Posts Tagged ‘Sony’

Sony’s recent advertising drive for all things Playstation in Japan used to strike me as somewhat misguided. People faces as the play PS3 or PSP, in horrible high definition close up. I thought of my own time playing. How, for the most part, my reactions are reserved for well into a games experience, after becoming invested in the activity. I knew the players, these ‘faces’, would have only a short time to play their game. I imagined the bored and confused expressions that most would sport.

When the campaign launched these bored individuals were nowhere to be seen. Those on show were thankfully not average players with their faces stretched to fill my TV. Thankfully saved from the HD horrors of acne covered teens, I gratefully welcomed the close ups of handsome/beautiful celebrities as they overacted their way through games.

Then the cynic in me welled up. While the whole “Playface” campaign may appeal to this idol obsessed culture, to me it just seemed like the most blatant exploitation off both the talent involved and the audience. No product was shown, only the faces of melodramatic media personalities, hamming it up, to sell product to adoring fans by supposedly play a Sony system.

Then the other day I happened across one of Sony’s ‘caravans’. These are stages that are touring the country and offering the public a chance to put on their “Playface”. More for the novelty than anything else I decided to give it a go. After filling out a form and picking my game I was forced in to an overly warm booth to play (imagine a black public toilet… but with a plasma television in it). Cameras, embedded in every wall, surrounded me. They were laid out in a way that made me feel like I was being watched by four massive spiders.

I played Tekken 6. After three minutes they kicked me out and gave me stickers of my expressionless face.

I forgot about it until yesterday when I got an email from Sony telling me my face was ‘up’ so I visited their site and had my opinion of the whole exercise totally changed. Thousands of faces, including my own, are on the site. Many young adults, posing and exaggerating for the camera in an attempt to garner favour in the voting (imagine “Hot or Not” for otaku) but others were children. Seeing their faces fill with joy and wonder at playing took me back to how I must have looked when my Dad used to take me to the arcade to play Atari’s Star Wars game.

It made me happy. I could see Sony’s thinking, because for all my cynicism I could see the children weren’t faking. They were in awe. It is a feeling I now realize I have lost, but it is what got me into gaming and to see it in others makes me remember just why, to this day, I love my hobby so much.

Thank you Sony for showing me this joy again, and giving me the opportunity to always vote for the children over the vein young adults. Now kindly take your celebrities from my TV set.

You can see my big ugly mug here.

Without every really admitting it to myself it turns out I am a sucker for puzzle games, and the recent Playstation Network game, Trash Panic does much to fuel my closet addiction. The developers JetRayLogic, choose to remove the abstraction typical to the genre and instead place the game in comparatively real world settings. Arbitrary backdrops that used to typify puzzlers of old have been replaced by a rubbish bin (sorry, trash can) of various sizes.

Each stages sees an increase in bin size and also alters the type of junk you are required to deposited inside, from erasers to trucks. These items carry with them the properties of their real world counterparts (such as weight and combustibility) and it is this that differs the game from its peers. These are not the fantastical blocks of Tetris or the indefinable blobs of Puyo Puyo. These are pencils, motorbikes and bowling balls, and the only way to remove them is to use physics based solutions, such as burning them into dust or smash them to pieces.

It is this system that adds a different level of strategy to the experience. If you top the heap with hard or unbreakable items you will soon find the pile impossible to reduce, leading to rapid spillage followed by game over. Equally, if you are not careful with how you stack flammable items you soon find that the flames will not spread efficiently due to incombustible objects in the pile.

This use of ‘real world’ physics makes the game a fairly intuitive experience, especially in conjunction with the familiar puzzle controls of simply dropping things into the playing field. But it doesn’t stop it being tough and I don’t mean in an easy to learn, slow to master way. While you may quickly grasp the concept of the game even clearing the first stage can prove a challenge. Each stage’s objective is to simply dispose of a set amount of trash, and destroy a ‘boss’ item that has to be smashed within a set time limit. It sounds easy, but the volume trash usually exceeds the size of your bin by several orders of magnitude.

To further impede you in your quest for a high score the game also monitors your Ego (egotistical) and Eco (ecological) behavior. The more ecological you are the higher your final rank. But while Eco may well be the ideal it is far harder to achieve than you may imagine. Burning items is an effective away to reduce waste, but it raises your Ego. The more you burn, the more the balance tips against your Eco rating. Furthermore using explosives (which blow things out of you bin), spilling trash and destroying ‘mottainai’ objects (wasting/wasteful) all server to lower your overall rank. Fortunately you can gain back some Eco by degrading your heap with decomposition balls, but these are far trickier to apply effectively than all of the Ego boosting alternatives. On the plus side rank has no effect on your progress through the stages but this is a puzzle game, one of the few genres where score still matters so it is hard to ignore.

