Unboxing Sony’s white-hot PlayStation 4 ‘Destiny’ bundle
Remember this (glacier) white beauty Sony announced at E3? Well, after three long months of anticipation, it’s finally here.
The $450 PS4 Destiny bundle, which goes on sale tomorrow in time for the game’s official launch, will net you a physical copy of Bungie’s first person shooter/MMO hybrid, 500GB of hard disk storage, a 30-day trial to PlayStation Plus and, of course, that stark white next-gen console and DualShock 4. But we know how it is: you want to preview the goods before you plunk down the cash. And since we had one in-house here at Engadget, we took the liberty of tearing open the box to show you what’s inside. So go ahead and click. You’ll be glad you did.
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Buy ‘Destiny’ on PS3 or Xbox 360 and upgrade to new-gen for free
The wait is almost over: Destiny, former Halo-developer Bungie’s ambitious shooter, releases this coming Tuesday. If you’re holding out on it because you don’t have a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, though, there’s no reason. Bungie has announced that should you purchase the game for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, until next January 15th you’re eligible for a free upgrade to a current-gen digital copy. That’s as long as you within the console family you bought the game for originally. Meaning, if you buy the game for PS3 you’ll get a download of it on PS4, gratis. Any extra content like season passes will carry over too — just like your character’s progress and gear.
This goes way beyond what we saw a handful of titles offer around this time last year in a few different ways. For starters, this costs 100 percent less than the upgrade program for, say, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag or Call of Duty: Ghosts did. The other thing is that you won’t have to start from scratch (regardless of how many hours you’ve invested) when you jump to new hardware; Bungie is making the transition as painless as possible.
Speaking of transitions, Bungie hopes to make Remote Playing its latest effort on the PS Vita simple too. Sony’s handheld may be a capable piece of kit but it’s lacking total parity with the PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4 when it comes to controls. To make up for the handheld’s shortage of buttons, Bungie designed a control scheme specifically for playing Destiny on the portable. While the DualShock 4 has a touchpad, the Vita has an entire touch-friendly screen. Bungie has assigned ancillary tasks like tossing grenades, summoning the floating and robotic Peter Dinklage and executing wicked melee attacks to the left, center and right portions of the Vita’s display. And, as Eurogamer noticed, since the portable’s analog sticks don’t click in like their PS4 counterparts, running in-game is handled by pressing down on the system’s D-pad.
Why the extra effort? Well, according to the PlayStation Blog, the short-lived Destiny beta was the number one game Remote Played of any PS4 games for all of this past July. Excited? Well, NeoGAF has noticed you can start pre-loading right now.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Source: Destiny, PlayStation Blog (EU), NeoGAF
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Sony PS4 Remote Play and Game Control Mount coming to Z3 devices
Sony has announced that its new Z3 lineup will exclusively get PS4 Remote Play, a service that has so far only worked with the Vita. The console will detect your Z3 device over WiFi and unlock it, letting you play with a Dualshock4 wireless controller using the new GCM10 Game Control Mount (see the image below). On top of playing games, you’ll also be able to use a Z3 device as a second screen to view livestreams (of games, of course) or chat over the Playstation Network. Sony kept using the word “exclusive” with Remote Play, so if you’re using a non-Z3 handset it seems you’ll be out of luck. The mount and service will likely arrive when the Z3s do, along with the pricing.
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Sony
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Sony’s Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact stuffs full performance into an 8-inch slate
Sony had a minor hit when it unveiled the Xperia Z1 Compact, which crammed a full-power smartphone into a smaller frame; now, it’s hoping to repeat that success with tablets. Its new Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact is not only one of the thinnest (6.4mm) and lightest (0.6lbs) 8-inch tablets you’ll find, but is actually more powerful than the full-size Z2 Tablet. It still has a 1080p display, 3GB of RAM, waterproofing, an 8.1-megapixel rear camera and a 2.2-megapixel front shooter, but runs a speedier 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 processor. The Compact should also last for a very healthy 13 hours of non-stop video playback.
There are a few hefty software upgrades, to boot. Besides the audio upscaling also seen in the new Z3 phones, this is Sony’s first tablet with PlayStation 4 Remote Play — you can not only control your game console from the tablet, but use it as a primary screen if someone’s hogging the TV. You can even buy a custom mount for your DualShock 4 controller so that you don’t have to find a safe resting spot for the slate.
Sony expects the Z3 Tablet Compact to hit shelves in the fall. It’s not revealing full launch details at this point, but there will be both WiFi-only and LTE models.
Source: Sony Mobile
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Watch PS4 streams on your Vita with upcoming app
If you’re a fan of Playstation 4 game livestreaming, Sony’s about to have a PS Vita app for that. At a prelude to the Tokyo Game Show (TGS), it announced updates that will let you view live PS4 game action directly from a PS Vita. There are also themes coming to the PS Vita around the same time — Sony showed off one that centered around the popular (and insane) Dangan Ronpa shooter. It also revealed a pink-backed PS Vita with a white front arriving in Japan on November 13th for 18,980 yen (around $182). There’s no specific dates for the new themes and the PS4 game streaming app, but Joystiq pointed out a translated tweet saying it’ll arrive sometime in October.
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‘Madden 15’ will bring EA’s CoachGlass app to the PlayStation 4
Remember that Xbox exclusive “CoachGlass” app that pushed to push Madden NFL 25 tips and play advice to the second screen? It just got a little less exclusive. In a new post detailing the app’s Madden 15 implementation, EA revealed that the feature will be available on both Xbox One and Playstation 4 platforms. While there’s no word as to why the feature is no longer an Xbox exclusive, its former status won’t be forgotten: the app is keeping the Microsoft-inspired name. There are a few cosmetic changes too — the app has been redesigned to make play data easier to read, and it focuses more on statistics than suggesting strategies.
EA admits that many of the ideas from CoachGlass’ original app inspired Madden 15′s playcall features, but says the second screen add-on is still worthwhile. In addition to the redesign, the app now offers new options for run / pass while on defense and now offers suggestions for offensive plays as well. Check out EA’s full overview right here.
Via: Operation Sports
Source: EA
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PlayStation 4’s new digital game-sharing trick sounds simple
Okay, we know that the PlayStation 4′s Share Play feature is coming, but how does letting a friend on an entirely different console (possibly around the globe) play one of your games work? A lot like how PS4′s remote play with the PS Vita does, apparently. In an interview with Famitsu Weekly, Sony’s head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida said that game developers don’t have to do anything special to enable the feature, and that barring a game requiring the PlayStation Camera, any title should be compatible. Once firmware 2.0 launches, all a friend has to do is send you a Share Play invite and voila you can start playing their copy of Destiny on your TV. If it sounds like we’re living in the future, that’s because we pretty much are.
Don’t, however, go thinking that this is a loophole you can exploit to sidestep ever buying another game: Sony clarified to Kotaku that the guest’s progress would not be saved to their account, but to the host’s. It’s going to be interesting seeing how the feature deals with lag and just what the image quality’s going to look like once it launches. Given our hands-on time with Sony’s PlayStation Now streaming service, though, we’re cautiously optimistic.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Sony
Via: Kotaku
Source: Famitsu
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The gaming industry is booming and Sony’s lead is growing
Earlier this week Sony announced that it’d sold over 10 million PlayStation 4s to date, but that isn’t the half of it: the company’s latest gaming console is once again dominating the sales charts overall. As Sony tells it, July marks the seventh consecutive month that the PS4 outsold Microsoft’s Xbox One. Hardware isn’t the only area Sony is trumping its rival either, as The Last of Us: Remastered led software sales last month by a “considerable” margin ahead of number-two-seller Minecraft on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The gaming sector as a whole is incredibly healthy, too. The NPD Group reports that even though software sales are down overall for July (something it attributes directly to the lack of an NCAA Football release this year), hardware is picking up the slack. Comparing life-to-date numbers of the PS4 and Xbox One to their predecessors, the new consoles are outselling the PS3 and Xbox 360 by almost a whopping 80 percent. That puts this July ahead of last by 13 percent in terms of total money spent in the area, according to NPD.
Nintendo seems to be doing pretty well, too, despite that massive $97 million loss. The outfit says that Mario Kart 8 has now sold over a million copies in the US alone, and the Wii U has increased year-to-date sales by 60 percent compared to 2013.
What about Microsoft? Well, Redmond’s lack of a formal announcement should speak for itself. When we reached out for a comment, a company spokesperson reminded us that the Xbox One sales numbers more-than doubled in June (still no word on what they doubled from) and that “this momentum” continued into July. And, well, that’s about it. When you look at how many Xbox One software-bundled systems that Microsoft is releasing this fall, just how far behind the company is to its main competition (Sony) should be pretty apparent — the firm’s desperate and essentially giving away some of its biggest games in the hopes that people will buy an Xbox One.
Filed under: Cameras, Gaming, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo
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Why Activision is spending $500 million on Destiny
Yes, it’s true: Activision is spending half a billion dollars on Bungie’s Destiny. Yes, that’s true despite Bungie’s statement that, “the budget for Destiny, including associated marketing costs and pizza Wednesdays, is nowhere near 500 million dollars.” And that’s because, when Activision head Bobby Kotick revealed that gargantuan number earlier this year, he was speaking to the entire franchise, not just this September’s game.
“That number has been widely misinterpreted as a production number for the first game,” Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg explained in an interview today at Gamescom. “That number is an all-inclusive number that’s several years worth of investment, including marketing and several games, and a lot of up front investment in things like engines and tools that will be able to be used for years to come.”
This should come as no surprise to anyone closely following the tale of Destiny and Bungie working with Activision. The two companies signed a 10-year contract to produce a series of games under the Destiny moniker; the partnership was announced in April 2010, putting us just over four years into that 10-year deal. Despite being nearly halfway finished, Hirshberg said the $500 million includes more than just marketing, production and “pizza Wednesdays.” It includes additional entries in the franchise, even.
“When you see it play out, it’ll be fairly familiar: we’ll have packaged games, follow on content,” Hirshberg told us. All that is to say that Activision (and presumably Bungie as well) don’t see Destiny as the MMO-like game (think World of Warcraft) that the beta led many to believe: there’s no monthly subscription, no servers to manage, etc.. “I think that people are ascribing more mystery to the business model of Destiny than they need to,” he said.
So, yes, Destiny costs $500 million. But not this fall’s game — that’s the beginning of a much larger plan to make Destiny into the next blockbuster franchise. The next Halo. The next Call of Duty. Or even something bigger.
“Even with all that context, no one should be surprised that Destiny is a huge undertaking,” Hirshberg said, “An ambitious vision takes an ambitious investment. We wouldn’t be making it if we didn’t believe in the potential of the game.”
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Engadget Daily: the price of cable TV, inside Sky Sports News HQ and more!
Today, we investigated the rising prices of cable TV, toured the Sky Sports News HQ, learned about Sony’s 2.0 PS4 update and more! Read on for Engadget’s news highlights from the last 24 hours.
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