[chemgear]

Originally Posted by llama64

I'm surprised consoles are still a thing to be honest. All they are now is a small form factor PC with HDMI output and a customized/closed operating system.

Speak of the devil, New York Times today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/te...on-4.html?_r=0

I spent a week comparing the Xbox One and the PS4, and in my opinion, the PlayStation is the one to buy — if you’re going to buy a console at all. More on that later.

The Xbox One’s inclusion of Kinect is one reason it costs $500, compared with $400 for the PS4. In Xbox One, Kinect has a wider viewing angle, higher-quality image and facial recognition for identifying individual users. It says, “Hi, Molly” when I sit down on the couch, and then loads my personalized dashboard and recent activities. It’s cool and futuristic, but works inconsistently.

I found myself using basic commands like “Xbox, go home,” and then navigating the rest using the controller or my TiVo remote. And I found it annoying to have to go through the Xbox to get to TV every time. My 6-year-old son loved shouting commands at the console; unfortunately it rarely recognized his voice, and his attraction soon faded.

All this description illustrates the overall fatal flaw of the Xbox One: It’s too much work.

I spent hours setting up the Xbox One. It was in my home for two full days before I enjoyed even a second of game play; there were technical issues with its TV integration (solved by swapping out an HDMI cable after 90 minutes of troubleshooting), and there were endless updates to download.

By comparison, the PlayStation 4 was a delight to set up and enjoy. I plugged it in, downloaded a relatively tiny 300MB update, spent about 10 minutes setting up my PlayStation Network profile and was playing games 10 minutes after that.

Speed is everywhere. The menu and navigation screens on the PS4 are startlingly fast and responsive. Games load noticeably quickly — much faster than the Xbox games, even after updates.

I would argue that most things on the Xbox One are hidden or harder to use than they need to be. In my time with the PlayStation 4, I found it straightforward and, most important, fun. That ought to be the highest pursuit of a device invented for playing games, so for my money, the keep-it-simple philosophy of the PlayStation 4, plus the $100 price break, make it the winner.

The real question, though, is whether the idea of a console itself is out of date.

And spending $60 for games — no matter how graphically intensive — is hard to stomach in a world of low-priced apps. The game costs are especially painful since neither the Xbox nor the PlayStation can play games from the previous generation consoles.

So, the PlayStation is the better game console of the two, but in the end, it may be a victory of one dinosaur over another.