61 Frames Per Second : psn

Whatcha Playing: Earth Day Edition

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

April 22nd, the day we all take off from work and gather at our local mosques and synagogues to solemnly pay respects to our mother Earth on the anniversary of her creation... or something. So do your part and take your game time today away from blasting zombies and chainsawing aliens in half, instead playing games all about helping mother Earth. Here are the four games that I'm playing for Earth Day:

Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol for Nintendo DS

Rather than cleaning up a house and helping with domestic troubles, this Chibi-Robo has been tasked with turning a barren field of sand into a lush flourishing public park. Like SimCity, you get to design your own world, laying paths and streams, rocks and hills, even benches, fountains, clock towers, statues, and mini-games to your liking. The nicer your park, the more visitors it gets each day. You also have to befriend local toys (including Molly Mapletree, seen above) to help you build up your park and battle smoglings who aim to pollute all the beautiful nature you've brought to the park, but the majority of gameplay is planting flowers. It's actually a lot more fun than it sounds, thanks to the charm and playfulness found in all Skip-developed Nintendo games.

Flower for Playstation 3

Nature is so relaxing for those first few levels, but the final stage really flaunts the nature vs. man-made-atrocities vibe. It's vindicating to smash your trail of flower petals straight through scaffolding and watch a child's swing-set color itself and start swinging in the wind. My only problem with this for Earth Day is that it romanticizes the wind more than the flowers. Playing Flower makes me want to go ride a bike, not water a tree. Still, at least it's prompting me to go outside.

Bonsai Barber for Nintendo Wii

This WiiWare title asks you to be kind to nature in a very different way, by playing the neighborhood barber in a village of anthropomorphic plants. Yes, it's a cute and quirky little topiary simulation. The adorable factor in this game is fairly high without ever becoming sugary sweet, and seeing your shrubbery clientele bristle with joy when you've completed their new 'dos might just make you want to go outside and trim those hedges.

Pixeljunk Eden for Sony Playstation 3

If the above games are a bit too casual and cutesy for you, though, here's a true hardcore platformer. While a bit more abstract, the main focus of the game is pollinating flowers. You essentially play as a spider who thinks it's a bee who has done some psychadelic drugs in the garden. Through the techno and bright colors, the message is clear: more flowers = more awesome.

Related articles:
Ecco the Dolphin: Was This Game Ever Considered Fun?
Comfort Through Gaming: Accomplishing Anything in SimEarth
Chiptune Friday: Spring Into Spring with Sonic

Whatcha Playing: GTI Club+

Joe Keiser — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Did everyone miss this little racing gem when it came out a earlier this year? I know I did, and that’s a shame—but not as shameful as the fact that I missed the original game when it game out 12 years ago. I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen the cabinet, and I spent a lot of time in arcades in 1996. Maybe GTI Club was a Euro-specific thing?

Whatever. It’s mine now.

The original GTI Club came from the era that was undeniably the heyday of arcade racers, when titles like Daytona and Sega Rally were filling arcade goer’s fields of vision with hairpin turns and sunlit vistas. It’s a time period that’s not very well cataloged—major titles in the genre, like Daytona 2 and, until now, GTI Club, have never gotten home conversions of any sort. It’s sad because these games are not like today’s racing games, with all their twitch or slavish devotion to realism. Mid-90s arcade racers offer a specific mix of mechanical precision and simplified physics, and are uniquely satisfying in their sense of control.

The heart of this era beats in GTI Club+, and I could feel its pulse even though I had never played the original before. It turns out that GTI Club is actually a very nice example of the genre, and the remake retains the classic-feeling mechanics while augmenting the aesthetics to create a reasonable facsimile of what it must have felt like to play GTI Club in 1996. It’s a gorgeous, simple, three-minute romp through a beautiful beachside town in a tiny European car.

Most reviewers have said it’s only worthwhile if you remember the game, but that’s not quite true. This game is emblematic of a sort of game that isn’t really done anymore, and if you like that sort of game this is pretty much your only modern option. It feels as if it’s as loving a remake as Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and it’s a shame that more people haven’t picked up on its charms.

