Game Time - 4/29/2012

It's been another long week and Xenoblade has still managed to consume nearly all of my free time. Don't worry though, because I have a bit more to talk about. 

As most people have been made aware PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale the terribly named answer to Super Smash Bros. was announced on Thursday. I wrote a post on what was shown, but after thinking more about the game I've got a few things to say.

Stemming from this announcement I ended up playing Brawl with my brother and a few friends. It was a lot of fun, but I sucked it up something fierce.

With two games and a pretty cool announcement it was a solid week.

Xenoblade

After 100 hours of play time I still can't stop playing Xenoblade. I've completed almost every sidequest that has been thrown at me, but there are still a lot to go. After a ton of needless questing and leveling I'm sitting at the solid level of 87. The cap is 99, so after a few more hours of messing around I should be there. I could probably beat the final boss with my eyes closed, but due to the way I play games that won't happen for a while longer. 

The sidequests in this game suck. Straight up, they're not engaging. None of them are voiced, and the dialogue from your party is almost the same for every single quest. There's nothing to get invested in. It's a shame, because the rest of the game is so solid. Everything deals with killing a certain amount of monsters, or getting certain materials. While they give you decent experience the loot you get it almost never worth it. However, now that I'm at the end of the game that's no longer the case. The loot is awesome now, and I even got to see a fully voiced scene. 

It's refreshing to find almost all of a games characters to be genuinely interesting.

In the coming week I should be able to wrap up my time with Xenoblade. I'm really looking forward to the conclusion of the story. At first it seemed as if the game had nothing in common with Xenogears and Xenosaga, but now it's evident that they all share certain themes. I don't want to get too much into that though, because it would ruin the story.

For all the ragging I do on the sidequests I legitimately love the rest of the game. It does so many things right and I hope that more games do it like this in the future. JRPGs have been getting stale for a while now and Xenoblade tries to do as much as it can subvert that trend. 

Sony Smash Bros.

Yeah, I didn't play this game. I did however consume as much media as possible dealing with it and thought about it a whole lot.

This isn't exactly a name that rolls off the tongue...

My first thought was that PlayStation All Stars: Battle Royale may be one of the worst names a video game has ever had. It's not catchy and it's far too long. I've decided that I'm going to call it Sony Smash Bros., because it looks very similar to Super Smash Bros. When the first footage of the game came on GTTV all I could think about was how much the game looked like Super Smash. 

I've been browsing a lot of forums and it seems that there are a lot of people who aren't down with this game at all. I've seen people calling it lazy and unoriginal due to how similar it is to Super Smash. While it's clear that this game is pulling a whole lot of inspiration from another franchise I don't think that's such a bad thing. I like Super Smash and I like Sony characters. If you put the two together that's something I could get down with and this game is my opportunity to do that. That's not the problem for me.

It's hard to defend against the Super Smash comparisons when you release a picture that has a Wii in it.

The place where it all got a little weird for me was when I read about some of the game mechanics. As most people know the goal of Super Smash is to knock your opponent off of the stage. That's not how this game works at all. That fact alone should appease all the haters right? Well no, because the way you score points sounds awful. Every character has three specials of varying power. The only way to score is by hitting opponents with a special in order to kill them. In that way it's like a timed super smash match. The issue I have with it is that if you get hit with a special it's an instant kill. 

On it's own that's not too terrible, but it brings up a lot of questions. Apparently SuperBot games recruited avid fighting game players to work on the game. They claim that the game will be easily accessible, but deep at the same time. It's like they're trying to tell me that this game will be super competitive if I want it to be. I don't want to be pessimistic, but I don't see how this mechanic is so deep. If all I need to do is fill a meter for a super what's the point of the characters even having moves other than supers? The only reason you'll be fighting is to get your super. 

With that mechanic in mind it changes my view of all the footage, because it means that the game is super unbalanced. It's clear that some supers are far better than others. It's caused me to be very skeptical about the whole game. I realize that this makes me sound like a super competitive asshole, but I assure you that's not what I'm trying to do. It's just that I like it when a game is balanced. I'll most likely be playing this game a lot with my friends and it'll be super annoying if it's not balanced properly. The game is still in development, so there's time for the mechanic to change, or for everything to get a lot more balanced.

Super Smash Brothers Brawl

After talking a great deal about Sony Smash Bros. with my friends we decided to play some Brawl. As I've mentioned before Brawl isn't my favorite Smash Bros. game, but I still find it enjoyable. The controls are floaty and it's not as fast as Melee was. Regardless of my feelings we played for a few hours and it was really fun.

