|
Playstation Home
(PS3)
Sony
Price: free (but only if your
time is worthless) |
Sony's attempt at a sort of
social/marketing environment was created using a
simple, two step procedure:
1) look at what made Second
Life so popular.
2) do pretty much the exact
opposite.
 Putting it bluntly, there's nothing
worth doing in Home except playing simplistic pool
and bowling games, along with some Flash-quality
software that can't be enjoyed with friends.
Your character's mobility is also greatly restricted...
apparently, the developers thought it was more important
to let your avatar do corny-looking dances than jump
onto ledges hanging just out of his reach.
If you get bored (and in
Home, that's a likely prospect), you can watch ads for
miscellaneous games and movies by Sony and third-party
publishers, but there's enough advertising for these
products everywhere else. Honestly, Playstation
Home is less impressive now than Second Life
was five years ago. Sony actually
managed to make a free virtual world that wasn't worth
the price of admission.
Prinny: Can I Really Be The
Hero? (PSP)
Nippon-Ichi Software
Price:
$40 |
 Nippon-Ichi is one of those rare game companies
in the post-Wii era that's dedicated to a hardcore
audience. In the Disgaea series, it's possible to
power up weapons to obscene levels by fighting in worlds
that exist inside said weapons, and to get your
characters' levels up to 4-digit numbers.
Prinny takes this hardcore mentality and
applies it to the side-scrolling platformer. To
drive home how hard the game is, you get 1,000 lives to
start out. Then again, you're playing as a
character from the Disgaea series that explodes if it's
thrown, mishandled, looked at funny, or scolded, so it
evens out in the end.
The game indulges in
everything that you remember about old-school,
tough-as-nails platformers, but unlike those
miscellaneous rom hacks of Super Mario games, this one
doesn't indulge in unnecessary sadism, arbitrary time
limits, or artificial difficulty, making it tough
but fair. There's even a secret item you can find
somewhere in the game that lets you quit the game
early. Some of Nippon-Ichi's early PSP efforts may
have been hit-or-miss (Spectral Souls had load
times whenever you had a character do
anything), but this game is definitely on the
"hit" side of the equation. Also, it comes with a
soundtrack, and if you tried to order that from Japan,
you'd probably have to pay $40 for that
alone!
Dead to Rights:
Reckoning (PSP)
Namco (Rebellion)
Price:
~$15 (used) |
On the one hand, you can actually wield two
sawed-off shotguns at once--a feat which I'm sure would
probably dislocate your shoulders in real life. On
the other hand, the game is fairly boilerplate (think
Max Payne if he had a dog), the ending makes less sense
than the final act of Metal Gear Solid 2 (And not in the
"everything just got a whole lot weirder" sense
either--which is a shame, as MGS2 showed that something
could be salvaged from that sort of thing), and at one
point, the game red-screened with an "out of memory
error"--something that simply should not be happening on
a console.
Dead Head Fred (PSP)
D3 Publisher
(Vicious)
Price: $15
(new) |
The
game has you as a detective who is a body with a brain
in a jar for a head. (Or a skull for a head, or a
zombie head for a head, or a mannequin head for a
head...) Most of the heads are useful for
particular situations, certain heads being more useful
against given enemies than others (particularly, in
countering the attacks of the enemies; so think God of
War meets Mega Man and you'll "get" this particular
aspect of the game.) Plus, it's got more John C.
McGinley for your money than a boxset of
Scrubs.
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
(PSP)
Konami (Hideo Kojima)
Price: $20
(new) |
The Metal
Gear series was a bit different from the typical
contemporary fare--it emphasized sneaking around rather
than shooting, blowing up, or stabbing everyone in sight
(and the occasional off-screen goon). After a
(roughly) decade-long hiatus, a PS1 game came out to
some fanfare. Then, a sequel came out and
completely changed the game in a way that was mostly
like the first one with a new set of characters...okay,
it was pretty much EXACTLY like the first MGS with a new
set of characters. Also, the last half-hour or so
made no real sense. Then, they made a prequel to
the game, putting The Artist Not Yet Known As Big Boss
in the Russian jungle, pitting him against his former
mentor and the wild.
This game is a sequel to
Snake Eater, with everyone's favorite
gravel-throated-superspy-voiced-by-a-screenwriter
forming a band of abandoned Russian soldiers while
trying to stop global thermonuclear war. Also, you
can use Wi-Fi hotspots to recruit new soldiers (probably
one of the more creative ways to use this
feature). It's probably one of the best sneaking
games you'll see on a portable console (and this is
against two Syphon Filter games and a Splinter Cell
game, so it's not exactly "wins by default"
here). |