Related Links:

Building a Better Racer
Excitebots Should Be Super Smash Bros. Kart
Alternate Soundtrack: Need For Speed: Underground

Vandal Hearts Resurrected, Has Terrible Character Art

John Constantine — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

You’d never suspect that, once upon a time, strategy RPGs were a rare and beautiful beast. Twelve years ago, you wouldn’t open a magazine and think, “Ah, yes, I see. This month there are thirteen different Game Boy games coming out from Namco, Square, Inis, Nippon Icchi, and Atlus that will allow me to train tiny warriors to walk across a colorful grid to slaughter evil beasts. Oh, look, there’s six more on Sony’s Playstation and nine more on Sega’s Saturn. Can’t wait to see next month’s haul. I’ll be moving across those grids and having fun until the sun goes out, by gum!” It just didn’t work like that. There were only a few of them. There was Tactic’s Ogre, which was made by Yasumi Matsuno. Then there was Final Fantasy Tactics which was, um, made by Yasumi Matsuno. But then there was Vandal Hearts, a dead ringer for Matsuno’s SRPGs that was, in fact, not made by Matsuno. It was one of Konami’s early Playstation/Saturn RPGs that, like its cousin Suikoden, could have easily been mistaken for a Super Nintendo game. It had its fans, but after one sequel it disappeared into videogame history. That’s why Konami’s announcement of a Xbox Live Arcade/Playstation Network prequel, Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment, is such a surprise. They showed off some of the game at their Gamer’s Night 2009 event and Vandal Hearts is looking pretty different ten years after its last installment. First, the game’s entirely polygonal now, with a much darker color palette than it had back in the day. Its character art also looks less like this:

And more like this:

Bleh.

Word is Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment is out on XBLA in August and PSN shortly thereafter. More snide commentary on the art style as we see it.

(Link: Siliconera)

Related links:

The 61FPS Review: Suikoden Tierkreis
PSOne on PSN: Somehow, it’s Suikoden
Beating the Dead Horse Who Has It Coming: Playstation Releases on PSN

The Japanese PlayStation Store Gets Final Fantasy VII, Life Declared "Unfair"

Bob Mackey — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Let's face facts; the American PlayStation Store is...not so good. Just take a look at the number of original Playstation games you can download in Japan, compared to what's available here. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Surprised? Then you probably haven't been paying attention. No offense intended, of course, but if you've been following PlayStation Store release news since the PS3's launch, then you're probably familiar with the disappointment all PS3 owners feel when they see so many of their favorite games just out of arm's reach. Of course, it's always possible to go through the rigmarole of creating a Japanese account and "tricking" the PlayStation Store into thinking that you deserve access to its superior Japanese marketplace, but you shouldn't have to. Hell, if Sony got their act together and started pimping the PS3 as the place to get your affordable fix of their respectable and immense library (especially the PS2), I'd consider adding their new console to my rickety fire hazard of an entertainment center.

And to add insult to injury, one of the most beloved, sought-after games in Sony's history, Final Fantasy VII, has just popped up on the Japanese PSN store, causing Final Fantasy fanboys country-wide to start wailing in agony.

Despite being so successful and so reprinted, Final Fantasy VII inexplicably goes for unreasonable sums on sites like eBay. Its price in PlayStaion Store? 1500 yen (roughly 15 bucks), which isn't too shabby for a game approaching its twelfth birthday. So far, Square's released quite a few games for the PlayStation Store--including the ultra-rare Einhander--but they've entirely ignored their American fanbase. Making Final Fantasy VII available outside of Japan would basically be like printing money, though it's important to note that Sony seems to have taken a firm anti-money stance this generation. Whatever their justification, I hope they at least think about expanding their American PlayStation Store soon--if only to quiet those misguided fools who still regard Final Fantasy VII as the "best game ever."

Related Links:

PSOne on PSN: Somehow, it’s Suikoden
Beating the Dead Horse Who Has It Coming: Playstation Releases on PSN
Far Out, Man

Alternate Soundtrack: Noby Noby Boy vs. Daft Punk

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

As John previously mentioned, Spring is in the air here in New York. Coats and coffee have been replaced by t-shirts and...well... some people still have coffee. I've been rocking the cranberry juice myself. With all of this new life in the air, I find myself returning to my summer lover, Alternate Soundtrack, and where better to begin than with Bandai Namco's newest Springtime insta-classic, Noby Noby Boy.

As I'm sure you know, because you're all just that well-informed, oh wonderful 61fpsers, Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy is a game all about relaxed play. In fact, the game's title is a pun on the japanese words for "loose" and "stretch," much like how the original Katamari Damacy was a visual pun in that the two kanji were nearly identical, but I digress. While Katamari was notorious for its ridiculously catchy and enthralling soundtrack, Noby's is much more subdued. Introductory tuba and bells clear the path for sedate acoustic guitar plucking. That's about it. Thankfully, Noby uses just about every feature of the PS3's Cross Media Browser, including the ability to play music from the hard drive, allowing you to make your own soundtrack with incredible ease. I found that the game works wonderfully with Daft Punk's Discovery.

