Quick Look: PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

Can anyone tell me what the giant robot girl-thing is from the Bioshock Infinite background? I just want to make sure it isn't from Infinite, a game I am looking forward to playing...

This game is running at like 300 fps. It's almost off-putting.

@Scotto said:

Coldplay? The fuck is Patrick talking about? That music couldn't sound less like Coldplay.

Yeah, I don't think Patrick knows who Coldplay is.

Perhaps he meant, uhhhh, Nickelback? All-American Rejects? Or any number of other postgrunge generic rock bands that are nothing at all like Coldplay?

Though this does make me question what kind of music Patrick is into at all. Clearly not rap or hip hop, given that he never contributes at all when Jeff talks about music. And apparently he has no sense of the musical style of one of the bigger rock acts from the past decade. Perhaps full-on indie-music-you've-probably-never-heard-of, to go along with his manner of dress, drinking of PBR, and playing of indie games?

@BisonHero: I know he was recommending Passion Pit's latest single (Take a Walk. Which is pretty great, for the record. The rest of the album isn't my style, way too poppy) a while back on twitter. Which, uh...actually is closer to Cold Play than anything else on that list, so, hell, I dunno. Maybe he simply misspoke? (and by that, what I mean is that maybe he meant some other band, but was remembering them as coldplay.)

This game takes the very few things I like about smash bros and then fills the holes with garbage.

What a mess of a game.

Can't imagine anyone but fanboys with a childish mindset getting excited for this.

Having played this game for many hours, watching this is painful. Most the things they are complaining about are tweakable options in the settings menu prior to every match that Jeff just doesn't access until the end.

This is gonna be one of those games that is fun enough if you have 4 people in a room to play it but isn't worth it if you don't.

There seems to be a huge gap in reception of this game between reviews from other outlets and this Quick Look. It's been getting decent scores but man this starts out pretty rough. A lot of hate being thrown its way. One of the few times I'm left feeling like the Giant Bomb view of a game is just a major fucking bummer.

This game seems strangely bland to me, it needs more mania! I guess i just dont see the appeal of the super move kill thingy, i want to throw dudes ofscreen.

*edit: And the menu's seem very cold/lifeless.

There is no way Coldplay is in this game.

Also, Vinny, Smash Mouth.

Raiden spent his life as a child soldier in an african civil war, and as a soldier indoctrinated though VR training to do an AI's bidding, that little intro thing is so, so terrible.

Building up a gauge to press the kill button for points, doesn't sound exciting.
 
Smash Bros was really interesting at the time for its cast of characters, Nintendo famously has a very strong cast of characters which was bolstered at the time by the growing fame of Pokemon. Really not feeling Sony's cast, i couldn't even tell you who should be in it, the ps1/2 was great for its huge support from 3rd parties.

Looks horrible... Haha.

Game kind of looks bad, looks like someone took the Mugen engine and placed random sprites from different games in it. Looks like they are fighting against a blue screen....pity, i was looking forward to it too

That was not Cold Play...

Raiden's voice is the guy who did Raiden in all of the previous Metal Gears.

I love it when Jeff flat-out announces, "I feel like there's no Marth equivalent". THAT'S WHAT''S BUGGING ME SO MUCH! They completely whiffed this lineup - much has been said about the crappy 3rd party roster (no Crash, Lara Croft, Spyro, Cloud or Solid Snake? Any of those means 1000% more to the Playstation brand than Big Daddy), but Superbot really did go out of their way to screw over the Japan-made Sony exclusives. Spike doesn't look anything like Spike from Ape Escape, they DID ignore the Rab-bot from Jumping Flash, but most of all, they ignored EVERY SINGLE RPG SONY HAS EVER PUBLISHED. There ISN'T a Marth equivalent, even though there easily could've been. And there should've been. Characters from games like Arc the Lad, Alundra, Legend of Dragoon, Wild ARMS, Jeanne D'Arc, Dark Cloud 1 + 2, Rogue Galaxy and White Knight Chronicle should all be here!

This game blows. It really is very solid, but when you nail the core gameplay you gots to bring everything else. Sony has been killing it for almost 2 decades now in video game land. How could you not have a fighting game with more personality?

EDIT: It says a lot about how "powerful" some of Sony's brands are - namely Twisted Metal - when none of you could recall where the giant Babydoll mech came from on the Bioshock Infinite stage. I didn't even play the PS3 Twisted Metal (like alot of people. I heard it didn't sell very well. Maybe next time they'll abandon the really desperate "hardcore" attitude), but I knew it came from there. They really did fall back on too much new, unproven, uniconic stuff in this game. *sigh*

After seeing a lot of coverage on this game (including GameInformer's Test Chamber), I finally got why this game feels off. They're incredibly biased towards a)western releases, even though Sony is a Japanese company, and b) newer stuff that is much less iconic.

