Salting the Earth
By Gaff 6 Comments
Do you remember how, back in the day, how every platformer on the NES tried to be Mario, but was completely eclipsed by every installment put out by Nintendo? We've seen it happen so many times: the Halo series on the Xboxes, Gran Turismo on the Playstations and of course, the Mario games themselves on all Nintendo consoles. First party studios always seemed to get an edge over third party competitors, whether it's through better platform holder support, marketing power or just the sheer power of getting bundled with the actual hardware. Of course, there are a few exceptions (Killzone, anyone?), but in general, third party developers have a really hard time beating the first party developers at their own game.
Knowing this, I can't help but feel sorry for the guys at United Front Games. Their first game, Modnation Racers, a PS3 exclusive, can bluntly be pitched as "LittleBigPlant with karts". It was coming out in a few weeks, looked good, had some fairly positive press coverage, and then... The bombshell: Media Molecule, freshly acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment, announced LittleBigPlanet 2. A few bulletpoints: fully backwards compatible with the first game, the trailer showed some features: showcasing the possibility of LBP Shooters, programmable AI, and Racers. Talk about stealing someone's thunder.
We'll have to wait and see how Modnation Racers will perform, but damn, LBP2's announcement can't have done it any good.
Knowing this, I can't help but feel sorry for the guys at United Front Games. The easy pitch for their first game, Modnation Racers, was put it bluntly, "LBP, but with karts". It looked promising, it had fairly positive coverage from the game press, it was a little under two weeks away from its releasedate... And then the bombshell: Media Molecule, freshly acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment, announced LittleBigPlanet 2
6 Comments