Powers on the Sony PlayStation Network

Based on the comic series by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, "Powers" the television series has debuted on the Sony PlayStation Network. You can check out my review here. Enjoy.

These Are Not the Games You're Looking For...

There were two PS3 demos that I had high hopes for, mostly because I had fond memories of them, or thought I did.

Warlords, back in the Atari days, was the fo'shizzle. This was after the initial rush was over, and the bloom was off the rose for the Atari 2600, and then all of a sudden there was a buzz about this new game that was soooo cool, could be played by up to four players, and even used the paddle controllers (which were fairly useless unless you played Pong or Breakout). That game was Warlords.

In Warlords, each player (or if less than four, the 'computer' was your opponent) took a corner in which there was a castle or fortress (or the best approximation you could get with the primitive technology, you had to use your imagination more with the 2600 games). You protected your castle with a rolling shield that could circle your corner. Then you would shoot and catch and shoot back little balls of fire to destroy your opponents' castles. It was like Breakout, only draped in coolness.

Warlords has been called one of Atari's most popular games. I know I played it constantly, with friends, with family, alone, and we would play for hours. If I'm being honest, I can remember dates that were arranged around a game of Warlords. It was great fun, and really one of their best games. That's what I thought I was getting when I downloaded the Warlords demo from the PlayStation Network.

In this new Warlords, the concept is there, but filled with crazy heavy graphics, annoying cartoons, and just really unnecessary details. This is a simple game that should stay simple. I'll stick to my Atari.

Next time, we'll talk about Journey, which is even further off the mark...

Pain and Addiction

You might ask where I've been. It has been some time since I've written this blog. Well, November had something to do with it. I'm a writer, and November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. You can read about it here, but that took up quite a bit of my extra time. I was also sick, and had a twisted ankle in there as well. I could easily make those excuses, but it wouldn't be entirely true. The truth is I've found a PS3 game I really like. It's called Pain.

I have the Dark Crystal to thank for this new addiction. Late one night she sent me this quick text: Go to the PlayStation Network and find the game called Pain. I'll give you ten bucks for the download. You will love it! I did eventually, at first I was skeptical, and I didn't quite trust the PlayStation Network after that wonderful hacking scandal. Once I had the game, and started playing I was sooo hooked.

Pain is kind of like Angry Birds, only instead of birds, you're flinging people from a slingshot into at first a cityscape and then other worlds trying to break stuff for points. Besides the obvious buildings, cars, billboards, signs and the like, there are also explosives, tunnels, even mimes and monkeys as obstacles. The whole time your people are screaming in agony, making snarky remarks and getting tossed about like crazed ragdolls.

Besides different backgrounds to be flung into, there are also a variety of people who can be flung. You can be a rapper, a gamer girl, a cheerleader, a wrestler, a cowboy or girl, a ninja, a pirate, a cat, an old lady, even characters from other games, or 'celebrities' like Santa, Flava Flav, Elvira, George Takai, Elvis, Andy Dick, or David Hasselhoff. Yeah, even The Hoff.

Thank you, Crystal, for hipping me to this terrific game. And just for the record, I've never felt the need to collect that ten bucks, especially not for the hours and hours of fun I've gotten from this game.

The Infamous Demo

When we first got the PS3, a remarkable thing happened. The entire PlayStation Network was hacked and personal information and passwords were stolen by Mario knows who to do Mario knows what. Nothing bad has happened yet, but Sony encouraged us all to change our passwords and hope for the best.

Oh yeah, as an incentive to get folks to trust them again, they also had what they called their "Welcome Back" program where they would outright give you two free games from The PlayStation Store for each account. The Bride and I looked at each other and said "Hells yeah," cuz that's a total of four free games for our inconvenience. That might be fair - as long as no one who stole our info ever uses it.

The problem of course is that there was a 30 day expiration on those free games, and neither I nor my non-technically challenged wife could navigate the terrors of The PlayStation Store/Network/Home to make this thing work no matter how hard we tried. It's a damn shame, because I was kinda looking forward to two of the free games offered - Little Big Planet and Infamous.

Now we've talked about the second Little Big Planet here before, but Infamous was a game whose interest caught me elsewhere. I co-host a weekly vidcast about comics, The All Things Fun! New Comics Vidcast, and a few months back, one comic book grabbed my attention. It was Infamous from DC Comics, and it was, you guessed it, "Based on the Best-Selling PlayStation Videogame."

What got me the most was that there was a story here. This wasn't like the mini-comics that came with the old Atari 2600 games like Star Raiders and EarthQuest that really had nothing to do with the game at all. Infamous had a compelling story and characters, and from everything I had read, this carried over directly from the PS3 game. I really wanted to try.

Dejected at not finding my free games in exchange for being hacked, I was exploring the rest of the Store/Home/Network and found that there were demos that could be downloaded - among them, Infamous. So I went clicky-clicky. I was a bit surprised to find it would take well over two hundred minutes to download, but I let it go overnight and decided to play it the next day.

Unlike a lot of things on the PlayStation, the downloaded game was actually easy to find, and when I clicked it on the intro started, looking very much like a comic book, not the comic book, mind you, but a comic book just the same. Nice art, and animation and flash working together to tell a narrative close to what I already knew. Then it was time to play, and then it got hard.

A diagram of how the controller worked came up on the screen, no, two screens. Wow, maybe I am just a technology caveman, or just easily perplexed, but that's a whole lotta buttons and functions. Again, I am flummoxed by the controller. I'm going to have to take a picture and print it out to use as a cheat sheet so I can play. Or I can do what I always do, just push all the buttons and move all the levers and hope for the best.

When it comes to playing, I am eased up a bit by the way everything is pretty much spelled out as far as what you have to do, with missions, and onscreen directions. It still doesn't make it easy. And the controller shaking in my hand is an interesting sensation. There is a learning curve involved, and knowing the basic plot of the game helps. One annoying factor is that when you leave the mission area, you start over.

All in all, I'm still learning, and still trying to play, but this has great graphics and is fun for those who know how to turn on the PS3, and those who don't. I might just buy the whole version of this one.