Good Game is now just over one week old! We'd like to say a huge thanks to everyone that's come on-board and helped make the launch a great success. How much of a success? Read on (this was as at around 9 last night):

The road ahead will be filled with action, paved with airstrikes, fragmentation grenades, takedowns and angry Greek gods-to-be. There will be clan wars, community nights, free-for-all competitions and, in Black Ops 2, only a Sole Survivor will remain. There will be reviews, gaming news and information from around the broader community. And, as long as the ancient Mayans weren't right (if they were, we might not be around as long as we'd like), there'll be Christmas, and lots of gaming goodness into 2013 and beyond, as new platforms start to loom on the horizon. It's exciting times in the world of gaming, and we're glad to have you here. Whether you're a regular forumer, taking part in our events, staying in touch with reviews and news, or dropping in occasionally to keep an eye on what's happening around the ANZ gaming community through SITREP, we hope you hang around. We look forward to having you along for the ride :).

Since most people who were interested in Destiny and trying out the Destiny Beta will have had many opportunities to play it over the last couple weeks, I won't dive too deeply into the technical aspects and features of what most people will have already seen and heard of from game so far. Personally, I have played the Beta across the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 over the past week and Destiny has performed extremely well forboth of those platforms, to my surprise. So instead, I will share some favourite aspects of the Destiny Beta and hopefully many of you can happily share some of your own personal impressions as well.

After thoroughly enjoying the Destiny Alpha on the PlayStation 4 just last month, Destiny as a whole had definitely shown real potential to become an engaging online, co-operative first-person shooter with its solid shooting mechanics, deep class customisations and beautiful, expansive universe. The sheer quality and polish of the title at such an early development stage already was what led me to feel the absolute need to pre-order the full game in order to access the Beta, even though I had initially planned on keeping the rest of the game a mystery until release day.

At first glance, the Destiny Beta looked and felt exactly the same as the earlier Alpha build with the addition of more story-related missions on Earth. This was in no way a negative since many players would have been experiencing Destiny for the first time and it has definitely been enjoyable recreating and experimenting with the new classes and features from a clean slate. It was also very encouraging to see that the impressive visuals and fluid gameplay were maintained with barely any noticeable drops in performance - especially knowing that significantly more players were populating the servers across both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live this time compared to the Alpha Build.

From the safe sanctuary of the Tower hub to the huge sandbox map of Old Russia in the Beta, Bungie's attention to creating and polishing the intricate details for all environments and characters made the entire atmosphere of the game easily engrossing while exploring alone or with friends. The lighting effects were fantastic and I was especially awed by how consistently detailed the textures appeared for foliage, rubble, the dilapidated buildings and basically everything in the world of Destiny. I have also enjoyed playing alone at times just to slowly explore parts of Old Russia and to admire the scenery at my own pace. Watching Tower the lights bouncing off the stone floors at the Tower and seeing the Traveler's presence looming ever so silently over the rest of the city were awe-inspiring moments for me when I first played the Alpha and they were still breathtaking whenever I saw those vistas again in the Beta.

Additionally, these visuals seemed all the more impressive when taking into consideration the fact that there are no loading screens for travelling between different areas of the maps after landing from orbit. The transition between the narrow, Fireteam-only building interiors and corridors to the open "instanced" areas and landscapes (where you could randomly come across other players that are are playing in the same location as you) were almost always perfectly seamless. As a consequence, the gameplay just felt that much more smooth and intense when I became completely absorbed in travelling and fighting with alongside my fellow comrades. The only times that truly felt deserving of a breather were the blissful moments after defeating an incredibly tough boss or huge waves of enemies, and the Destiny Beta nailed this pacing perfectly in the Devil's Lair Strike mission.

