In the least shocking news of the week Sony have finally revealed their Playstation 4 during their media event that is currently taking place in New York. Absolutely nobody was surprised by this.

Things didn’t exactly get off to a flying start with terrible sax-heavy jazz music issuing forth from the Sony Livestream, eliciting horrifying memories of the times I’d been put on hold. Finally, though, the event kicked off with Andrew House heading on to stage to waffle about….uh,nonsense, mostly. He chatted about the Vita, social interaction and other things that were frankly not very interesting. An example of the fairly typical nonsense was, “We’ll show you in which the living room is no longer the center of the playstation eco-system. The gamer is.” Uh-huh. Eventually though, House got around to what everybody had been waiting for, the announcement of the Playstation 4. So far I still have no clue what the thing looks like, but hey, at least there’s a logo!

Mark Cerny then took to the stage, and also waffled considerably, reminding why I hate media events. According to him the team, “looked at how the Playstation’s ecosystem could evolve”. According to him that evolution is,  “dynamic preference-driven path through the world of content,”

Okay. That’s nice. Where’s the games, already? After Cerny got a grip on himself he picked up a brand new Playstation 4 controller from the floor, which some idiot has presumably carelessly left lying about, and fired up a game of his own creation called Knack. This was the big moment, the first game shown to be running on the PS4! And damn was it disappointing.  Underwhelming stuff for the first ever game to be shown on the console.

Things got more interesting, though, as we got to witness some footage from an Unreal 4 Engine demo, the next Killzone title and a new racer called Race Club. These all looked visually fantastic, although to be fair the graphical upgrade wasn’t actually that impressive. The games looked amazing, but not oh-my-god-that’s-such-a-huge-leap stunning. It’s not like going from the PS2 to the PS3.

The Witness was also briefly showed off, an open-world puzzler from the man behind Braid, and was also announced to be a PS4 exclusive.

The graphical upgrade isn’t all that important, though. It’s all about the gameplay, and for now we’ll just have to wait and see what developers are coming out with for the Playstation 4. For tonight I’m signing off as the Sony livestream is pretty late for this UK lad, and I’m not going to attempt to update this live as I’m supposed to be writing out the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance review, and there’s plenty of sites out there doing that already, after all. The livestream is also proving to be pretty hard to watch as it struggles to cope with the large volume of viewers. Tomorrow I’ll check out the aftermath and talk about the games in more detail and, of course, the console itself, but for now Sony’s announcement of the Playstation 4 hasn’t excited me all that much. It looks like a good console, but none of the games shown off or ideas that Sony presented how made me gasp. Maybe I’m just being cynical.