So thanks to Zombiegamer I had a chance to spend a little bit of time with the gigantic VHS.
It's surprisingly not as VHS looking in real life and rather sleek. I still find it ugly (I find both consoles ugly so don't play the fanboy card just yet) but it's much nicer than expected. Power supply is even a little dressed up, probably to try hide the fact that it's there in the first place.
One of the consoles was rather noisy when I put my ear to it, but the other was whisper quiet but this was in a noisy bar area at Trenchtown so hard to say.
Very impressed with the user interface and the snap-in functions. These consoles were offline so I couldn't browse the store and such but generally it seemed to work pretty well.
Killer Instinct didn't look like much to rave about and it felt like stick figure fighting, very rigid, but then I'm not big on fighting games and the only ones I've ever really enjoyed were Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur.
Forza was much of a muchness and felt no different from Forza 4 and didn't look all that different either except maybe for some more smoothed edges and such. Still some pretty dodgy textures on cars were apparent but that could have just been the livery.
So the bad news? Everyone will call me a fanboy now forgetting that I loved the 360 controller and I think the best controller of its time was the Dreamcast...but I really really dislike the XO controller.
Good parts first. I like the analog sticks. Smaller so they fit the tip of my thumbs perfectly and the control is great with just enough resistance.
The triggers however are terrible. They are soft and lack resistance while having no travel at all, it's like an on/off switch with a delay.
I thought maybe it was just Killer Instinct with the the feedback switched off but once I got to Forza the feedback irritated the crap out of me.
It's gimmicky and nothing like the sales pitch. I expect the left trigger to resist under braking, instead it just vibrated. While the car is losing traction the whole thing vibrates. It doesn't tell me anything I didn't know before on the 360 and instead distracted me while driving.
The bumpers? What bumpers? Where are they? Impossible to feel as they have no feedback whatsoever.
I went from being mildly interested in an XO to not being interested at all because of the controller. I'm surprised in this myself because I was expecting the haptic feedback to be revolutionary.
Granted I am yet to play a racing game with the PS4, but I walked away from the XO experience thinking that I would be better off just buyinf Forza 4 on my 360 again and playing that rather than spending 7k for the privilege of doing the exact same thing but worse.
Obviously spending more time with it could see me getting used to it, but at this point I'm very happy I didn't fall for the hype and just ordered one outright without testing it. More over I feel pretty content with my PS4 and not like I'm missing out at all.
