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• Mega64's Movie Adaptation of Shadow of the Colossus Possibly Better than Sony's

  I hate to ruin your day, but Sony is making a Shadow of the Colossus movie--the news is a few weeks old, actually. So how, exactly, is Hollywood planning on handling such a beautiful, understated game? About as well as you would think. I'm pretty sure all I need to do is quote Variety's The Cut Scene blog to give you a full understanding of how the final product will most likely turn out: I understand the folks working on the project are planning to have some of the characters who appear only momentarily in the game, such as those who try to track down and stop Wander, play bigger roles in the film. And despite the game's somewhat "artsy" cred, they're hoping "Shadow" will be a "Lord of the Rings"-style fantasy tentpole. The silver lining to this ugly little cloud comes in the form of a video by gaming pranksters Mega64, who were undoubtedly inspired by Sony's unfortunate announcement. While I'm sure Sony will throw millions more dollars into their own adaptation, there's no denying that far more entertainment can be found in the group's 2-minute take on this PS2 classic. Video after the cut. Read More... Posted Apr 21 2009, 09:30 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: mega 64, sony, shadow of the colossus, movies, bob mackey

• Vandal Hearts Resurrected, Has Terrible Character Art

  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. Read More... Posted Apr 13 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, game boy, xbox 360, konami, sony, sega, psn, Saturn, Suikoden, final fantasy tactics, tactics ogre, yasumi matsuno, vandal hearts II, monster madness, john constantinel xbox live arcade, vandal hearts, vandal hearts flames of judgment

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

  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. Read More... Posted Apr 13 2009, 02:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: sony, psn, ps3, bob mackey, square enix, playstation store

• The Art of Heavy Rain

  We have absolutely no clue what Heavy Rain is going to be. Well, we have some idea, sure. We know that Quantic Dream’s unsettling detailed three-dimensional characters and environments recall the world on its most, dreary rain-soaked day, shades of grey and brown and green. We know that the character’s have facial expressions that dip so low into the Uncanny Valley that they stop being repellant and become entrancing. We know that the game will be played predominantly through quick time events. We know that, if Indigo Prophecy and Omikron are anything to go by, Heavy Rain’s going to be, if not good, one hell of an interesting game. Truth is, we know so little because Quantic Dream hasn’t shown the actual game to anyone besides a small handful of journalists and employees of Sony Computer Entertainment. They’ve shown two demos as examples of the technology and style that will make up Heavy Rain. That’s it. No actual game. Quantic Dream are mysterious Frenchmen, so they are. Today, we can add some new pieces to the Heavy Rain puzzle. This concept art may not tell us a whole lot about the game’s story or what it will actually be like to play, but they speak volumes about its tone. This game is going to be unsettling. How unsettling? Follow the jump. Read More... Posted Apr 06 2009, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, uncanny valley, sony, indigo prophecy, heavy rain, quantic dream, omikron, ps3, scea, Fahrenheit

• Less Than Perfect: Jak and Daxter and The Flawed Character

  On last week’s GDC ListenUp special, the three amigos John Davison, Garnett Lee, David Ellis, chatted with God Of War creator David Jaffe about the dominance of empowered supermen/women as protagonists in videogames. Their discussion started around the difference between Western and Eastern tastes in protagonists. The American palette leans towards the militaristic hero archetype, the one man, muscle bound army who, plagued by existential angst or not, can solve every problem with brawn. The Japanese audience prefers youthful androgyny, characters either brimming with naïve confidence or crushed under the weight of responsibility for civilization. The ListenUP crew went on to lament that there is seemingly no place in either culture for the Peter Parker/Spider-man archetype, characters who are empowered, but deeply flawed, whether by insecurity or another humanizing debility. They’re right of course. I can point to a selection of flawed, humanized characters in games; Oddworld’s Munch and Abe are iconic inhuman outsiders made relatable through fragility and Ico’s horned protagonist is so memorable because of his incompetence and weakness. Gaming’s more literary canon, the adventure genre, is also populated by relatable humanized leads like Farenheit’s Carla Valenti and Lucas Kane or Dreamfall’s Zoe. But these icons make up a significant minority in the world of character-based and narrative-driven videogames. If Peter Parker and his alter-ego are the most profitable fictional characters in contemporary media, why are characters like him so under-represented in videogames? Why are our game protagonists so rigidly defined by complete empowerment? Where are our emotional, and our actual, cripples? Read More... Posted Apr 01 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, psp, sony, japan, ico, farenheit, america, spider-man, abe’s exodus, oddworld, dreamfall, jak & daxter the lost frontier, listenup, munch’s odyssey, high impact games, Jak: daxter

