I pride myself on staying up-to-the-minute, so in honour of President Nixon's
recent trip to China let's have a look at Gris (2018), a platform
game for almost every modern gaming system except, curiously, the Xbox. As of
this writing it's out on budget. I played it on the PlayStation 4.
Is Gris the time, the place, the motion? Is it the way we are
feeling? Does it have a groove? Does it have a meaning? Does it give me
chills? Are they multiplying? Does it make me lose control? Is it
electrifying? Read on, dear reader, and be thankful that all of the
Grease references are in the first two paragraphs because
otherwise I would have had to weave them into the body text and it would have
taken ages and you wouldn't be reading this until June.
What is Gris? It's a platform game with lovely music. It attracted
good-but-not-great reviews when it came out and went on to sell over a million
copies, which is impressive for a low-key art game without much marketing
behind it. The reviewers compared it to Journey, but it actually
has much more in common with the 2014 platformer Ori and the Blind Forest. They have similar mechanics and progression, and in both games you are
menaced by a bird, although in Gris the bird is a manifestation of
self-doubt whereas in Ori the bird is, from what I remember, an
actual bird:
Ori and the Blind Forest - it resembles a Roger Dean painting.
Gris owes something to Aubrey Beardsley, but it does have floating
rocks, which was a Roger Dean thing as well.
One thing that separates the two games is the difficulty level.
Ori looks cute, but underneath the pleasant exterior it's
surprisingly hard, almost sadistic. Last year's Ori and the Will of the Wisps is apparently even more difficult. On a personal level I enjoyed
Blind Forest but it was a frustrating experience. Periods of
platforming brilliance alternated with frustrating wall-jumping puzzles that
just left me feeling drained and annoyed when I finished them instead of
happy.
I grew up with Jet Set Willy and Head Over Heels, so I'm
used to frustrating gameplay. I didn't enjoy it in the 1980s and I don't enjoy
it now. I played those games because there was nothing better,
although Head Over Heels was more sophisticated than most. In
my opinion the designers of Ori should have made the main story
easier and reserved the really hard jumps for secrets, but what do I know? It
sold millions and lots of people enjoyed it.
In contrast Gris is mellow. You can't die, and there are only two
or three head-scratching puzzles and difficult jumps. The absolute worst that
can happen is that you mess up a jump and have to retrace your steps a little
bit. The developers wanted to make a mood piece, introspective and sad,
although surprisingly there is an actual game underneath the lovely graphics.
Gris tells the tale of a young girl - her name is Spanish for
"grey" - who is trying to cope with an unspecified personal loss, strongly
suggested to be the death of her mother. At first she can only walk slowly
through a landscape of broken statuary, but over the course of the game she
learns how to jump, swim, sing, and turn herself into a solid weight. Not
necessarily in that order. There's no dialogue, there are no subtitles,
there's no story in a conventional sense, just a pervasive sense of loss and
fragility.
She also makes friends with a cute little stone cube who eats apples. He jumps
when you jump, and there are a couple of puzzles where you have to synchronise
your actions in order to proceed:
The game has a simple hub design albeit that you can only replay maps after
you've finished the main story. In each level you have to find a couple of
sparkling stars that form a constellation; optionally you can hunt for memory
fragments that unlock a special cutscene at the end. During the platforming
sequences Gris only has a few powers, but the game mixes things up so that it
never gets boring. In particular there's a late-game section in which Gris has
to carefully leap out of some water blocks without crossing a gravitational
line that gets particularly tricky.
Multiplayer? No. The PlayStation 4 version runs at 1920x1080 but the PC
version runs at any arbitrarily high resolution. Ultra-widescreen support
requires editing a .dll with a hex editor but is otherwise unproblematic.
Gris has some flaws. On the positive side I was pleasantly
surprised that it's an actual game rather than an interactive
music video. Based on the trailers I was expecting Gris to be an
elaborate Flash animation in which you walked to the right and occasionally
slid down some hills while the sun rises in the background - the most obvious
nod to Journey - but it's a proper hub-based multi-level platform
game. It could have gone on longer and I wouldn't have minded. It's more of a
game than e.g.
Far: Lone Sails and far more of a game than visual demos such
as Proteus or Linger in Shadows. It even has a
certain amount of reply value, if you want to collect all the memories.
On the negative side Gris has a habit of introducing some
interesting ideas and then quickly abandoning them. The section with the
little forest guy could have gone on longer, but almost immediately after
solving a couple of puzzles he runs off and the game never repeats the
experiment. A section with platforms that appear and disappear as you jump
only amounts to a couple of screens and isn't complex enough to be challenging
because the platforms never go out of sync, so once you work out the route you
can't fail. The game launched at around £15.99; any more would have been too
ambitious for something so slight. Perhaps the team didn't want to overstay
their welcome.
Of note the game is only available digitally. It takes up around 4gb of hard
drive space. There were short-run physical editions by Special Reserve
(Nintendo Switch, with an artbook) and Limited Run Games (PS4), but they have
long since sold out.
Good stuff? The music is excellent. It's lighter and less symphonic than for
example Journey, with a hazy, melancholic air. The hub level in
particular would be a fantastic audiovisual screensaver if you were spending a
week binging on tranquilisers. Parts of the music reminded me of Hiroshi
Yoshimura's Nine Post Cards but with lusher orchestration.
And on a visual level the game is of course striking, with a stark, clean
style that gradually fades from grey to multi-colours.
It also occasionally put me in mind of 8-bit platform games. The following
screen in particular made me think of Mikro-Gen's Frost-Byte:
It has been a long time since I thought of Mikro-Gen. The ZX Spectrum was
popular in Spain so, who knows, perhaps the developers really did intend for
parts of the game to pay homage to Starquake et al.
Of course a good game is more than just a bunch of sounds and graphics. For
all its faults as a game Far: Lone Sails stood out because it
had a mood and told a story. Gris is like that. After learning how
to jump and fly Gris seems to be on the mend, but she is menaced by a giant
bird - and then a giant eel - which is presumably a manifestation of her
depression. I don't want to spoil the ending but she does eventually overcome
this, although the grand finale is bitter-sweet. I felt sad at the end and
wished Gris luck for her struggles in the future.
The ending unlocks a gallery of concept art plus some unused musical
tracks.
Some people will probably detest the twee graphic style, the pretty music, the
prissy art design and inoffensive theme etc, but on the whole I'm impressed
with not just Gris but the art game movement in general; it must
have been tempting to churn out cynical imitations of Journey but
the likes of Bound and What Remains of Edith Finch are
clever and surprisingly iconoclastic. Gris straddles an odd
half-way ground, both an art piece and a decent albeit simplistic platform
game, although it's more of the latter than the former.
Nomada Studios was formed purely to develop Gris, and to date it's
their only product. There's no world on a sequel. My hunch is that
they're in an awkward position; they can't repeat Gris' storyline,
so a sequel would have to be a fully-fledged 8-12-hour game along the
lines of Will of the Wisps, but that would require a much higher budget
and a longer development cycle, and realistically what kind of market is there
for Gris 2?
Still, I'm digressing. I finished Gris in three brief
sittings over three days but at £5.98 I didn't feel shortchanged as the music
is excellent and the ending is sad. It runs on a potato and it's worth it
purely as an illustrated music video with a surprisingly decent platform game
underneath it.
I pride myself on staying up-to-the-minute, so in honour of President Carter's
recent negotiation of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel let's have a
look at the PlayStation 4. Let's taste the oil, the freckle-founds, tongue-born of
tomorrowland.
Back in 2018
I bought a PlayStation 3 on a whim; it gave me a chance to play Blu-Rays and catch up with some
games I had missed. Furthermore I wanted to see what
all the fuss had been about, because the PS3 led an interesting life.
The PlayStation 3 was launched in 2006 and remained in production until 2017,
although technically it was replaced in 2012 by the PlayStation 4. As of 2021
almost all the PS3's online services have been discontinued and in July this
year the store will be deactivated, at which point the only way to buy games
will be on the used market, as physical discs. It remains to be seen what
impact this will have on patches and digital downloads.
I've written at great length about the PS3 before. It had a disastrous launch.
In 2006 Sony was high on the success of the PlayStation 2, which had crushed
the Sega Dreamcast, crushed the Nintendo GameCube, crushed the original
Microsoft Xbox. With sales of 150m+ it remains the best-selling games console
of all time, even including portable units.
The decision to build the PS2 around a fully-functional DVD player was a
masterstroke, joint-first with the decision to give the console
backwards-compatibility with the original PlayStation. The PS2 also benefited
from weak competition and considerable goodwill from the original PlayStation,
which had a terrific range of games. It looked cool as well. At around
$299/£299 the launch price wasn't onerous and after the next generation of
consoles was released it had a second life as a budget console stroke cheap
DVD player.
The PS3 on the other hand had a much tougher ride.
A PS3 Super-Slim and a PS4 Slim. The PS3 Super-Slim was "full Kriegsmodell panic-mode", intended to pare the hardware down to a point
where each unit made a profit. The PS4 Slim wasn't nearly as
drastic.
Sony was extremely bullish in 2006. Sony Japan CEO Ken Kutaragi pooh-poohed
complaints about the high launch price by suggesting that consumers would be
happy to work overtime to afford it, while his European counterpart believed
that five million people would buy the console even if it had no games, purely
because it was the new PlayStation. But initial sales were tepid, not helped
by a global financial crisis that took hold a couple of years after launch;
the PlayStation 2 continued to outsell the PS3 right up until 2010.
What went wrong? The launch price of $599/£425 was very high. Infamously so;
the company's E3 2006 press conference became an early YouTube gag. The
original video is long-gone but I still remember "five hundred and ninety-nine
US dollars" and "gimmicks" and "giant enemy crab" as the presenters tried to
get the audience worked up about a bunch of dull-looking prototypes plus the
umpteenth update of Ridge Racer.
The press conference showcased some of the console's features, but none of
them felt substantial, and the range of launch titles consisted mostly of
sports games. Furthermore it was released an an awkward time, just after the
final major franchise entries for the PS2 had come out, so it was three-four
years until the likes of Resident Evil, Gran Turismo,
God of War etc made their way to the new console.
On the other hand Gran Turismo 6 was worth the wait - it still looks good
today.
In 2006 everybody had six credit cards, but $599 was a lot of money. The PS3
was intended to showcase Sony's new Blu-Ray format and sell a lot of
high-definition Sony TVs in the process, but Blu-Ray's reception was muted. On
the positive side it killed off Toshiba's HD-DVD, but my personal recollection
is that most people were still getting used to 32-inch 720p LCD televisions in
2006, and were not interested in upgrading yet again to take
advantage of 1080p.
As it turned out the market share of Blu-Ray discs never came close to beating
DVD. In the UK Blu-Ray peaked at around 15% of DVD sales in 2013, after which
optical media as a whole was displaced by internet streaming.
I've never liked the design of the PlayStation 3. All three models had
the same basic idea - an oval embedded in a rectangle - but it's not an
interesting idea. The slim model of 2009-2012 was the best-looking, but
the oval just made the console look fat and the shiny plastic of the
super-slim looks cheap.
Sony hoped that the PS3's multi-core Cell processor would become the heart of
its next generation of consumer electronics. Ken Kutaragi was convinced that
you would be able to network your PS3 with your DVD player, which makes me
wonder if he had misunderstood one of the engineers' briefing slides. In the
end the Cell was overkill in televisions and set-top boxes, and in the PS3 it was
hobbled by a weak GPU and a lack of system memory.
Eventually Toshiba released a couple of Cell-powered televisions, but only in
Japan, and I can't find any reviews of them on the internet, only press
releases. My hunch is that they were contractual obligations or loss-leaders.
They couldn't play PS3 games, so what was the point? The PS3 saw some use in
cluster supercomputing and there were Cell CPU cards for the PC, but outside
the world of academia the Cell failed to catch on.
People still debate whether the Cell was a hidden gem or a boondoggle, but the
general consensus today is that advances in other architectures have
eliminated whatever advantages it had.
Gran Turismo Sport finally adds a high-quality model of the Mini...
...and actual Porsche-made Porsches, instead of custom-made RUF
Porsches.
Furthermore the PlayStation 3's competition was a lot stronger. The Xbox 360
was technically simpler than the PS3 and bedevilled by hardware failures, but
it had a year's head start and was $100 cheaper. Despite being released a year
earlier it had a more powerful GPU than the PS3 - Sony lost time when their
original GPU deal fell through - and so cross-platform games looked much the
same on the 360 even though it was in theory less advanced than the PS3.
Meanwhile both companies were blindsided by the huge success of the Nintendo
Wii, which combined family-friendly games with a novel new motion-sensing
controller at a price that made increasing sense as the world's economy ground
to a halt. They countered with their own motion controllers - the Microsoft
Kinect and the PlayStation Move, both 2010 - but they were late and had
nowhere near the same market impact as the Wii.
Sony and Microsoft were also unprepared for the enormous inflation in
development budgets that took place in the HD era, which meant that the
expected flood of exclusive games for their consoles became a trickle, because
developers concentrated on cross-platform releases. Publishers were desperate
to recoup their costs and were no longer prepared to limit their market to
just one console, which did the PS3 no favours, especially because developers
were unwilling to wrestle with the Cell. If the game had to run on the Xbox
360 as well why bother optimising it for the PlayStation 3?
The PS3 had an online store, but the PS4 was part of the first generation
of consoles for which physical releases became an afterthought. 43gb
doesn't seem so bad. GT5 and GT6 required a whole afternoon's worth of
patches before they worked properly, so downloading masses of content is a
series tradition by now.
Oh. It's not 43gb. It's 97gb. And that's not counting the extra 8gb of
optional photographic backdrops, which bumps it up to 110gb because even
97gb is a lie.
The PS3 had been designed during a time of plenty and Sony sold each unit at a
loss. The company expected to make a profit from sales of games and Blu-Rays,
but the late-2000s financial crash upset Sony's plans and the company posted
hefty losses in 2009 and 2010.
And yet, in a turn of events both surprising and heartwarming, things did
eventually turn around. The PS3 had legs, and by 2010 or so all of the
PlayStation's major franchises had finally made the leap into HD. The
resulting games - a mixture of exclusives such as
Gran Turismo 5 and God of War III and multiplatform titles
such as Metal Gear Solid V and Grand Theft Auto IV -
were generally worth the wait. The PS3's games library even had a late-period
renaissance with Journey (2012) and
The Last of Us (2013), widely acclaimed as two of the best games
of their generation on any platform.
A small stash of PS4 games on old-fashioned discs. The PS4 copies the
entire contents of the disc to the hard drive and runs it from there, with the disc as a
licence key, so sadly you can't save disc space with physical
media.
Along the way there was the Ico / Shadow of the Colossus remaster,
solid ports of the Bioshock and
Batman: Arkham games, the overlooked-at-the-time Red Dead Redemption, at-least-it-runs ports of Skyrim and
Fallout 3 / New Vegas, plus Sleeping Dogs, Mirror's Edge,
the Uncharted games, the new Deus Ex and
XCOM titles, etc. The PS3's first four years were a bleak
wasteland, after which it had the good fortune to coincide with a miniature
golden age of video games.
And of course there were the endless FIFA and
Call of Duty games, which were pooh-poohed by the press but sold
loads. There's a generation of kids who grew up with those games; my natural
instinct is to mock them because they didn't grow up with Japanese RPGs
in the original Japanese, but I can't do that because it would make me
an asshole. They had dreams too.
Some electronic gadgets look great long after their time. The original
Apple Macintosh, for example, or the first ever Sony Walkman. And on the other hand there's the super-slim PlayStation 3.
By the late 2000s Sony managed to reduce the manufacturing cost of the PS3's
hardware to a point where they made a small profit on each unit. The very last
model, the Super-Slim (pictured above) felt toy-like in comparison to the
original, and several features had been stripped out - gone was native PS2
compatibility and the option to run Linux - but it did make a profit.
Ultimately the PS3 went on to equal or slightly surpass sales of the Xbox 360,
depending on whose figures you believe, but it was a close-run thing and Sony
never again took anything for granted.
Subnautica is a bit like Durell's Scuba Dive for the ZX Spectrum, and I'm
only half-joking - Scuba Dive's combination of freedom of movement and
creeping terror was years ahead of its time. As you can see I've only
played Subnautica for half an hour or so.
And where are the salt deposits? What do they look like? Why have I written so
much about the PlayStation 3? Firstly because it's an epic tale of failure and
triumph. Secondly because it's hard to write about the PlayStation 4.
It was launched in 2013 to positive reviews and good sales. Nothing went
wrong, and today it's the second-best-selling-non-portable console of all
time, behind the PlayStation 2.
There were no infamous disasters, no massive hardware recalls, no hugely-hyped
flops. In general the PS4 was perceived as return to form, and today
it has a great range of games albeit that Gran Turismo Sport is
puzzlingly spartan, but I'll talk about that later. Meanwhile the competition
was weaker than it had been in the days of the PS3. Nintendo's Wii U was
technically unrefined, and after a strong start Xbox One sales faded badly.
The Last Guardian was originally developed for the PlayStation 3, but development took so long it was eventually held back for the PS4 instead.
In particular the Xbox One was hit by a controversy of Microsoft's own making
- the company announced that disc-based games would be forever locked to the
player's account, which meant that there was no way to lend disc-based games
to a friend or sell them on the used market. Furthermore Microsoft declared
that the Xbox would only work if it was connected to the internet; one
executive unwisely stated that if people were unhappy with that they could
always buy an Xbox 360 instead, and another executive was asked to leave the
company after implying that the only people without internet access were poor
rural folk of no consequence.
Abzu, from some of the people who brought you Journey.
The issue of ownership when it comes to physical media is a touchy one. In
contrast PS4 games can be sold on and shared freely. Sony made hay with this
in their 2013 E3 presentation, and came up with a YouTube skit that skewered
Microsoft's policy in a little under thirty seconds:
Microsoft eventually backpedalled, but as of 2021 the Xbox One in all its confusing variants has been
outsold 2:1 by the PS4. Technically it still remains in production but my hunch is that the few units available new are really old-new stock.
As of April 2021 the PS4 Slim also remains on sale brand-new, and a few A-list
games are still planned for it. I bought my PlayStation 3 long after it had
died, but right now the PS4 is still in theory "a thing", especially given
that sales of the PlayStation 5 have been hit by component shortages. There are over a hundred million PS4s out there, making it a substantial market even if the console is yesterday's news.
The PlayStation 5 is more powerful and has a much faster storage system, but
it's not a conceptual leap over the PS4. It has native 4K support and can do
real-time raytracing, but those two things strike me as nice bonuses rather
than compelling arguments in favour of the PS5. I have nothing against the
PS5, it just doesn't grab me.
The Witness is a simple puzzle game with lovely graphics that have
pre-baked raytracing.
It's interesting to compare the PS4 with my desktop PC. I built my PC from
parts in 2011. Back then it was a 64-bit, four-core Intel i5-2500k clocked at
3.3ghz, with 8gb of memory, a 1TB hard drive, and a built-in Intel HD 3000
graphics chip. I didn't play a lot of games at the time because I was too
busy. I quickly replaced the GPU with a Geforce 750 TI, which ran at around
1.3tflops.
I still have the same machine today, albeit that the only original components are the motherboard and case. My
PC is a big, noisy, heat-spewing monster that can just about run modern games
at 1080p albeit not all that well. It's not a million miles removed from the
PS4 Pro in that respect. Even with newer components it will always be limited
by its slow system bus.
Indie platformer Gris doesn't stretch the hardware, but even if you can't stand the twee presentation it's a surprisingly decent albeit short platform game.
For the PS4 Sony decided to give up on the Cell in favour of the same x86
architecture used by my PC. The PS4 is built around a 64-bit, eight-core AMD
Jaguar chip clocked at 1.6ghz, with an on-chip GPU that runs at around
1.7tflops. Therefore the PS4 has twice as many cores as my old desktop PC,
running at half the speed, but with a slightly better graphics card. The PS4's
Jaguar CPU has around a quarter the performance of an i5-2500k, albeit that it
also consumes around a quarter the power. The machine also has 8gb of memory,
a huge advance on the PlayStation 3's 512mb. Compared to my PC the PS4 slim is tiny, it
generates less heat, and it only makes a noise when unusually taxed.
Croteam's The Talos Principle - another puzzle game - looks nice, but even though the scenery is very bare and polygonal the frame rate is stuttery.
