The whole premise of LittleBigPlanet is that it can be anything that you want it to be. The idea was that new features and building configurations would be added to the game as patches, never needing to buy another $60 boxed release again. Unlimited levels from the community, plus great support from the developers.
The developers kind of fumbled this one, the updates that were available were not many. They added paintballs in the Metal Gear Solid pack, they added Water in the Pirates of the Caribbean pack, but really nothing that revolutionary, just things that were really missing. Also, each pack was about $6.

All of this being said, I still bought LittleBigPlanet 2. I had countless hours of fun with the original and it was so inventive that I thought they deserved the pre-order. I honestly did not expect much from it.

LittleBigPlanet 2 is amazing.

The modifications to the game mechanics add some really interesting ways of interacting with the game. I honestly cant think of a way they could have done these changes to the core with a patch. I mean, I guess they could have made a 10GB patch and released that.

It is nothing like the money-grab that Capcom did with Super Street Fighter 4. These are serious changes, plus the levels from the original still work with the second one. Its really win/win.

The story felt very short however. I remember telling my girlfriend to give me a minute while I beat a boss which I was sure would be a story twist, only to find out it was the end. I appreciate the lack of wheel-o-death like on the first game but this was just pretty silly. I feel like there were no “worlds” that were as inventive and detailed as Frida’s Wedding on LBP, there were no real challenges like Boom Town, and the little add-ons like the hamster, bee and rabbit are overpowered.

Thats it for my complaints. The sharing aspect of the game is highly improved. Finding levels is way easier now. They have a site that you can go to (littlebigplanet.com) and queue the next levels you want to play.

Building levels seemed easier, although I have not published one yet. They have included new portals that transport you to a different level, which they use a -lot- during the storyline, and it allows you to build a world as big as you want and if you run out of space, spill into another.

Would I have liked it to be a DLC update for $30? Yes. But I also want world peace and free sushi sundays.

That would mean that PSN would have been down for six weeks by the time services are restored.

Every day this outtage continues I am more and more embarassed to have put my faith on Sony. A company that has proven over and over that they dont care about their customers. Promising game vouchers for PSPGo conversions and then backing out. Charging developers for bandwidth costs on PSN, which means smaller and shorter lived demos for customers.

Go to wikipedia and count how many firmware updates that fix or add nothing there are. Firmware updates that are just “security fixes.” Sony was completely on top of hacking when it came to their data and those patches came quickly.

I am not worried about my data, but at this point I’m beggining to worry about Playstation exclusive developers like Q-Games (of Pixel Junk fame.) All of their profits come from PSN sales. Sony said theyd be helping developers out, but with such an extended period of downtime I’m sure some studios will fall on hard times.

At the same time, I am worried about those who are not involved in games like I am. Those who get their news from the local NBC affiliate that dont know what is going on. Are they going to buy the NGP? What can Sony say? At this point just hold off the launch for an extra week and announce the re-launch during E3.

This outtage hurts gaming as a whole. If we are going to move to cloud gaming and cross-platform gaming, we need everything to be secure. Hackers were there before, they’ll be there after. You have to build everything with that threat in mind. I’m not excusing the hackers, but Sony was ridiculously unprepared.

Meanwhile, I’m going through my pile-of-shame, which is holding me over until L.A. Noire. I’m almost done with Arkaham Asylum and will probably go to Dead Space afterwards.

My heart goes out to those of you who bought a PSPGo.

(source: Joystiq)

Update : Sony has said that they have not released a timeline for PSN to come back online. So instead of May 31st it is indefinite. That’s better?

For those who know me, you might know that I was in love with Grand Theft Auto IV, and I consider The Ballad of Gay Tony to be one of the finest gaming experiences I’ve ever had. Red Dead Redemption takes that to the next level and is the next generation of sandbox open-world games, period.

While the world seems, huge I don’t consider it to be too cumbersome and the ability to automatically travel to any location as long as you setup a campfire makes it that much smaller. That being said, there is more than enough game there for even the most hardcore gamers out there. There’s hidden treasure, hunting challenges, damsels in distress, stolen horses, ranching jobs, and bounties you can take.

Then there’s the storyline which to me has a very big resemblance to that of Niko in GTA IV. John Marston has a mysterious past and he has come to Armadillo to tie up some loose ends from that past. The voice acting and mo-cap are top notch as you would expect from RockStar. In fact I would say the story, being as comprehensive as it is makes this game be a slow burn and considering, which is a good thing.

I ended up going through the story and then immediately going into the free roam multiplayer. Free roam could have been it’s own game. I have not encountered too many people that are not willing to posse up and go take over some gang hang outs together. The leveling system is much like Call of Duty’s with unlocks and prestiges.

I of course have to point out that the game is far from perfect. The game has locked up on me three times, and some of my friends who have been playing on new Slim line PS3s have also told me this. I once picked up a hogtied woman and it would not allow me to drop her, I ended up triggering a story mission so the game forgot i was carrying her. Some of the other bugs this game have are hilarious, look for ‘red dead horse woman’ in YouTube. Luckily the frustration of the lock ups does not cause that much grief because of the brilliant auto-save functionality. I’ve had it lock up, right after it saved. Maybe I just got lucky.

All in all, Red Dead Redemption is a game you must experience. I started playing the game thinking I would just play enough for this review but then I kind of forgot about the review all together and went ahead and got the platinum.

This is how the west was won.

Oh and he himself confesses, he does not play video games.

Why should he play video games? This is the world of video games now. You need to have a franchise, something you can make lots of different versions of and charge lots of money for each version, and launch a different version every year. You dont need to play it to sell it. You just need to see what the trend is, get one of those games, and turn on the milking machine.

This is what he did with Guitar Hero, and with Call of Duty. This is also what he couldn’t do with Tim Schafer’s Brütal Legend, a game Activision got after they merged with Vivendi.

Last July, almost a year after Activision had dropped Tim’s game from their lineup Schafer said this:

“His obligation is to his shareholders,” Schafer tells Eurogamer. “Well, he doesn’t have to be as much of a dick about it, does he? I think there is a way he can do it without being a total prick. It seems like it would be possible. It’s not something he’s interested in.” (source)

I think that this is a totally understandable thing to say. Specially since after Kotick dropped your game, they then went after EA to try and stop them from publishing at all. It really is a dick move.

Well that’s Bobby Kotick for you. He then goes on to say that he’s never met Tim Schafer, that the decision to cut the game was because Double Fine (Schafer’s company) was always late, over budget and because “it doesnt seem like a good game”.

If Kotick had said, “Well, the project didn’t have the franchise power that we like our games to have”, that would be one thing. He instead, comes out and says that the game was not very good? According to who? Sales? It must be sales. Because the game was excellent.

Good things take time, and when you’re creating a world from scratch you cant really just rush through it.

Thats why Guitar Hero’s metacritic scores have hurt so much. Starting with a 91 in Guitar Hero, the latest game in the series dubbed “Warriors of Rock” (it would be #6 if numbered) scores a 73. There have been 11 Hero games (not counting portable consoles) between 2005 and 2010 and the average score is 79%. For comparison Rock Band, the main rival has had 5 games for the mayor consoles, including a Lego version for younger players with an average score of 84%. With the sixth game being released later this year which includes a keyboard and a “learn to play music” Pro mode.

Tired of music games? Well good, because now we’re going to talk about first person shooters. Call of Duty was making Activision tons and tons of money, in fact, they had two developers working on it at the same time. They had Infinity Ward doing most of the development work for the engine and then they had Treyarch doing the ‘hold-over’ game in the off-year.

This setup worked well, Call of Duty 4 was released (IW), then 5 (Treyarch), then Modern Warfare 2 (IW) and finally 6 is coming later this year (Treyarch).

Sadly Infinity Ward seemed to be tired of doing just Call of Duty and they thought they could expand and do something different. Well they got their wish, since the leads at IW were fired for insubordination and half the IW team defected to the newly formed Respawn Entertainment over at Electronic Arts.

I mean, Infinity Ward has made you so much money, all they wanted was a little artistic freedom. A development cycle off the treadmill. It ends up in drama. Everybody knew it would. Its the way Bobby Kotick does business. This is why Activision has replaced EA as the “evil” company in the last few years.

While EA has spent money creating and publishing new exciting franchises like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge. Allowing some developers to just build a big playground like Burnout Paradise, and even taking risks in some games that, while they may lack universal appeal, are too good to never be published like Brütal Legend. Activision has spent their time trying to make Guitar Hero formula (game + cheap accessory) work in other ways, like with DJ Hero and Band Hero (not counted in the above tally of Hero games) and with Tony Hawk (now with $100 skateboard!).

Now, before you tell me that Activision is just trying to survive, just remember that Activision’s name is actually Activision-Blizzard. Blizzard is operated quite differently than Activision though. Blizzard still concentrates on its own properties like StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo. Games that dont have many iterations yet make the company staggering amounts of money because of how addictive, polished and entertaining they are and their ridiculously long shelf life (Diablo II was released in 2000, its last patch was in March 2010). This is why I separate Activision from Blizzard whenever I talk about the company.

