The PS3 has had a bit of a rough road and with it still being the most expensive of the consoles and most people using it almost exclusively as a bluray player it's not really living up to its gaming pedigree. But then galloping on the horizon out of the sun comes two figures! Are they heroes? Are they villains? Only time will tell, but let's take a closer look at these two, Little Big Planet and Playstation Home, upon which much of the hope of the platform has been pinned
Saviour of the PS3? and epic new step in games? The ultimate entertainment product? Too cool for school? First off I investigate Little Big Planet possibly the most hyped game yet.
Playstation used to be king of the school yard, it had come in as a rank outsider with the orginal console and wooed hardcore and mainstream alike, then it cemented its success with the playstation 2 the most popular kid in the class who laughed derisively at the new fat kid xbox and kicked dirt in they eyes of the smaller dreamcast till he went home crying. So most people would have thought nothing would defeat the king of school everyone was sure the ps3 would be the king of next gen.
But it was not to be, the ps3 has not had an easy birth, it was late, expensive, their PR team went out of their way to piss off their customers, and with a decidedly lackluster lineup of exclusives that were hyped like mad and ultimately failed to deliver the device was looking a little bit wobbly. Most of the good titles had been pinched by the xbox who in the intervening years has hit the gym and shaped up. Even the relatively thick kid wii is doing very well by getting on well with everyone and making lots of friends with people ps3 and the like alienated in the past.
So people at sony were looking for something they could point to something to say to their customers that they shouldn't pawn the big forman grill lookalike and get a 360 or a wii or both for the same money as the obsidian monolith. The picked on media molecules new pseudo 2d platformy physicy usercontenty game Little Big Planet as their great hope for salvaging the machine from being just an also ran.
LBP with it's quirky graphics and user created 2d platforming levels and physics engine seemed like something new something unlike anything the xbox or the wii had. So from just an interesting game it was promoted to triple A console platform saver. I suspect this was somewhat of a surprise to the people developing LBP that suddenly this weight was dumped on their shoulders.
Even with LBP finished and ready to go the drama didn't end there due to a background song it was recalled at the last minute and had to be completely reissued because of a Koran reference.
As a result a game that was supposed to hit last month took till now to reach shops.
But is the result everything Sony promised it would be. In short No, and I'm not sure it ever could have been.
Anyway beyond the hype and political jumbling is the game any good to play.
Well it has charm I'll give it that, the friendly cartoonish sackboys and their happy pseudo 2d world with its bouncy fun physics has wonderful visual style. The graphics are lovely and quirky with nice little touches like depth of field motion blur and a variety of filters all look wonderful. The little customisable sackboys and sackgirls can be posed and you can control their expressions arms with buttons and analogue sticks with the Sixaxis motion controlling their head or body.
The quirky intro explaining the concept of littlebig planet where all the dreams go is quite fun and picking Stephen Fry as the narrator of the game is a very good move. The introductory level that starts off showing all the people who made the game. After a brief tutorial it gradually works you into the game with some story levels introducing the concepts. You can run about and jump. You can also grab hold of things with R1 to drag stuff around hit switches or hang onto things. You can move left and right as you would expect, there is also a depth about three layers to the screen which mostly the game tries to handle automatically but you can override it.
This is where the problems start to kick in, the auto depth sometimes does what you want it and other times does its damnedest to bugger things up by putting you at the wrong position on the pseudo Z axis to do what ever it is you want to do. It's frustrating as hell to want to jump up to a platform above you or get level with a block you want to push and have it put you consistently in the wrong plane.
As you go throughout the story levels you can collect points for high score as well as items that you can then use to make your own levels and costumes for your sackboy. The fact that you have to play the story levels if you want to be able to make stuff of your own is another black mark in my book.
The story levels are reasonably inventive all with different themes and looks to them but in the end it is really just a 2D platform game. It suffers from all the key platform game issues, it's annoyingly easy to miss judge jumps and end up falling to your death again and again and again. Some of the sections on vehicles are fun riding a crazy skateboard or some of the even more outlandish contraptions people have come up with is quite entertaining but in the end there is nothing terribly compelling about it. No story to tie it together no goal as such beyond reaching the end or reaching it quickest.
Some of the more cooperative things may well be more interesting but I tend to object on principle to games that pretend to be single player yet require you to play multiplayer to get the most out of the experience. I don't mind if the game is multiplayer full stop because then if I buy it that's what I want, it's just being tricked into buying an essentially multiplayer only game with a cheap five minute half arsed single player tacked on irks me. Halo is a good example of this, especially in later iterations, the single player is fairly weak they put most of the effort into multiplayer so the single player and AI is very lackluster.
I've had a bash at the content creation stuff and one of the problems is that you get pretty much none of the bits to make stuff from the start. To get the full compliment of stuff you have to play through the levels finding all the secrets (which are often very difficult to find and or require multiple players to get at) to get all the items. So if you want to make things you are forced to play the story levels, none of the cool stuff like motors or rockets is there as standard it all has to be unlocked. This essentially doomed my creations before I began, since I lost patience with the single player "story" missions (the story element is incredibly misleading, there is a pseudo story in the levels but it is basic at best and told through annoying popups) since I would repeatedly have to replay levels due to getting stuck due to the dodgy z axis automation, occasionally dying as a result, and also falling to my death due to the normal scourge of all platform games before Prince of Persia sands of time came along and showed them how it should be done. With none of the toys to make things move or react or fly all I had was very boring platform levels which I couldn't even be bothered to try out.
I did look at some of the user created content, it is damn hard to find what you are looking for there is no search function and the tagging of levels by type though implemented doesn't seem to be filterable in the main window. I gather some of the community people have been working on fixing that with things like sackbook. Some of the levels are quite creative I did tend to stick to things that had rockets in them but still they still have all the underlying faults of the LBP engine.
