The PS4 and Xbox One have been out for a little while now, giving us some time to really get a feel of these new consoles. In some cases, that means discovering new reasons to love them.
In a happy turn of events, some of the features that we initially didn’t care for have become solid reasons for keeping them in our living room.
Here’s a selection of surprising things we love about the PS4 and Xbox One.
Surprising Things We Love About the PS4 and Xbox One
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The Kinect's Voice Integration
Say what you will about the Kinect, but its voice integration does a surprisingly adept job at helping you navigate the Xbox One's UI.
Prior to my purchasing of the Xbox One I expected that the so-called "Kinect 2.0" would swiftly be unplugged and shoved into my cupboard, but no! It actually became my default method of browsing through my game library and flicking through the system's various media services. It's as game-changing and mind-blowing as Microsoft would lead you to believe, but it IS useful, which is a big step up from the original Kinect.
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Live from PlayStation
Live from PlayStation is a selection of live streams of different games broadcast by the PS4's community, and as you can imagine, these streams vary from hilarious, to boring, to weird. And that's why we love it.
Because streaming on the PS4 requires very little effort, there are a real cast of characters broadcasting their gameplay footage for the whole world to see. Delving into this treasure trove reveals some golden nuggets, along with some real oddities.
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PS4 Party Chat
Microsoft messed up when it came to the Xbox One's Party Chat, and this means that the PS4's take on the feature is surprisingly the best way to communicate with your friends while playing a game.
Considering that on the Xbox 360 it was incredibly easy to start up a Party and chat with your buddies, it's alarming how complicated the system is on the Xbox One. Many users, myself included, have not been able to chat with friends who are playing different games. If that wasn't irritating enough, the system itself is fundamentally flawed, as it unnecessarily "Snaps" the party in a sidebar and has in-game chat set as the default option. Why would we start a Party with friends but still want in-game chat active, Microsoft? Why?
After the pish that was the PS3's PSN (excluding the always wonderful PS Plus, of course) the PS4 is now the better console to play with friends. It's still got the worst bundled-in microphone, though. Look at that thing. Woof.
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Share Button
I met the announcement of the Share button with an exasperated sigh. Yet another attempt to integrate social media into my gaming experience that would swiftly become useless, I thought. Little did I know that the Share button would be one of the PS4's biggest draws.
Thanks to the PS4's Twitch integration, the Share button lets you easily broadcast gameplay to the streaming site and to your friends, with no need for capture cards or even a PC.
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Xbox Fitness
Crave Online's Joey Davidson has already expressed his appreciation for Xbox Fitness, the, er, Fitness app that's somewhat buried in the Xbox One's App Store.
Free to use for Xbox Live Gold subscribers, Xbox Fitness offers a wide array of fitness videos and, thanks to the Kinect, judges you accordingly on how well you follow them. It also includes leaderboards and achievements, giving you an incentive to keep fit and put more time and effort into the app.
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Xbox One Controller's Triggers
The Xbox One controller's "Impulse Triggers" give a great amount of feedback when using them, and are a large part of what makes the controller arguably the finest we've yet seen in console gaming.
Drifting around corners in Forza Motorsport 5 with the triggers is the closest a controller has came to offering the same kind of force feedback usually reserved for gaming wheels, and it works like a dream with first-person shooters, too.
