I’m an XBox 360 owner (and apparently in the majority in the Sony-Microsoft battle, though Nintendo is winning the wider war) and played Little Big Planet for the first time this Christmas at my cousin’s house.
This is what all the noise is about? Oh sure, the game looks cool and I understand the appeal about being able to customize things, but the game is basically a Mario-style platform game. The skin is really nice thanks to the Playstation’s engine, but I don’t see how a game like that competes with things like Call Of Duty, Halo, and Gears of War. And if you are aiming for a mainstream, family experience, doesn’t the Wii show that you don’t need top notch graphics to appeal to this demographic?
It doesn’t compete with games like Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War. Those are all shooters and people who like shooters all already have an Xbox 360. So Sony is trying to branch out and come up with something to capture a different audience — the shooter audience, among others, is already tied up by Microsoft.
The problem is as you say: Nintendo has the family audience. Sony needs to come up with another way to attract a different audience.
For me, the most obvious thing would be one of the things that helped the PS2: RPGs. The PS2 was the king of RPGs with more great ones that I can possibly count. Not everybody plays, them, but you do have a very hardcore fanbase for that genre (including me) that will buy almost any game of the sort.
Plus, these are the most popular type of game in Japan. I lived there for three years and I can tell you that the shelves are packed with Final Fantasy et al to the exclusion of almost everything else. The first Xbox (like the 360 today) couldn’t penetrate the Japanese market.
But nowadays you can barely find RPGs on any system. Or at least I can’t. Which is why I’m still stuck buying and playing games on my PS2…
Hot damn, but that is a beautiful game…
Sackboy 4 Life!!
Playstation 3 May have the built-in Blu Ray player, but X-Box 360 has 2 big plusses on its side 1) More games, especially when it comes to downloadable games and 2) X-Box 360 now acts as a download player for Netflix, lets you choose over 12,000 titles to download.
Playstation 3’s downloading capabilities are miniscule compared to X-Box.
I have all of the systems, so I’m not really biased against any of them. But I think Oliver is pretty off base with this post in a number of ways. First of all, Little Big Planet is great. It’s very innovative in ways that platform games haven’t been in the past (and I’ve played most of them). But in any case, it’s not trying to compete with COD (which exists on the PS3 by the way) or Halo, or Gears of War. It’s silly to even suggest it.
And I’m not sure what your point is when you say that you don’t need top notch graphics for a family game. Yes, it’s true that you can have a good game without great graphics, but that doesn’t mean that nice graphics don’t add anything to the experience. And in any case, we’re talking about the PS3 here. Are you suggesting that Sony should just give up on the family-friendly genre all together? Or that they should make a game without good graphics since “you don’t really need them?”