1416: Rooted

I haven’t embraced the next generation of video games consoles as yet — except for Wii U, which people keep insisting doesn’t count — and, barring something absolutely astonishing coming out on Xbox One (still a fucking stupid name) or PlayStation 4, I have very little intention of doing so until I absolutely have to for professional purposes.

Launch lineups are rarely much cop anyway, but it’s not just a weak selection of games that’s putting me off this time around; no, it’s more the fact that neither of the two boxes really offer anything I particularly want out of my gaming time at present. That may well all change when they both have some decent exclusives — not to mention the variety of indie games we’ve been promised on both — but at present, they’re two shiny black boxes that do a bunch of things I don’t give a toss about and occasionally, if you ask them nicely, play games.

Let’s take Xbox One first, because this is by far the least appealing of the two systems. Xbox One is a sprawling mess of “entertainment apps,” rolled together into an OS that has seemingly been designed by someone who had no idea what things actually worked about the Xbox 360’s already imperfect OS. Gone is the facility for cross-game party chat; gone is the ability to pop up the guide and quickly check your friends list in game; gone is the ability to see how much fucking hard drive space you have left — and instead we have “Snap” functionality, that allows you to do two things at once.

I do not want to do two things at once with my console. I barely even care about the limited social functionality already built into the PS3 and Xbox 360. I certainly don’t want to make a Skype call while I’m trying to immerse myself in a game, and I definitely don’t want to watch television at the same time as I’m playing a game. When I play a game, I devote my full attention to it; anything less is, to me, disrespectful to the people who worked hard on it. I won’t turn off the soundtrack and listen to my own music — except in racing games, where the soundtrack is usually generic bland-o-rock anyway — and I certainly won’t listen to podcasts or watch videos while I’m playing. I don’t play games as idle wastes of time or just “something to do” — it’s my chosen means of entertaining myself and consuming cultural content, so it deserves me showing it that much respect, and Xbox One doesn’t appear to be built with that in mind.

PlayStation 4 is less offensive to me in this regard but it’s still stuffed full of features I’ll never use. I seriously doubt I’ll ever use the video recording facility, for example, and I still do not see the appeal of streaming as either a broadcaster or a viewer — particularly if every bastard person in the world is doing it. The system is, at least, on the whole, seemingly designed more as a games console than an entertainment megabox, so there’s that, but without any compelling games — save perhaps Resogun, which I’m certainly not buying a new console for — there is precisely zero reason to pick one up just yet.

I’m not convinced either of these systems have been designed with players like me — people who have grown up with the video games medium almost since its inception — in mind. I know for a fact Xbox One certainly hasn’t been — it’s trying desperately to replace the “family friendly box” reputation that the Wii had and the Wii U has, so far, failed to replicate, and in the process has decided to vomit a bunch of features only useful to those with chronic attention deficit disorder all over itself. Balls to that shit. Also, Microsoft’s “experiments” with microtransactions can go eat a thousand dicks.

I will almost inevitably get both systems at some point in the future, either for work purposes or if some particularly compelling exclusive emerges — something from any of my favourite Japanese devs appearing on PS4, for example — but at present I’m more than happy working through my substantial PlayStation 3 backlog, dipping occasionally into a few Xbox 360 titles I’m yet to play and spending the majority of my gaming time on PC. Not to get all master racey, but PC still beats the pants off both consoles in terms of both performance and flexibility.