Category Archives: PlayStation

Games, PlayStation

Macrotransactions

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I found very little to interest me at TGS this year. Much the same as last year, in fact, where I was only interested with some of the stuff because I was there and it afforded me the opportunity to get an early play on the Xbox 360. Even so, one piece of oddness that inspired many an online debate was the price of Gran Turismo HD.

What was odd was that it didn’t herald the expected high cost of Blu-ray games, but that it takes the concept of microtransactions and runs with it. And runs, and runs. It’s still going, I think.

That’s just wrong. How can you possibly sell a car game without cars? Will you have to buy ammo in Resistance when you run out now? It’s accepted now that the horse armour in Oblivion was really stupid but it wasn’t one of the fundamentals of the game; it’s not like you had to buy a sword. Or feet so that you could actually move around and play the thing.

Microtransations are fine as a side thing so that you can get a few extra maps or something for your favourite game when your interest is beginning to wane, but when content is excluded deliberately so that you have to pay extra for it, it becomes a bad thing. £50 games are annoying but I’d prefer to pay that and have the full, undiluted game there than I would pay £20 and have to spend 50p a time for everything I want to use.

I had as much fun online in PGR3 with some friends playing around in some of the weirder cars as I did using Ferraris, and that’s unlikely to happen if it requires a monetary risk on what could be a crap car that you’ll use for ten minutes before going back to the F50 GT.

In short: bad, bad idea. Don’t support it and let it be consigned to the scrapheap where it belongs.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

Hungry For The Wolf

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Amaterasu

It’s hard to believe that I’ve actually got my copy of Okami here. The last time I saw this game in anything more than video form was back at TGS 2005 and I’ve been enchanted by it since then, counting down the days until an English-language version. No thanks to SCEE and their February 2007 shite. Imports FTW.

I think most people would by lying if they said that it was anything other than the truly spectacular art in this game that attracted them to it, because it really is beautiful. Like Shadow of the Colossus it maybe pushes the PS2 a bit too far: whizzy particle effects, flying cherry blossoms, and animated cel-shading are all well and good but for all its beauty, it can chug sometimes. Did I mention that the art style looks great, though? It really negates any technical issues for me.

Of course gameplay is more important than graphics and all that guff, so how does Okami play? Pretty well, actually. Probably not as suitably godly as the visuals (more like slightly saintly – say that ten times fast) but it does some unique stuff and complements the handpainted visuals with paint-based gameplay. Enemies are finished off by painting a slash through them, raging rivers are bridged by painting a bridge between the banks, night is turned to day by painting a sun in the sky, etc. Fits the whole art motif perfectly. Did I mention it looks reeeally nice?

This is definitely one of those games that always seems to come along in the last days of a console and becomes one of the defining titles. It’ll be interested to see how well the somewhat rudimentary combat holds up throughout the apparent 30-hour length, but regardless this is one game where I actually think that it’s worth buying for the graphics alone. I feel dirty for saying that but it’s true.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

I Think I Get It Now

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A few months back I complained that I didn’t get on with the “marmitey” gameplay (thanks for the excellent adjective, Martin) of the Metal Gear Solid series. I take it back.

You tend not to give games that you dismissed another chance but I stuck MGS3: Subsistence in again the other day. Maybe it was the nagging sense that I was missing something or maybe it was just that I’d bought the bloody thing twice and still hadn’t had my money’s worth, but whatever it was I’m actually enjoying it. Despite the silly story and tendency to drag in the cut scenes (almost twenty minutes at the end of Virtuous Mission!), the proper 3D camera really saves it.

I still maintain that, because of that camera, MGS3 can be classified as a bad game. It worked in the first two because they were (a) angular and (b) complete with radar. MGS3 was neither and might as well have been an FPS for all the time that I had to switch to first person to see a guard ahead of me. Subsistence’s camera is a significant addition that really should have been in there from the start.

