Guides
There's a fine line between waiting out a rough launch and giving a game a free pass.
Actually, it's neither. LittleBigPlanet has been updated to version 1.03 with a 20MB patch for 1.02 users. There's been no official word on any of the typical Sony info sources about what this patch does, though. Currently, the LBP servers are back online, but struggling. When I first fired it up 20 minutes ago, I was able to get into a couple of online levels and actually complete them, too. Haven't been able to connect to other human players, though. Someone on my friends list shot me an invite and it returned a message claiming that we were running the same build, so maybe there are still 1.02 players out there gumming up the works.
Things haven't remained all peachy, though, as I'm currently getting the same "failed to load level" errors that I was getting the night the servers went up earlier this week.
[UPDATE] It appears that the LBP servers were taken down again moments after this article was posted.
SOCOM was updated to version 1.20 this morning, and the official SOCOM site lists these changes:
- Fixed many issues which would cause the game to crash, hang, disconnect and exit to the PS3 XMB.
- Fixed an issue which would cause large numbers of players in a high player count game to be simultaneously disconnected.
- Fixed an issue which would cause players to be invincible.
- Fixed a physics issue which would cause players to occasionally "warp" around on the map.
- Fixed an issue where a "corrupt save data" message would be incorrectly displayed after updating the game.
- Fixed some player model issues related to team swapping.
- Client/server optimization.
- Fixed an issue where the scope camera had an incorrect offset from the barrel of the gun while prone or leaning/peeking.
This will be a 550MB patch for people running any version older than 1.10. If you already got the monster 1.10 update, then you'll be downloading another 50MB or so for the upgrade.
I've been thinking of the best way to handle reviews of these games. If I had written a review of SOCOM last week, for example, I would have given it one star. If our score went to zero, I'd try to give it that. Why? Because it wasn't even a game. It was a $40 title screen. Rather than write a review that doesn't do anyone any good, I wrote an article or two about the status of the servers, figuring that would hopefully keep people from running out and buying the game before it gets fixed.
I'm currently doing a pretty good job of pretending this game never came out.
But my patience won't last forever. Expect a review of LittleBigPlanet by early next week at the absolute latest, and if the server situation hasn't been ironed out by then, then I guess you can expect the review to reflect that. As it stands, the rough launch is already a knock against both games. As for SOCOM, there are other, more-important games on our review schedule right now. Perhaps we'll get back to it later this year and figure out if it's any good or not.
Filed under :
SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals: Confrontation,
LittleBigPlanet,
PlayStation 3,
PlayStation Network
Short. To the point. I like it!
This gives Sony and Insomniac a chunk of time to clean up after the beta and prep their servers for 60-player chaos as soon as the full retail hits stores next week, on November 4. Keep your fingers crossed, R2 fans. Sony hasn't exactly had the best of luck with launch day server stability these days.
Have you been enjoying the beta? Is it selling you on the final product?
Is this game the most important Sony release of the season? Or are you a LittleBigPlanet sort of guy/gal?
Can I fit any more questions at the end of this article? Should I do laundry tonight?
Filed under :
Resistance 2,
PlayStation 3
The Giant Bomb staff would like to officially salute Kotaku's Michael McWhertor for trying the big, awful-looking Guitar Hero-themed KFC meal so that we don't have to.
It looks like paying $7.99 to be kicked in the stomach until you cough up blood. It makes the KFC Famous Bowl look dainty and dignified by comparison. Thankfully, we will never have to know for ourselves. Instead we can continue staring down the barrel of a Pizza Hut Macaroni & Cheese With Bacon "pasta" thing, which isn't game-related unless you consider stunt eating to be a game.
For the record, stunt eating is not a game.
Rated T for Terrifying
As you might have heard, THQ filed a lawsuit against Activision over box art. Specifically, THQ's people think that the box for Activision's Score International Baja 1000: The Official Game is way too similar to THQ's Baja: Edge of Control.
Take a look for yourself, and keep in mind that THQ's game came out first and has been out for a bit. Activision's will be out soon.
