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Hello and welcome to the IGN launch party for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One! I’m your host, Claude Marshall! Ahem. I should explain. I’m the son of William H. Marshall, the actor who played the King of Cartoons on Pee Wee’s Playhouse. IGN’s budget is very small. They promised me free beer, but it appears someone drank it all before I arrived. I guess we’ll just move forward.

Today is launch day for the PS4! The Xbox One doesn’t come out for another week, but we’re pretending it’s a launch party for both so fanboys won’t leave ASCII drawings of Nazi symbols and giant penises in our website’s comment section.

Let’s get started by celebrating the amazingness of the PS4! It’s the Ultimate Media Center! Do you like movies? Well fire up your laptop and start streaming those video files straight to your PS4! No need to waste precious hard drive space with . . . what’s that? Oh. There’s no DLNA support? They had it in the PS3. What happened? All right, well just transfer those mkv and mp4 files over to the PS4 and . . . it can’t do that either? It doesn’t play mp4 files? What year is this?

Not to worry! There’s still plenty of great media available for the PS4, the world’s Ultimate Media Center! Do you like music? Well, you can store all your mp3’s on your PS4! Your entire music collection, right at . . . what? This thing doesn’t play mp3’s? Jesus Christ, guys. How is this an “Ultimate Media Center” when it only plays media you buy from their store? Slow golf claps all around, I guess.

Not everything has changed, folks. It’s still super easy to upgrade the PS4’s hard drive! Why you’d want to when it only plays proprietary media is beyond me, but it’s just as easy as the PS3 . . . what? You have to take the entire console apart? The PS3 only had one screw. You pulled down the panel in the back, undid the screw and the hard drive slid out on a tray. It was like a work of art. All the screws on the PS4 have a protective seal that, when broken, cannot be fixed? So if you try to trade it in at a Gamestop, they’ll know and have a reason to give you less money. How could they screw this up? It was perfect.

Well, at least it’s still free to play games online without some asinine . . . Oh. They’re charging annual fees now. $50 per year for online gaming. Like a ransom. I don’t see how it’s NOT a ransom. People already paid $400 and they’re still holding all the best features hostage. I’m not being difficult. YOU’RE being difficult.

Ahem. How about we move on to the Xbox. Exciting! The new Xbox One can finally play Blu-ray movies! Fans have been waiting years for this now standard functionality to . . . what’s that? It doesn’t play Blu-ray movies? It has a Blu-ray drive. How could it not play Blu-ray movies? Licensing fees, MY ASS. They expect their customers to drop half a grand on gaming, yet they’re too cheap to pay for a Blu-ray license? Is this another thing where a company forces people to only buy media from them? Assholes! All of them!

Oh well. It’s still a great console. You can watch and record TV on Xbox One! That’s pretty neat! Throw away that bulky DVR and . . . you can’t record TV shows? It can record the screen as you play games, right? That’s way more complicated, so why can’t it record TV? No reason given at all? Well that’s some bullshit. Are they aware of how bullshitty that is? All right, as long as they know.

No worries, folks. We have a few more features up our sleeve! The future is here! With Xbox One, you can video Skype with your friends while playing games! You can digitally shoot your friend in the face in Call of Duty and see his angry reaction in real time! It’s a . . . you’ve gotta be kidding me. You can only do voice calls while gaming? Is this some new trend, inventing cool features and then removing the only desirable aspect?

I don’t understand why anyone would want this. The whole console seems like a trick to get people used to using Windows 8. Couldn’t I just take an old computer, upgrade the video card, attach a TV tuner/recorder to it, buy a $5 controller and basically have an unlocked version of an Xbox One that lets me do whatever I want? It’d have tiles for Netflix, Hulu, sports, retro game emulators, and PC and Steam games, all in one system.

What exactly am I promoting? Really? That’s your answer. Big black boxes full of hype. You know my mic is still on, right? People will buy them anyway? You can dick them a million times, brag about it and they’ll still give you all their money? Wow. Screw ‘em, then. They deserve it.

Glad to have you here, folks! Regardless of your choice of consoles, now is the perfect time to cement your reputation as a gullible asshat who has way more money than sense and is easily duped into buying whatever the latest “thing” is, even if it’s a half-finished, ugly behemoth of a device full of regressive features and broken promises. Sure, the graphics are only better on paper and the previous consoles have better features, but you’ll be the first to own something new! Buy now!

Is that enough? Good, get me some beer. I really, really need a drink.