Quite a leap, huh? Plucked acoustic guitar to pungent synth blasts, but it works. Much like Takahashi's sophomore game (let's face it, We <3 Katamari doesn't count) represents a shift in his own career, focusing less on "goals" and "craft" and more on the fun of play and freedom of youth, Daft Punk's sophomore album attempted to be more open-minded and playful than their previous material, and was as such named for the childhood psychological phase of discovery. Philosophically, the two works share a great deal of common ground: occassional moments of poignancy and introspection amidst an overall air of liberation and excitement, the carefree juxtaposition of elements from unrelated fields (cavemen did not have helicopters, but that makes the game more fun!), a deeper sense of connection with its intended audience and reliance on their reaction to achieve the works' goals. Oh yeah, and robots.

But it's all too easy to ramble about the meaning behind anything done by Takahashi and/or Daft Punk, let's just go to the video for a demonstration:

Oh yeah, that's the stuff right there.

Be sure to check back here in the not-too-distant future for more Alternate Soundtracks, and, of course, you're welcome to share your favorites and your ideas in the comments. If you sell me on a particular idea, it just might be featured later on, and I'm always happy to give credit where credit is due.

Previously on Alternate Soundtrack:
Castlevania III vs. Bush
Ai Cho Aniki vs. Xiu Xiu
Orbital vs. The Notwist
Altered Beast vs. Natalie Portman's Shaved Head
Kirby's Adventure vs. girlsareshort

The 61FPS Review: Noby Noby Boy—Part 2

Joe Keiser — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Over the weekend, I spent half an hour tying my body around a cloud.

I’m not really sure why I did it, and I’m not particularly convinced I enjoyed it. Something inside me told me to do it, and after a fashion I succeeded.

And then I played Noby Noby Boy for a few more hours. And when I put down the controller I came to a realization: this is not something that can actually be reviewed, at least certainly not with the ease of other games.

Let me be clear: I am not the sort of person that believes that reviews should not have scores or grades at the end. I believe that most games are built with specific goals in mind, and that the value of those goals and how successful the game was in achieving those goals can be measured in a relatively standard way. It’s not objective, and there are exceptional games that bring trouble to the grading system, which is why you see so much hand wringing about review scores (note: that hand wringing is also valuable—it keeps scoring models contemporary and reviewers on their toes). It’s the same thing that happens at almost any school.

Noby Noby Boy is one of those exceptional outliers. There's little like it and almost nothing to compare it to. There’s also no implied contract here: you’re not trading $60 for the promise of a solid genre entry that meets all the bullet points and marketing hype. Noby Noby is $5, with the marketing hype being that it is “inexplicable” and the bullet points being “relax” and “have fun”. Without any expectations, it can’t be said that Noby Noby Boy is a failure. But can it also be said that it is a success?

As I am passing judgment here, I have to say that I don’t think it can. As it turns out the flashes of wonder I described in Part One of this review didn’t snowball into gloriousness—instead, they twinkled like stars in a vast emptiness. Noby Noby Boy feels like a toddler’s busy box, where all you do is see how things fit together. It has a sort of witless charm about it, but each time I was done fiddling with it (“fiddling” being the appropriate way to describe anything a player does with Noby Noby Boy) I didn’t feel like I had gotten anything valuable or even experienced anything notable. It just felt like mucking about with an unassuming toy that had an aesthetic similar to but not as well realized as Katamari Damacy. And I thought Katamari Damacy was brilliant even with the timers and size goals disabled.

Noby Noby Boy’s issue isn’t that it’s aimless. It just doesn’t give you the proper tools to let making the aims you create seem worthwhile. I’m going to give it a C, because five dollars does get you a certain amount of endearing cuteness and it does come through with its promise of “relax”. “Have fun” is rather more dubious, however.

I now expect much hand wringing.

Rating: C

Past Reviews:

Noby Noby Boy - Part 1
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

Rite of Spring: Flower and What’s Lacking in the Romantic Games Movement

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:00:00 GMT

Last week was full of everything you want out of a vacation: a change of setting from urban sprawl to glorious mountain range, rancid air exchanged for clean winter wind, great food, better scotch, and the best company. Of course, there was also a smorgasbord of great portable games. Retro Game Challenge, Atlus’ under-the-radar curiosity My World, My Way, and Kirby Super Star Ultra made for marvelous palette cleansers, washing away the last traces of Epic Holiday Gaming morsels still stuck between my gaming teeth. It was restful, brief, and rejuvenating. When I returned, I knew that it was going to be time for 2009 hardcore gaming to go into high gear what with Street Fighter IV and a Killzone 2 demo waiting, but the first thing I had to spend some time with was Flower. As soon as it had finished installing, well, it felt like my vacation had just gotten an extension.