Can you spot ten differences between these two images?
I'm no lawyer, but I think I see their point. While we're on the topic, I was recently out doing a little shopping when I noticed something pretty similar coming out of the R section.
Deliberately similar? Or a completely random coincidence?
I can't imagine Konami's Rock Revolution box shot just happened to duplicate the color and feel of the Rock Band 2 box by mistake. I'm guessing that someone said "let's see if we can trick people into thinking this is officially related to this other thing!" Then someone probably said "but that's just wrong and potentially illegal!" Then the other guy said "then forget I said anything and help me pick out a proper shade of blue!"
Filed under :
Rock Revolution,
Rock Band 2,
SCORE International Baja 1000,
Baja: Edge of Control ,
PlayStation 3,
Xbox 360
OK, stop smiling. Seriously, I just feel like you're mocking me now.
So far, it's been a chore getting lists of levels to load at all, and now that I've managed to get the "Cool Levels" option to start returning results, none of the user levels I'm attempting to play are actually loading.
On top of that, the menus feel very laggy, seizing up from time to time like they're waiting for some nugget of online information and having a very hard time squeezing it out of the server. Totally bummed out over here. Really wanted to see what levels people have been cooking up.
Anyone out there having a smooth experience tonight?
Filed under :
LittleBigPlanet,
PlayStation 3
Dude is stoked. Srsly.
But you probably won't notice these messages very frequently, because Sony has announced that the North American servers are now online! As someone who has been sitting on a copy for like a week now, this is great news. Furthermore, the levels created during the game's beta have been preserved and will show up online, as well.
The last remaining piece of the puzzle is the pre-order bonus material, like Kratos and That Girl From Heavenly Sword That Everyone Just Calls Nariko As If I'm Supposed To Remember What The Hell Her Name Was. Mark Valledor's post on the Sony blog says that those redemption codes should start working later tonight.
As for our LBP coverage, I'm going to spend some more time with the creation tools and the user levels before writing the review, but I'm already pretty sure that I love this game. I finished the single-player levels over the weekend. They're enjoyable, but the level creation and user stuff is obviously the star of the show.
Filed under :
LittleBigPlanet,
PlayStation 3
Why earn trophies when you can just take them by force, right Niko?
The full trophy list hasn't been revealed, but the ones that have been listed so far appear as achievements in the 360 version. 51 trophies sounds like "the full 360 achievement list plus one new platinum trophy for getting all the rest" to me.
We'll all find out together next week, as the patch will be posted for download on Monday, October 27. Like other trophy patches, you won't be awarded any retroactive cups. So get ready to clear out those save games and start cracking.
Green Lantern busts out a wall!
This is the third different version of the game I've seen over the course of its development, and as a nearly-complete game, it feels pretty different than it did back at PAX, and vastly different from how it felt back at E3. Back then, the game seemed fun and also kind of simple--but apparently that's just because the development team wasn't close to finished. Today, the game feels like it retains that level of play, but it also appears to have much deeper, skill-based angle to it, one focused on the proper timing of your moves and combos, resulting in wild juggles, much like the stuff you'd expect to see in the early games in the series.
As I was getting worked over quite badly by Midway's Paulo Garcia, I could see some of the horrific things he was doing to me were going to take some skill to pull off. This game doesn't seem to be about the basic memorization of combo strings, like some other 3D fighters (including the past couple of MK games) have placed an emphasis on. Instead, it's about making sure that you can land a couple of ground hits that end in a pop-up, letting you work in some special moves and sort of fling your opponent around the screen. In the case of Wonder Woman, well, she uses her lasso to make sure you get to experience every little corner of the screen as you're being tossed around.
There will be blood.
If you can save up your breakers and fill your meter, you can pull both of the triggers to enter rage mode for a bit. Rage mode disables your reaction to getting hit, so you can kind of punch your way through oncoming attacks to deal out damage while your character glows with a cool, yellowish tinge... like he or she was infected with cyber-jaundice or something. Being in the rage state doesn't make you invincible, though. You might be able to punch through an attack and crush your opponent's guard, but you'll still take damage and get dropped if you run out of health.
