Next gen? Current gen? Weirdo fighting stance Street Fighter Gen. Whatever this is, we are in it, right now! You could probably argue we've been here for a while on the PC, and I'd possibly even agree having upgraded my own with magic, voodoo and the dark art of TressFX some time in the middle of last year, but for the lowly console owners this is the future. We are half a step away from Mattel hover boards, watching Jaws 19 and wearing two ties at the same time.
I wasn't planning to transition from the PS3 or the 360 so soon, with a lack of games and a whole bunch of disappointing launch releases. But the chance to get one of these new machines for less than the insane £400 (+game) pricetag was far too good to turn down. That coupled with inFamous Second Son and Ground Zeroes on the horizon I took a leap into buying a new home console in the first year of its life for the first time. (I did get a 3DS at launch, dunno if that counts.) Was it a poor decision? Here are some words that I wrote with my hands talking about my experience with the PlayStation 4 over the last couple of weeks. (ish)
I opened the box and took out the console which looks like a giant eraser. My first thought was how light the console is. It seems a lot lighter than both my previous consoles and it has pointy angles which automatically says future, like some kind of alien artifact. It was strange unboxing it, there was a distinct lack of excitement compared to my Saturn or even the 3DS (back in 2011). the same feeling I had when unboxing the Wii U. I picked up the controller, felt the sticks and the triggers then switched on the machine. I like the new controller, it has real weight to it, and the sticks have a good amount of tension on them. I do however think the triggers while better than the PS3's are still a little spongy and inferior to the 360's. I was greeted with the usual login and update stuff you get these days, but the most surprising thing was that the PS4 doesn't have a start-up chime. It seems like an odd omission. I love console start-up noises and Sony have had some of the best over the years, it's sad to see something like that go, but in its place Sony have added some sad piano music playing in the background to remind you of your own mortality or maybe it's there for you to mourn over the loss of the start-up chime. I wouldn't be surprised if it was filled with subliminal messages telling you to go buy the digital version of Knack on the PSN store for £53 (FIFTY THREE POUNDS FOR KNACK!!!) Whatever the reason it's plinky-plonky and makes me want to cry when browsing my games.
One of the first things I did was download all of the PS3 games I own like Sound Shapes, FlOw and Flower. And then onto the "free" PS+ games such as Resogun, Don't Starve and Contrast. later in the week I dabbled in a couple of the free to play offerings such as Warframe and Blacklight: Retribution. I played Blacklight for a couple of matches. I killed four or five people in a row and it told me I was a threat, mega threat? ultra threat? some kind of threat. It seemed highly accurate though because I obviously have the skills to take down the future terrorists (?) with my shooty-guns. I pressed the left trigger followed by the right one a bunch of times in some eerily empty maps with barely anyone playing, admired the kinda cool looking menus and deleted it from my 354GB HDD... What the fuck!? Where did all my memory go? This seems like a pretty big problem for the future. 500GB (which is a slight lie in the first place after all the updates) seems pretty small considering the sizes of some of these files. It wouldn't be so worrying if I hadn't used up over a fifth of the space in a handful of days. Six months to a year down the line it seems understandable, but so soon it's a little worrying. I guess this is an inevitable problem for the future, but one I know I'm going to come up against sooner than I'd like.
There's something really simplistic and empty looking about the XMB... is it an XMB? Infinite-line-media-app-bar? ILMAB? There's something a little unfinished about it. I love that I am immediately at the games I want to play as soon as I have signed in, but that bar is full of things cluttering up my games. Does the Playroom need to be there when I have no intention or the means to use it? same goes for the unlimited music and movies too. It's nice that I have the option to use that stuff (I won't ever) but let me remove it from that list. This has turned into a whine. I don't mean it to be that way, it moves snappily and it's easier to get to messages, the store and downloads because they are on another bar at the top. I'm not entirely sure what the Facebook-ish wall at the bottom is for but It's good to remind myself what games I have played and gotten trophies in minutes beforehand. I guess with all the information overload we have in our lives I have to be constantly reminded of that time I breezed about a digital field and murdered some space Nazi's in Killzone just to feel alive. Next gen feeling.
