Playstation 3 Highlights - January and February 2007 (Month #3 and Month #4)
If you are just tuning into this series and haven't read the first two entries, that's fine. Last time, I explained why I would be covering two month's releases in this post, and it's simple. January saw only one game released, while February saw two. Which is the total of how many were released in December of 2006. So far, months two, three, and four combined have a total of less than half the games released at launch. Kind of amusing really.
This time around, we get to talk about Sonic the Hedgehog, Virtua Fighter 5, and MLB Baseball 2K7, which is a decent selection right at the surface because nothing is similar. Platformer, fighter, sports. So without having any direct competitors upon release for each genre (MLB 07 The Show wouldn't be released for another 3 months), these titles have to sink or swim all on their own. Let's jump right into January's release of Sonic and see how it does.
JANUARY 2007
Sonic The Hedgehog - The first thing you're going to notice about this game is it looks fantastic. No seriously, out of nowhere, the Sonic series pulls out some Square Enix Final Fantasy level of graphics and it will blow you away. The story follows the same old Sonic story, Robotnik wants to control the world/destroy some shit, and Sonic chimes in to stop him. It retains all the same platforming style, and some RPG-style elements with crystals that you can put into Sonic's shoes to gain different powers/moves. But you don't even need to get through the first level to realize exactly what this game is, and it can be described in two words : Tech. Demo. This game pushes the capabilities of the PS3 to it's early day limits, and while it looks great, that's all it does. The levels themselves are fun and offer some good challenges to you, but there are times when it seems very slow, and there are other times where it actually is slow. Anymore than a four enemies plus yourself on the screen and you'll be introduced with some frame-hopping. What kills this game though is the load times. They are way too frequent. In the opening town segment, I approached someone for a mission. There was a string of text, then a load screen, then a single box of text, and another load screen before it finally put me into the mission.
Value : $15
FEBRUARY 2007
Virtua Fighter 5 - For the first installment in the fighter genre on the console, Virtua Fighter 5 looks amazing with it's crisp clean graphics. The character models are really smooth, and the arenas you get to fight in are full 3D letting you move around them in any direction you want. You'll either be fighting in a closed off arena, giving you the potential to back your opponent into a literal corner and beat them down, or open arenas where you can knock them back for a cheap and easy "Ring Out" victory. However, the gameplay for this one runs pretty stale after a handful of rounds. While the characters are fun to play as, it's more of a "realistic" styled fighter, so there are no crazy special moves like MK style fireballs, ice clones, or shadow teleporting. Your arsenal of moves revolves around punch and kick combos, as well as some grabs. But unless you're changing your fighter after every two or three matches, the lack of depth in the moves doesn't give a whole lot of reason to bleed hours into playing this one. Virtua Fighter 5 offers your traditional "climb the ladder" styled arcade mode, or a king of the hill mode where you can enter various arenas and keep fighting until you lose, as well as an offline multiplayer.
Value : $5
MLB Baseball 2K7 - 2K Sports got an advantage on this one, with the Sony exclusive MLB The Show not coming out for another few months.The main game itself doesn't bring anything too eccentric to the plate. You have your typical exhibition, season, franchise and playoff modes where you can pick whatever team you want, adjust any of the difficulty sliders you wish, set the length of your season or playoffs, and start swinging. The one quirky feature is the default swinging controls, it uses the six-axis in the controller. Just a simple quick push in a forward direction and you'll swing. You can even tilt the controller up or downwards to influence a fly or ground ball. It's weird and awkward at first, especially because the game doesn't actually inform you beforehand that this is how you're meant to swing, but eventually it becomes easy enough, but there's always the option to turn it off for a traditional button push swing. The biggest feature to shine through the 2K sports games are the mini-games. We've already gotten to cover NHL and NBA for 2K, and they all had a great selection of mini-games. What does MLB bring to the offering? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The only mini-game type feature is Home Run Derby, which is an actual event in the MLB season during the All-Star Break...so we can't even actually count that one. This one, from head to toe, is just a baseball simulation game. It looks good, it plays smooth, and it is pretty enjoyable, but with no mini-games added in, this game loses what little bit of depth it could have had.
Value : $3
What's Worth It?