My favourite aspect of Destiny Beta, by far, has been how simple and easy it is to join up with friends in-game and coming across new people across your journey. The Roster sub-menu was very simple to navigate and check to see exactly what your friends were doing and how many players were already in their Fireteam (party) so that you could immediately choose to join them or invite them to your own. Apart from the opening mission to the game, every other section of the Beta so far has actively allowed and encouraged team co-operative play, which has definitely provided many distinct and memorable experiences with different Fireteam buddies and strangers through matchmaking. Even while repeating the same limited Story and Strike missions multiple times.

So far, I have absolutely loved the different experiences I've had with purely completing missions with some friends to help them with their campaign or to hunt for better loot, occasionally teaming up with the more competitive ones for the Crucible battles, and then kicking back with others to simply enjoy and explore the hidden little secrets and locations scattered all over the maps. Although the drop-in/drop-out co-op feature is certainly not unique to Destiny, the seamless transition between single player to social, team-based game in such a huge, persistent world still impresses me to no end. My biggest hope in this respect, is that there will be missions and game modes at full release that allow us participate in Fireteams with more than three players (aside from the Crucible).

First and foremost, while the overall graphics and texture details of the PlayStation 3 Destiny Beta were definitely a step down from the PlayStation 4 version, it still looked very stunning and impressive given that the scale and size of both games felt exactly the same. Many of the textures for objects and the environment were understandably less detailed and flatter in comparison, such as the cushioned walls in some of the buildings of Old Russia and the cartoony-texture of the first story cutscene where Ghost revives your Guardian. But at the same time, other sections of the game like the Tower looked virtually the same on both consoles with simply more polish on the PlayStation 4.

Aside from the visual differences though, everything else from the Destiny Beta on the PS3 ran almost identically to the PS4 version. From the shooting mechanics to the user interface, the character animations and map sizes - it wasn't long before I started getting deeper into the gameplay again and stopped noticing any graphical differences altogether. Especially since the character and enemy designs were still very detailed and that the orbital loading timeframes seemed reasonably similar as well. In fact, I actually created my Warlock Class and played through the Story, the Strike mission and a few Crucible matches with a friend all on the PS3. The best feature was seeing that all three of my characters in the Beta were shared and transferred between both the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4.

If nothing else, after personally experiencing just how well the Destiny Beta played on the PlayStation 3, it has made me appreciate the efforts that Bungie have put into polishing their new IP for all fans by striving for performance parity across the platforms.

And now we wait. The Beta has all but confirmed Destiny's place as one of the main games that I (and I'm sure many others) will consistently be playing long after release day.

With plenty more planet systems and celestial bodies available to explore and access in the full game, Destiny seems to have a lot to offer for the base game already. I hope we will eventually see a much wider range of enemy types and races across the Solar System too.

Sony have broken radio silence on their next-generation console and announced the Playstation 4 in an almost two-hour long presentation in New York. The presentation had an incredible amount of information in it, which we'll cover in more depth over the next few days, but for now here's a broad-brush wrap-up and some brief thoughts on each aspect of the announcements.

Up front, Sony made a point that the PS4 would be highly interconnected and social, including integration with Facebook and Ustream. Social highlights announced at the show included:

• It connects with your Facebook social group and can use real names and photos as well as your PSN ID and avatar.
• It has a chip dedicated to capturing and processing video feed from your gameplay, and a share button on the controller that, when pressed, allows you to quickly and easily post up screenshots and video from any game, as well as stream live gameplay over Ustream.

• It will allow you to watch friends playing on their systems (over the network), and even be able to (with permission, or on request) take over their controller and get them through tricky bits in the game. Kind of like Nintendo's Super Guide, except it's your mate helping you out.
• There is a renewed focus on remote play, with it shown, in-action, at the event. The hope is that almost all PS4 games will be available over remote play - PS4's design incorporates Gaikai technology to enable it to do this far better than PS3.
• Gaikai is working at building the world's largest gaming network, to deliver Playstation gaming (PS1/2/3) to as many devices as possible. This looks to be the future of backwards compatibility.
• A new and improved PSEye (which will work with both the new Dualshock 4 controller - see below - and the current Move), which will run at 1280x800 @ 60FPS resolution.