• Getting Medieval (and Evil) on PSP: Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!

  Well, Sony, it’s about time. You publish two versions of Yuusha no Kuse Ni Namaikida for PSP in as many years and you don’t release either outside Japan? Come on, man! What could it hurt? Patapon and LocoRoco are weird, original PSP games and they’ve done okay. American nerds love RPGs and retro style. Where’s the love? WHERE IS IT?! Ah, there it is. It’s understandable if you missed Yuusha no Kuse Ni Namaikida (You’re Pretty Cheeky For a Hero, if you prefer) when it came out back in 2007. Even amongst import gamers, it was still pretty obscure. Here’s the score: you play as the evil, world-menacing bad-guy-demon-lord from Ye Olde JRPG. You build a large maze-dungeon on a 2D plain, fill it with monsters, and then hide in it. Eventually a hero will show up to try and kill you. You, naturally, aim to avoid him. Think Tecmo’s Deception meets Dragon Quest. Here’s a trailer to get your mind rolling. Read More... Posted Mar 31 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, psp, sony, dragon quest, scea, locoroco, patapon, holy invasion of privacy badman, scej, tecmo’s deception, Yuusha no Kuse Ni Namaikida

• Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and the Second Chance

  There’s just something about a re-release. Not a remake mind you, I mean a game being released a second time, possibly ported to another system, with a few ancillary new features thrown in to entice previous owners to cough up more cash. Sometimes they just get me angry. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Why?! You can buy perfectly good versions of those games for half the price and play ‘em the way they were supposed to be played! Grumble mumble whyioughta. That’s just the idiot inside, the natural born fanboy hungry to defend an allegiance, doesn’t matter to what or who. He’s easy to ignore, but hard to suppress. Most of the time, I love a good re-release. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Excellent! Those are great games that more people should play, glad they’re getting a new lease on life. It is too much to ask that a game be better than it was the first time around. Read More... Posted Mar 17 2009, 01:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, persona 3 fes, nintendo, wii, sony, resident evil 4, ninja gaiden, metroid prime, tecmo, ninja gaiden 2, devil may cry 3, ninja gaiden sigma, ninja gaiden sigma 2

• Sony's Trailers Are Graphics Whores

  We get it, Sony, the Playstation 3 is the most powerful of the three current-gen home consoles. You don't have to flaunt it over and over to make yourself feel better for being in last place in sales this generation. You seem to be treating this as a beauty pageant, and you're certainly not in the running for Miss Congeniality with these repeated boasts. I'm referring, of course, to the recent trend of all of the PS3's exclusive AAA titles featuring trailers of all in-game footage. This would be fine, in fact commendable, if not for the fact that they have to tell us, heavily implying that other trailers rely on CGI cutscenes (they mostly do). The latest offender is this one for Sucker Punch's Infamous. It may be all in-game footage, but I'm pretty sure all that excessive blur and reverse time were added in post-production (the slow-down may very well be part of the game). See said trailer after the jump: Read More... Posted Mar 13 2009, 12:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 103 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, sony, trailer, killzone 2, uncharted 2: among thieves, infamous, god of war iii

