As the next generation of game consoles get ready to roll out, a good friend has opted to give me the long-term use of his PS4.
I am so totally stoked.
During a rough financial patch, a few years back, I had to sell mine in order to keep the heat on and put food on our table. I've missed it, ever since. Over the past couple of weeks, I got to finally finish Fallout 4 (with all of the DLC!) as well as Batman: Arkham Knight. But there's still like, almost five years of games out there, that I've never had the opportunity to play. I'm betting scads of them are less expensive to purchase now, as well—Once we're out of our sublet and back into the RV, storage will be at a premium, so I'll likely go digital downloads only. As we'll be living in seclusion on Vancouver Island, this fall and winter, having the console to help keep me from going insane (or at least building on the level of insanity that I've already achieved), is going to be such a welcome comfort.
I've got a copy of Red Dead Redemption III to noodle with. Any advice on what titles I should pick up? I like story-driven RPGs and open-world games. Straight ahead shooters and online games aren't my thing. Read the rest
“I originally only made NES/SNES cartridges out of wood. Someone kept on bugging me to make him a Soul Reaver cartridge, so I eventually made him one. This was made out walnut, cherry and poplar using a laser engraver.” Read the rest
I've been waiting for the PlayStation Classic to be cheap enough to impulse buy. $40 was my price point and today Amazon has it beat by a penny.
The PS-Classic comes loaded with 20 games, several of which I would like to play. The console is hackable with little more than a Google search and it seems simple to add games.
I'm looking forward to playing Twisted Metal with my daughter.
PlayStation Classic Console via Amazon Read the rest
Last June, 18-year-old Daniel Fabian of Pasco County, Florida was playing Grand Theft Auto Online, when he informed the other players in his team chat that he was going to take a break to "smash" (have sex with) a 15-year-old girl.
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Oklahoma City Thunder basketball star and retro-videogamer Paul George worked with Nike and Sony on a new pair of PS1-inspired sneakers. Due out December 1, the PG 2.5 x PlayStation design follows on the heels (sorry) of the black PG2 x PlayStation sneakers that were released in February and sold out in a hot minute.
"For those who know me, gaming is a big part of who I am – I love the fans and I love this community, so it was amazing to see the gaming and sneaker worlds collide with the original PG2 collaboration," George writes. "This time around, I wanted to take the design old school, back to my earliest days of gaming. For me – as I’m sure many of you can relate – those memories date back to the original PlayStation."
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We've come to the end of an era in portable gaming: according to Engadget, Sony has announced that they'll cease producing their handheld PS Vita in Japan, next year.
At the 2018 Tokyo Game Show, Sony has announced the birth of a new product and what could possibly be the final nail in the coffin for another. Sony Interactive Entertainment SVP Hiroyuki Oda has revealed that the company will cease PS Vita's production in Japan sometime in 2019. Further, he said the electronics/gaming giant has no plans to create a successor, echoing Shuhei Yoshida's revelation way back in 2015 that Sony doesn't see a market for a follow-up to the handheld console.
That it's not going to be produced for the Japanese market any longer is likely the final nail in the PS Vita's coffin. Japan was the nation where the handheld was most popular. If it's dead there, it'll soon be dead everywhere else as well. I for one am sad to see it go. I have a large library of PS Vita and PSP games that I still enjoy goofing on, from time to time. The size of the PS Vita and its performance made it an enjoyable piece of kit, for me. I ran out to buy one as soon as it became available in Canada and never regretted the decision.
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The fad for fire-and-forget retro consoles continues with Sony's PlayStation Classic. It's $100, has 20 games built-in, modern connectors, and the original 1995 design—albeit shrunk to the size of the original's controller.
Five of the games were announced: Final Fantasy 7, Jumping Flash, R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, Tekken 3 and Wild Arms.
The mini console is approximately 45% smaller than the original PlayStation, and it emulates the original’s look and feel by featuring similar controllers and packaging. Long-time fans will appreciate the nostalgia that comes with rediscovering the games they know and love, while gamers who might be new to the platform can enjoy the groundbreaking PlayStation console experience that started it all. All of the pre-loaded games will be playable in their original format.
The NES Classic and SNES Classic are huge moneyspinners for Nintendo, so this was an inevitability.
It'll be out on December 3. Sony's press release says you can pre-order it, but the only place I could find was this unnervingly empty database stub at Best Buy. Read the rest
I've been a PlayStation guy for a long time now. Read the rest
When pictures of the forthcoming sleeker PlayStation 4 "Slim" showed up on Twitter and NeoGAF, no-one knew if they were the real deal. But when Sony started making noise and having the images disappeared from Facebook, everyone knew they were the real deal.
Eurogamer, having taken legal advice and removed video coverage of the box, confirms the story, with new high-resolution photos.
Bear in mind here that what Sony got taken down were not NDA-sealed marketing images or even photos surreptitiously taken in its private facilities: if the reports are to be believed, it's scrubbing images it does not own, of a console that was, supposedly, prematurely sold to a member of the public.
We can confirm that the PS4 Slim is real.
In our bid to confirm the veracity of the images that leaked online last night (more on that below), Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter visited the person who claimed to have bought the console from Gumtree.
ORIGINAL STORY: The PlayStation 4 Slim has leaked online.
The new console was first spotted on auction website Gumtree, before being picked up by NeoGAF.
Twitter user shortmaneighty2, who spotted the Gumtree listing, and NeoGAF user Venom Fox have posted multiple images of the console, showing it boxed, unboxed and compared to the original PS4 console.
It's "kind of ugly," writes Erik Kain at Forbes. Read the rest
Microsoft long ago stopped saying how many XBox Ones it had sold, but figures released by Electronic Arts expose numbers far short of rival Sony's Playstation 4.
On a financial call with reporters, CEO Blake Jorgensen said the combined install base of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 was about 55 million units. With Sony boasting of 36 million PS4s shifted, that makes for 19 million Xbox Ones.
The numbers tally with rumors, but both machines are doing well given that we're still only 2 years into the current generation of hardware. The big loser this time around is Nintendo, thought to have sold only about 11m Wii Us. Read the rest
Adam Jones of Skegness, England was given a year jail sentence for "aggravated vehicle taking and driving without a license or insurance" after leading police on a 100mph chase that damaged countless cars. After he was caught, Jones reportedly told authorities that his driver's education consisted of playing Playstation driving games.
"You said you 'Only learnt to drive on a Playstation game," the judge told Jones. "You were driving like a Playstation game. You drove as fast as you could as if in a video or playstation game without any care for those around you."
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Sony's game console comes in a box 19 inches long, 13 inches wide, and just over 4 inches thick. It does not fit in your pants, as Floridian Christopher Caldwell learned to his dismay.
A security guard at a Port St. Lucie Walmart told police that he saw Caldwell, 36, not only "sticking the PlayStation 4 in his pants" but stuffing in accessories, too. When he left the store without paying for the gear, he was stopped. Mr. Caldwell now faces a charge of felony grand theft.
Will Greenlee of the St. Lucie News-Tribune explains what sort of pants might be able to contain the 10-pound retail package, or even merely the 6.17-pound console itself.
Pants fitting that description include so-called Hammer pants, which are strikingly generous in the thigh/crotch area and were popularized by the 1990s rapper M.C. Hammer (real name Stanley Kirk Burrell).
Harem pants, often worn by belly dancers, also fit the bill. A November 2012 article in “Vanity Fair” talks of Justin Beiber’s affinity for harem pants and describes them as “a supremely unflattering style of trousers that droop above the knee like an oversize diaper before tapering down to the ankle.”
[via] Read the rest
Sony's classic console was originally envisaged as part of a collaboration with then-market leader Nintendo. It went its own way, and the rest is history. Here's a look at a rarely-pictured prototype, though, thanks to imgur user DanDiebold. [via] Read the rest
Let's have a deep chat about the practical feasibility of getting our childhoods back.
More perfect for being unfinished, The Last Guardian is a a yearning soul-whisper for its sentimental fans, the lost game of a microgeneration.
After a presentation that dragged on for hours, Sony failed to show the assembled game press the gadget they were there to see. The verdict was in before the event was over: another Sony shitshow. The New York Times' Brian X Chen sums it up:
During the 140-minute event, which started at 6 p.m. in New York, the press reactions started with impatience in the first hour, gradually rising to frustration in the second hour and finally, in the third hour, a combination of disbelief and disappointment when the show concluded with no price tag, no shipping date, and not even a prototype or a picture of the PlayStation 4 revealed. Left without a box to review, the press turned on Sony instead.
However, we can EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL the design for the new PS4, above. All is forgiven, Sony! Read the rest
Playstation 4, from Kotaku's liveblog
'Tis the season for big news in console gaming: both Microsoft and Sony have been expected to announce new hardware. Sony is first with a new edition of the PlayStation 4. Around the web, live-blog coverage of the invite-only announcement event: Verge, Engadget, Kotaku, Ars, Wired.
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