To go with the new console, we'll get a new Dualshock 4. It's kept the analog sticks in the same position, but added a touch pad to the top, improved the triggers and handles, and there's a move-like LED on the side facing the console when you hold it.

Sony also went to some effort to emphasise that they want the user interface to be immediate, elegant and powerful - no lag, instant responsiveness and all that, and they showed it in action. There's a new interface, as yet unnamed, but it looks effective and appealing. Further, the controller can be put into a low-power state with a push of a button - there's no more booting everything up and loading a game - at the end of a session just suspend it, and at the start of the next session resume where you left off (very much like the Vita for those that own one).

I'm not sure I've seen as many different publishers and developers represented at one conference. I won't name them all, but the names we saw live or on video included people from Ready at Dawn, Ubisoft, Activision, Bungie, Media Molecule, Evolution, Guerilla Games, Polyphony Digital, Capcom, Quantic Dream, Square Enix and Blizzard, all talking up the PS4. Sony have got some serious developer support going here, and strong developer support means more games. We saw gameplay or trailers from:

• Killzone: Shadowfall (FPS)
• Knack (an action platformer)
• Driveclub (racer)
• Infamous: Second Son (action)
• Diablo III (action-RPG)
• Deep Down (action-RPG)
• Watch Dogs (open world)
• The Witness (puzzle)
• Destiny (shared-world shooter)

And also got told to keep an eye out for Final Fantasy at E3. As well as that, we saw tech demos from Quantic Dream, Media Molecule and Square Enix. That's an exceptional line-up of games for a console announcement, and we should expect more at E3 (we haven't heard a peep from Naughty Dog or Polyphony Digital). Sony are bringing the games, which is exactly what we want to hear.

Sony have never skimped on technical performance, which was plainly evident in some of the gameplay footage we saw today. The PS4 was designed in consultation with a many developers, and without doubt the strong developer support at the event that reflects. We've got some information on specs for the console, but (as is often the case at this stage) there's still a fair bit more before we know for sure how much grunt it's got - but it's a clear step up from the PS3.

• X86 CPU - 8 Core "Jaguar"
• 8GB GDDR5 Memory
• APU 'system on a chip' Technology
• Customised GPU
• HDD Built in - No word on sizes yet.
• 6x Blu Ray and 8x DVD player
• 802.11 b/g/n wifi
• Bluetooth 2.1
• USB 3.0
• HDMI and digital optical out
• Not backwards compatible with PS3 natively

As was the case for the PS3, the PS4 will have a range of multimedia options. They didn't focus on it at the event, which was clearly games-focussed, but Music and Video Unlimited, Netflix, Crackle and a bunch of other services were briefly mentioned.

The PS4 looks very impressive out of the gate - the graphics really do look a step up, some of those technical specifications are mouth-watering (8GB of GDDR5 RAM is exceptional - particularly keeping in mind that console software is far better optimised than on PC, and doesn't have a Windows 'overhead' to deal with) and the games announced at the conference are the kind of titles that make me want it on day one. The video and screenshot sharing functionality looks brilliant, particularly for competitive gaming (no more taking screenshots with a mobile for Zombies ladders - woo!), and being able to watch your mates play through something sounds like a feature that could be a lot of fun.

However, we don't know when it will launch (particularly in Australia and New Zealand - we can fairly safely assume it'll be around November in the US and Japan), and how much it will cost - look out for this at E3. We don't even know what it looks like yet! We also advise some caution as to the full feature-set of the final console - all three 'living room' Playstations have been excellent pieces of gaming kit and, in my opinion, the best gaming consoles of their generation, but Sony does have a habit of announcing features that are never fully realised (remote play on PS3, for example). Taking all that on board, and even if they don't make good on everything they've presented, Playstation 4 is still looking like a might fine piece of gaming kit.

There's an incredible amount of material here to digest. We'll bring you more PS4 coverage and analysis over the coming weeks and keep you up to speed with the upcoming jump to the next generation!