What We Played: PS4 Launch Special

Friday 29th November 2013. A day which saw more of your TSA team at home than usual, twitching at the sound of every diesel engine and car door, and filled with giddy excitement whenever someone chanced to knock on our doors.

I was one of the lucky ones and was dissecting the packaging to get at my PlayStation 4 just after 11AM, having expected to wait most of the day. I quickly set up, upgraded, etc., the first dilemma of the day in what to play first.

As I’d gone for the Player Edition, the one with Killzone: Shadow Fall, that was the obvious choice.  It’s certainly very pretty and remarkably colourful compared to Killzone 2, the last game in the series that I played. And it’s that lack of practice with FPS’, all my gun-toting since Battlefield 3 having been in third person titles, that led to Shadow Fall making a fairly early exit from my PS4 after only about 45 minutes.

My marksmanship was staggeringly and frustratingly poor, so while I had other games to play, I did just that. I will go back to it, maybe restarting on easy while I get my eye in. I’m certainly interested to see how the use of the tactical scan and OWL drone change the gameplay dynamics, as the game seems to be moving away from being squad based.

Super Stardust HD remains one of my favourite PS3 games and thanks to PlayStation Plus its spiritual successor, Resogun, was a free download on my PS4. Of course SSHD running in 2D could already hit 1080p at 60FPS on the PS3 so there was never any doubt that Resogun would do the same, just the question of how Housemarque would use all the extra FLOPs.

Clearly their choice was to go for particles and lots of them, increase the surface of the playing area and remove the planet that was blocking your view of what is going on over the other side. It looks great, plays great and has that SSHD feel.

And that’s my only problem with it; it feels like I’m playing SSHD again. Okay, so the time bonuses have gone and been replaced by a “save the last humans” mechanic (announced by your DS4’s speaker at the start of each level), which is confusing me somewhat as I can’t always work out why some of them are dying, and you no longer have to switch between weapons for maximum effect. But it is SSHD 2 in all but name. I will still be playing it excessively though.

The only other game I played on launch day was Flower, another one that was free to download thanks to Sony’s generous Cross-Buy system. For me it is still thatgamecompany’s finest game to date, sorry Journey fans. It’s not without reason that Flower was the first (and so far only) game I’ve used to try out the new Share button.

I’d forgotten just how magical Flower is. It’s great to have a reason to play it again! #PS4share pic.twitter.com/LFIXwaXLQ2

— Watchful (@KnightOfSwords) November 29, 2013

Peter spent some of his time on Friday, while waiting for his PS4, playing FIFA 14 on his Xbox One! When his PS4 finally turned up, instead of gaming he set about swapping the HDD over and by the time he was ready to roll again, the PSN had gone down. Since then he’s sadly had quite a busy weekend, and not had all that much time to spend with his new machine.

You may have noticed that Stefan’s PS4 suffered from a broken Blu-ray drive which left Killzone: Shadow Fall off of his launch day gaming menu. Like me his other two experiences came courtesy of Resogun and Flower:

Resogun is an absolutely astonishing game to look at. It’s actually really easy to miss out on a lot of the graphical prowess and particle physics effects in the heat of the action, so it was only really when I was playing with Davs in co-op, where I ran out of lives and was watching him play, that I was able to take in just how much is being chucked around on screen, with the shockwaves of explosions kicking up and dislodging thousands of tiny cubes.

It was also really lovely to revisit Flower, with that game’s revamp. While I didn’t really get on with the controls on Vita, the DS4’s motion and tilt sensors are really responsive. I was able to turn on a dime, it felt like, and just do exactly what I wanted to. I think it’s even better than the PS3 version in that regard, and it looks so lovely in 1080p, as well!

When I finally did get to play games on disc, Killzone: Shadow Fall and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag were what I dabbled with, both looking incredibly good. I’ve not really tried much Killzone single player just yet, but I played a few games online with people from TSA and twitter, and had a great time, tearing through the enemy and not losing a single match.

Aran didn’t manage to get online with his PS4 until around 9pm and his initial thought was that none of the trailers prepared him for how good everything looked.

Killzone: Shadow Fall is a decent shooter, though I did find myself getting a bit lost on some of the more open levels. It isn’t a forgiving game but I am enjoying it.

Resogun will be the first PS4 game I will try and platinum. It’s amazing, looks gorgeous and is such a good challenge. If DLC is announced for it, I’ll probably get it.

9pm would be considered quite early to Dom, who got his machine and then played far into Saturday morning following a long day at work:

I’ve spent most of my time on Resogun and Killzone: Shadow Fall, Resogun being a classic arcade game which epitomises the ‘just one more go’ feeling, and Killzone just a high quality FPS that I’m only just getting to grips with the multiplayer on (after some embarrassing early rounds).

How did your own PS4 launch days go? Did you too spend most of your time with Killzone and Resogun?