Best source for lifehacks (save this place)

Amen to that. I may just be being contrary, but having previously liked a lot of what I was hearing about the Xbox now it just looks exactly the same as the PS4. The Xbox had positioned itself as future facing, while Sony were sitting in the past, refusing to think about what game ownership might mean in the future of…

In fairness, if IP was unenforceable or didnt exist, you would have 10,000 zelda games on the shelves by crappy third party developers out to make a quick buck off the backs of decent developers.

Dont be so sure. Pre-smartphones, many people had a console at home even though they were a casual gamer. They just wanted a blast of something from time to time. FIFA, that kind of thing. Nowadays smart phones are beginning to scratch that itch for some people and a controller would move that line just a little bit…

I love stuff like this. Spend 12 hours figuring out how to save 5 minutes. These are my kind of people.

Which rights in particular?

To be honest - FF used to be a title that I would buy a system to play, up there with Zelda. Now I might buy it, if I happened to fancy a game at that moment. But otherwise, not really bothered.

Sony could do the same thing. Or indeed Steam. Or, for that matter, your Smart TV, iPad or PC.

Can i just make the point that the XBox is not DRM free. Neither is the PS4. Instead they just use the same DRM as they always have. Thats a big difference and hugely important, because a precedent has now been set that digital DRM = bad, physical DRM = good. As though the former is anti-consumer, the latter is…

Agreed. They could easily have an either/or option - every time you play a game, you either stick the disk in, or go online to authenticate. Unless there's some reason I cant see, surely that would be a simpler idea?

This makes people happy so cool for them, but personally I feel like I'm losing out. I gain zero from this but lose a couple of neat features.

very doubtful. That list is too long, frankly. It may as well add £100 knocked off the price and a free handjob.

You're talking about physical media. Games bought digitally are not transferable by sale or gift on PS4 (or at least last I checked that was the case) which in fact is the most stringent DRM there is. It's physical media there are no restrictions on. A difference worth noting.

Agreed. In fact there's more - on Xbox you can sell and gift online purchases, and share with your family members for free on their computers. These cant be done on PS4.

PS1 era games are hard to play without emulator tools to improve them. Indeed by a weird twist of history, late era SNES games generally look a lot easier on the eye than many PS1 games.

I do wonder about these updates - sure they seem to be affecting non-standard hardware setups (ie upgraded HDD) - but is that really such an unusual scenario? And do they not roll out these updates in waves?

The Xbox One runs as a virtual machine (2 in fact) on a hypervisor layer. That makes that if you managed to brick the virtual machine with an update no proble. You can easily recompile a new one then re-download your profile.

There's two sides to the online tech stuff. One is the simple stuff - online stores, online libraries, multiplayer servers, stuff like that. Sony and MS will both have offerings, and while MS are making more of a push now in truth both are similar. The tech needed for that isn't very hard - a few server rooms and…

Yes you can install to it, though I hope they are bright enough to a) distribute the install over the internal and external devices so that you keep game critical data on the faster drive and b) make that process invisible.

Both devices are offering play as you download. You keep, say, a 1 gig footprint on your device. If you choose a game that's not installed you begin to download the game and get to play the first level within a few minutes. the remaining content downloads as you play.