It is probably quite telling that I'm writing this quite a while after the thing came out. I played it a bit on the day of the release then switched to fallout and didn't look back for quite a while and even then only out of a desire to finish off this little overview I had already started writing. It just doesn't really grab you in anyway.
So little big planet is a noble effort with very slick presentation let down by the fine details of the implementation and indeed the fundamental problems with the genre of platform games as a whole. This should never have been Sony's big hope it's cloth hands are insufficient to lift such a heavy burden as being the one and only title worth buying a ps3 for.
So that brings us to Playstation Home the open beta of which went live last week. It would be really simple to say "Butchered Second Life Clone" because that is essentially what it is. Quite what Sony were hoping to achieve here is a bit beyond me. I guess they saw Microsoft ripping off nintendo's Mii's and thought, gotta have me some of that!
One of the big selling points (at least according to Sony) of the PS3 is the free nature of it's mulitiplayer. With Wii it does have some free multiplayer on some games but most of the time if you are playing with other people they are right there with you windmilling their arms and generally posing a danger to fragile items, tv's, grandpa's ashes, people, small children, and pets. With Xbox you can get live gold if you pay for it, which some people do. I don't, it seems like a rip off to have to pay for something I got for free on the pc for years (and rarely used). But the ps3 makes a big deal about how multiplayer is free for all if they sign up for playstation network.
Home is an extension of that adding a 3d world with a player avatar which unlike its competitors outings is more realisticly based than the fairly caricature nature of the Mii and even microsofts New Xbox Experience avatars. The idea being you meet and greet in this virtual world and then do things with your virtual friends maybe taking them off into a game, the virtual world acting as a way to put together groups and also explore content in a new way. It also allowed user customised avatars and even their own apartment with furniture that can be arranged and replaced to the players liking. Home was announced ages ago and is only now appearing after repeated delays. Microsoft managed to get New Xbox Exprience out before them despite seeming to start making it later.
Anyway come friday I downloaded and installed Home ready to give it a go. After several tries I eventually got in, the severs are a touch busy at the moment and creaking under the strain, today I got 15 error C931 (which means "servers are full, fuck off!") before I could get in so maybe things are improving. The options for avatars are fairly extensive and the look is fairly realistic and as such I feel that's a bit of a short fall. You can never quite make an acurate version of yourself in these things so the more low fi approach of something simple like the mii is more pleasing. Anyway armed with new fairly good avatar, that only slightly looks like a serial killer out on parole for good behavior but ready to snap at any minute, I wandered into home proper.
My apartment loaded and I was wandering around a fairly detailed if bland white room with a few bits of furniture in it. I looked out onto the balcony and looked at the realistic harbour that looks vaguely Italian for some reason. I wandered about my one room apartment I went out onto the balcony then I danced like a robot, then I rearranged all the furniture so it was piled up in a big tower in the middle of the room, then I moved it all out onto the balcony, then I added more generic sofas in a pyramid in the empty living room, then I danced like a robot again.
Having exhausted the potential options in my new apartment I decided to see what else there was. I headed out into the main hub of the world, Home Square, which links the various locations of my apartment, the Home Shopping Center, the Home Theater, and the Home Bowling Alley.
I ran a circle round the square and looked at a few posters for games then went into the theater. They were showing various trailers of stuff in there along with some web tv like Eurogamer TV each playing in a screen in the theater. They supposedly had an exclusive trailer for "the watchmen" so I thought that was as good a place as any to start. Entering a theater places you in a completely empty theater facsimile sitting all the way at the back with all the house light on full, it's not even 3d it appears to just be an image. The video is shown in a tiny box in the middle of the screen. You can hit a button to zoom it in and then you get a smaller border so maybe the video taking up 3/4 of the screen. There is no way to go completely full screen that I could find. So after watching a trailer or two in a nice windowed box like the bad old days of full motion video I decided to wander round the shops.
The shopping center is a large location with quite a few shops for furniture, appliances, and clothing, other stuff may turn up in future. Enter one and you get the option to buy new stuff, so far so ordinary. However all of this stuff costs real money, and not insignificant amounts most furniture was like 70p or more. Some things like a more fancy apartment was 4 quid. Clothes were similar and sony brand virtual tv's equally pricey. All that for a load of fake things that have no useful purpose. What are Sony on! I mean when the first 360 DLC came out the infamous horse armour for Oblivion debacle people went nuts over the rip off, now sony have released not only one horse armour equivalent but a variety of shades and a series of horse platforms and mirrors so you can flaunt your horse armour better. I guess sony think their customers already have more money than sense for shelling out for the often graphically inferior PS3 over the 360 so will buy any old piece of crap if it is a bit shiny.
Anyway hoping what awaited me behind door number 4 would improve things I headed to the bowling alley, it was full with no open spaces and loads of people queuing so I logged off and came back another day. When I could eventually get near some of the games I found a cheap nasty breakout clone, a dodgy version of echochrome, and various other games so bad they couldn't even sell them on the playstation network. I didn't get to play bowling or pool they were just to crowded but I can't imagine they were going to be the cure for all the ills of the system.
All in all I come back to my original sound bite assessment "Butchered Second Life Clone" but with the addition of micropayment hell bolted on. It is a complete waste of time in my opinion I wouldn't be surprised if once the initial buzz dies down it becomes a total wasteland empty of all but a few stragglers. I can't really see what it adds to things, the Mii's and even NXE bring something to the party that was lacking, Home is just there for Home. In a nutshell I can watch videos in a small window play crap versions of very old games I can get better versions of in flash with five minutes searching google and run around a dodgy 3d world where there is very little of any interest to do but what there is has to be purchased for fairly large amounts of real life money. Sounds great doesn't it.