farbot.com

I'm still very excited about LittleBigPlanet, and the hands-on time PS3Fanboy recently got with the title highlights that it's not going to be a one-trick pony completely dependent on user created content. The game will ship with some significantly challenging levels that don't count lives but instead take you to a checkpoint when your sackboy dies or falls to far behind -- something that kept rough patches in recent Ratchet & Clank games from being too much to bear.

This new video shows off some menacing Helghast sackboys before launching into a flurry of very interesting, very creative and fun-looking gameplay clips. I'm dying to get this game so I can play it with my kids and if you have young children, you should be too. The ability to create game worlds for them and set appropriate challenges to ease them into learning about video gaming in general combined with very pretty visuals and a wide range of theming options has enormous potential.

The potential for add-on content is ridiculous for this game as well. Sony could end up selling add-on packs of world textures, pre-made objects, and character accessories themed by game. We could see Killzone packs, Ratchet and Clank packs, Jak and Daxter packs, Uncharted packs -- if they have a theme about it, they could make a great-looking add-on pack for it. Media Molecule would of course make them and get a cut. And we'd get our authorized fan art construction set to build a Killzone war zone studded with flowers, Clanks, Uncharted idols, and garden gnomes. Well, that's the hope anyway.

But first it has to be finished and released. Its current release date has been nudged back from September to October, and it's still so far off that I'm sure those are only best guesses. Here's hoping we'll be making Christmas-themed avatars and levels with the whole family this year.

As seen on PS3Fanboy.

This dimly lit interior of the Perestroika club from Grand Theft Auto IV is shown with a tough-to-see profile of Niko at the far left with arms outstretched, aiming a weapon. Given that I didn't have anyone with me when I took this picture last night while playing the game on my PS3, you might wonder how I could be shooting and taking the picture at the same time.

The game had frozen during one of the missions, requiring a full reboot of the PS3. While the 1.01 patch might be helping, it hasn't fixed all of the problems with playing the single player game while connected to the PSN, and the real test won't occur until we hit peak gameplay times this weekend. Next patch, please.

I like to reward funny writing, especially when it comes in a sales email. The above headline, "10% Off Data Tapes. You Know You Want Them." came today from SuperMediaStore.com. The king of funny writeups is most definitely woot.com. If you want to see some creative work surrounding clearance items, check'em out.

Movie tie-ins have a terrible reputation and when they hit the release date for the film on target, most gamers from experience presume corners were cut and quality suffers. When I downloaded and took the PS3 demo of Iron Man for a spin yesterday I hadn't seen anything about the game in the media so I was able to come at it fresh.

In general I'm a fan of third person action games when the controls make sense, and the short level you got to play in the demo felt pretty good. The controls for flight, weaponry, and maneuvering are ok, and in general matched the rest of the game. The same gameplay concept, if tightened up with higher resolution character and environmental assets could have been a pretty sharp game, but as it is this looks like a pretty mindless action romp with Marvel Comics character trappings and generally low-resolution areas with weak animation.

It must be my own tilt towards these kinds of games that has me thinking I'd play it as a rental because early reviews are quite poor, in the 30% and 40% range. Check out the latest scores on MetaCritic.

Today's Penny-Arcade is laugh-out-loud funny and deserves special attention. The introduction from Tycho is quite a good tease:

This probably happens to everybody. Next time we're late for a date, I think we need to steal a vehicle that doesn't sport such a large, almost inescapable grill.

Maybe it's the stronger story in GTA IV than previous games, but I find myself shying away from stealing cars and instead tend to re-use ones I've parked outside my safe house or left in states of disrepair near a mission's conclusion as much as possible. And if I must steal one, I prefer not to have to break windows to get into them. I don't know if that keeps the police from noticing it or not. I just haven't played enough to find that out.

Check the full comic image here.

Just like the Game Secrets post I wrote about yesterday, This Is Just To Say poetically dodges true a true apology for a variety of games, some more familiar than others.

I'm consistently impressed with the level of writing on GamersWithJobs and this one is much more accessible than Secrets was simply because no graphic editing skills are required to get your message across. Bare words are enough, if artfully arranged, and the community has jumped in with both feet.

One of my favorites is from Quentin_Stone here:

Okay okay, I made up his comment about the internet being a fad but it seemed to fit well here. In a recent interview with CNET, Miyamoto was unsure about how successful Wii Fit would be in the United States due to how parents in America are routinely absent from their children's lives...

While I do believe it's possible more Americans are divorced than Japanese, I don't know how this would have an effect on their sales of Wii Fit. I'd like to see these "averages," that Miyamoto is talking about and if his statements (if he made them at all) are based on any hard data. I'd also like to see the average number of Japanese parents that buy smelly underpants from vending machines who also own Xbox 360's. That might be Microsoft's key to success there....Miyamoto might be onto something.

Or he might be full of crap, just like this post.

Via MEGATONik tipped by Kotaku

Video games come in many different varieties. There are titles that you pick up every now and then and play to kill some time, there are games that you play through over a collection of evenings or a weekend and then set on the shelf almost forever and then there are games like Crisis Core. A game that is pick-up-and-play, gaming-on-the-go friendly yet with top-notch production values and an epic storyline that's ready when you are.

Rarely do I burn 36 hours in a game, finish it and feel like I had just scratched the surface. In fact, I had just scratched the surface, with the game ticker showing just over 50% completed. The last area of the game was so engaging I couldn't just keep myself from diving head-first into the final confrontation. Minutes later, after the credits and storyline rolled out, I saved my game and restarted on Hard difficulty at level 56 (99 is the max) without a thought.

I'm just going to dive right into my only problem with Crisis Core and get it out of the way.

Marc Rein, the VP of Epic Games, has stated in an interview that the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3 won't be retrofitted with the split screen multiplayer mode that will ship on the Xbox 360. He also stated that the 360 version won't have mod support, at least at launch.

Personally I think that slaps UT3 into a very crowded multiplayer shooter field on the Xbox 360, one dominated by the likes of Call of Duty 4 with Halo 3 hot on its heels. And really, if Epic can't convince Microsoft to let them put in mods before the game ships you can kiss that feature goodbye entirely on Microsoft's console.

Via PSU.

Like many others, I downloaded the MGO Beta from the UK Playstation Store last night and left my PS3 online all night to download and upload the 1.10 patch via their P2P option. I attempted to create my "Konami ID" via the Konami ID website but the site was barely responding. Konami is obviously aware of the problem, posting a message on 4/16: