You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 7 days — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
To keep the buzz going from its recent PlayStation 4 announcement event in New York, Sony’s just released some high-res screenshots from the upcoming console’s user interface. While we already saw many of them at the big event, there’s a few intriguing images showing how the tablet or smartphone interface might look, along with shots of the social and video editing aspects of the UI. Other screens show the home, sharing, game streaming, user profile and friend feed pages, so hopefully the gallery below will whet your appetite until we can all actually see, you know, the console.
Gallery: Sony PlayStation 4 interface
Via: Edge Online
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
There’s been some debate over the state of the PlayStation 4’s hardware when Sony declined to display the console itself at its PlayStation Meeting. As we’re quickly learning, the company had good reason to keep the box under wraps: it’s not quite done yet. Sony Computer Entertainment Japan President Hiroshi Kawano has revealed to 4Gamer that even he hasn’t seen the finished system, and he only saw the DualShock 4 the day before it went on stage. We wouldn’t worry about the design’s progress just yet, but the news hints that Sony’s timing on pulling it all together is much tighter than it was for the PS3 — although that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Whatever the PS4 looks like in the end, we know it won’t support the DualShock 3. Perpetual font of wisdom (and Worldwide Studios President) Shuhei Yoshida has warned that the PlayStation Move is the only controller making the leap to the next generation. That’s not entirely surprising given the changes in button layout and the addition of some Move technology — Sony likely wants to set some expectations, and our existing game library won’t play on the PS4 as-is. The cutoff may still be disappointing for anyone who invested in a full set of gamepads for LittleBigPlanet sessions and has to once more start from scratch.
Source: 4Gamer (translated), IGN
The big story of the week, no, month, is Sony’s next-generation console, the PlayStation 4. Well, the company didn’t show us the physical box itself and instead chose to detail a new DualShock controller, some not-hugely-specific hardware outlines and titles we can expect to see (in some form) on the fourth generation PlayStation. As Pythagoras said: “Number rules the universe,” and the After Math prefers it that way. Find some of those numbers after the break.
First things first: We still haven’t seen the PlayStation 4. That said, if you’d like to see someone other than a Sony rep or developer putting their hands all over that DualShock 4 with touchpad and share button — we asked, but apparently network TV still trumps internet — then say no more. Managing Director of Guerilla Games Hermen Hulst came by the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show with a prototype unit (not shown) loaded up with the Killzone: Shadow Fall demo we saw at the press conference. Jimmy and guest Anthony Anderson played a bit, with varying degrees of success and were predictably impressed by the new system, due to release by the end of this year. Unfortunately, there’s no new information to be had, unless you wanted to know what the ceilings in the game look like (clearly, Anderson prefers to play shooters inverted). Watch the video embedded after the break, we’re going to doublecheck ?uestlove’s Instagram to see if he got any backstage or setup shots of the system behind the curtain.
Via: Kotaku
Source: Latenight (YouTube)
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The only hardware shown on-stage during Sony’s PlayStation 4 event was the retooled DualShock controller, the DualShock 4. No box. No PS4 Eye. No new version of Move. As for the console itself, its absence makes some sense in light of today’s news from SCEA prez Jack Tretton that the console’s internals are “still in development in terms of final specs and design.” So, how final is the only piece of hardware Sony was willing to trot out? “It’s near final. It’s just gonna be small tweaks being done,” Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida told us in an interview this morning.
Sadly, he also admitted we won’t be able to touch any of it anytime soon. “By E3, I think” was the best he could offer. He blamed Sony’s hardware folks for not allowing access, despite him pleading with PR to give hands-on time. “I was just asking our PR team can we just let you touch this stuff. Our hardware guys don’t want you to find out some detail that …” he said, trailing off. “Some dirty secret?” we asked. “Of course,” he responded with a smile.
Moving on to Vita and the Remote Play functionality on PS4 (which allows you to play any PS4 game on your Vita, via streaming), Yoshida said that — unlike with the PlayStation 3’s Remote Play functionality — Sony’s asking devs to try their game via Remote Play on Vita before submitting final code for publishing. He also said that, using Remote Play, developers could implement Vita-specific controls. “Some PS Vita games make use of the edge of the screen to add contextual buttons — that works really well, I think, and it’s easy to see. So that kind of thing I’d like to see developers do on PS Vita over Remote Play,” Yoshida explained.
He also apologized for not showing the final box, getting out ahead of the inevitable question from the room full of journalists. But hey, we sympathize — Sony’s gotta save something for E3, right? PlayStation Plus on PlayStation 4 may also be on that list; when we asked Yoshida about its presence on the next Sony game console, he coyly answered, “I know the answer, but we’re not talking about it. I’m a subscriber, so I’d like to see it.” Us too!
Sony head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida is a gregarious, smart, talkative interviewee. And that’s exactly why it was so weird that he fully waffled when we asked him to address whether or not the newly unveiled PlayStation 4 will play used games. “That’s my expectation, that PS4 games will work on [the] hardware. That’s my expectation,” he told us in an interview this morning. When we pushed to clarify what he meant, Yoshida stuttered. “Ummm … yeah. We have to really name our system services to explain more about it,” he added.
That’s a similar answer to what he told Eurogamer last night at Sony’s big PlayStation 4 announcement event, vagueness and all. Yes, used games “can play on PS4,” but does it require a license repurchase? Perhaps you have to belong to an as-yet-unidentified PS4 online network? It’s not entirely clear, but there seems to be a caveat to the statement, “Used games work on PS4.” Sony, however, isn’t saying what that caveat is just yet. Of course, current-gen consoles all support buying any used, physical copies of games and playing them on their corresponding game consoles
Yoshida also confirmed that games will launch at retail as well as digital, but, well, you probably already guessed that from the included Blu-ray disc drive.
Despite showing a variety of games running on the newly announced PlayStation 4, Sony PlayStation’s US head Jack Tretton says the console’s “still in development in terms of final specs and design.” He told All Things D as much in an interview this morning; the PlayStation 4’s specs were detailed in a press release by Sony last evening, which detail the internals as an 8-core 64-bit x86 “Jaguar” CPU built by AMD, a Radeon GPU comprised of 18 “compute units” which push out 1.84 TFLOPS, and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM.
Tretton also said he “hopes” that the PlayStation 4 won’t cost $599 at launch (the PlayStation 3 launched in two models, at $499 and $599). “When I think about the console, you open it up, you look at it, you certainly look at it when you insert a disc, but for most people, it’s behind a cabinet or on a shelf somewhere and you spend all your time looking at the screen,” Tretton said.
Sony’s focus last night, however, was all games. As for when we’ll see the elusive box? “There will be multiple opportunities to share the look of the console between now and launch,” he said, “We just didn’t choose this first event as the time to show it.” In speaking with Sony president of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida this morning, we confirmed that we’ll get to go hands-on with the PlayStation 4 “by E3,” which goes from June 11th to the 13th.
Source: All Things D
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