Surprisingly enough, and again this is just my opinion, the only title from these two months that's really worth grabbing is MLB Baseball 2K7. Despite it just being a baseball simulator and missing all the other features that are normally present in a 2K Sports game, this one is still incredibly fun. To me, it's the use of the six-axis for swinging your bat that makes this one worth it. It brings a bit more realism to having to swing for your hits, and being able to tilt it to influence ground or fly balls gives you more control over what you're trying to do. It's a game that gets recycled every year for a brand new one, so it doesn't make this a must-own title, but for only a few bucks it'll serve a good place in your library.
What Misses?
Both of the other games. I will admit beforehand I may be wrong about Virtua Fighter, but I'm not knocking it's worth just because I'm not a fan of the genre. Well, I'm a fan, I'm just not good at the games. However, Virtua Fighter 5 doesn't bring anything eccentric to the game. Punch and kick combos with a grab move, that's about it. No fireballs, nothing excessively crazy. This game might be more fun in a multiplayer setting, but as a single player game it doesn't have much substance, unless basic fighting moves are your thing. Again, it's a later entry in a series of fighting games so for me personally there may be something I'm missing from previous entries, but what I experienced in this particular title didn't make me want to visit the others.
Sonic misses because of a couple things. For starters, as pristine as this game looks graphically, the gameplay is not on the same level. It feels like Sonic Adventure just got a facelift just so it could look good on a newer HD console. Which would be fine, except that you probably spend just as much if not more time in load screens than you do getting to play the game itself. The levels themselves run a lot like they do in Sonic Heroes, which I reviewed recently. You have opportunities to play as different characters/teams, each one with a special power or ability, and depending on which character you're using you can access certain areas of the level. So each level can't be fully explored unless you replay it with all the different characters. It's the typical, more recent Sonic formula, but the repetitiveness is quite bland.
That just about does it for months #3 and #4 of release for the PS3. Month #5, March 2007, is going to be a bit before it comes up here on the page, as there were 8 games released that month. One of them, though, was Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion which, as you may well know, is a huge game. I won't be trying to complete it, but I want to put a good amount of time into it before I decide what to say about it. So stay tuned for that entry, and I will try and get a couple of Quick and/or Full Reviews up here in the meantime.
Game on guys!
HG
This time around, we get to talk about Sonic the Hedgehog, Virtua Fighter 5, and MLB Baseball 2K7, which is a decent selection right at the surface because nothing is similar. Platformer, fighter, sports. So without having any direct competitors upon release for each genre (MLB 07 The Show wouldn't be released for another 3 months), these titles have to sink or swim all on their own. Let's jump right into January's release of Sonic and see how it does.
JANUARY 2007
Sonic The Hedgehog - The first thing you're going to notice about this game is it looks fantastic. No seriously, out of nowhere, the Sonic series pulls out some Square Enix Final Fantasy level of graphics and it will blow you away. The story follows the same old Sonic story, Robotnik wants to control the world/destroy some shit, and Sonic chimes in to stop him. It retains all the same platforming style, and some RPG-style elements with crystals that you can put into Sonic's shoes to gain different powers/moves. But you don't even need to get through the first level to realize exactly what this game is, and it can be described in two words : Tech. Demo. This game pushes the capabilities of the PS3 to it's early day limits, and while it looks great, that's all it does. The levels themselves are fun and offer some good challenges to you, but there are times when it seems very slow, and there are other times where it actually is slow. Anymore than a four enemies plus yourself on the screen and you'll be introduced with some frame-hopping. What kills this game though is the load times. They are way too frequent. In the opening town segment, I approached someone for a mission. There was a string of text, then a load screen, then a single box of text, and another load screen before it finally put me into the mission.
