The Great Console Race

The next generation of consoles is still shrouded in mystery and rumor, but a few more tidbits of information have been cleared up by Sony and Microsoft.

For the PlayStation 4

The much talked about “Share” button will be controllable by game developers. The point of the “Share” button is to tap into a trend in gaming—live  streaming video of playthroughs. The PlayStation 4 “Share” button, though, has it’s limits. “There will be parts of a game that the maker does not want people to be able to see. For example, on Vita, developers can in certain scenes disable the feature that lets users take a screenshot, and (the Share function) will have a similar mechanism,” Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida told 4gamer.net.  If the developer doesn’t want people to know about their twist ending or final boss battle, they can block that from being shareable.

Sony is already trying to make sure that the PlaySstation 4 is user friendly (and rumors have it cheaper than the PS3, but still on the high end) with better graphics, a more comfortable controller and ease of usability in the user interface.  The release date is still unknown, but the belief is that they will announce the release date before E3 in June, probably around the same time Microsoft announces.

Meanwhile at Microsoft

They are still trying to negate the rumors about the much hated “always on” internet connection.  A new internal Microsoft email says “Durango [the Xbox codename] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today’s Internet. There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should ‘just work’ regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing Blu-Ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game.”

Microsoft has been battling the constant internet connection rumor for awhile, and there was word awhile back that the internet connection would be developer exclusive (I’m thinking EA would probably go for that) but one of the interesting things about the Microsoft email is that it references another Durango rumor—that the Xbox will have a HDMI input to allow it to be hooked up for live/cable TV viewing.

Either way, these two big releases are coming to a big point in their rumor mills—the acknowledgment of a set in stone release day. Microsoft’s big release announcement event will be held later this month, and PlayStation is sure to follow suit.

Which console are you most excited about?