The difficulty of the main game combined with the Eco/Ego mechanic creates an arcade feel to the whole experience. Later levels feel more like an exercise in trial and error than skill. The lack of save function on the main stage progression further reinforces the feeling that the game is trying wring another pound/quarter/hundred yen out of you. This makes idea of having a ‘quick game’ somewhat masochistic as time quickly disappears with little to show for it. Simply clearing levels is fun and taxing, but for me the idea of trying for a high score is wholly unappealing.

Aesthetically Trash Panic has a lot in common with Katamari Demacy. The general humor and sensibilities, combined with the Japanese characters, gradually increasing world size, and the manner in which “real world” rules play into the puzzles all come together to inject that same levity into the proceedings. But this is a far more punishing experience than Katamari Demacy. Indeed I suspect this lightness is all that has stopped me ‘Trash Panicking’ my PS3 in to tiny pieces. Fortunately it seems to have struck a good balance. For the most part I can attempt a stage three or four times (one try usually lasts around five minutes) before finally surrendering out of frustration and annoyance.

As an offshoot of the puzzle genre it is fantastic. Applying so many extra rule sets to the familiar puzzle formula it proves a more varied experience than its brethren while remaining intuitive. It is unfortunate that the variety it offers also makes the game less predictable. The primary attraction the puzzle genre is to bring order to the chaos, but in Trash Panic, the chaos always seems to win. Thus while progression does bring a measure of satisfaction I never feel quite the same sense of achievement or compulsion to come back to it as I do with Tetris or Drop 7.

Yes the wonderful Japanese Famitsu magazine has finally passed down judgment on Killzone 2. Giving it 8-8-8-8 (that’s four reviewers each giving it an eight). That is the same as HAWX this month and Unreal Tournament 3 back in September. But perhaps more importantly it is also less than Haze (8-9-8-9) the much maligned Free Radical PS3 exclusive from 2008. A game that’s Metacritic score was blamed by many for the company’s closure and eventual buy out by Crytek.

I guess if the rumours are true about advertising space equalling scores in Famitsu then the four full pages seen for the game in the same issue equates to two points a page.

Let me be clear that four eights are not a bad score but when placed in the context of these other scores you have to wonder why Sony didn’t put more behind this game in their home territory. Perhaps it’s just them admitting that first person shooters will never appeal to the mass audience in Japan. Or maybe they don’t want to draw attention away from the Final Fantasy XIII trial addition that was released this week.

Before I begin I should preface this article with the fact for the majority of the year I have not owned a Playstation 3. I have always been aware, jealous and observant of the buzz and critical opinion surrounding key titles. Now my PS3 sits proudly with my 360 and Wii but my knowledge of the games is limited. I have tried to be as fair as possible but for gaps in my knowledge I apologize and will rectify in the coming year as my Sony back catalogue arrives. Thus treat this pick of the year more as a review.

PS3 is still struggling a little behind the competition in terms reaching its peak. Being the newest machine and notoriously difficult to develop for, many multiplatform titles have suffered from poorer performance than their 360 cousins. This year has started to see developers reaching the point that they are familiar enough with the system that games are almost identical. A few development teams have even chosen to use PS3 as their lead platform, and in these few cases games benefited on the system because of this.

To discus the best Playstation 3 game of the year for would be a kin to asking panda what its favorite food is. That is that I have only tried one full game on the console all year. That said what a game. Little Big Planet by default gets my game of the year award but it would be a hard act to follow.

In truth it is merely a solid and extremely well polished two (and a half) dimension physics based platformer. Charming presentation that actually fills me with joy permeate the whole game. In some ways it feels like Fable 2 in its whimsical British style, if only because both games feature Stephen Fry’s fantastic vocal contributions.

None of this however is what makes Little Big such an achievement. User created content maybe a buzz word at the moment but rarely has it been implemented so well in the console space. In theory making sequels unnecessary as the game is endless. Though the online got off to a rocky start with server issues, developer Media Molecule should be given the same leniency afforded to MMORPG’s. Little Big allows users to upload vast amounts of content and play together. While the world is not persistent as in a game such as World of Warcraft, it is still an incredible achievement.