Sony announces Play station 4 for Holiday 2013

The new control pad for PS 4

Knack: A nifty oddity which looks like a kid-friendly 3-D cartoon, Knack lets you control a tiny robot who can morph into a huge robot composed of apparently hundreds of distinct parts. Think Pikmin meets Transformers. Excitement Level: 8

When it came time to announce their next-generation Playstation console, Sony did not hesitate. The introduction of the Playstation 4 occurred at a media-packed event in New York, which featured appearances by some of the greatest, most popular, and most self-important videogame creators in the world. They showed off a slate of games that ran the gamut from “exciting” and “visually stimulating” to “confusing” and “wait, so Killzone is still happening?”

The presentation was, in some ways, a bold refutation of Nintendo’s Wii U — Sony made a point of stressing that it had involved third-party developers in the process of crafting the Playstation 4. But this gaming generation wasn’t kind to Sony. The Playstation 2 was a culture-impacting, boundary-bursting force of nature; the Playstation 3 was a high-powered machine with great games that had a hard time competing with the muscular Xbox 360 and the mass-appeal Wii. So, there came the inevitable moment in the Playstation 4 presentation when Sony made it clear that a key part of the PS4 pitch was its compatibility with the PS Vita, Sony’s low-selling mobile-games device. The intention is to allow you to play all PS4 games on your Vita — if you have a Vita, which you probably don’t — a compatibility system which basically makes the Vita into the Sony equivalent of the Wii U’s GamePad.
But comparisons between the PS4 and the Wii U arguably stop there. Although the first hour of Sony’s presentation was weirdly devoted to non-games product-y yammering — “Hey, look, you can post video of yourself playing a game online, just like PC gamers have done for over a decade!” — the tech giant wisely ceded the stage to some of the medium’s most intriguing creators, who paraded quick peeks at their games.