Between the breakers and the game's 2D feel, the game feels like a good mesh of the things that were interesting about the previous generation of MK games and a lot of the feel of the classic 2D games in the franchise. Things like the way a jump kick sort of sticks in the air for a bit when it lands, or the way Mileena's roll move (now on Kitana, as Mileena herself doesn't appear in the game) serves you up for an easy uppercut if blocked really go a long way.
There's a tightness to the gameplay that the previous MK games seemed to lack, with a lot of extra little moves and tweaks that can be done to alter up or branch existing moves. For example, Raiden has his classic teleport. But if you do the teleport move and then quickly do another, he'll quickly teleport twice, which sounds like it could be good for tripping players up. Batman has a move that lets him quickly throw two batarangs if done with the proper timing, Sonya's leg grab has an enhanced version that pops enemies up for a juggle if done with just the right timing, and so on. These moves might not be required for the average player to have a good time, but they seem like they'll definitely be worth learning if you want to be the best.
To finish off the fights, each character will have two finishing moves. While the fatalities that I've seen so far aren't exactly grisly and shocking in the way that the old MK games were, they seem to retain the spirit of what finishing moves are supposed to be--over-the-top and occasionally-ridiculous ways to slap an exclamation point on the end of a fight. Lex Luthor, for example, taps his wrist computer for a bit, causing a ton of lock-on targets to appear on his victim. Then, a bunch of missiles come flying out of the sky, blowing up and knocking over the loser. Of course, if this were a regular MK game, the guy would then explode and reveal a billion ribcages, but I didn't miss that too much. Besides, this game totally has the Liu Kang MK1 arcade machine drop from Mortal Kombat 3. So it's already A-OK in my book.
Between this being an all-new engine and the first game that the MK team has done for this generation of consoles, it makes sense that the game is much more focused on the fighting this time around, rather than tossing in a bunch of adventure modes, or kart racing, or a puzzle game. But there is a pretty lengthy story mode that will explain why, exactly, all these MK and DC characters are getting together in the first place.
Raiden can charge his fireball, but if you hold it for too long, it'll blow up in his hands.
Wait... why would those guys fight each other? They're both good guys! That brings us to the main focus of the game's story: The Rage. The Rage is an infection of sorts that travels from character to character and makes them behave a little strangely. It appears to provide a good story-line justification for all of the different crazy match-ups that are possible in the game. Ed Boon told us that each side of the story should take players around three hours to complete, and that each side contained around an hour of cutscenes as a part of that number.
The other modes are all focused on the fighting, like a practice mode, online play, and the kombo challenge. This seems similar to the trial minigames that you'll find in the practice modes of some games, and it has you attempt to pull off ten unique combos for each character. This plays into the tight timing for juggles and enhanced versions of special moves that I was talking about earlier. On my first handful of tries, I couldn't even get the timing down for Scorpion's first combo. So this seems like it'll be a good way to learn the timing for some of the trickier moves. It also seems like it could be insanely frustrating and time-consuming. It sounds like some achievements and trophies will be assigned to completing these combos. There will also be a standard arcade mode that will have endings for every character.
All in all, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe seems like a smart collection of changes and enhancements to one of the fighting genre's longest-running franchises. It'll be interesting to see how it's received when the game hits shelves on November 16.
PlayStation 3
-
LiquidPrince
281 points -
Absinthetic
249 points -
Fix2
200 points -
S1LENT_ASSASS1N
65 points -
Clockswork
40 points -
thelastguy
21 points -
guermo
19 points -
Jeff
17 points -
albaker
10 points -
wartime
10 points
-
LiquidPrince
1,801 posts -
Sentry
1,238 posts -
shadows_kill
1,211 posts -
nerdboy
762 posts -
hush404
474 posts -
AaronBelfast
461 posts -
dcpc10
372 posts -
Solid_SnakeXx
343 posts -
DrPepper1990
340 posts -
thelastguy
284 posts
