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The worst thing about the PS4 is that all the footage coming out shows the PS4's PSN store is the exact same design as the current PS3's store design.

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You got Killzone right? Would you mind playing together in a few hours if PSN is actually working at any point today (I'm on US East Coast)?

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Whoa, the motion controls for controlling the cursor on the keypad work surprisingly well. I'm impressed.

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Anyone else not having the What's New section and game activities appearing? That's literally half of the UI not working for me. Is PSN having trouble?


The one thing that sticks out to me so far is how crisp and clear the games are. I suppose this is the whole 1080p thing but it's really nice.

Just the other day I was asking if anyone was still making exploratory FPS games and lo and behold, Killzone Shadowfall is a breath of fresh air. The game lacks any tension or drama (maybe I should I be playing on hard?), but it's nice to have a large area to move in and find your own path through and the platformy/puzzly elements were more enjoyable than I thought. The zipline mechanic seems like it will be a lot of fun to exploit in all of the levels and should make for some interesting speedruns. The game is growing on me. It's weird how the combat segments feel like accents to the enviornment traversal rather than the overall point since the enemies are sparse and in very small groups. Maybe this changes (I'm on level 3) but it's good change of pace.

Lego Marvel Super Heroes is fantastic. From the first second of gameplay it was already a huge improvement over Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes. The game does such a fantastic job of evoking the Marvel characters through both their animations and their moves, something that's a bit harder to do with Batman and Robin since they're known more for their personalities than combat techniques. While Lego Batman 2 featured a ton of playable characters from throughout DC, the game was still The Batman and Robin Show. The levels were all played with B&R first and most of the puzzles are solved using their various suits while in Marvel the superheores' powers are classified to work in certain puzzles (Big Characters can interactive with heavy objects, characters with Superhero Sense can detect hidden objects). B&R had some fairly generic melee attacks and limited usage from their suit powers but Marvel's characters are more developed; Hulk can break pieces off the ground and throw them, clap the air, pound the ground, grab enemies and slam them to the fro, and grab allies and slam them to and fro. Iron Man shoots his proton cannons, can fly around and shoot missiles, and can charge up his uni-beam. Spider-Man can swing around and that's all I've done with him so far. Mr. Fantastic can turn into a teapot. Again, the graphics are crisp and vibrant and full of character and the animations for the characters are unique and ostentatious, often making call-backs to the current Movie universe. The only downside so far is that the humor is more blunt and cliched than Lego Batman and the voice acting worse. Lego Batman had a nice subtlety to its writing and quips (even making swipes at the Arkham City) and used as many of the voice actors from the DC Animated Universe cartoons as it could. But I'm really looking forward to playing through this game. It should be good in two-players as well.

I haven't played too much of Knack but I'm enjoying the enemy encounters more than I expected. I like how they eschewed complexity of combat abilities in favor of focusing on movement to avoid attacks and make openings.


Edit: http://youtu.be/SZi91tFHpWQ

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Yeah, starting with Lego Batman 2 they've jumped to full voice acting so it's just two games so far. I too lamented the change but honestly Lego Batman 2 wasn't bad at all thanks to the good writing and voice acting. The series has just made a jump from " Tuesday morning puppet cartoon for 2 year olds" to "Saturday morning action cartoon for 7 year olds".


The What's New section told me that DJ is streaming Resogun right now and took me right to his channel in "Live on Playstation." The smoke boss he was fighting was so, so cool. The What's New section was also giving me updates on all the records Notbov was making in Killzone Shadowfall and gave me the option to join his game. The game booted up and gave me a message that it was waiting for a spot to open up on his team. It was taking a while and I went back to Killzone's menu to mess around but once a spot opened up it put me in the game with Notbov. That's some good integration there. I do wonder why it doesn't let you write comments on events like on PS Vita. It seems all you can do is thumbs up stuff.

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I remember a Sony announcing a while back that they were going to start manufacturing PS3s in Brazil and the price was still ludicrous.


Has anyone here played Super Motherload? My family wants me to bring the PS4 home for Thanksgiving and Christmas but there aren't a lot of single-console multiplayer games out right now (and now I have to buy some controllers too).

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I love how Sound Shapes turns your PS4 controller into a lightshow based on the level's colors and beat.

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What I've found myself doing a lot in Killzone is playing the Scout as a pure support class. I sit in a corner and use the Tactical Echo and flashbang drones over and over, racking up support points.

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PS4 does have HDCP but Sony said they are going to patch it out after people complained. This is a very important launch for Sony and they have been surprisingly accomodating to fan desires. I can't help but feel like we didn't make as much use of this opportunity as we could have. I mean, when Sony has started namedropping Yakuza 5 in interviews as a game they need to get localized, anything is possible.