The game is exhilarating. Having grown up in rural upstate New York, the contrast of Flower’s city-bound preludes and its soaring bucolic playgrounds pulls at very specific heartstrings in me. The game is brief but I’m no less taken with it. Jenova Chen and ThatGameCompany are damn good at eliciting just this sort of emotional response with their games. Their debut Cloud was rich with the same bittersweet catharsis that characterizes Flower. Both are something like the game equivalent of a symphonic poem, their fluid flight-based gameplay replacing music as the visceral informant of a visual/audio narrative. They’re games unified in subject too; Cloud and Flower chronicle escapes to a pure, natural world from metropolitan confinement. They are concerned with beauty and simplicity.

I wouldn’t say that Chen and TGC started it, but they’re certainly poster children for what appears to be a burgeoning romantic movement in game design. As much as Jon Blow’s Braid was a commentary on play conventions, it was also a deliberately lyrical game. Trading in pastoral visuals and acoustics to inform its tale of romantic loss and redemption, it shares more than a little with Flower and Cloud. I’m wondering, though, why these new romantics have yet to explore more emotionally troubling and challenging themes. Gamers and critics are constantly citing “dark” themes as a mark of credibility in mainstream game design, but the darkness they refer to is usually tied up in angst driven narrative and violence. Where are the games that are legitimately dark, games that don’t just gain their emotional thrust from beauty or human ugliness? Braid’s ambiguous conclusion and TGC’s exploration of predatory natural selection, Flow, flirt with ugliness and dissonance but never make them their focus. (Flow’s poetic prescript “…life could be simple…” limits the game’s reach from the start.) But why can’t the lyrical style and play of these games be applied to subject matter like Procedural Arts’ Façade, a game that places you directly into a married couple’s complete relationship breakdown?

I’m excited by these creator’s efforts and, yes, moved by them. I was caught up in Flower from the start. But I am anxious and thirsty for the romantic games’ movement to find its Stravinsky, that artist who asks me to look at and hear and play something I’d rather not to make their work that much more powerful.

Related links:

Flower - A Zen de Blob?
Indie Dev Moment: Dyson
Far Out, Man
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

Maybe You Should Just Watch Them: Hands-On With Watchmen

Joe Keiser — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:25:00 GMT

What a strange trajectory the Watchmen property has taken, to begin as the (not a, the) groundbreaking and thought-provoking comic series of the 80s and end up here, as it will, in an episodic brawling game based on a movie with one of the most tortured development cycles in history. How did we get here? Where even are we?

Watchmen: The End is Nigh, or rather the small amount of it I got to sample, didn’t seem to have the answer. It comes on the fully modernized digital distribution system, yet feels like it comes from another time. Several other times, actually—the simply animated comic panel cutscenes, which were vetted by original series artist and co-creator Dave Gibbons, bring the feel of 80s comic design and contrast well with the slick in-game graphics. The split-screen local multiplayer is a blast from the recent past. Both are welcome.

Other parts are less inviting. In this build the controls were rather floaty, a sense of imprecision exacerbated by a pre-loaded combo system that made reaction feel sluggish in tense situations. Gameplay was simple to the point of anachronism.

Maybe that is the point—retro-styled gaming has worked on Xbox Live Arcade, over and over again, for years. Maybe the game is supposed to feel old in places, dog-eared, like a graphic novel from 1987. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t know what the point is. I could come up with arguments as to why showing Rorschach and Nite Owl in their good old days, as this game does, is a good idea (showing who these characters wanted to be in their flapper days provides strong contrast to who they proved to be when everything went bad). I could try to explain why putting these characters in an old-school brawler makes sense (that they were based on characters from an earlier era and are now themselves characters from an earlier era, and games like The Warriors showed that putting such iconic classic characters into a likewise classic-feeling game style has a curious synergy). I don’t think these are terrible arguments, but for some reason I remain unconvinced.

The game, in its full form, could well provide its own reasons for its existence. Just the fact that Watchmen: The End is Nigh is a multiplatform episodic game with retail-level production values despite being digitally distributed makes it, at the very least, a market pioneer. And it could, priced properly, make for an evening of goofy fun with a buddy. But it’s an odd duck, and no one would blame you if you stayed cautious around it.

Note: This hands-on preview was conducted at an event hosted and with conditions controlled by the publisher.

Related Links:

Curveball: Hands-On With Wanted: Weapons of Fate
Gone Vertical: Hands-on Bionic Commando
Bayonetta: Not As Gratuitous As You Think

Flower - A Zen de Blob?

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:59:00 GMT

thatgamecompany's long-awaited "Zen game" Flower is finally being released on the Playstation Network next week, having been originally teased way back at the Tokyo Game Show in 2007. So far the game has caused all who've witnessed it to find themselves unable to accurately describe what the "game" is, only that it is captivating.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi was recently treated to a demonstration by Creative Director Jenova Chen. While it is still nowhere near as telling as an actual hands-on experience with the game, it is most definitely insightful.