Now Sony does a great job of managing their worldwide studios; they're a real, true international publisher. But western characters are blander. It's a fact. Look at Nate, Killzone guy, BOTH Coles (*sigh*), Ninja Theory's Dante and Nariko... they're just people. Boring. What made the Playstation were a good mix of eastern and western games, and colorful characters with personality. There are only, like, 3 of those here (Jak, Sly and Ratchet. And Spike... even though he doesn't look anything like he should). They really screwed over the eastern-made games that built the Playstation. Ignoring all of Square-Enix's stable (Cloud, Sora, Lightning, Squall, etc.), and Sony's first party RPGs, like Dark Cloud 1 + 2, or Wild ARMS. Or White Knight Chronicles, Rogue Galaxy, Jeanne D'Arc, Alundra, Arc the Lad, Legend of Dragoon, etc.

And in terms of timelessness/nostalgia, yikes. There's no Tomba, no Rab-bot (Jumping Flash), there's no Crash, no Alucard, no Lara Croft or Solid Snake, there's no Spyro... there's mostly just crap from the PS3 era. Which is easily the most forgettable and bland of all hardware generations, thanks in no small part to western studios' fascination with making things grey, gritty, "realistic" and boring. Twisted Metal is revered because people remember TM2. No one cares about the "I'm desperate to cause a controversy"-tone of Twisted Metal Black or Twisted Metal PS3. Heck, 4 Giantbomb editors couldn't even identify the giant Babydoll mech from the PS3 game that came out a few months ago. And now Starhawk's bland, forgettable, unlikeable lead character is headed to this game via DLC? COME ON! What is remotely iconic about him? PUT THE STARHAWK IN if you're going to do that!

This game needs 200% more personality. And it needs an injection of Japanese playstation brands, stat! Even a stage based on Ridge Racer would have been preferable to anything Bioshock-related. Heck, I'll take Battle Arena Toshinden, or Bloody Roar! *sigh* Maybe they'll nail it in a sequel... if it even sells well enough to get one, which I doubt.

@vinsanityv22:

Western games aren't blander, dude. How many spunky yet emotionally insecure 16 year olds with spiky hair are there out there? At least one for every buffoid macho dude in a space suit. The west and the east both have their protag cliches.

I agree with you though that there are way too few iconic Playstation characters here.

That would also be weird if this game had Harry Potter characters in it. Or that Geico gecko. That would be weird.

The fact so many of these are multi-plat softens the impact.

I don't know if anyone says it (I'm sure someone does) but the big Robot Chick is Twisted Metal...I think the guys are asking about this....

I don't know if the game looks interesting enough to buy---and I don't think I would have referred to it as "all stars" seeing as how tons of people wouldn't have bought but maybe one of the games being referenced---but the boys sure made it look kind-of fun, in a totally chaotic way!

I wonder who it is you can hear mashing the hell out of their controller, lol

The menu-screen looks like it belongs in a WWE game circa 2004.

Vinny would make a good QA guy.

I don't know what it is specifically, but even without the additional systems that Vinny mentioned, Smash Bros. has a sort of kinetic excitement where this game feels weirdly generic. It's a shame.

Well this is certainly a wonderful hot mess

I really like Smash Bros., both on a "let's all fuck around" level, and on a slightly more competitive level. So I'm kinda into this. It's a shame that there don't seem to be that many characters. And how the heck is there no Crash Bandicoot?

Would have liked to see how it played with items turned off and more 1v1 than just that match at the end, but I get why they didn't consider doing that. It's just that I enjoyed Smash Bros. the most without items, and got into 1v1 play almost more than 4-way FFA, so I'd like to see whether that holds up here because from what they showed at the end it looked alright.

So, this looks ok, but I definitely agree with the idea of bringing in some of the villains. Why have Evil Cole at all? He apparently has a Kessler skin, why not just have Kessler? Kessler's powers were so drasticly different than Cole's it would have been more interesting.

Having Jak, Sly, and Ratchet was a good choice. Sir Daniel was a good choice. Having Noriko is also a good choice, as Heavenly Sword was a technical setpiece for the PS3 back in the day. Having new Dante is a poor choice(as the first 3 DMCs were PS2 exclusives for a good long while, so that era Dante is more closely associated with Sony. Have new Dante as a costume swap).

Having Ostrava (dude on Demon's Souls box art) would probably have been a good pick, as Sony published that.

The list can go on, I guess. I understand why a lot of the roster is as it is, but some of the choices seem real odd. Regardless, despite some complaints they voiced, from the sounds and responses they had while playing, it was pretty obvious the guys got into it after a bit. Maybe Sony will have another go at this in 4-5 years and it'll be better off.

@vinsanityv22 said:

And now Starhawk's bland, forgettable, unlikeable lead character is headed to this game via DLC? COME ON! What is remotely iconic about him? PUT THE STARHAWK IN if you're going to do that!

Hmm. Kinda surprised that the boys even did a Quick Look for this. Not surprised at the reactions therein, however. Guns were drawn for this game for this game from the announcement of it. Shots blazed fast and furious upon sight. Kinda can see why, but sad still.

There's a LocoRoco stage. Why can't you play a Kirby-esque LocoRoco? Whenever you hit someone, you get bigger or something. It would be a cool mechanic and they would have to use one 3rd party character less. Same deal with Patapons.

