Just finished watching the show. Couldn't stay up last night, my eyes were drying out and threatened to kill me so I went to bed at 11PM. Glad I didn't stay up, that was a LONG show.
Dunno really who Mark Cherny is - I've certainly played Marble Madness in my youth! - he seems a rather *cough!* "fabulous" fella, with his expressions and...ahem...mannerisms.
Sorry. I don't mean to be prejudiced in any way, it just struck me watching him. Anyway! Specs... Wow. 8GB. THAT was a bit unexpected! I think some of us were worried Sony were going to have to go with just 2GB, but obviously they decided to go all-out no holds barred etc. Fantastic.
The hardware certainly seems to be
quite capable, despite the average-ish power level in absolute terms. I was totally, totally blown away by Killzone, which looks just amazing and insane. Infamous, if in-game, was also incredibly impressive, as was Square's presentation, but I've no idea if that was actually PS4-rendered realtime or not as I've seen at least some parts of that video before. Bungie's Destiny, also very impressive. Basically, these console games are far ahead of almost all current PC games visually; only Crysis 3 can really compete, from what we've been shown so far. This is GOOD NEWS though, as porting games to the PC will be much easier with this console hardware than it used to be in the past.
Ubi's game wasn't as jawdropping; I'm uncertain of what gameplay is actually like. Completely openended like GTA, just move around, hack stuff and cause random havoc...what? Maybe there is a plot hidden in there somewhere, I dunno. (Now there's a UBI guy talking about the game on the post-show session at Gametrailers, maybe I'll find out as I'm typing up this post!)
Poor Wuu, though! PS4 + Vita does anything the Wuu does and...ahem...about 16x more, just going by main memory bandwidth.
Oh, but Vita doesn't have a NFC reader! It's DOOMED! *ahem* Sorry about that.
They showed the controller - big whoop though, as it already leaked before the show - but NOT the box itself! That was unexpected, but also understandable I suppose. Sony might want to hold back some of the system's flash and thunder for later in the year, not blow everything all at once, if the final look has even been decided yet. That's always a possibility also.
The Gaikai stuff, as well as the PS Store with dynamic downloading and so on was very interesting. A bit disappointing that streaming will apparantly be Sony's solution to backwards compatibility, but hey... PS3 will basically be totally un-emulatable for 10+ years if not more, including Cell into the PS4 would be cost prohibitive, and an add-on box is generally just fail, as major hardware addons for consoles traditionally bellyflop bigtime.
I must say that Sony seems to really have its shit together this time around. The fumbling and bumbling we saw with PS3 and online, achievements, friends management and so on appears to be a thing of the past. It's the new Sony! The sharing aspects, webcasting of gameplay, letting people jump into your game and interact with you as you play and so on, it's very aggressive and fascinating. I'd really like to see what people do with it post-release of the console! It seems a lot more useful than poor Wuu's nintendo universe scratchpad.
...Now you have to excuse me, I have ten (edit: shit, scratch that... 26!) pages of this thread to catch up on.