Incidentally I’m now watching US copies of MGS and MGS2 on eBay. I’m such a completist whore.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation, Sega

Sleeping With The Fugu

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Yakuza

It’s not Shenmue, but Yakuza is somewhere in the vicinity. It’s a bit of a unique beast, mixing elements from Yu Suzuki’s great classic, the ubiquitous GTA, and even parts from Sega’s Streets of Rage. Probably the main thing that it’s inherited is that it’s a very flawed game and has a shitty dub (though not quite that shitty), but still manages to stay enjoyable.

Still, it’s good to have a crime game that isn’t played out entirely in Ebonics. It would have been nice if it was in Japanese being that it’s in Japan and I doubt many Yakuza bosses sound like Michael Madsen and are unable to get through a sentence without saying “motherfucker” (yes, too much swearing can get annoying and lose its potency). In all fairness it’s worlds better than the dub in Shenmue – these people can act and it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a broom cupboard – but this isn’t GD-ROM anymore: can’t they have put the Japanese dub on there as well?

In any case, while this isn’t going to attain classic status it’s a pretty good game nonetheless. I played a couple of hours this afternoon and found myself enjoying it, and my only complaint was that the names that are thrown at you in the first few hours can get overwhelming and difficult to follow, especially when some aren’t seen in person while still requiring you to keep track of them. The loading times are also a slight annoyance as you get a good few seconds before every fight, and fighting tends to happen a lot.

The combat system is nice and brutal, with plenty of weapons to grab and a growing library of suitably brutal moves. Finishing someone off by smashing their head into a wall is oddly therapeutic. A couple of hours into the game you’ll have to fight your way out of a hostile area and I thoroughly enjoyed it, with enemies surrounding you and affording you the opportunity to knock groups of them flying with a weapon. Or one of them if you can grab them.

So my first impressions are that while this isn’t a classic, it’s still an enjoyable game and worth a look. If I finish it you can probably expect a review.

Games, PlayStation, Xbox

On Inevitability

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PS3 and Jenga: the similarities are endless

Seriously, who didn’t see this coming? I’m a bit tired of conjecturing on the subject as I’m sure a lot of people are, but I bet Microsoft Europe are enjoying the prospect of another Christmas as the only new “traditional” games console. You can bet that they’re going to make all the PR capital that they can out Sony’s lost goodwill after another disappointment for Europe, starting now. At least it’s only a four month delay this time and not a fucking year, complete with threatening letters to importers.

What did slip under the radar, at least from the European perspective, is that shipments for the rest of the world have been halved. 400,000 units for the US is very similar to what the 360 had (I don’t have the exact numbers) and that suffered chronic shortages, and 100,000 for Japan is nothing. The six-year-old PS2 sells around 110,000 units a month there, and the PSP is getting spanked by the DS but still manages 120,000 or so according to Video Game Charts.

I’m not going to speculate on what this will mean for the European market but you can bet that the effect on 360 sales, whatever the size, will be positive. And £425 is a lot of money but the chances of people paying that much for a luxury item are much higher in the run-up to Christmas than they are in March.

Games, PlayStation, Tech

Dual-Boot PSP

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Yesterday’s news that a downgrader for the 2.71 PSP had been released was greeted with enthusiasm by a lot of people who had been keeping their PSPs updated since updating your PSP to play PSP games seems like a contradiction in terms at the moment. I know I bought three new ones in Japan but I wouldn’t call any of them essential.

So I jumped on this new bandwagon and, risking a brick, downgraded my PSP to 1.5 again. It worked fine – although the fact that it only initiates without crashing a tenth of the time is disconcerting – and set about using a handful of hacks to turn my PSP into a dual-boot machine. I can now choose whether to boot into 1.5 (for homebrew) or 2.71 (for new games) depending on where I have my wi-fi switch when turning it on.

I seriously recommend using the combination of Devhook and Harleyg’s Custom Firmware to do this with a PSP. You get the ability to play all the latest games on 2.71 and use great stuff like ScummVM on 1.5, all within the same PSP. It might actually get me using the thing regularly, even if the battery is still rubbish. How many other systems can give the double frustration of Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts and Ultimate Ghosts ‘n Goblins? It’s violence guaranteed!