Hello Pixlbit! Over the past weekend, while checking out various social feeds I noticed a bunch of folks happened to be in Los Angeles. Some of those folks happened to be connected to the gaming industry and then I remembered there is a little tech show going on.
Here I was getting my weekly blog ready and I was going to give some impressions on two of the three games I bought for the Vita, and I guess I should be talking about E3 as well.
I really don’t have much to say on it. I mean, there are things I want to see happen, maybe a price point for the next consoles, heck anything that’ll get people talking that isn’t “rumored” and “heard from a friend of a friend, who knows someone in the building with a guy” stuff. So before they kick off the party in LA I decided to post the five things I want to see at E3…that may or may not happen, for the Vita.
- A Basketball or Hockey Game: It’s about time this console had one of these games. EA you know the Vita can handle an NBA Live. Heck I’m ok with NBA Jam showing up.
- Games that don’t use all the Vita’s features: Again I’m ok without using every single bell and whistle on the dang thing. Make the gameplay good, and it’ll be a hit. Try and shoehorn swiping up/down to fight an enemy and c’mon now *shakes fist at Uncharted
- More Free to Play Games: I do love me some Jetpack Joyride and Treasures of Montezuma Blitz. How about more of these games?
- iOS/Android Games: Yup broken record time, but some of these games would go really well with the Vita Crowd.
- Stream More PS3 Games: You know Sony, the Vita can be your WiiU tablet. Just saying.
So that’s my modest list. I think one of the five might make an appearance.
I’ve been spending a lot of time playing the Vita, perhaps the most since I bought it, and I thought I’d give my impressions about two of the three games I’ve spent a decent chunk of time with. This isn’t a review because I haven’t completed them, but I do have some praise/gripes with them
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
Where do I begin? I’m really enjoying this game and I’m shocked considering there is a big brother console version, and I figured it would be watered down (it probably is considering I never played the console version).
What I am drawn to is that you can play through the Story Mode on Easy, get your upgrades, and it makes the harder difficulty levels much more manageable. Getting the little upgrades are awesome especially since before every race you can pick what you want to use, something lacking in a certain Fast and Furious game.
There are some cool un-lockable items like stickers for your license, and characters. I’ve unlocked a handful, but I need to race at higher difficulties to unlock them. This won’t be a problem. If you like Mario Kart, I think this is one of the better non MK games out there.
Ridge Racer
At first I was disappointed with the fact that it’s more geared toward playing online, a watered down version of the PSP games, and it is really lacking in a bunch of features.
The game is pretty, which is fine for the first couple of minutes, but after noticing the Windows 8 setup with all it’s tiles, and finding out there is only 3 courses (6 if you count the reverse versions), I felt let down. I played the Franchise since the Playstation, and it’s sad to see it head to this. I would have been happy with a cleaned up, ported version of the PSP game. There is a ton of space on these Game Cards, couldn’t they include a World Tour? Heck if they tried something like have a story mode like this game
It would have been awesome, and easily worth the $30 bucks.
After getting over my disappointment, I decided to play and learn the heck out of one of the tracks. They’re not really new, but I haven’t touched a Ridge Racer game in a while so I was getting used to it again. After a couple of races you can earn enough credits to upgrade your car. I found out it was easier to kill two birds with one stone by just racing online. It’s a ghost town online, which means I can race by myself, try and beat my time, earn a little more credit (120 online compared to 110 offline), and I log races for some race 50 online trophy (those useless things, but are fun when you unlock because you get a little bubble on the top right of the screen).
The game does announce when you earn a trophy like it’s a news story. Kind of cool…but I’d trade it in for World Tour Mode.
PICKUPS PICKUPS PICKUPS
Target Clearance has been a gold mine for me the last couple of weeks, and it’s slowly getting into the gaming side.
I think I bought the final game that uses the UDraw. I’ll give this a try later on this week, and since I’ll be using the UDraw, I might as well finish that Marvel game I bought for it, played a couple of levels and never touched again (it was a not good point and click game). You know what would have been awesome on the UDraw? Command & Conquer: Red Alert. What could have been.
There was a bunch of 4GB Vita Memory Sticks for $5 each.
*I once paid $100 for a 1GB PSP Memory Stick, and a year later paid $20 for a 2GB stick.
I filled up one of them with a bunch of downloaded Vita games from PSN, the second card is still sealed. I want to add Minis on there but I don’t want spend the time to scroll through my download list, and adding them to the stick.
I’m not a big Superman fan, but I did love to watch these movies growing up, and for $3 bucks, it’s steal. Superman trapping three folks in glass, Superman going to his High School Reunion, and Superman spinning the world the opposite way so Lois doesn’t die. Good stuff. Oh and I’ll probably see the new movie, and it should be interesting to see Amy Adams as Lois Lane (FYI I liked Kate Bosworth as Lois in Superman Returns)
I picked up some $.66 cent Battleship figures from Fake Lego
And my store finally realized after years that the Harry Potter polybags aren’t worth $5 bucks and clearance them to $1.06. I’m going to use the sets for parts, and I’ll probably swap out the heads of Harry Potter so I can have some Gryffindor kids. Maybe I’ll have them join my Chicken Man Army.
Final thing is my ritual of CD Sunday for my other hobby. I went to the local music store, spent an hour looking through the CDs and the bargin wall, and came home with around 20 CDs for $26 bucks.
I did the Buy 10 get 5 free, which included a bunch of DJ Singles from Europe. There were like five different songs and each song had 2-3 different mixes. Nothing too fancy, and I added to my 90s One Hit Wonder collection. The stuff on the left is the DJ singles, and on the right are regular jewel case CDs.
I’m not big into Electronic music, but there are some songs I like on these albums, and it’s a nice change of pace from my usual music. I should do a music collection blog. We’ll see. Anyways hope you all have a good week, enjoy all the E3 info!
That’s all for now, more later!
-Chris
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