There is no better proof that you dont need to churn out crappy versions of games just to make a buck better than… Activision itself!

With all this being said. How they are not aching for money, how they can take risks and decide not to, and how they just decide to try and sell you plastic crap I will leave you with this. This is a quote from Bobby Kotick a few weeks ago about Respawn Entertainment, the people from Infinity Ward that he let go:

“That’s one of those really difficult decisions as the CEO of a company, where you step back and say, ‘No good is going to come of this. They’re going to leave and probably have a really hard time ever being productive or successful ever again, and we’re going to lose some talented people, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ And there wasn’t.” (source)

What a total prick.

I saw this the other day. I can’t wait until they get it running on the iPad too.

“I was highly anticipating the release of The Ballad Of Gay Tony, but just found out that it is only on the XBox360. I am certain that I am not the first person to ask this, but how come it wasn’t released on the PS3?” – received via Mouthoff

We know that it continues to be an often-asked question – and believe us, we understand the frustration of PS3 owners like yourself who haven’t been able to play any of our most recent releases. All we can say is that we at Rockstar promise to be very good to you with our releases in 2010. Please stay with us and stay tuned!

I find it so odd that they decided to pick this question amongst all the other ones. I’m going to go out in a limb and say they’re trying to string us along until they’re able to release the DLC on PS3. Lost and Damned was released 17 February 2009, and if we use the same logic as other ‘exclusive’ Xbox360 titles, exclusivity lasts for a year.

Then again, maybe they’re just referring to LA Noire and Agents.

Source: Rockstar Newswire

Well, this has sucked.

In Rock Band mode the guitars just keep pressing X (green) in turbo mode, making it impossible to control the game. After some searching around it seems like this is an issue with Rock Band 2 and the way to fix it is to set the controller to Guitar Hero mode.

Now for the fun part, apparently firmware 3.10 broke the controllers. Well it didnt break them, it just made them not get their connection straight.

To fix this I made sure I had one Dual Shock taking slot 1. Then I proceeded to plug in the ‘footpedal’ in Rock Band mode, this should make the controller turn Blue. Then you need to go into Guitar Hero mode and hopefully it keeps the Blue light when it auto-adjusts. If it doesn’t then you need to keep turning the knob back to Rock Band and re-syncing until you do get the Blue light and then go into Guitar Hero mode.

This might take a few tries. Have patience. It sucks, I know!

Some have suggested using two Dual-Shocks so that the guitar is actually controller 3. This worked for me as well but i didn’t have any better luck than with just the one controller.

What if I have 2 Nyko Frontman guitars?

Its the same process for both I did one guitar first, and then the other (Blue and then Orange). It has been taking me like 10 minutes to get them to sync correctly, but once i do, they just work.

This is not the nicest of solutions, and I am honestly quite annoyed by this situation but the guitars work and I got the game for cheap. I’ll search around tonight and update this post if I find any better solutions.

UPDATE (11/29/2009) :

If the controllers come up SOLID RED in Guitar Hero mode, turn the knob back and forth (to Rock Band and then back to Guitar Hero) this will toggle the controller and make it try and find a new open channel. Wait for it to go to a new solid color, if it goes red again just turn the knob once more, repeat this until you get a different color. Its really not a pretty solution. *sigh*

If you haven’t been following me on twitter, then you  might not know how awesome I think Bayonetta is. I just love how completely ridiculous the game looks, it’s like they started it and somebody stopped checking on them then a few months later they had this conversation:

Manager: “so whats with that DMC clone?”
Developers: “well… about that… a few of the guys are recovering sex addicts… plus, that new you must be drunk policy we gave them… might have backfired”
Manager: “lets see it… oh god… well the only way to ‘fix’ this is to make it more over the top and hope for a ban”
Developers: “Yes sir, right away, sir”

If you have not had the chance to get the demo from the Japanese PSN store, I highly recommend you stop reading right now and go and get it. The gameplay is fast, and furious. You do combos that are just a joy to execute and look amazing on screen. SEGA did a pretty great job of porting this over from the 360 version.

Now, I know what you’re saying. I’ve seen that trailer, it looks like nothing but crotch shots. I ask you, what’s wrong with that? According to Famitsu, NOTHING. Famitsu just gave the 360 version a 40/40 and the PS3 version a 38/40. The discrepancy is in the port graphics. (Kotaku on Famitsu score: link).

Devil May Cry was fun, the series lost me after the second one. This seems like it is once again genuine fun and I intend to really give it a go. Did I mention her outfit is actually her hair and it randomly leaves her semi-naked during combat?

Bayonetta should hit japan this November and the states sometime in early 2010.