According to this tweet by Sid Shuman, the full roster for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale has been revealed (and yes I originally read this on IGN).

Is anyone else disappointed? I figured they still had a few more characters to reveal before launch. Why the hell would they blow their wad two months before the release of the game? Way to kill off any hype building up to the release of this game. They should have spread them out more and revealed them up to the week before launch. Fucking Sony executives are dumber then a sack of potatoes.

PlayStation All-Stars could have (should have) been the biggest marketing tool of all time. It should have included All the stars of PlayStation. It should have been a celebration of all things PlayStation. That blu-ray should have been stuffed to capacity with extras showing mini documentary's of the origins of the playable characters, all of the games they are featured in, and some words from the creators of the franchise, as well as a demo of each of their games, ala Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Unlike Smash Brothers, this game should have only included one character per franchise, the biggest middle finger to Nintendo and Microsoft, a way of telling them "Fuck you, you don't have enough franchises to do this!". It would have allowed casual PlayStation gamers to be able to see the PlayStation in the same light that I do. PlayStation has the biggest, most diverse list of exclusive games out of the current console makers yet Sony does nothing to let people know this. I have already made a blog about the characters I would have liked to see and the problems I have with Big Daddy, Evil Cole, Raiden being in this game so I will not repeat that here (feel free to read that blog post here). Why not teach people about lesser known PlayStation characters like Fred Neuman, Aya Brea, Commander, Selvaria Bles, Leonard, Rohn, Cullen Gray, and Finn? It would have led to some people picking up those games after learning about them in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

And then there are the stages they made. Did we really need two God of War stages? There were so many other PlayStation exclusive games that would have made for great stages like: Afrika, MAG, Gran Turismo, Starhawk, MLB: The Show, MotorStorm, SingStar, EyePet, Wipeout, Tales from Space, Katamari, Kinetica, Super Stardust, Journey, Calling All Cars!, Echochrome, PAIN, PixelJunk, PlayStation Home, Super Rub 'a' Dub, Eye of Judgment, Mobile Suit Gundam, SOCOM, Crush, Invizimals, Zombie Tycoon, Escape Plan, Rag Doll Fu, Tokyo Jungle, Sports Champions, ModNation Racers, Sound Shapes, Wonderbook or Little Deviants. But no, they decided "let’s use God of War twice!". They literally have enough exclusives to only use each franchise once while making a stage and filling out the roster of playable characters. Once again, a perfect opportunity to stretch that middle finger out to Nintendo and Microsoft wasted.

Then there is the stunning lack of Crash and Spyro. Why the fuck are these two not in the game? I have two theories. 1) Sony was actually selling its roster spots (which is why all the third party characters have a game coming up) and they would have had to pay Activision to use Crash and Spyro and the publisher (that damned publisher) decided it would be an unnecessary waste of money and then went on to green light more Wonderbook games, or 2) They already have the characters and are going to sell them as DLC.

To me, the thing I love most about Super Smash Bros. is that it is a celebration of all things Nintendo. All of the extras you could unlock in “The Vault” the trophies that each had a large description, and the huge amount of songs were great fan service. The combat is also simple to play and understand for people of any and all ages.

The combat system in PlayStation All-Stars is fun (trust me, I have played it) but unless you play it for yourself it just seems overly complicated. They should have focused on making it simple fun for everyone, but instead Sony hired a group of hardcore fighting game nerds who ended up creating an overly complex fighting system that isn't straight forward and thus isn't inviting to casual players (which is the audience this should be aimed at). Capture the casual audience and once they see all the interesting PlayStation characters, they go out and buy their favorite characters game helping them make the transition from casual gamer to core gamer. And when that transition happens, they will remember who made them fall in love with video games. Taking a new generation of gamers would really help Sony in the long term.

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This game could have been so much more had it been given more time and a game director that actually was passionate about the PlayStation. Omar Kendall does not seem to give the first shit about PlayStation. Ever since I saw an interview he did with GameTrailers where he said that El Dorado was from Uncharted 2 I knew he was the wrong person to be directing this game (starts at around 1:25 in the video below and you can see even the interviewer is surprised). This game should have had a co-director to go along with Omar (or even replace him entirely with Seth Killian) like Greg Miller, Colin Moriarty, or Will Powers. Yes, I realize a lot of you guys here hate IGN but those two guys, Will (and myself) are the only people that I know of who really understand PlayStation and have an appreciation for all branches of it.

So to sum it all up, I am disappointed that Sony did not do more with this game. If Sony doesn't care then why should anyone else? To call this game a Super Smash Brothers Clone is insulting to Nintendo. While Smash Bros is a celebration of all things Nintendo that happens to also be a fighting game, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale seems like a fun fighting game that happens to feature PlayStation characters. Those Will Powers tweets really paint a grim picture for the future of PlayStation. He mentioned a few games that have absolutely no PR support, including LittleBigPlanet Karting (which I had assumed they were going to push this year along with Battle Royale). Between Sony laying off a big chunk of its PR staff and then releasing a new PS3 model that is actually more expensive then the old one, do they actually expect to do well this holiday season? Whoever the evil Sony Warlord is that seems hell bent on destroying the company, I hope they get rid of him before it is too late.

Edit: Here are those tweets of Will Powers for those of you who don't want to click through the link.