[zybar]

I tried to get Rclark to post his thoughts on the PS4, but he doesn't come by anymore  and his mailbox is full    I am waiting to buy, so I have nothing to add personally.
I find it ironic, now that they are out, that no one has a voiced their opinions.

I think many of us are waiting on the sidelines.

I did have an XboxOne on pre-order, but decided to cancel it when I looked at the lack of games.  I would say it is pretty much the same thing with the PS4.

While both consoles sold +1,000,000 units right off the bat, I think it will take some time for the majority of folks to upgrade.

George

[SoCalWJS]

This morning, I heard on the LA ABC Morning news that a bunch of the Xbox one's were being returned due to excessive fan noise, but Microsoft was swapping them out w/o problems.

Haven't heard much other than that.

[zybar]

This morning, I heard on the LA ABC Morning news that a bunch of the Xbox one's were being returned due to excessive fan noise, but Microsoft was swapping them out w/o problems.

Haven't heard much other than that.

Both consoles have had reported hardware issues and both vendors appear to be handling it.

Not totally unexpected.

George

[kingdeezie]

For what it's worth to anyone, I've had the PS4 since launch day.

When I opened it up on launch day I was a little bit disappointed. Admittedly, my system is significantly less common then most average consumer, and open to quirky complications.

The issue I had? The PS4, unlike its predecessor, doesn't let you choose what sound format to output (stereo versus multichannel). I have a HDMI switcher that decodes HDMI audio codecs to PCM, and then outputs toslink (optical) to my Meitner MA-1 DAC. What the switcher doesn't do is change the signal from 5.1 to 2.0. I have used this method with the Wii U and PS3. So, for the first hour with the machine, I was without useful sound, and was quite frustrated.

After looking for a long time in the settings menu of the PS4 for a way to change the signal to stereo, I eventually had the bright (read should have been the most obvious) idea to plug the PS4 directly into the DAC with toslink. This fixed the issue, as the PS4 automatically detected the DAC was only 2 Channel.

Once I got the sound up and running, I was less than happy with the SQ results for the first few hours. It took the PS4 a few hours of play time to open up in the sound department. Before it did, I was remarking to my wife that it sounded worse then the PS3.

At this point in time, I am much happier with the sound.

Other then that little mixup, I am completely thrilled with the machine!

The graphics are IMHO a massive upgrade. I game using a JVC RS50 projector at 100 inches, and the differences in quality and resolution is welcomingly apparent. I sit about 12 feet from my screen, and the change has been dramatic.

A lot of people have made mention that the launch lineup of both consoles has been pretty poor, but I would tend to disagree.

Knowing that the new consoles were launching, I held off on playing COD, Battlefield, Assassins Creed, etc, etc. This has given me a large amount of options to play.

Immediately, and as ridiculous as it sounds, I was snagged right out of the gate with Resogun. It was a free game that came with Playstation Plus, and has been a blast to play. I just finished it completely a few days ago, getting the platinum trophy.

Right now I am enjoying Killzone Shadowfall. The graphics are amazing, but the gameplay is only ok. I like it less then Killzone 3, but still find it overall enjoyable. The multiplayer is awesome (but I suck).

I still have COD to delve into, and Assassins Creed, which from the reviews out, has around 80 hours of content!

The UI is pretty slick, it is definitely an upgrade from the PS3. Updates, friends, invites, are so easily accessible and fluid it makes me excited to have to access the XMB while in game.

I bought two consoles, one for myself, and one for my younger son for Christmas. I popped his open to make sure it was okay, and it worked beautifully. My PS4 works flawlessly, other then slightly louder then other PS4's I have heard fan. My fan can get pretty loud during intense gameplay. Louder then my slim PS3, but not as loud as my launch Xbox 360 was.

I also purchased an Xbox One, but my older son came to me a couple of weeks ago, and asked if he could have one for Christmas. I decided to give him mine so he has one for the holidays.

Once Christmas rolls around, I'll be able to compare the PS4 with his Xbox One.

Either way, I'm pretty happy with the PS4! No regrets. 

[Woodsea]

Thanks for the review Kingdeezie!  Have your son sign up for AC so he can review his X one!

[highfilter]

Got a PS4 as well. Slick looking unit - having it sit above my PS3 Slim, the PS3 looks outclassed.

