Sony’s PS4 turns 8 years old this year, which seems remarkable given just how full and rich a life it’s had. Exclusives like Bloodborne, God of War, and The Last of Us Part II have given the console an incredible reputation among the gaming community, and it’s still got life in it yet despite the recent release of the PlayStation 5. However, there’s still plenty of hidden lore about the PS4 that many gamers aren’t aware of. Here are 10 of our favourite PS4 facts that you may not know.
1. The PS4’s design is deliberate
The parallelogram-style design of the PlayStation 4 isn’t just to make it more futuristic. The front part angles upwards so you can get to the power button and eject button more easily, and also so that you can more easily access the console’s USB ports. Meanwhile, the back end of the PS4 angles downwards so that it’s less easy to see cluttered cables, making the area beneath your TV look a little neater. Let it never be said that Sony aren’t masters of engineering!
2. PlayStation gaming is more hygienic than your kitchen table
One concern that you may not often consider while you’re gaming is hygiene, but it’s undeniable that we should all be thinking more about this aspect, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily, your PS4 controller is significantly more hygienic than your kitchen table. Don’t just take our word for it, though!
Just take a look at this cool Betway infographic to see a fun comparison of all the different gaming machines and how they compare to your kitchen and bathroom. You’ll never look at your analogue sticks the same way again…
3. Double-tapping the PS button swaps between apps
We all know that pressing the PlayStation button on the DualShock 4 brings you to the main menu. However, did you know that the button also has a second bit of neat functionality? Double-tapping the PlayStation button will swap between the last two apps you’ve used. This means that if you’re gaming and want to quickly get to your friends list or another app, you can just double-tap the PlayStation key and you’ll be back in your game again.
4. You can charge your DualShock 4 using a phone charger
Sony encourages you to connect your DualShock 4 to one of the PS4’s USB ports and put the console in rest mode to charge the controller, but you don’t have to do that. Since the PS4’s controller port is just a standard Micro USB port, you can connect it to any phone charger that uses the same connector and it’ll charge. That means you can leave the controller plugged into a wall socket and it’ll work, a trick that’s significantly harder to pull off on PS3 controllers.
5. The PS4 messaging system is inspired by Dark Souls
It seems there are very few things in the gaming community that aren’t somehow inspired by Dark Souls these days. One of these things is the PlayStation 4’s messaging system. Supposedly, SIE then-president Shuhei Yoshida liked the way Dark Souls’ messages were unobtrusive and helped players to learn more about their environment, and so he implemented something similar on the PS4’s interface, which displays messages without making them take up the whole screen.
6. A French teenager managed to buy a PS4 by passing it off as fruit
This is the kind of story that’s almost too good to be true, but it most certainly happened. In early 2019, a French teenager by the name of Adel picked up a console and took it to a shop’s fruit section, weighing it as though it were a large bag of fruit. He then put a price sticker generated by the fruit weighing machine on the PS4 and managed to walk out of the shop with it, having paid the equivalent of just £8 in the process. He was eventually caught and taken to jail, but we can’t fault his smarts.
7. PlayStation gamers really love Spider-Man
This one may not come as a surprise if you’ve played Marvel’s Spider-Man, but Insomniac’s open-world web-slinging game is currently the best-selling PS4 game of all time. It’s managed to shift a whopping 20 million copies, beating out competitors in the form of Grand Theft Auto V (19.4 million), Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (16.3 million), and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (15 million). Sony will be pleased given that Spider-Man is also a PlayStation exclusive.
8. You can use a PlayStation Vita as a second PS4 controller
If you’ve got a PlayStation Vita sitting around and you’re not sure what to do with it, why not use it as a second PS4 controller? All you need to do is log in to the Vita using the same PSN credentials as your PS4, then activate the Remote Play feature. After this, using a normal PS4 controller, sign in as a second profile, and voila – you’re now using your Vita as a second controller. Not bad given that you’ve almost certainly run out of Vita games to play, right?
9. You can play pretty much all PS4 games on PS5
Sony may not be heading into the next console generation with quite the same heavy emphasis on backwards compatibility as Microsoft, but it’s still not leaving PS4 owners behind. You can play pretty much every single PS4 game on PS5, and while there are one or two exceptions, they’re not likely to be games many people are desperate to play on next-gen hardware anyway. Just fire up your PS5, slot the disc in if you have one (or download the game onto your hard drive), and that’s all you need.
10. Most PS4 models have been discontinued
Unfortunately, we are now inevitably entering the sad twilight years of the PlayStation 4. It is, after all, an eight-year-old system, which is an absolute age in gaming years. Earlier this year, Sony confirmed it would discontinue all but one PS4 model, so you can now only get the 500GB Jet Black PS4 Slim model if you want to buy a new console. Still, once the PS5’s availability increases, you’ll be able to play everything PS4-related on that, so it’s not all bad news.
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