watch, but it's also due to the fact that the event in question consisted of one long-winded, hyperbole-filled speech after another.
Honestly, most of what was said by both Sony's staffers and those working for various third-party studios could have been said--and probably was said--when the Japanese giant unveiled the first PlayStation console all the way back in 1994.
That in and of itself didn't completely turn me off, by the way, as pretty much everyone in the gaming industry is guilty of it these days. No, what turned me off was that it lasted for two-plus hours.
As for the rest of what was covered during this event: it was OK, I guess. A good number of games were shown in some form or another, for instance, and all of them looked quite nice. I can't say they got my heart racing, though. Of course, I've never gotten all that excited about "realistic" graphics in games--which is what pretty much every next-gen game developer and publisher is peddling these days. Nope, I'll take a healthy dose of whimsy and an interesting art style over realism any day.
That said, I was intrigued by Jonathan Blow's
The Witness. The trailer didn't give me a very good idea of what to expect from this title's gameplay, but its style made up for it--at least to an extent.
I also liked the looks of Capcom's
Deep Down, although I'd be lying if I said this game's "
Monster Hunter meets
Demon's Souls" aesthetic didn't seem a bit ... derivative.
Oh, and the controller! How could I forget about that? Actually, it wasn't hard at all, as the controller looked pretty much like every other controller Sony's produced since the first DualShock--except, of course, this time it features a tiny touch pad on its face.
Strangely, no one from Sony or any of the third-party studios on hand put the touch pad through its paces, so it's hard to say at this point whether it'll be useful in the end or not. At the moment, though, I'm personally leaning toward the latter.
The PS4 controller was the only piece of hardware unveiled during yesterday afternoon's broadcast, by the way; the actual console was, unsurprisingly, nowhere to be found. I'm guessing Sony's waiting until E3 to reveal it--hopefully along with the system's price and launch date.
Given all of the above, I can't say I'm all that stoked about the PS4 at the moment. Of course, I've yet to be persuaded to buy a PS3, so my relative disinterest probably shouldn't surprise anyone.
Still, I know a lot of you guys and gals own PS3s. What do you think of the PS4 now that a bit of information about it has been released? Are you frothing-at-the-mouth excited about it? Are you already planning to avoid it like the plague? Or maybe your feelings lie somewhere in the middle of those two extremes?
