Gamnesia’s Hands-On Look at the PlayStation 4

Gamnesia: "The first thing I want to point out is that overall, I am absolutely impressed with the PlayStation 4, what it can do, and what it can offer. It's a technological marvel and quite an impressive feat that Sony's attempting: trying to bring gaming and social media together, so that the two feel less disconnected. I thoroughly enjoy the ability to be playing Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag while party chatting across games, downloading multiple games and updates, and then going to check out the store while rendering a video, all the while not having the framerate, graphics, nor gameplay suffer even the tiniest flicker of a pixel. The amount of on-board memory the console has, the 500GB hard drive — which is easily replaceable by the way — and it's beefy CPU and GPU help make all of that possible.

Without trying to be what some would call a "graphics whore," I have to say that the games just look simply beautiful. It's amazing how just a home console is able to render games in 1080p at 60fps. Of course this is completely obsolete to a high-end gaming PC, but it's still very impressive for a console at just a $399 price tag. I had the opportunity to compare some PlayStation 3 games to their PlayStation 4 counterparts, and the difference is both noticeable and incredible. Flower, by Thatgamecompany, for example, is cross-buy capable is as available on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation 4, and I was able to compare the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions side-by-side. Though the game is native to the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4 uprezzes the graphics and is able to play in 60fps. One might not think that Flower is 60fps at all that impressive, but when you actually have the new — and extremely comfortable, incidentally — DualShock 4 and feel how well the new and improved Sixaxis feels and controls in conjunction with the game, you can literally feel the difference in your hand. And this speaks nothing about how each individual blade of grass is detailed separately, how the wind moves, how improved the sound quality is ... basically every aspect of the game is made better because of the PlayStation 4."