Xbox or PS4?

The two game consoles are battling for a dubious prize, says Molly Wood. 

A philosophical war is being waged in the world of video game consoles. One view is represented by Microsoft’s Xbox One: the console as home media hub, combining television, movie watching, video streaming, games and computerlike features such as Skype into a single device that’s as much set-top box as gaming rig.

A second view comes from Sony, whose PlayStation 4 is for playing video games first, for streaming video and watching DVDs second, and for little else.

As often happens with philosophical debates, right and wrong are subjective determinations, but as also often happens in life, simpler tends to be better.

Both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 were released in November, and since then, the question has been rampant: Xbox or PS4? The release of a new game console is rare; the Xbox debuted in 2001, and the second version, the 360, came out in 2005. The PlayStation has been around since 1994, and its third iteration came out in 2006. Buying a new box can be a long and expensive commitment.

I spent a week comparing the Xbox One and the PS4, and in my opinion, the PlayStation is the one to buy - if you’re going to buy a console at all. More on that later.

First, the reviews. The Xbox One is wildly capable. It’s also larger, heavier and uglier than the Xbox 360 - testament, one assumes, to its raw power.

The Xbox’s primary selling point is that it combines video games, downloadable apps, streaming Internet video, DVD playback and live TV into a single home screen. You plug it into your cable or set-top box and route live TV through it, and you can even use the Xbox channel guide, OneGuide, instead of your cable provider’s.

This is an impressive feat, but it’s not free. To access streaming media, apps or even the channel guide, you must pay for a $60 (Rs 3,711) -per-year Xbox Live Gold account, on top of your Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime or any other service subscription fee.

Once you’re connected, you navigate through menus and the guide using the Xbox controller or the console’s other big innovation: voice and gestures in the form of Kinect, the voice and motion-sensing camera that was available as an add-on to the 360.

The Xbox One’s inclusion of Kinect is one reason it costs $500 (Rs 30,925), compared with $400 (Rs 24,740) for the PS4. In Xbox One, Kinect has a wider viewing angle, higher-quality image and facial recognition for identifying individual users. It says, “Hi, Molly” when I sit down on the couch, and then loads my personalised dashboard and recent activities. It’s cool and futuristic, but works inconsistently.

The Xbox has Kinect-enabled voice controls built in throughout; commands like, “Xbox, go home” or “Xbox, go to TV” start specific functions, or you can say things like, “watch FX” to control television playback. You can also use hand gestures for navigation and selection, but as with most gesture controls, the motions required are hilariously impractical for regular use.

Unfortunately, despite the gee-whiz appeal of the voice features, the verbal commands aren’t practical either. They don’t always work, and it’s inefficient to say “page down” repeatedly in the TV guide, compared with quietly pressing a button.

I found myself using basic commands like “Xbox, go home,” and then navigating the rest using the controller or my TiVo remote. And I found it annoying to have to go through the Xbox to get to TV every time. My 6-year-old son loved shouting commands at the console; unfortunately it rarely recognised his voice, and his attraction soon faded.All this description illustrates the overall fatal flaw of the Xbox One: It’s too much work.

I spent hours setting up the Xbox One. It was in my home for two full days before I enjoyed even a second of game play; there were technical issues with its TV integration (solved by swapping out an HDMI cable after 90 minutes of troubleshooting), and there were endless updates to download.

Both consoles are notorious for requiring frequent updates, but even the three game discs Microsoft sent me demanded updates before I could play. And the Xbox and its games are astonishingly bandwidth-hungry. One game disc, once inserted, asked for a 13-gigabyte download before I could even play.

Speaking of game downloads, those are also huge. I bought the popular NBA 2K14 game, which clocked in at a staggering 44GB in size. (For context, the Grand Theft Auto 5 game for the Xbox 360 was 16GB.) The game took almost eight hours to download and install, and then wouldn’t work with my controller unless I logged out and logged in every time I wanted to play - a known bug.

For anyone with slow Internet access or a bandwidth cap that usually maxes out at 250 or 300GB, the Xbox One could potentially cost you a lot in overage fees. Plus, its hard drive is just 500GB, and you cannot upgrade it or add an external drive. Xbox, go home, indeed.

By comparison, the PlayStation 4 was a delight to set up and enjoy. I plugged it in, downloaded a relatively tiny 300MB update, spent about 10 minutes setting up my PlayStation Network profile and was playing games 10 minutes after that.

Speed is everywhere. The menu and navigation screens on the PS4 are startlingly fast and responsive. Games load noticeably quickly - much faster than the Xbox games, even after updates.

Despite the PS4’s gaming-first focus, it offers plenty of media features, like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video, plus access to Sony’s music and movie streaming services. And unlike the Xbox, access to streaming services is free. You do need a $50 (Rs 3,092)-per-year PlayStation Plus account if you want to play online with other gamers.

The PlayStation is highly social. You can share game screenshots on Facebook or Twitter, and you can even record and share short video clips, with basic editing built in. The killer feature is the ability to broadcast your gameplay live to Ustream.tv or to Twitch.tv, a hugely popular game-streaming website where people spend hours watching other people play video games.

The Xbox One promises to support Twitch streaming in the future, but it wasn’t available when I tested it. In addition, Microsoft has already promised an Xbox update this spring to fix a social experience the company admits is “hidden or harder to use than it was on the Xbox 360.”

I would argue that most things on the Xbox One are hidden or harder to use than they need to be. In my time with the PlayStation 4, I found it straightforward and, most important, fun. That ought to be the highest pursuit of a device invented for playing games, so for my money, the keep-it-simple philosophy of the PlayStation 4, plus the $100 (Rs 6,185) price break, make it the winner.

The real question, though, is whether the idea of a console itself is out of date.Mobile gaming on tablets and phones can be as immersive and fun, and obviously more portable. A console for streaming video is redundant when most new televisions have Internet streaming and apps built in, not to mention Internet-connected Blu-ray players, streaming devices like Roku and Apple TV, or even Google’s $35 (Rs 2,164) Chromecast.And spending $60 (Rs 3,711) for games - no matter how graphically intensive - is hard to stomach in a world of low-priced apps. The game costs are especially painful since neither the Xbox nor the PlayStation can play games from the previous generation consoles.

So, the PlayStation is the better game console of the two, but in the end, it may be a victory of one dinosaur over another.