LittleBigPlanet - It was worth the rental.
I came extraordinarily close to falling for the LBP hype and dropping the sixty bucks.
Thankfully, I didn’t. I rented it from our neighborhood video store instead. This was $7.99, and the game was definitely worth that.
Let me be straightforward here: LBP is marketed as being all about creating your own levels and playing through levels other people have created. I’m not interested in either, so my point in renting it was to see how the out-of-the-box single-player game was.
It’s freaking gorgeous and oozes style.
It reminded me a lot of a mix of Clockwork Knight and Exit, with the graphics turned up to 11 and music that never once got old. Your character, when you start the game, is boring as all hell, but that doesn’t last very long. By the time you’ve played half-way through LittleBigPlanet’s story mode, you have a schoolgirl dress, glasses, nekomimi and a two-ponytail wig with which to dress your Sackgirl, and that should be enough for anyone.
You’ll also have played for about three hours, and another three hours will get you to the Bunker stage, which is the third stage from the end of the game, and then another two hours will see you through the Bunker level, unless you need to go out and buy another controller having snapped yours in half, and then another 30 minutes or so will see you to the “ending.”
I will not spoil the ending here, largely because it would take longer to type out a spoiler than it takes to watch the ending. It’s a 10-second affair that ranks right up there with Quake and Sudeki, and it came as quite a dampener to the experience - they got Stephen Fry to narrate the introduction and the tutorials, would it have killed them to have him record some sort of congratulatory voiceover?
Still, this is not the first time that Sony has bet the farm on a platformer that I didn’t really “get”, and it worked out pretty well for them last time, so who am I to criticize?
Important Milestones.
I reached an important, nay, critical moment in PS3 ownership this week.
Our local “Fred Meyer’s” had the collector’s edition of “Stranglehold” on clearance for $24.95, with all clearance items being discounted an additional 20%.
So now I own my first PS3 game, and after only four months of console ownership!
Hopefully it will wipe the horrible painful memories of trying to get the PC version to work out of my head.
Another way to look at it: I’ve now purchased the movie “Hard Boiled” for the third time.
This last week also saw the purchases of Kingdom Hearts II, because, well, I’d like to see the rest of the story even if I’ve heard horror stories about the Atlantea level in this one, Patapon for the PSP because everyone is raving about it and the poor PSP has been somewhat neglected lately, Persona 3 FES because I needed another 70 hr RPG to not play and to feel guilty about, and Heavenly Guardian because it looked cute and I liked the Pocky & Rocky games on the SNES.
I’m really not good at clearing out a backlog.
Heavenly Sword: See Gong, Throw Hat.
I have to admit, I laughed at the Penny Arcade “Heavenly Sword” comic.
Well, let me rephrase that. It’s a comic, you’re supposed to laugh at it, laughing is a natural and expected response. What I meant is that I didn’t take it too seriously…
You know, that doesn’t really work either.
OK, third try: I really expected that the comic was an exaggeration of the truth. And then I actually played the game, and found that every time I felt stuck, I just had to look for the box of hats. I think Gabe & Tycho deserve serious credit for producing the shortest strategy guide in history.
But wait, you say, “Heavenly Sword” is a PS3 exclusive, and you are a die-hard Sony hater. What is up? How is it that you are playing this game?
Well, thank a combination of things for that.
1) Warner announcing Blu-ray disc exclusivity. The format war is over, and as much as I was pulling for HD-DVD to take off, it’s not happening. And, in truth, it didn’t matter which format died first, just that one of them DID die. This isn’t like “DVD vs DIVX”, where the prospect of being locked into Circuit City’s insane world domination scheme was a nightmare - both formats are pretty equal.
2) My wife and I started playing “Champions of Norrath” on the PS2 and, well, PS2 games look like ass on a 50″ screen. And not good ass, at that. The PS3 has built-in upscaling for PS2 games, which eliminates some of the blur around text in dialogue and makes the PS2 jaggies a little less obvious.
So, we bought a used 60GB PS3 from Gamecrazy.
This had the following beneficial results:
1) We get hardware based backwards compatibility with PS2 games.
2) Buying a used system meant that we didn’t give Sony any money.
3) Buying from Gamecrazy meant that we didn’t give Gamestop any money.
As a side benefit, the previous owner of this PS3 had apparently explored the full depth of the PS3’s game library… by which I mean that the only data on the console was save games for football and golf games. I don’t think it’s seen extensive use.
So, anyway, we rented the first Pirates of the Caribbean Blu-ray and Heavenly Sword. And Pirates looks really really nice in 1080i, and Heavenly Sword looks pretty decent as well. Minus 5 points for overuse of bloom and minus another 10 points for what I will call the Sudeki factor: Western developers trying really really hard to be Japanese developers.
I’m going to need to resist the temptation to re-buy DVD titles as Blu-ray discs, but honestly the price of Blu-ray discs will help curb that temptation. There are a couple of titles I never owned on DVD that may find their way home, but apart from that it’s rentals only for a while.
Man, I went link happy in this post.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
