Jim S Squires, esq here. Myself and Ted Ryan Newsome Hewson had a most excellent adventure yesterday. No, we didn’t get to travel back in time and help stop Hitler. Even better — we went to the future (which was conveniently located in downtown Toronto). What did we see? What did we play? Put on your safety helmets and shin guards, kids. You’re in for some lengthy exposition on this biggest PlayStation games to come out during the upcoming holiday season!

Continue Reading »

I may not have talked much about it thus far, but Buzz: Quiz TV for the PlayStation 3 is easily in my top five most anticipated games this fall.  Not only am I a bit of a trivia junkie, but Buzz will be delivering something that I’ve been demanding for years — the ability to make and share your own quizzes.

Creating a new quiz couldn’t be easier.  Just visit mybuzzquiz.com, sign in with your PSN ID, and get creating!  The quizzes you create can be taken both on the My Buzz site and in the game, and are accessible to everyone.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — Sony knows exactly what Velocity Girl is looking for.

I’ve never really gotten in golf games much. Sure I’ve played the occasional round of Golden Tee in random bars and enjoyed some Mario Golf back in the day, but I’ve never really searched out a golf game — not even the first Hot Shots Golf on the PSP that came out back when the system first launched. After Lumines and Wipeout I was out of interesting games to play and decided to just get the game to futz around with while waiting for something else worth playing. Truth be told, in the early days of the PSP if I wasn’t playing Hot Shots Golf my PSP would never have been used. I played the HELL out of that game and got quite good at it.

So how does someone who’s averse to sports games get so sucked in to a golf game? Probably because it’s nowhere near realistic, and the fact that there’s tons of stuff to unlock — and it’s just fun.

So fast forward a few years and the sequel comes out. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it, but does it live up to expectations? Continue Reading »

Those of you who listen to the bitcast may know that I recently dipped my wick in the little bit of Sony golf love known as Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds. Hot on the heels of their PS3 release, SCEA has announced Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 for the PlayStation Portable. Considering the love Dan has spouted for the original PSP title on the ‘cast (now available for download for the low low price of $10.99) I think I may have to pick this one up.

The long-running Wipeout racing series has its roots deep in the history of the PlayStation. Its first incarnation was a slightly dodgy affair that held the promise of 3D antigravity racing, and despite a number of problems it went on to become a hit as the first non-Japanese PlayStation game. Wipeout 2097, or Wipeout XL as it was known in North America, was an amazing upgrade that fulfilled the promise and became what is still widely considered a watershed game. After a number of sequels, and a strangely weak showing on the PS2 with Wipeout Fusion, the series seemed to have gone on hiatus for a number of years. And then when the PSP launched in March 2005, like a fiery vodka-and-Red-Bull-fuelled techno phoenix, Wipeout Pure appeared, and it was the very best version of Wipeout ever made.

The series has never been known for radical departures in gameplay. After the fanfare following XL, the designers were probably loathe to mess with what was widely considered a Very Good Thing. Thus the franchise has become the epitome of iterative game design. Each Wipeout is essentially the same thing: futuristic antigravity racing with rapid-fire combat and an edgy, electronica-fused atmosphere. What you historically got in new versions has been a mix of further refinements to craft handling, weapon tweaking, and track design. This is what made Pure special; for the series, it was the evolutionary equivalent of a shark. An absurdly optimized killing machine, nearly perfect in form and consequently at an impasse. Nothing more could really be done with the franchise in the way of gameplay without adding new base capabilities to the hardware that had become feasible in the post-PS2 days. Namely, online multiplayer.

So when I tell you that Wipeout Pulse is the ridiculously polished, online-capable, super-tweaked version of Wipeout Pure, I want you to understand where I am coming from. It is a game that has been in the works, in some form or another, for 13 years. It is probably the finest handheld racing game ever made by the hand of man. And I say this with all due reverence to the Burnouts, Ridge Racers, and Mario Carts of the world. Those are fine games. But this is Wipeout.

Continue Reading »

Right now on Amazon they have a fantastic deal for PS3 owners. Pick up Eye of Judgment complete with Playstation Eye camera for only $47. I picked this up myself a few weeks back and despite a few flaws with the layout and a bit of a learning curve, I’ve found it to be a pretty enjoyable experience. Regardless — the Playstation Eye has been a ton of fun and made my purchase more than worth it. Check out our review of the Eye and all of the software currently available for it here.

Sure you can buy the Eye on it’s own for $32.99, but why would you when you can get the game with it for only $15 more? If you pick it up, make sure to let us know. I’d be more than happy to set up an uber-geeky playdate with you.

[Amazon via PS3 Fanboy]

I used my randomly-forged Japanese PlayStation store account to download the Echochrome demo today for PS3. I also snagged the PSP demo, but was unable to check it out due to aforementioned forged Japanese account – the software instructed me that installing it under Nerfgun-san rather than Nerfgun would nuke my North American “certificate”, which of course means the PSP would be unable to find employment and die alone and destitute. I can’t have that.

Echochrome plays much as the videos say it does “solving a series of black-and-white Escher-inspired perspective drawings that are technically impossible in Euclidean geometry. The only control you have is over the camera. While quite mind-bending at first, the demo does a great job of walking you through the “five mysteries” of the game at the outset and you quickly acclimatize to the odd 3D/2D translation you must do in your head to make it work. All the while soothing YoYoMa cello music plays in the background, making the entire enterprise feel quite cerebral and scholarly. It’s like the polar opposite of Madden. The kind of game where you don’t blink for an hour.

I did have some trouble with the camera, which does not bode well at all since that is the entire control scheme for the game. At certain points it seemed like it was trying to help a little bit, which had the opposite effect. You must join up the edges fairly precisely, there’s not really any snap to it, so when you line up a nice bit of walkway for your poser-hero and then the camera shifts of its own accord, you rightly want to hurl something sharp. Wasn’t a big deal, it only happened twice but it immediately pissed me off. I hope there’s some setting in Japanese that I can’t read for Camera Assist=NO.

The demo is in Japanese with English voiceovers in the tutorial, so not so hard to figure out. If you have access, I recommend it.

Have to say though, a bit disappointing that the PS3 version doesn’t seem to support Remote Play; and the PSP version has twice as many maps as the PS3 one. The PSP is really where you want a game like this in the end but it just looks so damn sharp in HD.

(UPDATE: PSPFanboy has posted the Echochrome demo for, durr, PSP. Gogetit.)

(Originally posted at citizengame. Come for the impudence, stay for the ennui!)