• Chiptune Friday: Spring Is In the Air With Okami

  Two truths. Today is March 13th. It will not be spring for another eight days. Also, the original soundtrack to Okami is not chiptune. At all. In fact, it is fully orchestrated and entrenched in traditional Japanese composition, a far cry from the heavy metal and pop roots of the blissed-out blip songs composed on the NES or similar consoles. Have you gone outside though? It is freaking gorgeous out there. It may rain, it may be cloudy, but the bitter miasma of late winter has lifted, washed away as if by… a celestial brush! Given, it’s likely that the fine weather is a result of the Earth’s natural solar orbit and axial spin, but I like to think that there’s a sun goddess wolf out there making it nice outside. I’m going to find her. We’ll go to the park and play fetch. Beautiful women will be all, “Oh your dog is beautiful!” And I’ll be all, “Check dis.” Then Amaterasu will make a bushel of fragrant botanicals grow at our feet. Here are three selections from the Okami soundtrack. Listen, be in bloom, and grab your DS or PSP. Go play outside today! The Great Goddess Amaterasu’s Revival Hit the jump for more fresh goodness. Read More... Posted Mar 13 2009, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, platinum games, wii, clover studios, capcom, atsushi inaba, sony, playstation 2, chiptune friday, okami

• Trailer Review: Infamous

  The media blackout on Suckerpunch’s Infamous is finally lifting. Some very positive, extensive previews of the game have started popping up. Edge’s recent cover story got me particularly pumped. This new trailer is light on play but heavy on ambiance. Still very cool. Read More... Posted Mar 05 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, trailer review, sony, scea, prototype, killzone 2, infamous, suckerpunch

• The 61FPS Review: Killzone 2

  NOTE: The following review and the grade attached to it are based entirely on Killzone 2’s single player campaign. Stay tuned to 61FPS for a follow-up, post-release examination of the game’s considerable multiplayer component. Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. There may be hundreds of them, but first-person shooters can really be broken down into two categories. The first type of FPS is marked by a strong balance between play, narrative, difficulty and pacing. If that balance is good enough, the game warrants a full playthrough. The other type is competent and even entertaining, but it’s just one more game with a gun. For one reason or another, maybe the challenge isn’t engaging enough to keep me going, maybe it’s the story, this type loses my interest long before the credits roll. Guerilla Games’ Killzone 2 almost falls into the latter camp for me. Had it not been for the demands of this review, I never would have finished the game. I’m glad I stuck it out though. Killzone 2 stumbles in its first half. Unwieldy controls, awkward combat dynamics and an unfocused, impersonal narrative are a lethal combination. But during the game’s back half, everything gels. It just takes some time to get Read More... Posted Feb 27 2009, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, killzone, sony, call of duty, 61fps review, gears of war, call of duty 4, killzone 2, Adam Rosenberg, guerilla games, killzone liberation

• The One That Got Away: Arc the Lad

  Romanticizing the pre-internet age of games criticism is common amongst those of us born before 1990. With the presses stopped on Electronic Gaming Monthly, the last survivors of gaming print’s heyday are Gamepro and Nintendo Power. Those magazines still cater to the adolescent audience they always have, but they’ve lost all of their old schlocky appeal. It’s a good thing. Gaming print isn’t dead, and games criticism is slowly but surely emerging from its fandom-based larval form. Yeah the internet’s glutted with drivel, but there’s a lot of substantive, well-written study of the medium happening. *cough* One thing certainly hasn’t changed. Gamefan may be long dead at this point, but Dave Halverson is still publishing monthly volumes of unabashed fandom in Play. Play, like Gamefan and Gamer’s Republic before it, isn’t really criticism. The magazine doesn’t engage in heady intellectualism like Edge, but it also doesn’t fall into Consumer Reports-style, reviews-and-previews tradition of Gamepro. Halverson’s publications are professionally made ‘zines, literal love letters to the industry they cover. The furor surrounding Halverson’s praise for Golden Axe: Beast Rider a few months back was surprising. The man isn’t a critic. He’s a lover. He publishes The Girls of Gaming, for crying out loud. Despite his flighty editorial mandate, Halverson’s pubs have had a surprisingly lasting impact on North American gaming culture. Today, Treasure is an iconic development studio beloved the world over. Gunstar Heroes wasn’t responsible for that notoriety. It was Gamefan’s constant lionization of the company that birthed the cult of Treasure. Gamefan was, for me, a message in a bottle. Every single month, I would open an issue and be overwhelmed by bizarre foreign games I would never have a chance to play. And at the back of every issue waited the most cryptic and vexing passages of all: the advertisements for Halverson’s import games shop Game Cave. The ads were four-pages long and littered with miniscule pictures of games accompanied by nothing more than a title. That was where I saw this. Read More... Posted Feb 26 2009, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, victor ireland, working designs, sony, playstation 2, play, gamecube, Playstation, nintendo power, golden axe, xbox, gamepro, vagrant story, arc the lad, golden axe beast rider, gamefan, arc the lad collection, maximo, gamer’s republic, tactics ogre

• Where Is SSX?

