Throughout the earliest memories of time, mankind has always tried to be the best at everything it could be proud of, whether it be through one aspect, or many, or all of them. History has recorded this time and time again, but recently mankind has created a new kind of war, much like how kings and emperors send their champions to represent their land against other lands, the people are the new rulers and their champions are their handpicked devices. The tools themselves have been redefined and have evolved from sharp pointy objects to living, breathing engines of raw power. And now we take a look at one of the newest kinds of wars of mankind, the console wars, and why the PS4 is the greatest among the few available champions of this generation.
Whenever I wake up and head to my TV, I would always look with pride at the console that’s just sitting right below it, the PS4. It is without a doubt a gaming machine that I can rely on, one where I wouldn’t need to worry about game breaking bugs as much as I would with a PC and where the graphics to performance ratio is just right for gaming needs and human eyes and not to mention all the exclusives that I could want that isn’t available on any other gaming platform. The PS4 truly is a monster of a gaming machine that nobody would ever regret getting.
The extensions of the PS4 is also something to take note of. Like being able to play some of the best games on any platform in Virtual Reality, like traversing the world through a small critters point of view in Moss, shooting enemies with slow-motion bullets in Superhot, and filling a bucket under your waist when playing Resident Evil 7. Not to mention the experience I could get when I connect my PS4 to my PSVita is nothing short of amazing. Just try imagining playing Final Fantasy XV in the toilet! The PS4 truly has the best budget to experience ratio when it comes to virtual reality and knows how to make use of its portable machine counterparts.
The PlayStation 4 has always had an edge over its competition and what it lack in some areas, it more than made up for it in others. When we look back at E3 2013 when their eighth generation consoles were announced for both Microsoft and Sony, the PS4 gave everyone at Microsoft a scare when they announced that the console would be priced much cheaper than the Xbox One, they strayed away from the always online approach, the graphics would be much higher, and that they shunned the single-use DRM games tactic. It was nothing short of a landslide victory for the PS4 even before day 1 of its release.
The PS4 was also the first console to give us gamers a taste of what 4K gaming would feel like when it released its mid-generation console with the PS4 Pro. While it wasn’t real 4K that we got, it was enough to wet our appetite for what future console gaming could hope to be. While the Xbox One X is the go-to console for 4K gaming now, the Pro was the trailblazer and I’m sure as hell that Microsoft would never have created the Xbox One X if it wasn’t for the PS4 Pro.
Even when Nintendo released their 2nd eighth generation console, the hybrid console known as the Switch, the PS4 still stuck to its roots and was not swayed in the least, the focus, the drive, and the flexibility was still there. The content the PS4 had was nothing short of overwhelming when compared to the Switch. While it definitely has some great exclusives especially since Nintendo has some of the most iconic games and characters to boot, the device became something of a port machine where the number of exclusives was overshadowed by the number of games ported from other consoles.
What the PS4 has over its competitors is that it didn’t have an identity crisis, it knew what it wanted to be and stuck to it all throughout its life cycle, it never needed to be anything else since all it would do is sacrifice something or a lot of things just to make something else work. All it needed to be is a machine dedicated solely to gaming and giving its players the best experience console couch gaming could give as much as the current technology can. It gave us all the most exclusive titles, the best stories, the most diversified genres, the best combination between the Western and Eastern games and narratives, the most optimal graphical fidelity a console could give during most of its life cycle, and without a doubt the greatest overall experience I and probably most gamers could ask for from a home console.
While it is true that the machine is not perfect and that it comes with a few setbacks like its stance on online multiplayer with other platforms, its questionable choice of paid online connectivity when compared to its predecessor the PS3, and its lack of design when it comes to controllers just to name a few, I would still pick the PS4 over any other console or even gaming platform if I had to pick just one out of all the choices on offer since my investment in the overall fun factor with the machine would be much greater than what I could ever project with all the others.
What I also love about the PS4 is that the company behind it, Sony, has been nothing short of godsend to game developers. If it wasn’t for Sony, some of the games that we know, love, and grew up with would have never come to being what they are now. Like with the Yakuza series, nobody would give it a chance but Sony took it and it has now become one of the best and most dramatic series the Playstation has to offer, or when Squaresoft parted with Nintendo, Sony’s console at the time, the PS1, gave the Final Fantasy series a new home for it to grow and continue its numbers starting from the most memorable one with Final Fantasy VII. Sony is definitely a company that not only takes a chance at the longest shot of gambles but also gives us all hope for more great games to be able to enjoy some day. We should be thankful for Sony for giving us so many stories, games, time killers, and most of all memories that we will never forget and carry forever throughout our lives.
After all that has been said and done, it is without a doubt that the PS4 is definitely the greatest platform of this generation. It is the console where we can play the best games first before any other platform, where if budget is a concern it is the best go to platform that can offer the most experience on any hardware, where the support of the console is nothing short of amazing, where we can play, learn, and create many memories with our friends through gaming, and where we can get the best connection out of the games that we love. The PS4 is THE console of the generation!