There's some other menu stuff. I like the little text boxes when you send multiple messages back and forth and the inclusion of a little noise when you get a message or something has started/stopped downloading is probably one of my favourite improvements (really) Maybe Sony could only pay for one sound clip and cut the start-up chime in favour of this. I still dunno how I feel about that, I'm still stuck on this damn thing. To be honest I don't really know why I keep bringing it up. There's still no option to set all games to have inverted camera just like the 360 in 2006, but hey, next gen and all that. Sony hate us dirty, inverted players. You can't pause downloads and the download speed seems similar-ish to the PS3 speeds at most times, although I DL Warframe during the middle of a weekday and it went surprisingly fast considering the filesize. I also like the way the light on the controller pulses in time with the beat during Sound Shapes.
Here are some thoughts about some video games I have played on a new video game system.
Resogun.
My first thought was to try and be clever by creating an image of Resogun using lots of tiny Lego bricks. I have the right amount of Lego and I have the right amount of patience, but after about an hour of trying I just ended up with what looked like I'd dumped a pile of Lego onto my bedroom floor like the overgrown child that I am.
Resogun was the first game I played and it's a real stunner in the visual department, somewhere between Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD. The amount of things going on on screen is crazy. The first time I started it up it was like an overwhelming barrage or light and sound being stamped directly into my brain. That first time I heard the lady abrasively say "Save the last humans" through the speaker on the controller as the huge words rotate around the cylindrical level, my eyes lit up. Admittedly I didn't read how to play the game and just thrust myself directly into it, which resulted in the first few games turning into a mess of nonsensical noise.
After an hour or so I fully grasped that you had to fill the bar up at the bottom by killing enemies which would result in a strikingly beautiful, yet pretty simplistic boss at the end of the five levels. Occasionally you are told that keepers are detected that are a collection of glowing enemies in close proximity, that are usually on a kind of rail which have to be defeated before they disappear, which in turn shoots a spark off to somewhere else on the level freeing one of the ten humans in boxes around the level. I absolutely adore the way you have to manage all of the things at once, defeating waves, picking up little humans running about the level and boosting through tens of enemies at a time. The boost is one of those mechanics that has the right combination of sound effect, light trail and burst when you pop out of it to create this satisfying explosion of light. I think forcing 40 or 50 enemies into a clump and then boosting into them for a huge explosion is one of the most exciting things in any side scrolling shooter I have ever played. That along with the way the level just slo-mo explodes into thousands of particles at the end of a level make this the best and most visually pleasing game I have played on the system.
Resogun is super short and there's plenty of replayability with the harder modes being incredibly difficult. I'm really glad it's given away for free with PS+ If there was ever a game that could do with some dlc levels this is it. I'd probably buy more Resogun in a heartbeat.
Warframe.
I think this is probably my first time adventuring into free to play games. I put about four hours into it and it seems... ok? It's hard to judge something like this that's completely free. It seems fully featured with a pretty big selection of various mission types. The shooting reminds me of the guns in Mass Effect and the sword has no lock on making most melee fights some sort of ultimate test against the jittery camera more than any hunchbacked, alien-beetle-monster-man.
All of the missions saw me leveling up my sword and my guns at a pretty slow rate with the occasional loot drop out of an alien space locker. Most encounters early on seem doable with one or two players, but I had to stop at the first boss because I'd always reach him and the rest of the people I was playing with would drop out. He seems far too hard to beat without excessive (boooring) grinding or having a couple of other similarly leveled players, and I don't think the action or similarly boring environments are enough to put anymore time into. I'm sure there's a lot more to see and there's a whole crafting and mod system in confusing menus that are never explained to you. The tutorial pretty much explains how to shoot and slice things. I found myself utterly baffled about how to even get into a mission due to the badly designed menu.
If there is one thing I like about the game, it is that the character designs are pretty unique and alien.Some people have heads like hammerhead sharks and the default suit has a striking resemblance to something out of Evangelion. There's something very organic-looking about the character designs and I like that a lot. If the game played better I'd be tempted to put a little more time into it, but that slow grind and samey missions/environments don't seem all that much like a fun time.
There is also some crazily priced microtransactions in the store, one of them is about £80 and another couple are £110 just for some cosmetic shit, weapons and in-game currency.
Contrast.
I like the music, the setting and the atmosphere of this puzzle-platformer. Some of the dialogue is really good and other parts of it is horrendous. The characters have really striking designs, but the second they move they act like badly animated puppets, which is even more noticeable when all of the other characters are shadows. It seems ok, but I'd have been really disappointed if I'd paid for it. It has a really cool dash move. I'm pretty big on the dashes in video games.