Controlling the wind via Sixaxis motion control, carry colorful flower petals through the dreary grey flowers and grass to energize the world with color, panning out for cutscenes of landmark colorings. This looks decidedly similar to the story mode of de Blob (my #1 favorite game of 2008) with the notable exception of being incredibly relaxed. There don't appear to be any enemies or noteworthy obstacles, just the garden around you. We've heard that the "levels" of Flower are each the dreams of potted flowers on a window sill and that other dreams include bringing wind to a valley and bringing light to a darkened city. It appears from this demonstration that the little success cutscenes will feel very liberating and joyous for the player, an excellent way to form an emotional connection in such a "casual" game. (You may notice I'm using quotation marks a good deal here. That's because the jury is still out regarding Flower feeling like a "game") Very interesting here is Jenova's explanation that the player will still be in control even during the cutscenes so that they never lose that sense of immersion, even when the camera pulls away, similar to how the player could still control the camera during cutscenes in Shadow of the Colossus.

Flower looks to be the game of the season that shows the most of what the Playstation 3 can do. Tens of thousands of blades of grass moving independently, pushed and pulled by the player in lush high-definition. If you have a Playstation 3 and ten dollars, you should probably get Flower when it hits the PSN Store next week. I know I will.

Related articles:

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Beating the Dead Horse Who Has It Coming: Playstation Releases on PSN

John Constantine — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:45:00 GMT

Castlevania Chronicles, the peculiar Playstation remake of a peculiar X68000 remake of the original Castlevania, was released as a downloadable title on Playstation Network today. It ain’t the best Castlevania out there, but it’s still a swell action title. The disc release was never widely distributed either, so this will be the very first time most interested players will even get the chance to try it out. Of course, the same could be said of a lot of Playstation games. The halcyon days of 2003 when you could walk into any Blockbuster or Gamestop in the country and pick up five classic PS1 games, often times still shrinkwrapped, for ten or twenty bucks are long over, and the collector’s market is making many great games prohibitively expensive. Want to play Silent Hill? Hope you’ve got an extra sixty-five dollars lying around. How about Suikoden II, considered to be the series’ definitive installment? That’ll be $150. And what about cult classics like CyberConnect2’s Silent Bomber? Yeah, seventy smackers.

You shouldn’t have to pay top dollar for these games, though, considering they could very easily be released on the Playstation Network. Over the course of the past two years, SCEA, along with a handful of other US publishers, have put up a measly twenty-six Playstation games on PSN, while Sony Japan have released close to a hundred. This isn’t the first time I’ve brought up this inexplicable disparity here at 61 Frames Per Second, but seriously, Sony. What the hell is going on here?! If the current market has proven anything, it’s that you can put almost anything up for download on a console and someone will buy it. There is no other explanation for Boogerman’s presence on Nintendo’s Virtual Console. The expense of having a game re-rated by the ESRB can’t be that high if Boogerman is getting re-released.

Sony, if you want to convince people to buy a Playstation 3 or PSP, then nostalgia-bomb them. Tell them they can relive all their fondest memories of 1997 for a mere five dollars on the Playstation Network and I promise you, people will literally throw money at you. And no, I don’t mean you should put up more Jet Moto games.

Related links:

Sony Gives Thanks Via Charming PSN Deals
Far Out, Man
I’ll Tell You When I’ve Had Enough!
Sony Might Just Hate You
Boogerman: Too Immature for Children

Sony Might Just Hate You

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Even before the company’s dramatic fall from grace, there has been a number of reasons a discerning individual might think that Sony hates them. The original Playstation had a failure rate to challenge the Xbox 360’s and the first DualShock controller didn’t become a pack-in with the system for months after its release. The Playstation 2 launched at a pricey $299 and that price held until May of 2002 when Sony suddenly and without forewarning dropped it to $199, leaving thousands of gamers out a hundred bucks when a simple press release could have saved them the trouble. The PSP launched and its screen was plagued by dead pixels and the Playstation 3 cost half a grand at the cheapest when it launched in ’06. One day, they’re committed to backwards compatibility and against rumble in controllers, and the next they’re asking you drop sixty smackers on a controller that shakes and backwards compatibility is for the birds. Yep. Sony hates you. Sony hates all of us.

Well, today, Sony hates your potential creativity. If you’re anything like us, you looked at LittleBigPlanet and thought, “Oh man. I am totally remaking Castlevania III in that sumbitch.” As the game plowed through its autumn beta, it turned out there were many like minded souls out there, making all sorts of homage-laden playgrounds for Sackboy to romp about. Then, last week, Media Molecule started disappearing levels from LittleBigPlanet’s servers en masse. Claiming that these deleted levels were the target of user complaints, it turned out that they were almost all removed under the auspices of copyright infringement. Most of the levels erased were based on classic videogames, but as Kris Erickson pointed out on PS3 Informer, some levels were removed for so innocuous a reason as they shared a name with a movie. (It’s actually just as well this one was taken down. No one needs to be reminded that Failure to Launch exists.) Today, Sony released a statement outlining some “suggested” LittleBigPlanet rules of conduct:

• Ensure that the content you share with other users is suitable for all ages - everybody has access to your level if you publish it.