Value : $15
FEBRUARY 2007
Virtua Fighter 5 - For the first installment in the fighter genre on the console, Virtua Fighter 5 looks amazing with it's crisp clean graphics. The character models are really smooth, and the arenas you get to fight in are full 3D letting you move around them in any direction you want. You'll either be fighting in a closed off arena, giving you the potential to back your opponent into a literal corner and beat them down, or open arenas where you can knock them back for a cheap and easy "Ring Out" victory. However, the gameplay for this one runs pretty stale after a handful of rounds. While the characters are fun to play as, it's more of a "realistic" styled fighter, so there are no crazy special moves like MK style fireballs, ice clones, or shadow teleporting. Your arsenal of moves revolves around punch and kick combos, as well as some grabs. But unless you're changing your fighter after every two or three matches, the lack of depth in the moves doesn't give a whole lot of reason to bleed hours into playing this one. Virtua Fighter 5 offers your traditional "climb the ladder" styled arcade mode, or a king of the hill mode where you can enter various arenas and keep fighting until you lose, as well as an offline multiplayer.
Value : $5
MLB Baseball 2K7 - 2K Sports got an advantage on this one, with the Sony exclusive MLB The Show not coming out for another few months.The main game itself doesn't bring anything too eccentric to the plate. You have your typical exhibition, season, franchise and playoff modes where you can pick whatever team you want, adjust any of the difficulty sliders you wish, set the length of your season or playoffs, and start swinging. The one quirky feature is the default swinging controls, it uses the six-axis in the controller. Just a simple quick push in a forward direction and you'll swing. You can even tilt the controller up or downwards to influence a fly or ground ball. It's weird and awkward at first, especially because the game doesn't actually inform you beforehand that this is how you're meant to swing, but eventually it becomes easy enough, but there's always the option to turn it off for a traditional button push swing. The biggest feature to shine through the 2K sports games are the mini-games. We've already gotten to cover NHL and NBA for 2K, and they all had a great selection of mini-games. What does MLB bring to the offering? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The only mini-game type feature is Home Run Derby, which is an actual event in the MLB season during the All-Star Break...so we can't even actually count that one. This one, from head to toe, is just a baseball simulation game. It looks good, it plays smooth, and it is pretty enjoyable, but with no mini-games added in, this game loses what little bit of depth it could have had.
Value : $3
What's Worth It?
Surprisingly enough, and again this is just my opinion, the only title from these two months that's really worth grabbing is MLB Baseball 2K7. Despite it just being a baseball simulator and missing all the other features that are normally present in a 2K Sports game, this one is still incredibly fun. To me, it's the use of the six-axis for swinging your bat that makes this one worth it. It brings a bit more realism to having to swing for your hits, and being able to tilt it to influence ground or fly balls gives you more control over what you're trying to do. It's a game that gets recycled every year for a brand new one, so it doesn't make this a must-own title, but for only a few bucks it'll serve a good place in your library.
What Misses?
Both of the other games. I will admit beforehand I may be wrong about Virtua Fighter, but I'm not knocking it's worth just because I'm not a fan of the genre. Well, I'm a fan, I'm just not good at the games. However, Virtua Fighter 5 doesn't bring anything eccentric to the game. Punch and kick combos with a grab move, that's about it. No fireballs, nothing excessively crazy. This game might be more fun in a multiplayer setting, but as a single player game it doesn't have much substance, unless basic fighting moves are your thing. Again, it's a later entry in a series of fighting games so for me personally there may be something I'm missing from previous entries, but what I experienced in this particular title didn't make me want to visit the others.
Sonic misses because of a couple things. For starters, as pristine as this game looks graphically, the gameplay is not on the same level. It feels like Sonic Adventure just got a facelift just so it could look good on a newer HD console. Which would be fine, except that you probably spend just as much if not more time in load screens than you do getting to play the game itself. The levels themselves run a lot like they do in Sonic Heroes, which I reviewed recently. You have opportunities to play as different characters/teams, each one with a special power or ability, and depending on which character you're using you can access certain areas of the level. So each level can't be fully explored unless you replay it with all the different characters. It's the typical, more recent Sonic formula, but the repetitiveness is quite bland.
That just about does it for months #3 and #4 of release for the PS3. Month #5, March 2007, is going to be a bit before it comes up here on the page, as there were 8 games released that month. One of them, though, was Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion which, as you may well know, is a huge game. I won't be trying to complete it, but I want to put a good amount of time into it before I decide what to say about it. So stay tuned for that entry, and I will try and get a couple of Quick and/or Full Reviews up here in the meantime.
Game on guys!
HG
