I don't know what's happening to me. A devout PC gamer since the age of 7, I'm slipping into the land of the console toys. I'm even excited about the prospect of buying an XBox360 next week. Someone give me some medicine.
Anyway, to prepare for my decline into the mindless gaming community, I spent some time playing two games on a PS3 yesterday. Verdicts below.
Sonic Unleashed
Not the best start. After a brief bit of fun in what I termed 'fast-mode', which is basically a series of linear paths where you can run like mad and it's quite enjoyable, night fell and we entered the Man-Pig - sorry, Werehog - section. Here, players must battle an obtusely disagreeable camera in order to navigate around a series of Tomb Raider out-takes, at a painfully slow pace, in awfully-contrived and unreasonably lengthy arenas where you can't bloody save the game. These bits seem to be trying to forward some sort of story, but it's so poorly contextualised that no one seemed to have the faintest idea what was going on. Instead, Sonic bounced around, pushing seemingly millions of boxes into place so he could jump on top of them, avoiding buzz-saws that had been strangely implemented into the sides of tall buildings, and throwing bright pink, glowing frogs at buttons to lower platforms.
It was really boring, really unforgiving, and really stupid. We each had a go, and each died repeatedly not as a result of being crap, but as a result of the controls not working properly. My friend put it best when he said "they came up with a concept for the best Sonic game yet - and then turned it into the worst one."
Little Big Planet
This sort of stuff isn't my cup of tea at all, but after Graham gave it the staggering, best-game-in-years-style score of 96% in his Resolution review, I thought I'd give it a go.
My first thought was that it controls abominably, and I wasn't keen on the forwards-backwards motion, which seemed a bit fiddly. And, y'know, it's a pretty straightforward platformer in every other respect. Mildly underwhelmed, I carried on. And then everyone started having a go at me 'cause I'd been playing it for ages.
"No I haven't! I've been, like, ten minutes," I protested.
"No, it's been an hour," I was told.
It had.
It's really, really lovely. It's incredibly addictive. It looks great. It's cute. And I haven't even touched the level editor, which I'm told is a stroke of intuitive genius. Good stuff, this.
...
By the way, I'm not really anti-console. In fact, I'm a firm believer that it's good to play games across as many formats as possible, and only in the last couple of months have I not owned any consoles at all.
And I really am excited about my XBox.
| Most recent blog posts from Lewis Denby... | |
| Feedback | |
 |
Halon - December 29, 2008 (08:26 AM) I'm not anti-console, it's just that every game I want is on the PC. There are maybe 2 or 3 360 exclusives that I would like to play but nothing that I need to play. Nothing on the PS3 or Wii interests me at all. |
 |
Lewis - December 29, 2008 (08:38 AM) I don't think it's even anything to do with exclusives with me. My PC's getting a bit old and most PC games are cross-format with the XBox. Plus it's easier for this reviewing lark, like. |
 |
zippdementia - December 30, 2008 (01:39 AM) Ah the joy of LBP. I'm writing a review on it. I'm almost done, but I think I have to post it tomorrow. I need sleep now. |
|
© 1998-2024 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors. |