What can I conclude from this? Not a lot. I don't have any cross-platform
games or any means of running tests. The decision to give the PS4 eight slow
cores rather than a smaller number of fast cores is puzzling, but on the other
hand the PS4 continually records gameplay video in the background - by default
it stores the last fifteen minutes on a rolling basis - and it can upload
screenshots to Twitter etc while you play, so perhaps Sony had a good
reason for all those cores.
A sedate lap of the Nurburgring in a Mini. See how I botch the karussell! The PS4 records continuously in the background for up to thirty minutes, albeit at 1280x720@29.97fps rather than full HD.
My hunch is that hardware-wise the PS4 is roughly equivalent to a
budget-priced mid-2010s PC laptop in performance terms albeit with a much
better graphics card, and of course it runs a games-optimised operating system
(apparently a stripped-down form of BSD) that doesn't have to worry about
printer drivers or antivirus scans. The launch price was $399 / £350, vs £700
or so for a decent-but-not-spectacular laptop or gaming PC back then, so it
was good value, and I suspect that if I had bought one in 2013 I would still
be using it today.
One thing that strikes me as sad however is the relative lack of ambition. Sony sold
the PlayStation 3 as a games console that could double as a home computer stroke multimedia entertainment hub. In contrast the PS4 plays games and films. It could in theory have been sold as a productivity machine, with Google Drive
and a spreadsheet and word processor - or at least some kind of app market -
but it's strictly a games-and-movies playback device.
That controller is filthy, isn't it? Sadly you can't use PS3 controllers
with a PS4. Having said that I prefer the shape of the PS4 controller and
find the sticks easier to use. The PS4 controller connects with a
mini-micro USB cable. It has a touchpad and a 3.5" headphone socket.
The touchpad was hyped
up at launch and then almost completely forgotten about. Very few
games use it. As a touchpad it's not very good; the few games that recognise it merely use it as an extra button.
There were three models of PS4. They all share a Blu-Ray drive, ethernet, an
aux port for the PlayStation camera, and two USB 3.0 ports. I have a pair of
USB speakers and the controller plugged into my PS4, but the console also
supports USB memory sticks, external hard drives, USB hubs, and a
keyboard/mouse, although inevitably only a tiny minority of
games support keyboard/mouse control. The original PS3 had four
USB ports, which felt OTT at the time, but now that USB is more useful with
consoles it's a shame the PS4 doesn't have more.
Physically the original 2013 PS4 is a black rectangle that resembles a
brutalist-era public building. It has a peculiar quadrant-style design that
makes the machine look as if it has an expansion module built into the side.
It was replaced in 2016 by the slim model (pictured passim), which has
exactly the same hardware in a smaller case, minus the original console's
optical S/PDIF output. The slim is smaller and runs cooler and is also
available in white.
Later in 2016 Sony released the PS4 Pro, which has a faster CPU and GPU
in a case that resembles the slim, but with an extra slice on top. It was
aimed at people who owned 4K televisions; the original PS4 models can only output
video at up to 1080p. On the used market all three models are roughly the same
price, so I opted for a slim model simply because it's smaller and uses less
power than the others. The Pro strikes me was a waste of time given that only
a few games exploit its strengths and no games absolutely require it.
If you already own a PC, what's the point of a PlayStation 4? At heart it's a
PC with different firmware that runs many of the same games but slower and at
a lower resolution, but it has a good games library. Even as a PC person I
remember being impressed by videos of some of the PS4's exclusive titles,
specifically the big open-world Spiderman and
make-your-own-game Dreams, but also God of War and
The Last Guardian, in which you are a little boy who has to persuade a giant cat-dog-bird thing to not be afraid of mirrors.
Of the other consoles the Xbox doesn't have the same range of exclusive
titles, and although Breath of the Wild on the Switch is very
impressive it seems a waste to buy a Switch just for that game. That is why I
bought a PlayStation 4.
Services? Play at Home is a temporary arrangement whereby games
are released for free so that people have something to do during the COVID
lockdown. As I write these words the range includes Subnautica and
Abzu. There's also PlayStation Plus, which is a subscription
service that offers free games and discounts.
In theory it sounds
great, but there are two flaws. The first is that if you cancel your
subscription you can no longer play the games, so it's really a kind of games
rental. The second is that you need a PS Plus
subscription in order to play online, which feels unfair.
As a PC person the idea of paying money to play online feels wrong. In contrast the Xbox One has no such limitation.
Post-apocalyptic stealth action survival game Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of a small number of former PlayStation exclusives ported to other systems.
Does the PS4 have any oddities or quirks? There's no backwards compatibility.
The PS3's hardware was awkward enough that emulation on the PS4 would be
difficult, but the PS2 and original PlayStation should be a doddle. Instead
Sony has PlayStation Now, a streaming service that consists
of warehouses full of rackmounted PlayStation 3 motherboards running Killzone 2. It sounds like an expensive kludge.
Incidentally Killzone 2 could do with a remaster. It's an
unusually good-looking first-person sci-fi shooter for the PlayStation 3,
released in 2009. It was designed to show off the PS3 and hopefully give the
system an exclusive FPS to rival Halo and the
Battlefield / Call of Duty games; it succeeded in showing what the
PS3 could do, but had disappointing sales figures. Nowadays I think most
people remember the design of the baddies (they looked like WW1
German Sturmtruppen with glowing red eyes) and nothing else, but
it has aged well on a visual level.
Back to the PS4. One thing in particular surprised me. If you want to play music on a PS3
you have the option of inserting a CD and ripping it to the hard drive, but
the PlayStation 4 doesn't support audio CD at all. There's no technical
reason, it just isn't programmed to read compact discs. Even worse, there's no way to copy media files onto the machine's built-in hard drive.
You can play music from a USB stick, but
you can't copy anything onto the machine itself. At launch the PS4 couldn't
even play MP3 files, although a later OS update fixed that. It feels like another admission that the PS4 is solely a games machine and not a multimedia hub (albeit that it does have Netflix etc).
The Dino 206/246 and Lancia Stratos use the same
engine, a Ferrari V6. They are otherwise very different cars, although equally
good-looking.
That's about the only quirk that stands out. On the positive side it's
trivially easy to take screenshots with a PlayStation 4. It was hard to take
screenshots with a PlayStation 3. The PS3 doesn't have a system-wide
screenshot key and very few games could take screenshots. In contrast the PS4
has a dedicated Share button that takes screenshots and short videoclips,
which works seamlessly.
The PS4 supports standard 2.5" hard drives. There's nothing to stop you from
buying your own drive and fitting it in the PS4. Sadly it only supports SATA
II speeds, so modern SSDs are hobbled. The PS4 also supports external hard
drives up to a capacity of 8tb, but they have to be USB 3 in order to store
applications; USB 2 drives can only back things up.
There's a special low-power mode that will download games in the background
while the machine goes to sleep, so it's perfectly practical to download games
overnight. Even in rest mode my PS4 tends to turn itself off after a
while - perhaps it's an internet connection thing. The rest mode is apparently
handled by a separate ARM chip with 256mb of memory, so I wonder if there are
internet arguments about how the PS4 is actually a
nine-core machine. Presumably Sony looked at ARM and decided against it, but it'll be interesting to see if the next PlayStation goes down that route instead.
Built-quality-wise my slim PS4 feels much less creaky than my super-slim PS3, albeit that the super-slim PS3 was really cheap. My Ps4 cracks and creaks as it heats up, but the overheating problems and duff capacitors that affected
the seventh generation of consoles seem to be much less prevalent with the
PS4. As of early 2021 all PS4 models seem to hover around £160-200 on the used
market, depressed by a glut of sales in the wake of the launch of the PS5,
elevated by the difficulty involved in sourcing a PS5. New PS4s are available for £235 or so. My hunch is that there won't be a super-ultra-budget PS4, as per earlier PlayStations.
Will the PS4 ever be a valuable antique? Some models of PS3 are sought after
for their backwards compatibility, and early Linux-enabled machines are staggeringly rare, but the PS4 didn't have any notable
technical changes throughout its life, and there are millions of them, so no. The Pro had a couple of tweaks but no features were eliminated. There are a handful of specially-painted special editions, albeit to my eye
the plain black and white models are better-looking (the rest are fussy).
And that's the PS4 itself. What about the games? Read on.