• Please respect other people's intellectual property rights. For example, don't use images, brands or logos that you're not entitled to use.

• If you come across any content that you feel the need to report, then please do it responsibly. Hoax reports will be considered inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing says creativity like a nice set of rules! Regarding the all ages part, I don’t see why Sony and Media Molecule didn’t incorporate age settings that reflect a given PS3’s parental settings in the first place. No hoax reporting? Fine. But the intellectual property issue is both prickly and offensive. As Erickson also points out in his excellent editorial, the majority of these levels deleted from LittleBigPlanet fall within the boundaries of fair use. The levels inherently don’t diminish the value of the work that inspired them because, especially with game homage, they have to run in LittleBigPlanet. But more importantly, none of these levels are made for commercial consumption. They are free, provided you already own the game and a Playstation. PSN member RoboAlucard92 isn’t getting paid for his Symphony of the Night level in LittleBigPlanet. When Konami releases their inevitable LittleBigPlanet Castlevania content pack, then that level might need to be taken down. But not before.

The very existence of LittleBigPlanet seems like an act of love. But this sort of corporate kowtowing looks a whole lot more like hate.

(Our thanks to CVG, PS3 Informer, and NeoGAF user newschool)

Related links:

Microsoft Just Might Hate You
Nintendo Might Just Hate You
Five Games That Will Be Awesome to Remake in LittleBigPlanet
Waiting: Four More Games That Will Be Awesome To Remake In LittleBigPlanet
Four More Games That ARE Awesome Remade In LittleBigPlanet

Create Unholy Life With the LittleBigPlanet Sackboy Generator

Nadia Oxford — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:18:00 GMT

If you look to your right, you'll see a picture of the lovely little girl I produced with a gentleman who called himself "Lou Sipher." He was an interesting man, full of ambitions but a little cold in bed.

Lou and I don't talk very much these days. He's a busy guy. Those Christian rock bands aren't going to trick themselves into playing evil secular music.

If you'd like to create your own twisted variation on Sackboy, check out the LittleBigPlanet site. You can't get too elaborate or anything, but you might pass away a few moments. I'm just going to sit back and watch the Internet implode as everyone dives for the chance to design the first Sackboy Hitler.

...Wow, my daughter's pretty terrifying. I can't wait until she starts kindergarten!

That's a knife in her hand, by the way.

Related Links:

Five Games That Will Be Awesome To Remake In Little Big Planet
Sony Fans, Meet Your New Totem: Sackboy
LittleBigPre-Order Confusion

WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out

John Constantine — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Nintendo has been on my mind over the past few days. Not as a corporation in the business of making video games. More like a singular anthropomorphic entity. This is how Nintendo exists in my head these days, so when I see them making business decisions, my psychosis interprets those decisions as being made by an individual. You know, as an affront against me personally. For example, I look at the abject madness that is Skip’s Captain Rainbow and then I remember that it will never come out in the US. Sure, WarioWare comes out, but do we get Mother 3? Tingle’s Rosy Rupee Land, a game that’s actually available in English? Nintendo doesn’t bring their weird games here, so Captain Rainbow, with its legion of obscure, z-list Nintendo characters, will flounder away on an island nation half the world away. Nintendo does things like this to spite me. Like my first experiences with WiiWare this past weekend.

On Saturday morning, I decided that, given my overwhelmingly positive experiences with original content on PSN and Xbox Live Arcade in recent weeks, it was time to give WiiWare’s offerings a shot. I loaded twenty dollars worth of Wii points onto my account and went to download Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People and David Braben’s Lost Winds. I was then promptly informed that there was not enough space on my Wii to download either title. My Wii does not get frequent use, so this was the first time I had to “clean out my fridge”. At first, I figured I would back up my Virtual Console titles to the SD Card I purchased two years back, but after fifteen minutes and only backing up five VC classics, it hit me that backing up everything was going to take up most of the day. I had to delete most everything to make space for just two WiiWare titles. It took over half an hour before I could even play them. Strong Bad and Lost Winds turned out to be okay, fun but fairly insubstantial after spending five hours total to complete both. The whole experience was, for lack of a better word, annoying.

When things like this happen between Nintendo I start to feel like the Big N is an ex-girlfriend with whom I had a messy break up but am now trying to be friends with. We're polite to one another and able to be at social functions at the same time but there's a smoldering bubble of bitterness under the pleasant small talk. Sometimes that bitterness boils to the surface.