System: The new controller is really nice. Makes you feel good! A friend came over and immediately liked the feel of it, he's a PS3 owner. The PS4 interface and navigation is really nice, very iOS / PC feeling. You can quickly snap between a game and another application by tapping the PS3 button on the controller and everything loads almost instantly. Ethernet speeds seem faster or better managed. Was downloading 4 or 5 game updates at the same time and they were cruising, plus they auto-install in a queue which is nice. The trophy system is much improved on the PS4, they all load very fast when you view your trophies and it doesn't take a life-time to sync your trophies, like the PS3 did. They also added stats for each trophy so you can see how rare they are based on user-stats. Never had any setup issues or hardware issues with the console, works perfectly.

Games: Only retail game we got was Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Basically a last-gen console port, but it does look really good and plays well. Sound design/quality in that game is pretty damn good. My favorite title for the PS4 is Resogun. Amazing retro graphics and fantastic sound design/electronic music. If you like Stardust HD, you'll love this game. Might pickup Killzone on Black Friday or something.

There's not a huge selection of games for either PS4 or XBOX ONE (launch title selection for every new console are never really that great), but 2014 is gonna be sweet.

[kingdeezie]

So, yesterday was Christmas! Merry belated Christmas to all.

I spent a significant portion of yesterday setting up video game systems for my two children. My younger one received a PS4, while the older one wanted the Xbox One.

I stated last time I posted about my PS4 impressions, that I would come back and give some impressions on the Xbox One once Christmas rolled around. My son and I have gotten a good feel for the system to this point.

At the risk of being called "biased," I have to say that I have been, to this point, massively disappointed with the Xbox One in comparison to the PS4.

Things started off pretty rough. I hooked up both machines before I turned either of them on. They were turned on around the same time (within seconds of each other). Without getting into too many details, my younger son had downloaded the PS4 firmware update, installed Skylanders, and downloaded the game's update, before my older son's Xbox One had even finished downloading the day one firmware.

From there, things just got worse. When we tried to install Battlefield 4 on the Xbox One, the system forces you to wait for the patches to download before the game itself will install. This meant waiting somewhere in the ballpark of 30 minutes to just play the game. This is in comparison to the PS4 which took maybe 3 minutes to install before I could play the single player portion of the game. It was the same story for every game Xbox One game we installed yesterday.

This lengthy installation process was made more frustrating by the fact that, even after being installed, several of the games froze during the menu screens. Battlefield 4 had to be restarted three times before it got past the "battle log" loading screen.

Once the games were stable, they ran perfectly fine. The machine looks quite capable graphically. Since we do not have a lot of duplicate games, it is hard to give a direct comparison, but both of my kids TVs are only 720P, so I do not think there is going to be a noticeable difference between multi platform games without 1080p capable televisions.

The Kinect features are pretty cool, when they work. Any amount of significant background noise makes performance of the Kinect pretty poor. I do not know if there is an issue with the Kinect that my son has specifically, but with my younger son chatting, and his TV volume on reasonably low (they live in the same room), the Kinect often times ignored commands completely.

Even with complete quiet, the Kinect is hit or miss, say maybe getting it right 85 percent of the time. It is pretty sweet being able to control the TV from the Kinect, as well as a significant portion of the Xbox's features, but I don't find it that enticing, and given the rockiness of the  performance of the Kinect, almost frustrating.

We don't have cable television anymore, so we did not get to use any of the features. We also didn't see any reason to use the SNAP multitasking yet, since most of the time, we were installing games.

I would expect that the Xbox One will get better with time, but as of right now, the machine doesn't feel very next generation compared to the PS4. It is packed full of features, but they are features that are either, IMO, superfluous, or not optimally functioning at this point in time.

At this juncture, I would have to recommend the PS4 over the Xbox One, based on just the game installation alone. I have never waited more then 5-10 minutes for any PS4 game to install from a disk. Outside of that, it seems the PS4 to me has been much more intuitive, smooth, refined, and stable. I've only had my PS4 freeze once during the Killzone Shadow Fall menu on day one with the console.

Either way, it is exciting to see what the future brings for both of these machines, I think we are in for some good gaming. 



 

   

[zybar]

Very nice review based on real world experience.

Makes me happy that I cancelled my Xbox One order and decided to wait.

George

[gregcss]

Thanks for the review. I'm going to wait a bit before I decided on either one, but leaning towards PS4 since all I want is a gaming system and BD player. A note about BF4 - I've been playing this on the 360 and it has froze numerous times during game play and I fault the developer, not the 360. There are now a total of 4 game patches and with those the game freezes are less frequent. Perhaps the freezes you experienced were caused by an unstable game and not the xb1.

[Bob in St. Louis]

Great review, thank you!