CES 2014: First-hand impressions on the PlayStation Now

Here's a cumulative look at the first-hand impressions of Sony's PlayStation Now, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas, from a variety of respected tech outlets.


[Also see: What is PlayStation Now?]

Overall, these testers were able to play three games on Sony BRAVIA TVs and the Vita: The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls, and God of War: Ascension.

Dale North from Destructoid found some issues in the technical quality of the Bravia set-up, but nothing out of the ordinary for something that's streamed. Overall, he came away very impressed.

...[E]verything I tried played wonderfully. Both the Vita and Bravia setups played well enough that there's really nothing to talk about here. It is actually easy to not be impressed because it works exactly as you'd expect. Responsive, lag free, and totally without incident -- flawless. It remains to be seen if we'll see as respectable performance over wireless and Internet connections. And we have yet to try mobile and tablet play.

Scott Lowe from IGN praised the Vita's streaming capability and was even more impressed with how Sony making their streaming service available on multiple platforms that aren't Sony-branded.

What surprised me...is Sony's embrace of non-Sony products for PlayStation Now. Although specific partnerships have not been confirmed, Sony has said that it will extend PlayStation 3 games to smartphones, tablets, or even TVs outside of its own family of products. It's a distinctly out of character for Sony, which has historically tied software and experiences to its own proprietary hardware.

Michael McWhertor of Polygon was impressed that the thing actually worked. Like others, he noted "lag input" and "compression artifacts," but everything was "more than playable."

Performance in games like The Last of Us and God of War: Ascension was impressive. Lag input was noticeable, seemingly more so on Vita when moving The Last of Us' Joel and waiting a beat for him to respond, but more than playable. Even the higher frame rate, faster paced action of Ascensionwas playable, though compression artifacts and more muted colors were present.

Image credit: Flickr 

PlayStation 4 Titles Will Require Remote Play on PlayStation Vita

Sony president Shuhei Yoshida has confirmed on Twitter that remote play from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation Vita will be mandatory for all titles, excluding those that use special hardware peripherals.

It was a promise given by Sony to all Vita owners that remote play would be possible, and does exist with certain titles on the PlayStation 3. A few problems with this feature: there's not enough titles that support it and using the feature renders the PS3 useless to do anything while playing with the Vita.

That's apparently going to change. Along with the announcement of a vast majority of PS4 games using remote play, Sony's purchase of Gaikai technology will be used to stream games instead of using the PS3's power.

Here's a more detailed explanation from the Eurogamer article that reported on a developer that told them Sony would make the mandate:

Remote Play works by downscaling the 1080p framebuffer to the Vita's native 960x544 resolution, using the PS4's in-built hardware h.264 video encoder to compress the image. This is then beamed out over WiFi to the Vita, which decodes the video and sends back controller inputs to the PlayStation 4. It's effectively OnLive cloud streaming technology relocated to the home - the difference being that image quality issues can be resolved through much higher-bandwidth video, while input latency is cut down considerably owing to the localised nature of the network.

While there's nothing that confirms multi-use on the new console, it could mean that if someone else in the household wants to use Netflix on the PS4 while someone else plays a game on the Vita with remote play, it could be possible.

[Source: Eurogamer]
[Photo source: Flickr/Javier Dominguez Ferreiro]