I use Facebook a lot. Multiple times a day. It’s great for catching up with friends, sharing information, and connecting through multiple sources with Facebook Connect. I do all of this on my mobile devices and laptop. But in its current form, Facebook on consoles is useless for me. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely see the potential there, but right now it’s pointless.
It’s hard to compare the video game industry today with the video game industry of ten or twenty years ago, But being the stubborn individual I am, I feel the need to. Current generation consoles, with their online connectivity and impressive graphics power are leaps and bounds more advanced than the Sega Channel or Mario Paint, but what about certain genres that never quite made the jump to next generation?
LittleBigPlanet was a critical success for Sony, but many players, myself included, have abandoned the game. While user-generated content is a great concept, in practice, it’s not always up to par. For me, LBP was great for the first month or so, until I ran out of enjoyable levels to play. While the game has barely sold one million copies in North America, the upcoming PSP version set for release on November 17th has the potential to open up the game to even more gamers.
The level designs in LittleBigPlanet are very conducive to portable gaming. Short, bite sized play experiences that allow you to hop in and out when you have a free minute, be it on the subway, sitting on a train, or stressing yourself out in a waiting room. I’d personally be more inclined to try out a new LBP level on the PSP on the go than firing up my PS3 for only a few minutes. As long as the PSP version doesn’t have to download large patches every month, it’ll be a great quick gaming experience.
Only time will tell if the PSP version will be as successful as the PS3 edition of LittleBigPlanet. Given the fact that only five or so games have reached the total worldwide sales level of LittleBigPlanet, it’s unlikely sales will match the console version. But in terms of the fun factor, which should be more important to all gamers, the answer may not be as clear. We’ll see next month.
Earlier this year I was thoroughly engrossed in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Horrible voice acting and cliché characters aside, it was a great game. In the game, you have both save spheres and HP/MP recovery spheres, but you never have them combined into one graphic, they’re always separate. Right before the first boss in the game, I stumbled upon an odd occurrence: there was a save sphere right around the corner from a recovery sphere, with a single enemy between them. This boggled me. Why would they even bother putting them that close to each other and not combining them into the same graphic, or at least just place the graphics right next to each other? In this case, you would recover your health and most likely have to fight through one more battle, possibly losing some HP and MP, then you could save and head down to the boss. What’s the point? The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that pre-defined save points seem to be an outdated mechanic.
Everyone likes choice in everyday life, right? Do you want ketchup, mustard or both on your cheeseburger? Do you want fries with that? Should I mow the grass today or wash the car? PC or Mac? Mario or Sonic? The list of choices goes on and on – and we like it that way. Its only natural, in the evolution of the gaming industry, to give the gamer progressively more and more choices when it comes to their character and the path that character takes in a game. Eventually, you get to the point where the character’s actions and moral decisions can have repercussions – for good or bad – at later points in the story. Lately it seems so much emphasis has been placed on giving the player these choices that games that tend to stick to more traditional means of storytelling are criticized.
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