  Let me ask you a question, EA Canada: must it all be so gosh darned realistic these days? I’ve played Skate and Skate 2. Cool games. Cool games that helpfully reinforce, digitally, that my brain is not ready to take up skateboarding. The sheer amount of things I need to take into consideration whilst performing a simple trick in Skate terrifies me. If I tried to do this in real life, and I had to think about all the different things I was asking of my body, a plank of wood, some wheels, and gravity, I would experience complete ego disintegration right before rupturing my testicles on a railing in some public park. Why oh why can’t you take me back to the good ol’ days of extreme-with-a-capital-TREME sports, EA Canada. Why can we not head back to the mountain for some good times with a new SSX, the awesomest fake snowboarding game of all time? SSX 4 showed up on a few release lists back at the end of 2006, right around the time that the Xbox 360 was ending its first year and just before the release of the Playstation 3. These were the systems said to be home for such a wonderful sequel. Alas, that game was never ever officially announced and has failed to materialize since. A sort of remix of SSX 3, SSX: Blur, came out for Wii in March 2007 and it remains the single most frustrating game I have played in my entire life. Read More... Posted Feb 23 2009, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, ea, microsoft, xbox 360, where is, sony, burnout paradise, criterion games, dj atomika, skate, skate 2l john Constantine, ssx 4, ea Canada, ssx, ssx blur

• 10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill

  Silent Hill (released February 24th, 1999) did not mark a pivotal moment in the original Playstation’s lifecycle. Technologically speaking, Silent Hill was a solid effort, but nothing unusual for the time. Foregoing the pre-rendered backgrounds that were horror games’ stock-in-trade, Silent Hill’s full-3D environments weren’t as pristinely rendered as Konami’s own, year-old Metal Gear Solid. The CGI cutscenes, another requisite of the era, were competent but by no means up to the Squaresoft gold standard. Its control was wonky, its camera unwieldy, and the voice-acting was stiff even for a Playstation game. Of course, none of that matters. Silent Hill was a pivotal moment in game’s maturation as an affecting, expressive medium. Forget technology; its technical failings made it a stronger work. Forget genre; Silent Hill is not survival horror. It’s just horror. Read More... Posted Feb 23 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, capcom, metal gear solid, silent hill, konami, sony, rule of rose, Playstation, tecmo, fatal frame, team silent, silent hill 2, sunsoft, 10 years ago, akira yamioka, shuji ishikawa, punchline, david lynch, jacob’s ladder, Adrian lyne, siren, clock tower