Also, the game looks fun to play and the stages are great, but everything around it looks so fucking bland and soulless. That menu is terrible, there's no personality and it looks like it's from the N64 and PSX era.

still say Kazuma Kiryu would have been perfect for this game.

anyways, I haven't been into one of these games since the original smash bros, and this looks pretty meh.

22 minutes in and Its pretty obvious you aren't supposed to die by ringout. You can't actually fly passed the screen like in that other game so the only way you can die realistically is to be insta-gibbed by a super.  
 
Also the Bioshock thing is still very silly. They may as well have put Bayonetta in here too since both games were busted thanks to PS3's infinitely powerful Cell™ and Reality Synthesizer™.
 
The way the levels change is pretty cool though. 
 
After looking at the wiki page the level changes are much less cool since the levels will only change into one thing. So the uncharted plane level will always become a bioshock infinite background.
 
Why is there no Crash Bandicoot or even Alucard? Sony might not have as many memorable characters as perhaps Nintendo does (probably because of good third party support in the past) but they still had/have a pretty good line up that seems to be ignored here.

It feels a little dirty to reference products that don't even exist yet, like Bioshock Infinite, new DMC Dante, and Revengeance. They stand too close to the line of fun party game into cynical marketing game; doesn't help that all the menus feel extremely sterile on top of that.

@vinsanityv22: While i agree with you on some of the roster choices and its size, barely anyone knows any characters from any Sony RPG from the PS1. Why? Because those games havent been around SINCE the PS1.

Since this game is compared to Smash Bros constantly, lets do it one more time. Smash 64 had like 12 characters in the roster, and (besides Ness) they were all safe, known character choices. Mario, Pikachu, Samus, etc. It wasnt until Melee and Brawl that they started expanding the roster, doing copy-cat characters (Fox-Falco-the other one, Mario-Luigi, etc) and lesser known characters (ie Marth). Sure, Marth wasnt a known character, since he was in the first few Fire Emblem games that never came out in America, but Fire Emblem sequels still came out here, so if you say "Marth, whos that" "Hes from Fire Emblem" "O, ok, ive never seen him in it but i know what Fire Emblem is, i played that on my DS the other day".

If they included any Sony RPG character, who would know who they are without going through a bunch of wikipedia articles to read about them? YOU would know who those characters are, but youa re part of a very small minority. A lot of people started in the PS2 era, when most of those franchises were dead. Also, I LOVE Dark Cloud, but i couldnt tell you the name of the main character (or any character) since i havent played it in years (but i would like Dark Cloud 3). Would i have liked a deeper Playstation history with the characters? yes. I loved Jumping Flash. I loved Crash and i loved Spyro (and neither of those franchises has been good since the PS1). BUT, there hasnt been a game for those characters in a while (Skylanders has Spyro, but in a very small and limited capacity, so i wouldnt count that). And that issue leads to why certain 3rd party characters are in and some arent.

Lets say Sont DID want Crash and Spyro in the game. They dont know them, Activision does. They go to Activision to see if they can license them. Activision says "We could, but we have no games coming out for those characters, so what incentive do we have to give them to you?" Sony doesnt get Crash or Spyro. The same could be said about Konami. Sony could have wanted Alucard, or Snake, or Big Boss, or w/e. They go to Konami, "How about you take Raiden instead since Revengeance is coming out soon. A new MGS game is announced, but its not coming out soon so we dont want Snake." And, a castlevania game is coming out on 3DS (and i dont think Alucard is in LoS2). Same thing with Square. What Final Fantasy thing do they have coming out that they need to promote? nothing.

We can blame Sony for why our favorite characters arent in the game (and we can to some degree) but its not all their fault. They are at the mercy of 3rd parties for a lot of characters, and 3rd parties want to promote their upcoming games. And why are they all new characters? Well, because right now, characters from PS3 games are the most known.

This does not look that fun. It's cool seeing all these characters in the same game though.

Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Maximo, Lara Croft, Joe from Viewtiful Joe, the King from Katamari (or the Prince, or both), and Rayman would have been nice characters for this game if they could have got them.

I am not a fanboy of any console and even though the ps3 is the only current gen console i don't have, i did own ps1 and 2 and have tremendous respect for playstation. That said, this game looks boring and extremely derivative also why no crash bandicoot?

Not a Nintendo fan boy but seems like it could use more "PlayStation" in it, especially considering they have 3 generations of consoles.

12:08 IT'S FROM TWISTED METAL YOU UNEDUCATED HEATHENS.

Wow the menus look more boring than the game.

Where the hell is Mr. Domino?

Am I the only one who just watched Vinny the whole time?

I know the rights are beyond them but still, Sony All stars without Crash is pointless. Hes the only true PlayStation Allstar

The amount of BioShock Infinite in this game, when BioShock Infinite isn't going to be released until next March, is really, really weird. Same goes for Raiden and new Devil May Cry Dante. I like the level design but the character roster is madness.

Leave it to Vinny to enjoy life.

@Ivoshandor: I second this truth.

They should have made it power stone like!!! With 3d environments this game would immediately get 4 stars! A shame..