le War: PS4
Battlefield 4
Browser, Video Unlimited, Music Unlimited and
Library, with any games you’ve installed slotted
in by the order of how recently you played them.
This whole section is designed to feed you live
information, though, so hover on What’s New
and you’ll see news and updates from around
the PlayStation Network (now to be known as
PSN), and leaving the cursor on a game brings
up a row of extra icons that include things such
as new content that’s now available, the section
that you last reached (so that you can hop
straight back to that point), your friends’ recent
activity in the game, community videos and the
game manual. It’s all genuinely quick, slick and
useful.
There’s a pleasing openness to Sony’s
approach, too. Sure, unlike with PS3 a £40
per-year PlayStation Plus subscription is now
mandatory if you want to play online, but if one
person in the house has subscribed, everyone
else who uses that console also gets access.
On the other hand there are a couple of odd
omissions. You can’t customise the wallpaper, for
example, and the suspend and resume feature
isn’t yet available. More annoyingly, the PS4
doesn’t have DLNA built-in and currently won’t
play media files over your network or from USB.
The backlash at that announcement seemed to
take Sony by surprise, though, and the company
says it’s “exploring possibilities” – fingers crossed
that means we’ll get media streaming in a future
update.
Gaming performance: the next-gen
promise fulfilled
Battlefield 4
We demand more than great games from
a modern games consoles, but gaming
performance still comes first, and once
you’ve overcome the disappointment
that 4K games are still the exclusive
domain of the high-end PC
the PS4 is hard to fault in the
performance stakes.
The fact that key crossplatform titles such as Call of
Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield
4 boast higher resolution
graphics on PS4 than
Xbox One is a huge boost
to Sony’s console, and
vindication of its the fact
remains that if you want
to play the big third-party
games at their best, the
PS4 is the console to go
for on day one.
Delivering on the
next-gen promise of
1080p gaming
and digital
distribution are
the core things,
but that’s backed
up by a superslick UI that feels ‘live’
and interactive, and delivers the
content you want with a degree
of snappiness that the previous
generation couldn’t get close to.
Add stand-out features such as
Remote Play, which really is terrific,
and you’ve got a massively strong
launch for the PS4. And it will only
get better as more games, apps and
features are released.
Over to you, Microsoft.
exclusive
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