• The White Whale: Terranigma and Ahab Gaming

  I sympathized with Nadia’s post last week about the pants wetting nature of Terranigma’s “Desert” theme. That eerie swath of SNES atmospherics by Miyoko Kobayashi and Masanori Hikichi is still fresh in my memory, and not just from following the link in Madame Oxford’s piece. Three weeks ago, after some ten years of hunting, I finally sat down and played Terranigma in one day-long marathon session. This was both the realization of a long-standing desire to play Quintet’s final Super Nintendo entry in their Heaven and Earth saga and also part of a grand gaming journey I’ve undertaken here in 2009. The quest, as it were, is to track down three games from the past two decades that represent significant gaps in my experience: The One That Got Away, The Second Chance, and The White Whale. My goal is to finally see, after building up each game that fits these descriptions for me in my brain, how they live up long after their respective primes. Given my inexplicable aversion to emulation, the English version of Terranigma has always been my white whale, the cartridge I’ve hunted for and that I’ve constantly sought for an actual way to play. An Australian copy of the game isn’t terribly rare, but it tends to fetch a high price, and then there’s the hurdle of getting it to run on a non-PAL Super Nintendo. That hurdle’s especially high since Terranigma, being one of the last Super Nintendo games, is fitted with a particularly finicky region-lockout chip. Even a Fami-clone that can play PAL carts like the Retro Duo won’t boot Terranigma. There are only two options for intrepid (and legitimately insane) gamers like myself. First, you can mod your SNES with 50/60 Hz region lockout switches. Fearing that I’d end up soldering my hand to the console, I opted out of this. The only other option is to find an incredibly rare version of the Pro Action Replay cheat device. Only three models will work, Mk2.P, 2.T, and 3, all of which only released in Europe in limited quantities. After trolling the net since last summer, I finally found one at the beginning of January. So, in spite of these barriers, in spite of my psychoses, I finally played and finished my white whale. Was it worth the wait? Did Terranigma live up to a decade of expectation? Read More... Posted Feb 20 2009, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, snes, working designs, sony, Playstation, soul blazer, super nintendo, terranigma, illusion of gaia, quintet, pro action replay, miyoko kobayahi, enix, masanori hikichi, retro duo, arc the lad

• Ghostbusters: There Are No Words For How Good Bustin' Makes Me Feel

  Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. I haven’t seen shit that will turn you white. The shit I have seen, namely a fresh build of Ghostbusters: The Video Game for Xbox 360 and PS3, will make you green. With slime. And envy. Last summer, a preview build featuring a portion of the widely seen New York Public Library level made the gaming press rounds. The unfinished code appeared out of thin air, its sender listed only as “Evil PR Monkey”. The demo was raw. Very raw. But not so raw as to diminish Ghostbusters’s promise. There were Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddmore (noVenkman in the demo), fully voiced by Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Aykroyd and Ramis’ script, even just that tiny chunk, was characterized by the same wit that made the original films such classics. Then a few weeks later, Activision announced that, following their merger with Vivendi, they would not be hanging onto the Ghostbusters license. News on the game since, even following Atari’s confirmation that they would be publishing Ghostbusters in June 2009, has been disturbingly light. No more of the actual game has been shown since that messy preview code. Until last week. While I didn’t actually get to go hands-on with it, I did get an eyes-on playthrough of the remainder of that library level. And now… well… I ain’t afraid of no Ghostbusters. Read More... Posted Feb 18 2009, 06:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, microsoft, xbox 360, sony, Ghostbusters, dan ackroyd, atari, bill murray, william Atherton, walter peck, ghostbusters 3, stay puft, ghostbusters the videogame

• Trailer Review: Demon’s Souls

  From Software, you guys got some weird in your blood. Who in the hell makes console exclusives these days? Not only that, who in the hell makes exclusives for every console on the market? And who in the hell makes console exclusives that are spiritual successors to cult hits that were console exclusives in the previous generation? You guys, whew, you guys are nutty. You’re nutty nut bars and I love it. It’s a big month for From Software. Just last week in Japan, they released Ninja Blade on Xbox 360. Ninja Blade is a third-person action game that is a modernization, in both tone and technology, of their Xbox-only franchise Otogi. Today, they released Demon’s Souls in the land of the rising sun. Demon’s Souls is the Playstation 3 version of From’s PS2 oddity King’s Field, a series of distinctly western RPGs full of the dungeon crawling and character customization Elder Scrolls fans go ga-ga over. As you can see from this trailer, Demon’s Souls is a real odd duck. Read More... Posted Feb 04 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, trailer review, microsoft, xbox 360, sony, playstation 2, xbox, king’s field, Demon’s souls, ninja blade, otogi, from software

• Cross-Atlantic Buzz!

  Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. Relentless Software’s Buzz games are multi-stage quiz challenges modeled after television game shows, right down to the snarky announcer. Players compete for points in multiple rounds, each one revolving around a different gimmick for rewarding or punishing correct and incorrect answers. The thing about Buzz is that it’s always been big in Europe, but not so much over here in the States. The series debuted in the UK back in October 2005 with Buzz!: The Music Quiz and it saw three sequels before hitting North America in October 2007. The PS3 debut, Buzz! Quiz TV, featuring both user-created quizzes and online play, is Sony’s most focused attempt to establish the series in America. When I approached the new American Culture Quiz Pack expansion, I wondered: how does the ‘American angle’ come out in a game so firmly rooted in its British origins? Is American trivia the key to Buzz’s potential cross-continental success? The allure of a game show is, after all, rooted in the American Pop Dream. When television first proliferated as an entertainment medium during the 1950s, quiz shows were some of the biggest attention-grabbers. All of a sudden, Joey Everyman could stand in front of a camera, answer some trivia questions and go home several thousand dollars richer. Fame and fortune; just what every American wants. Read More... Posted Jan 30 2009, 04:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, nintendo, wii, sony, scea, wii play, Adam Rosenberg, buzz, are you smarter than a fifth grader, jeopardy

• Facepalm: PS3 Hard to Program for "On Purpose"

  Kaz Hirai: "We meant to do that." Read More... Posted Jan 21 2009, 02:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: sony, console wars, ps3, bob mackey, hardware, pr, insanity, kaz hirai

• Sign of the Times: Current Gen to Stick Around a Little Longer

  It wasn't too long ago when Sony produced a commercial for the fictional Playstation 9 during their initial Playstation 2 campaign; that's right--the company was once so successful, it had the funds to advertise things that didn't even exist. But these were far different times, before the dot-com bubble completely burst; back in those days, you simply had to log onto the Internet and wait for padded envelopes full of money to arrive at your house (who knows where they came from). But in our modern times of economic disparity and joblessness, the evolution of entertainment technology is not one of our biggest priorities. And, according to a San Jose Mercury News report from yesterday, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division, recognizes the current problem with the standard five-year hardware cycle: "Just coming up with something that's faster and prettier isn't going to be sufficient. The life cycle for this generation of consoles — and I'm not just talking about Xbox, I'd include Wii and PS3 as well — is probably going to be a little longer than previous generations." If you've ever been around casual Wii gamers, then you probably realized that the one factor nearly every console war has been fought over is now completely irrelevant: graphics don't matter. Read More... Posted Jan 13 2009, 02:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: microsoft, xbox 360, sony, console wars, xbox, ps3, bob mackey, hardware, economy

• Life Without Playstation

  The future is a funny thing. If you had told me back in the fall of 2005 (what I regard as the height of the PS2) that Sony would be a money-bleeding mess three short years later, I probably would have slapped you out of pure contempt. It wasn't that I was a Sony fanboy, you see; it's just that the thought of a powerful company taking such a fall from grace was something once regarded as sheer lunacy--hell, even when Nintendo was sucking with the N64, they at least had the Pokemon brand to pump billions of dollars into their coffers. Sony? ...Not so much. Read More... Posted Jan 07 2009, 08:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, sony, sega, ps2, ps3, Saturn, bob mackey, economy, business

• Sony’s New Year’s Resolution

  For all intents and purposes, 2008 was an excellent year for Sony and the Playstations. Was it the salad days of 2001, when the Playstation 2 was coming into its own and Sony was crushing every proverbial ass in the world? Certainly not. But the Playstation 3 managed to finally get itself a stable of quality exclusives that weren’t completely ignored by the public and panned by the media. The Playstation Portable, despite receiving only a scant few notable games, had a banner year in Japan and continued to grow its install base in the rest of the world. The Playstation Network worked out a few of its kinks, and even if it’s the ugliest baby since Sloth, at least Home launched. And the good ol’ Playstation 2 continued, eight years after its birth, to both sell and play host to great new games. The end of the year, however, did not look so hot. The Playstation 3 got trounced by its competitors leading up to Christmas. You see, it didn’t matter how damn good Resistance 2, LittleBigPlanet, Motorstorm: Pacific Rim, or Valkyria Chronicles were. What mattered is that the average person in every country where the system is sold does not have $400 for a videogame console right now. Read More... Posted Jan 07 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, motorstorm, psp, sony, playstation 2, Playstation, littlebigplanet, resistance 2, valkyria chronicles

