Bit of a harmless bump, but I thought this review of the system itself from The AV Club was compelling:
Consoles used to be dumb beasts. In the days of the NES and the Sega Genesis, if you turned on a console without inserting a video game first, the machine would sit there blinking in panic. “You have to feed me a game,” it would say, wordlessly. “That’s how this relationship works. You feed me a game, and I let you play it.”
Now the beasts feed themselves. When you start up an Xbox 360, you get a panoply of entertainments and marketing come-ons that the console gobbles from Microsoft’s servers and regurgitates on your screen. Apps, movie trailers, and deodorant commercials flood the display in a reasonable facsimile of the eyeball-searing TVs in Idiocracy. The PS3’s XrossMediaBar interface is not as garish, but it too has seen marketing metastasis take hold. (Plus, it’s as confusing as you’d expect something called the XrossMediaBar to be.)
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The PlayStation 4 attempts to restore dignity to the player-console relationship. The $400 device, released last Friday, is more deferential than its predecessor. There’s an unassuming spirit to the PS4 that starts with the industrial design. The machine is a tight form that’s defined by one eye-catching detail—a sharp slope on the front and back faces that gives the box a quiet, confident edge—and a slew of well-considered touches. The power and eject buttons blend into the hardware so seamlessly that they’re practically invisible, and the same goes for the disc slot.
The unit’s indicator light, a long stripe between the glossy and matte sections of the console along the top, is the one element of the exterior that flirts with excess, but it works so well in context that it’s an essential part of the design. When that stripe glows to life, the PS4 seems like a piece of alien technology, with the light hinting at power within. The machine needs that stroke of excitement to complement the silent blackness of the overall look.
This is the type of machine that Sony ought to build. It’s a return to the calm futurism of the PlayStation 2 and a departure from the bulbous flash of the original PlayStation 3, with its plasticky chrome and hideous Spider-Man logo font. Sony falters when it tries to be flashy—the result always ends up feeling like a bunch of starched-shirt Tokyo engineers straining to be cool (because that’s what it is). But historically, no company other than Apple can match the elegance that Sony achieves in its best hardware, and it’s nice to see the company be true to its soul again.
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It is, in a word, dull. And that’s a compliment. The console shouldn’t be the star of the show. The games and the players deserve the spotlight. Sony seems to recognize this, and the PS4 hews closer to the notion of a “platform”—a blank infrastructure on which amazing things can be built.
Players have plenty of time to wait and see if the platform grows into its potential, as there’s no killer exclusive title that makes it worthwhile to run out and buy one right now. But Sony has laid solid groundwork, both in its powerful hardware and its austere software, for a machine that can stand back and let players occupy the stage. If only every console were so boring.
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