We haven't played Super Smash in a long time and it was good to get back to it. For some reason it's the only game series that I've ever practiced enough to get good at it. It's just fun and that's awesome. When I got done playing it I realized that I was ready for a new Super Smash game. I'll be able to get my fixes fairly soon. Sony Smash Bros. should be coming out before the year is out and Nintendo claims that there is a Smash game coming for the 3DS and the WiiU. 

SSX DLC?

This Tuesday we're rolling into May and that means that the SSX DLC will be hitting digital stores. My friends haven't been competing with my scores lately, so hopefully they'll be brought back into the fold. I really want to play more SSX, but it's hard to find the motivation when I have nothing else to work towards. 

I'm planning on finishing up Xenoblade in the next few days, so I'll be moving on to a new game. So far I don't know what that's going to be, but I've been thinking about Zak and Wiki. I started it a long time ago, but didn't end up sticking with it. I liked what I played, so I hope it'll stick this time around.

We'll have to see what goes down in the coming week.

     -Manny

And Then There Was PlayStation All-Stars : Battle Royale

Rumors of a new SONY game have been swirling for months. A supposed member of the development team leaked screenshots of the game,which looked an awful lot like Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series. There were screenshots of Sweet Tooth, along with some code, but like most leaks nothing could be confirmed.

In the following weeks it became more likely that the game was legitimate. In early April SONY sent out a poll that asked if SONY All-Stars: Battle Royale would be a good name. On top of that a domain for All-Stars Battle Royal was registered.

There is now no more question that the game is the real deal, because it was announced on Gametrailers TV. It is being developed by the newly formed studio SuperBot Entertainment. The studio was formed under SONY Santa Monica and Battle Royale will be their first game. Judging by what they're showing it seems that they've gotten off to a solid start.

Now that video of the game has actually been shown there is no denying that this game is a riff on Super Smash Bros. The two games look eerily similar, except for the fact that the character design is a bit less cartoony. Four characters will duke it out on a 2D plane. The gameplay wasn't explained in the videos, but there were a few things that were clear. Each character will have a super bar at the bottom of the screen, you don't die from falling off of a stage, and there will be a timer. It's been stated on multiple websites that the only way to score is to kill enemies with super moves. As of right now this seems fairly unbalanced, because super moves instantly kill anyone they come into contact with. Hopefully this mechanic changes somehow, or at least gets balanced.

Just like Super Smash, All-Stars: Battle Royale is filled with well known SONY characters. Kratos (God of War), Colonel Mael Radec (Killzone), Fat Princess (Fat Princess), Sly Cooper (Sly Cooper), Sweet Tooth (Twisted Metal), and Parappa (Parappa the Rapper) were all shown to be playable. When the president of the studio was asked about third party characters he said that third party characters are a huge part of SONY, so we can only guess that the game will feature a whole bunch of third party characters. He also said that they think the game has huge DLC potential, so I think it's safe to expect a whole ton of DLC.

As you'd imagine each character has their own move set. There were four characters continuously beating on each other the whole time, so it was hard to discern any specific moves from what was shown. What was visible were the supers. Every character has three super moves level 1, 2, and 3. When activated the character will start their over the top animation and rain down destruction on their opponents.

SONY franchises are also going to be getting in through the stages. Only a handful of stages were talked about, but some of them were easily recognizable. I noticed things from Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Jak and Daxter, Little Big Planet, Buzz, and Patapon. Every stage will have multiple franchises mashed together. One such example is Little Big Planet and Buzz. It also seems as if stages will have gimmicks. On the Buzz stage Buzz himself will come in every so often to begin a quiz. If the players don't get the answer right they'll be shocked.

While this does have a very Super Smash vibe around it, it looks different enough to stand on its own two feet. For starters it seems that they're trying to make it like a fighting game. They were stressing that avid fighting game players were hand picked to be on the development team. To be honest I'm surprised that it took SONY this long to make it. Now that the game is known you can bet that they'll be showing more of it off at E3.

As excited for the game as I am, that doesn't rule out all worry. Like I stated above the scoring mechanic seems very unbalanced. It's clear that some super moves are stronger than others. On that same note it almost makes the fight entirely about gaining meter to instantly kill everyone else. However, I have faith that SuperBot will overcome this and show us an entertaining game.

The President of SuperBot said that we can expect the game to be released this coming holiday, so expect news to trickle out until then.

Update: This video was posted on the SONY blog for your viewing pleasure.

     -Manny