• Canada Plays PSP

  Unlike the rest of the world, apparently. Ssssssnap! Sony's pretty good at making me hate their PSP commercials through sheer overexposure. While waiting in the theatre for Revenge of the Sith to start—shut up—the venue played commercial after commercial to give the bouncing audience something to focus on besides throwing popcorn and fencing with rolled-up Tribute magazines. Sony had obviously bought out Mama Multiplex's Advertising Hour because every third commercial was that PSP advertisement that made you want to slay Franz Fernandez. Read More... Posted Dec 19 2008, 11:07 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo ds, psp, sony, advertising, media, nadia oxford, commercial, canada plays psp, usa plays psp

• Playstation Home: All Your Worst Fears Realized To Hilarious Results

  As previously noted, Home is upon us, and yea, it is utterly pointless. Right now, Playstation Home is Second Life with more load time, more frequent advertisements, and fewer people to interact with. Oh, there is the promise that someday there will be content and it will be a glowing interactive testament to our lives as gamers, and even that doesn't sound particularly attractive, but for now it's pretty much a waste of digital space and real time. Well, actually, I take that back. Home so far has been good for one thing: painting an accurate portrait of its users. I, apparently, have been lucky my whole life to have had the social grace and fortune to talk to and befriend girls. All the jokes about gamers being Dungeon Master mouthbreathers who'd never seen a real live girl before seemed like wild charicatures of fictional persons to me. I would like to thank Playstation Home for finally showing me what kind of imbeciles I'd been ignoring this whole time. Read More... Posted Dec 18 2008, 02:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, home, derrick sanskrit, sony, joystiq, Playstation home, quincy

• Question of the Day: Your Ideal Controller?

  These days, the console exclusive is a cagey beast rarely spotted in the wild. You tend to find them in specialized reserves for endangered species, which is to say, coming directly from console manufacturers rather than third-party publishers. There are a stray handful of third-party exclusives, many of them living in the untamed wilds of the Wii, but if you’re an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 owner, you can almost always get the exact same game on both systems (give or take a handful of features.) DLC tends not to sway me one or another when deciding what system to get a game for. It’s all about the controller. After eleven years of using the damn thing more often than any controller, I’ve gotten all too comfortable with Sony’s Dualshock, so I tend to gravitate towards Playstation 3 versions of games. But I don’t think I’d say the Dualshock is my perfect controller by any stretch of the imagination. Read More... Posted Dec 16 2008, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, nintendo, microsoft, xbox 360, wii, sony, question of the day, dualshock

• Getting Started With Home: A Diary

  Home is here! After waiting for countless months with fairly few details on what exactly Home is, it’s finally here! To build up my expectations, I’m going to pick a screenshot at random and base all of my presumptions on that: Okay, so…nothing is happening. No, wait! I see one lady doing a crotch thrust at another lady. At a party that’s only ladies. Except for that one guy, who I think is about to do a cartwheel up the stairs. How illuminating! 4:41 – Alright, Home Home Home. Where is it…ah, Sony put an icon for it right on the XMB, no asking, no explanation. That’s kind of presumptuous of it. At least it’s only 77MB, and it asks to be installed. 4:45 – Wait, I spoke too soon, the first thing Home does when you start it up is ask to reserve 3077MB. You 20GB PS3 users might want to make note of that. I’ll give it the space, for now. I’ll even accept the End User License Agreement without reading it, a habit that I’m sure will result in having my kidneys forcibly removed one day. 4: 48 – Okay, now Home is playing a fun minigame with me. It’s called “count the connection errors.” So far I’ve gotten two, the plain vanilla “connection error” and the uncommon “request timed out”. It’s like an MMO launch, except I'm not 100% sure I even want to connect at all. 4:54 – Read error! That’s three. I’m totally winning at Home. 5:12 – Response parse error. That’s four. This is probably a good time to remind everyone that when a company releases free software as a “public beta,” that’s code for “don’t be surprised if we bone the launch.” 5:29 – Things to do while waiting for Home to start working:     Find and clean up the Bluetooth headset that fell behind the printer six months ago. Ugh, I don't think I want to put this in my ear.     Check out Echochrome’s newly updated trophy support.     Dream of having something better to do on a Thurday night than reading the words “request timed out” over and over. 5:49 – Wow, I’m actually connected to Home. Only took 68 minutes! Time to create a character. I’m choosing “Preset 4,” because I love fauxhawks and wife beaters. Read More... Posted Dec 11 2008, 07:10 PM by Joe Keiser with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: playstation 3, home, sony, joe keiser, Playstation home, connection error