P.S. Killzone doesn't have any voice chat in any form. Guerilla Games' response to complaints is "we are going to look into whether it's possible". What year is this?

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One cool thing about the Xbox One is that it finally puts the Kinect's motors to use for something other than just calibration. When video chatting on Skype the camera can follow the speaker around the room and zoom in on the speaker's face. I wonder if games can control the Kinect's movement as well.

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Oh, huh. That's still pretty neat. So did they drop the auto-calibration from the original Kinect?

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Knack isn't a bad game at all. It could use a little more platforming in its levels to break up the combat segments but the game does a good job of being challenging in a platform hell kind of way (I'm speaking about hard mode here). The fact that you die in one or two hits forces you to analyze your enemies attacks patterns for openings and find the least risky avenue of attack. The challenge comes in with how many different enemies there are and how the game will give you different configurations of the enemies mobs where your previous strategies aren't usable anymore because one enemy's presence covers the openings on another enemy. You play the same battle over and over again, slowly learning the small nuances in timing and behavior of a particular group until figure out a strategy to make them act a certain way, giving you an opportunity to defeat one of them at a time (the lack of loading times helps significantly in this regard). I can take on goblins pretty well but it was challenging when I had to fight a group of goblins with a tank that would constantly shoot at you or use a large force-field. The tank shells would kill you if you went after the goblins so I managed to circle the tank long enough (while avoiding the goblins) to get on the opposite side of barrel. I could get a only one or two hits in before it would use its force field, forcing me to back off and start running a circle again. Once I manged to run that gauntlet, the game then told me to fight a group of goblins and two tanks, so if I tried just running around one tank the other would just shoot me. It's a simple change but it makes a big difference in how you approach the battle.

I was also surprised at how much of a difference Knack's size makes. As you play a level you can find blocks that will very, very slightly increase Knack's size and light bar it adds up over time but on an upgrade per upgrade basis it doesn't feel like much of a change. However with how tight the timing is on some enemy's openings, a slight increase in Knack's arm length makes a world of a difference. Going back to goblins, the typical sword goblin has a particular attack where it starts running towards you and slashes twice. If you run at him after his second slash he will evade backwards just before you can hit him. The usual strategy I employ is to attack him between the first and second slash; there's enough of a delay between the two attacks that I can move in but if I time it wrong I'll die so there's some inherent risk there. However after Knack's grown, even just a little, that second slash becomes a completely viable opening. Knack's arm becomes long enough to hit the goblin during his backwards evasion. I expected Knack's growth to be more of a visual gimmick but these kinds of small changes in enemy balance in relation to your size really surprised me.

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Yeah, I've been using the dash punch off and on but the recovery time is killer in many situations. It's good for extending your time in the air if you're trying to dodge some projectiles or ground slams.

Yesterday someone was using the playroom to stream twerking videos and having robots shoot out of people's butts (which were then sucked back in). Another guy was putting pizza in his pants. An then some other guys were puling doorags over their faces and rapping (It was like something out of Hellraiser). The PS4 have made webstreaming accessible to the mainstream. It will be very interesting to see what happens going forward and I don't know if Twitch is competent enough to moderate it. Worst case scenario, Sony blocks streaming from The Playroom.

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The "cloak and dagger" warzone in Killzone is great. Team deathmatch, no radar, scouts only, knives only, cloak only.

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http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/11/microsoft-confirms-xbox-live-bans-for-excessive-profanity-in-uploaded-clips/

You can get banned from Xbox Live for cursing during videos you record using GameDVR. I know you can choose to upload your videos to Xbox live or you can choose to upload to both Xbox Live and SkyDrive, but can you opt to upload to just SkyDrive and avoid the risk of being banned? Or are people going to have to now watch their language even when wanting to share a video with just friends?

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I left my PS4 at my family's house so my brothers can play it over the Thanksgiving break. I decided to play some Blacklight via RemotePlay tonight but when I signed on I could see one of my brothers was playing Lego Marvel. I pressed start and we were playing two players, one on the console and me via Remote Play one hour away. It seems like the PS4 just treats the Vita as another controller turning on. This is really amazing.


If anyone wants to play multiplayer games just mail me your Vita and I'll register you on my system!

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Well their mahjong is just a port of their existing Vita game so I'm not sure if it actually required that much more effort.

A Dead Nation remake has been announced for the PS4, is being released as the free PS+ game for March, and has an interesting feature making use of the interactive livestreams: