Had it for a bit over a week, so here's my experiences with my shiny new PS4 so far. Note this is not any kind of formal review, just my blatherings about my impressions of it.
First off, I got the wrong flipping colour! smh The black one looks very smart, but the Glacier White looked really nice on Amazon, so I plumped for that instead. Opened the box and it turns out that it's a bit of a boring looking light grey. Well, I couldn't be bothered to return it just for that and get the black one, so I did the only sensible thing a nerdy geek like me could do: I named it
Fugly. That's the machine name, the way Windows does it and now I'm happy with it. Incidently, the controller looks nice in this colour, so it's not all bad. I also got the official Sony vertical stand for it at the same time (£15) so it can take up the minimum amount of space. It's a bit wobbly on the stand though, no matter how much I tighten it, which I think should be a bit better.
So, what's it like for gaming? Graphics quality is not bad for integrated graphics and generally looks nice. I've only tried Rainbow Six Siege on it at the moment though and don't plan on getting a whole slew of games for it, as it's primarily intended as a tool for playing online with my friends, so the only games I'll buy are for playing with them and perhaps an exclusive or two over time.
It can sometimes run the game at 60fps, but it tends to hit 30fps rather more often than I'd like, which is rubbish, but useable. Interestingly, vsync is switchable in the game's settings. The mouse look panning issue on an fps game is fairly awful and really screws up my aim, but I'm learning to work around it a bit now I've gotten used to it. The controller feels nice in my hands, well made and the controls are all very positive.
I was able to create a PSN account (with some hassle, more later) and play online with my friends. However, after a while, I kept getting removed (kicked) all the time when trying to connect to a server. A bit of research showed that this turned out to be due to NAT type 3, which is restrictive for a PS4. Lots of advice around the internet about opening various firewall ports, but in one of them it said to enable UPNP as well so I tried that only which fixed the problem completely - no open ports required. I'm sure I've read about security issues with UPNP, so I'll have to look into this later. It now shows NAT type 2 which is perfectly fine.
It was comforting to see that this "no hassle" zero configuration that is supposed to be a console's big advantage was absent! Yep, for some reason, trying to log in at
www.playstation.com is a real crapshoot for my new account, with it usually giving me an error message or the web page just not loading (tried three different browsers) but did log in just fine at
www.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com. Dunno why, as my friends can log in ok. I might try creating a new account and seeing what happens. Still getting a login error today, more than a week later.
The PS4 has a "10 foot" TV interface as you might expect, which is mostly quite intuitive and quite slick. Of course, it's a complete Sony closed walled garden in terms of content, so you can't go elsewhere if you don't like the way it works or the prices. It's got a fair number of configuration options too, which was a pleasant surprise and navigating the PlayStation Store was easy, but it's nowhere near as fully featured and slick as the Steam platform. The prices are another matter though. For example, The Last of Us Remastered is £19 on Amazon, but a whopping £55 in the PS Store! Price gouging much? Needless to say, I'll buy it from Amazon if I want this game or borrow it off a friend. I can also trade in a disc, but not on a PS Store game. The downside is that the disc must be in the drive while the game is being played, but that's not too bad.
Unsurprisingly, it plays Blu-rays very well. There's little mechanical noise (sounds really cheap and rattly on inject/eject) and the picture quality is perfect, with no skipping. I was all fingers and thumbs at first on trying to use the controller as a remote control since nothing is marked, but I've got the hang of it now after referring to the onscreen button legends for a while. It works well, but the speed options are weird. Forward goes 1.5x, 30x, 60x and 120x. Massive jumps, rather than the more sensible jumps found on every other player out there. Still, it's useable like this.
A PlayStation Plus paid subscription is actually
required for any kind of synchronous online play that isn't a simple turn-based game, which sucks balls frankly. One doesn't have to do this on a PC for the exact same connectivity. At least there's the option for a 14-day free trial, which I've taken.
I enjoyed playing with my mates (the primary reason for buying it) and we're all using a voice headset which really makes the difference, but I did die an awful lot, especially due to the aim issue. I might buy one of those PC gaming style accessories for it, or a mouse and keyboard adapter, but they're all awfully expensive at around £60-80 or more. This looks like a classic example of deliberate product lock-in since with the two front USB ports, there's no technical reason that a standard keyboard and mouse couldn't work on it.
My verdict: A decent gaming PC with a high end graphics card and decent CPU really blows it away on performance and isn't a closed walled garden, but it's still quite nice to use, play games on and watch TV on (discs and online catch-up services). Still less hassle to get going and maintain than a PC, but you'll pay for the privilege in terms of performance and money spent on the games. PC gamers should only buy it if they have a specific and compelling reason - such as that pestering friend!
Points rating: 6/10