• Heading Home: Revisiting the Curious Case of Playstation Home

  Sony said it was coming before 2008 breathed its last and, hey, here it is. Playstation Home will finally be open to the public as of tomorrow, close to two years after it was announced and a full year after its original release window. But even though PS3 owners across the world will finally be able to download Home 1.0, it still isn’t abundantly clear what they’re going to be able to do in Home once they get there. Here are the things I am one-hundred percent certain you will be able to do in Home on Thursday. Read More... Posted Dec 10 2008, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, grand theft auto iv, playstation 3, home, sony, far cry 2, Playstation home, the watchmen, red bull

• If Sales Numbers Mattered, LittleBigPlanet's Commercial Would Be Appealing

  The Playstation 3's killer app, LittleBigPlanet, didn't sell a hojillion copies and save the pandas like it was supposed to. Quick! Everybody blame something! The target that shall recieve my baleful glare is LittleBigPlanet's irrelevant commercial. "Oh shit you guys, you're going to have so much fun with this goddamn game. Fun! Yeah! Fuck yes, fun." What, precisely, makes LittleBigPlanet a vacation on Free Cotton Candy and Sex Island? "Oh," says the commercial, "We're sure you'll figure it out." Guess what! I didn't figure it out. Read More... Posted Dec 01 2008, 08:40 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: little big planet, playstation 3, sony, media, sackboy, nadia oxford, commercial

• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Announced, Most Likely Awesome

  Let’s just get this out of the way right now. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is freaking great. It is the best game that Naughty Dog has ever made and it is an absolute delight to play. The stories in games like Gears of War 2 are often forgiven for being like “b-movies”, but Uncharted actually is a b-movie, a bitchin’ pulp adventure full of likable stereotypes, absurd feats of physical prowess, physics defying escapes from death, and more one-liners than you can shake a number of different sticks at. Its character animation is astounding, its shooting tight, and its environments are linear but convincingly natural. It is awesome. So awesome. Bionic Commando awesome. It didn’t sell that great though. It sold well, but not nearly what it deserved and there has been some question as to whether it would receive a sequel or go the way of Sony’s other first-party titles from 2007. (Rest in peace Lair and Heavenly Sword. May your makers learn their lessons. Particularly you, Ninja Theory. Next time you make a game that has Andy Serkis yelling about his “holy genitals”, you can expect a very stern phone call from the proper authorities.) But, lo, Nathan Drake has returned. Behold the trailer delights. Read More... Posted Dec 01 2008, 08:15 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, bionic commando, sony, naughty dog, uncharted, heavenly sword, lair, uncharted: drake’s fortune, Nathan drake, ninja theory, uncharted 2: among thieves, beyond good and evil 2

• Sony Gives Thanks Via Charming PSN Deals

  We here in the United States celebrate our nation's Thanksgiving tomorrow, one of the great national holidays where just about every office is closed as we gather with family and friends to eat, drink, be merry, and prepare ourselves for the brutal holiday shopping season that starts the very next day. Sony, who usually update their Playstation Store on Thursdays, saw fit to treat us to this week's updates a couple of days early to save us the trouble of fighting tryptophan-induced grogginess, and oh the treats they have in store! First, of course, is the weekly free costume for LittleBigPlanet's Sackboy, a turkeyface. Hilarious, yes? No? Hmm, well maybe these next few items will give you something to be thankful for... Read More... Posted Nov 26 2008, 01:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: little big planet, playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, sony, super street fighter 2 turbo hd remix, the last guy, eden, echochrome, thanksgiving