Yeah, I’ve done a lot of research on this lately, and the TCL R series seems to be the best bang for the buck at that size and price point…unless you can live without the extra 10", in which case I would say go for the LG OLED55B7A, which has recently been popping up for around $100 more than the 65" TCL.
Though about trying it but damn why is that game a 60 gig download.
Guess I need to clean out the fridge.
I only had consoles as a kid- I switched to PC gaming pretty early.
I bought my first console in over a decade in 2017. A Switch, and I totally regretted it. I have nothing bad to say about Breath of the Wild or Mario+Rabbids. They’re great games, but not for me.
I should have bought a PS4 pro, and I remedied that this week during the big sale. Installed an SSD and downloaded the games I bought the console for (in order):
Bloodborne
Horizon
Team Ico games
Last of us remastered (and perhaps other Naught Dog games).
Red Dead 2
God of War
The PS4 and/or console exclusives basically. Everything else I’ll play on PC.
Not having much time for gaming, I decided to start from the bottom of the list. In the first couple of hours with GoW I felt the same sense of dread as I had with Zelda (i.e. “I’ve made a $500 mistake”).
Does the combat get more interesting later in the game? The troll and the stranger on the 2nd hardest difficulty are these overly long but otherwise trivial fights. I had similar feelings about the Drauger.
Does the God of War man talk less later? His relationship/dialogue with his son is so boring and cliche.
The viewing angle is tiny and the guy is HUGE. I get mini-headache whenever I spin the camera.
No matter- I switched to Horizon. I normally hate how kids are depicted in games (see God of War). Ciri was an exception, and now Aloy as well. The animation is incredible, and her interaction with the holographic father in the bunker genuinely moved me.
A bit further in- while it’s clear we won’t get Witcher-3 level drama/dialogue, it’s good enough. And the gameplay/combat looks to be better.
I’m saving Bloodborne for last, and I know that will be in my all time top 10 given my love of From. Two games will be enough to justify the purchase.
My only gripe about the PS4 itself? It’s late- I’ve wrapped up work, the sun’s gone down, and I head into the now pitch dark living room. Spin up the PS4 to start on my new collection of games, when lo and behold the controller has a fucking flashlight at the top. Google: can I turn this damn thing off? No, I can only dim it. Another appliance in my living room for which I have to break out the electrical tape.
I am giving some serious thought to moving my PS4 upstairs into my office and hook it into the LG 4K display I have there for my MacBook.
The downside is I try, and fail, to have my home office just be where I do work, and moving the PS4 up here pretty much guarantees I will not ever leave my office.
I totally agree, wish we could turn that light completely off, if only to conserve battery. I think it’s used by the PS4 camera to track your movements. A useless feature.
Don’t do it.
Question: When you’re done playing a game, do you just press the “PS” button to return to the main menu, turn off the tv, and walk away? On the switch, returning to the main menu totally paused the game. Will always pausing that way cause any weirdness? Does the game need to turn fully on/off sometimes?
I waffle on it because I have a hard time seeing some game elements on my 40" TV downstairs.
But yeah, it’s a bad idea. Which means I will do it by the end of the weekend.
Is moving the monitor not an option? You will regret mixing up your play and work areas.
I hate this thread so much. I have a PS4 Pro and Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition staring at me in digital cart right now.
:|
Oh, the work and play areas are thoroughly mixed. I play WoW and Steam games in here all the time.
All I can say is that I saved around 20% total (including the console) with the hardware/software sale. If you’re gonna do it, now’s the time.
In that case, all I can say is that the PS4 looks fantastic on my 4k tv.
I’m warming to the PS4 despite having felt forced into buying it by Sony securing actually good exclusives. (Why can’t they be more like Microsoft?) As such, I’m starting to feel like some of my PC games for which the graphics are less crucial (Rocket League) would be so much quicker to start up on this thing.
It works basically the same way as the Switch. When you hit the PS button it takes you to the system dashboard, your current game is suspended in the background, and as long as you don’t start a different game, you can jump right back into your game. And if you put the PS4 into rest mode—whether you go back to the system dashboard first, or do this directly from the quick system overlay when you press and hold the PS button—your game will also be suspended and you’ll be able to resume directly when you turn the system back on. Rest mode is the low power mode where the system is effectively off for the user, but still draws power and is able to do things like background downloads and start back up quickly. A complete shut down (i.e. safe to unplug from the wall) ends any open game/app.
There are exceptions to the above. At least a few games simply do not support remaining suspended while the system is in rest mode. The only one I’ve run across personally is Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, so my suspicion is this was more likely for early PS4 games, but it’s possible there are more recent examples. It would warn me before I entered rest mode that it was about to completely quit that game, so it won’t catch you by surprise if you have another game that works this way.
Games that rely on a persistent server connection usually support rest mode suspend/resume in the technical sense—the game application won’t close entirely—but if you come back to them after the system has been put in rest mode, they will have disconnected you from the servers and booted you back to the game’s main menu. Destiny and Overwatch come to mind from my own experience, and it seems like reasonable behavior in those examples.
I’m 90% sure the system can maintain the suspend state for one “game” and one “app” at once, so if you drop out of God of War and launch Hulu, you can still switch right back to God of War. But if you drop out of God of War and launch Assassin’s Creed, God of War will be shut down (again, with a warning).
That restriction (one game at a time) is system-wide, so if there will be more than one account using this PS4, it’s worth remembering that someone else’s gaming will close whatever game you left suspended. With my roommates it’s understood you’re responsible for making sure your game is saved and someone else could quit it when they play if you’re not around, so I’m in the habit of making sure I still manually save things when I stop playing and the main benefit I get of the suspend/resume is just the quicker relaunch time if no one else has played in the interim.
So that’s probably way more than you wanted to know.
It’s exactly what I wanted to know and not one bit less. Really appreciate the detailed response.
This sort of suspend thing sounds so minor on paper, but I’m finding it incredibly gratifying to be able to jump in and out so quickly. My gaming PC is it’s own thing, so it’s often not on, and even when it is, there’s always significantly more time from in-seat to in-game.
You can do a trial run with Remote Play.
Here’s a cleaner option to block the light bar.
Moving the PS4 to my office was a short-lived experiment. My PS4 doesn’t do 4K, and the 4K monitor I have doesn’t do HDR. Also, I find that my preferred way of playing is my feet up on my coffee table. I don’t think the UIs are made for playing the games 18" away.
RIght now, I am going to upgrade the downstairs TV to the 4k, but probably won’t immediately upgrade to the PS4 Pro. I need to get a new TV stand, etc, Since the Slim does HDR, I will see some improvement anyway.
Regarding the Fortnite/Epic account locks, and overall blocking of crossplatform play:
https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/1008847050744578050
In other news, water is wet. Nice to see confirmation from an inside source, though.
That makes no sense. It’s not being used on PlayStation. Epic runs the servers that the game clients connect to. There’s no “load” or cost to Sony.
Of course it makes sense. Sony likes money, so they’re locking accounts to their platform to lock their users in.