6/19/2010

Post E3 thoughts Plus

This post is a little bit later than I anticipated, but I kinda kept putting it off in favor of finishing up Mario Galaxy 2 & Fallout 3 (finally, bought that way back in '08 when it came out, never seemed to get into it long enough to finish til now).

Sooo, Playstation Plus. Sony's long-feared premium service. Feared in that it would bring an end to the free service we enjoy now that routinely makes the fact that 360 owners pay for their service, while superior, harder and harder to defend. The good news is that Sony at least claims that the same level of service you get now. It is so far simply like most premium services, where you get extras such as free tidbits (i.e. themes, maybe the occasional downloadable game) and early access to demos. And at the same price as Xbox live for a year ($49.99) it doesn't seem like a bad deal, but I don't know if I see a lot of people signing up just for that stuff. And when they buy-in rate is low, that's when Sony might take bigger measures, say having certain games have online play only for people who have the plus level of service. I seriously doubt I'll buy into this, as aside from Netflix and the occasional demo I really don't use my PSN for much. They would have to offer some very good incentives to make it worth the money even if it actually adds up to less than $5 a month...

And though it hasn't always been the case, news sort of slowed to a giant crawl after Tuesday's press conferences. Where was the Arkham Asylum sequel? What about those demos behind closed doors? No last minute surprises it seems. Essentially the biggest story running around afterwords was that Kinect wouldn't work if you were sitting down. Which Microsoft outright denied, but we'll see when the thing actually launches. The good/bad news is that I suddenly have a lot more games I want to buy, and unsurprisingly they are all from Nintendo. They seem to really have the strong lineup for the remainder of this year, even without a Mario or Zelda. Pretty much the only way they could blow people's minds more is by launching the 3DS this holiday, but Nintendo isn't one to rush things, I'm betting Summer of next year for the highly-anticipated handheld.

Moving (finally) on from E3, this is a rather big movie weekend, with the much anticipated Toy Story 3 opening. I've repeatedly mentioned that while I've enjoyed much of Pixar's work, I've never found them as pitch perfect as many others do (i.e. Wall-E had an extremely bludgeoning enviromental message that went over kids heads and was just insulting to adults). The previous Toy Story movies are 2 of my favorites and while I definitely want to check out the 3rd chapter, it just hasn't hit me as a must see, so I might wait for video.

I was hopeful that Jonah Hex would at least be enjoyable trash, as I really enjoy the comic book character it's based on, but with diverging hugely from the comic (he doesn't have supernatural powers!) and getting really poor reviews, seems like something I'll just catch sometime when I'm really bored.

Ok, that's it for today, but I should be back Monday or Tuesday with thoughts on the new Transformers game, the demo for Crackdown 2 and probably some other stuff. In the meantime enjoy both the TRAILER and FREE GAME OF THE WEEK:



FREE GAME OF THE WEEK: Death Row Diner

1 comment:

KK said...

Agree with you on Jonah Hex. It's something I might pick up on BD if it ever gets cheap, but I don't think I'll waste money on a ticket for that one. You should go see Toy Story 3, though (in 3D!). If you liked the first two, you'll like the final chapter. :)