“Well, if you would broaden your horizons we'd still be together! Try Wii Play or try not downloading so many things!”

"Well, maybe if you didn't start making such subpar software, maybe if you actually released your more interesting games in a language I can understand, and actually kept your word sometimes, I wouldn't have had to leave! Why don’t you support USB hard drives!"

“I don’t even know why I bother talking to you!”

“Go make another crappy Zelda or some Brain Training crap!”

*Door slams*

Okay, well, maybe that got a little weird. WiiWare is a chore to use and needs better games. Probably could have just said that.

Related articles:

Where is Wii's Disaster: Day of Crisis?
Trailer Review: Captain Rainbow
Many Colors in the Hardcore Rainbow
This Week in Shrieking Annoyances
Quickies: Homestar Ruiner
Whatcha Playing: Lost Winds

Sony Fans, Meet Your New Totem: Sackboy

Nadia Oxford — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Your dear mother has undoubtedly told you at some point, "You need to have a wife. It's good to have a wife." Maybe you agree or maybe you disagree, but either way, singles feel pressured to hunt down a mate even while insisting to themselves that the single life is totally rad.

Sony's adopted your mother's stance on companionship, but instead of spouses it's talking about mascots. "Every system needs a mascot. It's good to have a mascot. Here, Sackboy now represents Sony."

"Gee Sony, Sackboy is awfully cute, but is it a good idea to make him the spokes...doll for the company? We don't actually know how LittleBigPlanet will sell. And honestly, I'm okay with Sony's lack of a mascot--"

"It's good to have a mascot. Now start making babies."

If you feel wary, it's okay. Sony's previous attempts to match us up with digital companions resulted in lukewarm relationships before sputtering out: Crash Bandicoot, Lara Croft, Kratos. Even Microsoft fared far better by branding itself with Master Chief.

What do you think about Sackboy as Sony's new representative? LittleBigPlanet will undoubtedly be awesome, but even though we gamers are a grasping, superstitious lot, there's never any guarantee of a title's success. LittleBigPlanet might launch with gusto and burn brightly before crashing to earth like a failed science project. Also consider that the Internet's favourite hobby is to adore a big-name title for a few months, then dump on it (cough cough Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Grand Theft Auto IV cough hork).

I initially thought Sackboy looked like a hanged gingerbread man. He creeps me out a little. My husband was horrified at my comparison. I haven't yet told him that I changed my mind and decided that Sackboy looks like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction...if the Gimp was supremely happy about his position in Zed's shop, I mean.

Related Links:

LittleBigPre-Order Confusion
E3 Opinion: Because It's Cool To Complain

More Downloadable Remakes! More, Says I!

Nadia Oxford — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:04:00 GMT

Bionic Commando Rearmed is apparently excellent, not like there was ever any doubt (well...maybe just a titch).

Chances are good that Mega Man 9 will be playable as well, which leads me to believe that Capcom has a pretty good idea about how to handle its remakes. I would like to see more.

On one hand, the state of the gaming world is making me brood like Yahtzee. Why are the most exciting games of today remakes and sequels to old franchises? Am I a dirty person for being more excited about ancient gaming lore than Mirror's Edge?

I don't know if there are any rabid Osamu Tezuka fans among us, but the whole ordeal reminds me a bit of the Phoenix manga series. In it, mankind's progress sputtered and stalled because he became nostalgic for the past instead of trying to innovate for the future. Eventually, the human race decayed and crumbled before the master computers running the world burnt civilization to the ground with hydrogen bombs. Gamers' pining for the past might be a grim prophecy. We should tread carefully and be wary.

On the other hand...hey, Bionic Commando Rearmed!

I personally hope this opens the door for, um, remakes of remakes. I adored Mega Man Powered Up and Mega Man Maverick Hunter X for the PSP, but both of them sold poorly. This may or may not have something to do with the PSP being owned by next to no one (okay, that's hyperbole. It's owned by two people). Keiji Inafune had planned to re-make both the Mega Man and Mega Man X series on the PSP, but the project is now in limbo.

Will the likes of Bionic Commando Rearmed bring hope back to the children (me)? It's doubtlessly cheaper to produce an online game versus shipping, marketing and distributing a hard copy. Will Mega Man Powered Up get a second chance?

Just so you know, I'm willing to smother you all in your sleep for a chance at Mega Man Powered Up 2.

Related Links:

Mega Man 9 Bosses Look Like Mega Man 9 Bosses
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes-And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 2
Gone Vertical: Hands-On Bionic Commando

Introducing Mrs Radd Spencer

Nadia Oxford — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:36:00 GMT

1UP.com posted an excellent interview with Ben Judd, the producer of Bionic Commando Rearmed. Judd's insight is interesting, especially his revelation about Rearmed's story connecting to the next-gen game coming out for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3:

"Making the story for this was great. It was a lot of fun, actually, because you have a little bare-bones story from the NES. (...) One of the things we added in was that the main character has a wife. And you find out that his wife left him when you're talking to different people in the game. He says, "I don't know why she left. Maybe she doesn't like a military man." Later, you find out something happened to his wife, and you find out in the next-gen -- it ties into the next-gen game."

Maybe I'm too much of a girl sometimes, but I'm always very interested in the emotional aspect of video games. I thought, Radd Spencer has a wife? What does she look like?

I hope you appreciate the concept sketch behind the jump. I put many backbreaking hours into it.

Click the image for a face-punching full-size view.

I'm open to names for the dog. I was thinking of Awesome the Wonder Westie, but suggestions are welcome.

Coming up next: Bionic Baby. Okay, not really.

Related Links:

Bionic Commando is Love: The Bionic Commando Headquarters' Top Ten Bionic Arm Uses
Bionic Commando is Love: Bionic Commando in Eighteen Minutes
Bionic Commando Rearmed: T-Minus One Week

Far Out, Man

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When the demo for PixelJunk’s latest play on genre convention, Eden, went live on the Playstation Network late last week, I was still knee deep in a country spanning jaunt, my only real gaming time devoted to quick sessions of Shiren the Wanderer and Phoenix Wright: Justice For All. I’ve been following Eden closely since Dylan Cuthber and Q Games started showing it off earlier this year, intrigued by its subdued yet dense pop-art visuals, deep house soundtrack, and its peculiar momentum-based play. Now that I’ve spent some time with the free appetizer hosted on PSN, I am, like Derrick, entranced by Eden.

Beyond the basic satisfaction of moving through Eden’s gardens, its central theme of growth – your actions bring life to the environment resulting with subtle shifts in each garden’s music – is emblematic of the shift in the way games broadly can be classified. Discussing games and game design is no longer limited to mechanical identification; this is a platformer, this is a puzzle, this is a shooter. The boundaries of genre are disintegrating, much as they did for popular music half a century ago, leaving games to be defined more by aesthetics than basic function. Eden, even more so than PSN cousins Echochrome and Everyday Shooter, is an amalgamation of classic genre tropes – platforming, high-score challenges, exploration, and puzzle obstacles among them – that transcends taxonomy through presentation and the way it affects the player’s experience of the game. It’s easier to relate Eden to the electronica that soundtracks it than to other games. Like deep house, play in Eden is a soothing slow burn that can result in ecstatic highs but quickly lead back into a (without sounding too much like I’m writing this while holding glow sticks) groove. It’s a far cry from the traditional escalation of games, especially those not driven by narrative, where prolonged play leads only to increased tension.

PixelJunk Eden isn’t a platformer. It’s trance.

Related links:

Whatcha' (Wish You Were) Playing: How Does Your Garden Grow?
OST: Everyday Shooter
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

Where is The City of Metronome?

John Constantine — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Back in 2005, Swedish developer Tarsier came to E3 with a big game they’d been cooking up called The City of Metronome. Metronome, even three years later, remains a visual feast, its faceless characters, early 20th century fashion, and twisting cityscape sitting somewhere between Edward Gorey and Pixar, Ralph Bakshi and Alex Proyas’ Dark City. Tarsier had also created an exciting foundation for play in Metronome; every action was based around sound. A player could control the city’s citizens, alter architecture, and even fight using sounds recorded in the game. And recording wasn’t just a clever twist on item collection either, as the player could create their own noise to record by interacting with the world (breaking glass, having a conversation, etc.) Few games in the past five years have been as conceptually exciting or strange as Metronome. In 2008 though, it’s nowhere to be found.

Sadly, we do (sort of) know where The City of Metronome is. Tarsier announced in April 2007 that they had ceased active development because they couldn’t get publishers to take a chance on the game. In an interview with PSU.com, Bjorn Sunesson of Tarsier said:

The original City of Metronome concept seemed quite risky in the eyes of a publisher. A new team combined with a game that had unproven "weird" ideas for gameplay and took place in an environment unlike any other game. So what we are doing now is basically building the needed track record, combined with re-designing gameplay to a state where it is still innovative and awesome, but not so unusual that publishers marketing people gets all confused and scared.

A shame considering the success publishers like Take-Two have had with offbeat games like Bioshock in the past eighteen months. There is hope for The City of Metronome though. Just last month, Tarsier announced they’re currently developing a new game for Sony’s Playstation Network. Given Sony’s habit of fostering avant garde developers and games through PSN, it’s more than possible we’ll finally get a chance to explore Tarsier’s city.