Debatable: Xbox One Vs PS4

The popular kid at school. — what a cunt. I mean, to be fair, they’re normally popular for one reason or another. Maybe they’re brilliant for the local team and captain them to Junior A county hurling glory, or maybe they’re involved in fourteen charities while establishing their own NGO, or maybe everyone, from teacher to student, wants to ride them sideways ‘round by the bike-shed. They might just be the complete all-rounder and be all the above, the pricks.

With the Wii U dragging itself through life on the long dried-up ejaculate of Star Fox fans across the globe, this current crop of consoles has proven to be a two horse race, a two horse race that began with both consoles launching within a week of each other in both Europe and North America in late November, 2013. Well, the Xbox One’s launch was a little bit stilted across Europe-alone with the black box not coming to the likes of Scandinavia and Russia until September 5th and 26th in 2014, respectively. The story’s been well-documented at this stage: telly, no second hand games, always connected Kinect. The green team were on a hiding to nothing from the moment those entertainment systems left the warehouse.

The PlayStation 4, however, was positioned as the gaming system for you. They pulled on your heartstrings and you opened your wallets – and why wouldn’t you? It didn’t have any pesky TV stuff to get in the way; it was the home of the indie, discounting that Steam-thing; and it’s so much more of a powerhouse, you might as well be comparing Barcelona to Bolton, or at least a Louis Van Gaal-led Manchester United. As of November 22nd, 2015, over thirty million of you have bought PS4s — with ten million of those PlayStations finding their way into homes of the video game playing public only eight months before that sales figure was announced. Microsoft hasn’t been quite as verbose with their numbers. The last check-in came in November 2014, when they announced customers bought ten milllion units of their latest offering, with many guessing that the system sits somewhere between eleven and thirteen mill, right now. With Sony’s saviour resoundly beating Xbox One, I’m sure you’re extremely happy that St. Nick’s elves built you a PS4 rather than a Microsoft machine.

I guess I’ll be The Grinch, then.

The past calendar year saw the pendulum shift more in favour of Team “Cool Dad” Spencer, as far as I’m concerned. All of our peers, sneered and jeered at the audacity of Microsoft to push their system as a multimedia machine. The thing is, in this day and age, our consoles are exactly that. I’m sure a few of you have just finished Jessica Jones. Good, wasn’t it? How did you watch it? And the Now TV day subscription you got in for that excellent Super Sunday line-up, what device did you use for that, again? I’m not casting aspirations, I’m merely stating fact. We use these devices under our tellies to watch NXT on the WWE Network, just as much as we use them to play Gwent in The Witcher 3. And Xbox One does it better. When I ask my Xbox to pull up YouTube so I can watch handsome and insightful people, it does it without even thinking. Ask the PS4 to open Sky Go so you can avail of your oul fella’s monthly payment to Rupert Murdoch and it takes so long, it’s as if it’s asking if you REALLY want to watch another repeat of Father Ted on More4. Pulling up friends lists, checking your trophies, having a gander at your library — its like pulling teeth on Sony’s fourth console at the best of times.

But maybe I’m misjudging things and you don’t know your Frank Underwoods from your Frank Spencers. You only care about that copy of The Nathan Drake Collection that your boyfriend picked up second hand from Game and how many pixels make up Chloe’s face. There’s a news story regarding Xbox’s inability to reach 1080p on [insert AAA release name here] every fortnight, while their rival appears to chew up titles and spit them out in 180 more ps than the Xbox average, every single time. And when it comes to third-party, this can’t be disputed. But, if one was to look at the exclusives of the past twelve months, the scales start to tip toward Microsoft. PlayStation had more “only on” titles than Xbox, this year, but quantity does not equal quality. Bloodborne and Until Dawn, notwithstanding, Sony’s big exclusives came in the form of The Ordinary: 1886 and God-help-us-and-save-us-zilla. 2015’s Halo and Forza instalments were stellar efforts, Lara Croft’s timed-exclusive was highly-lauded and the best console exclusive was an old concept in a Metroidvania called Ori and The Blind Forest.

Speaking of things from the past, in order to access your back catalogue and delve into your beloved Warhawk, you have to sign up for PlayStation Now. Some of the PSNow titles require a subscription, others a rental fee. Either way, you can’t simply play the games you bought before. On Xbox One, you can – well, some of them, at least. On November 9th, Xbox announced over 100 old games you could play instead of the shiny, new ones on their current-gen system. Some are absolute belters like Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and some are absolute cat melodeon, such as Bellator: MMA Onslaught. As time goes on, Microsoft has stated it’ll be adding more titles to this scheme — don’t underestimate the ability to play old stuff on your current hardware, either. Maybe you, or I, try and stay as up to date as humanly possible, but there are people out there who haven’t gotten around to finishing Gears of War 3 yet and now they can, while their 360 rests in a Cash Converters shelf which they traded in for tin of John West and twenty box of Marlboro Lights.

Thankfully, the consoles also offer “free” titles (Jesus, it bugs me when you see people refer to these games as “free”) on a monthly basis, too, with their subscription services that you pay money for (meaning the games aren’t “free”) – PlayStation Plus and Games With Gold. The Xbox service saw D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, #IDARB and Rayman Legends all coming in Q1, with Major Nelson’s lads upping their game for the rest of 2015 by giving Gold members two games a month. Obviously, there’s going to be a few lacklustre efforts in there like The Deer God and Pool Nation FX, but the quality has generally ranged from good to great with the likes of The Walking Dead: Season One, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Tomb Raider and Thief all becoming available at no extra cost for paying customers. The more established PlayStation Plus has had its fair share of excellent titles, too, with OlliOlli 2 and Transistor, but to name a few. It comes down to taste, but if you’re looking for big, disc-based games as well as some smaller indies, Xbox has undoubtedly had the more showy offerings.

That beautiful, clever, funny, popular kid at school, who probably has a badass top-knot, is under-threat. Their shtick is wearing thin and people are beginning to look elsewhere for their kicks. I’d love to look into my crystal ball and tell you what the next 12 months hold — will Uncharted 4 be a step in the right direction for the series and will Cuphead be the indie phenomenon we all want it to be? – but I can’t. What I can tell you, however, is that if you had an Xbox One at the top your Christmas list, you chose well.

Patreon backers of $5 and over can see this kind of video early, so maybe it’s time to consider backing us? Debatable will be back in two weeks, and next Monday it’ll be Lee’s Reasons to be Cheerful – and so on!