Killzone Shadow Fall.
My console was a Killzone bundle, so this came packed in the box. I have generally been a fan of these games. I liked the campaign in two a lot and adored the multiplayer in three. The campaign wasn't all that bad either for the entire fifteen minutes it took to complete.
Killzone Shadow Fall never rises above its opening mediocrity. After the first mission it just gradually slopes downwards until the messy, unexciting end. I came away from Killzone thinking more about the twenty or so times I died slamming my face into the side of falling buildings more than any of its beautifully crafted character designs or explosive setpieces. You can tell a lot of effort went into the story side of things, it's just that every single moment of it falls completely flat with you being talked at sternly by the dude that exploded in the second season of Homeland and an invincible Helghan lady that's good with a sniper rifle and some knives. Even Malcolm McDowell didn't reprise his character from 3 and that dude will do ANYTHING!
The first problem that rears its head is that you're always waiting for something in this game. I assume Guerrilla thought being talked at by angry, deadly serious non-characters and waiting in lines as people are processed was immersive. It's just boring a lot of the time. This game seems so pleased with making you wait for a crane you're riding to shift over or waiting for something to happen after you have inserted one of about 700 plugs into a socket two feet away. There is an odd stealth sequence that basically has you running from container to container in a well lit room to avoid nasty-space nazi guards you could probably kill easily with your bare hands. It's just a lot of waiting for someone to say "go!"
Killzone... more like Waitzone. So, yeah, you do kill stuff, and for the most part it's pretty good with some aggressive enemies and a selection of pretty satisfying weapons. The Shadow Marshall rifle, which is your standard gun that can double up as a sort or energy-sniper rifle is probably the best thing about the entire game. I tried my hardest to never part with it on the missions it was given to me. Unfortunately the combat becomes more about entering rooms with an almost endless supply of enemies that pop out the second you take two steps forward. One room in the final(ish) mission is absolutely insane. It must be a pretty awful job being one of the elite Helghan guard. 95% of the time you must be hiding, crouched behind a wall going "Is he here yet?" "Shhh I heard a noise... get ready... sorry, false alarm guys." There are also a couple of points with infinitely respawning enemies. One where you have to hold off wave after wave after wave after wave after wave of soldiers while SURPRISE! you wait for a slow moving thing to get to its destination. In another I somehow ended up in a weird stalemate fighting against 5 or 6 Helghast while trying to hack a computer console. (Also waiting for the Helghan lady to hack a computer or something.)
The combat elsewhere is against really aggressive spider-tank things that aren't very fun to fight and these giant mechanical turrets that require you to mess around with more energy plugs in yet more sockets while avoiding exploding spider drones. The back half of the game is the biggest chore. I'd much rather be shooting things in a first person shooter than doing a selection of disposable side activities... and I'd happily never have to blow up one of those turrets by shooting energy plugs again.
What to say really. I'm like the millionth person to talk about how miserable an experience Killzone SF is. (and months late) I played a couple hours of multiplayer but got tired of being blown up and sniped by invisible characters over and over again on poor, messily designed maps. All of the talk about more open ended missions is nonsense with them usually having a pretty set path to go. There's a mid-credits mission that requires you to do four objectives in a really set pattern. It's a forced stealth mission in a game that can largely be played without ever having to do stealth. It was incredibly frustrating having to trial and error my way to the end of the game for about an hour in what is a five minute long sequence. Killzone feels incredibly last gen (semi-current?) with these stunning environments and incredible lighting, but full of little things that pull you out of the world. Some stuff is completely destructible, but you can knife those bottles on that table all day long and they'll never break. I played Ghostbusters at the same time and I could destroy huge amounts of the environment in a game from 2009. Come on next gen Killzone... let me bust stuff... Bustin' makes me feel good.
End bit.
So. this is some thoughts on my next gen console that's like current gen, but like old gen compared to PC's or something. I could describe some of the horrors I have seen spending a whole evening watching Twitch livestreams. I have seen the worst of humanity through a video game console. And I thought the voice chat in Call of Duty or Halo was the worst. I don't know why so many of the comments up the side of the screen want the girl to put the thing into the other thing... maybe theyre just trying to help her finish one of those plug sections in Killzone. The one thing I do know is that I am unable to stop watching. This is the future, we are in the future NOW! I'm off to go stop my future children from getting sent to jail.
Thanks for reading. Be excellent to each other.
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