So... Sony today made an announcement of something called PlayStation Home Arcade. This is where you can play Arcade games such as Frogger and Asteroids on you PSVita. But here's the cool bit, Intellivision are going to release "Intellivision Gen2" on this service. These are going to be remakes of Intellivision games, there's going to be a remake of Shark Shark, and my favourite Intellivision Game, AstroSmash. What's cool is that when you purchase these games, in similar ways to Playstation Minis, you have two licenses, one for Vita, and the another for... PlayStation Home!?
...Yeah... So much for getting me excited about a possible Astro Smash remake. As I don't own a PlayStation Vita, I would have to play it on PlayStation Home of all things... For those who might not remember, PlayStation Home was Sony's chance to plagiarise Second Life and put it on to the PS3, and failed doing so... But clearly someone is supporting this, as they're releasing these games on PSHome.
 |
| Kotaku reminding us how weird Second.... Ahem, PlayStation Home is... |
My experience with PlayStation Home is a boring one, I simply fiddled with it, tried to see what I could do with it's limited pieces of generic looking furniture, and going into the town to see what I get for free, which is hardly anything...
Then again, this whole PlayStation Home Arcade reminds me a lot of another arcade game service that another certain games manufacturer released a while back...
Another blinding success... Oh wait... no it wasn't... Despite me still thinking that I own the most achievements for Game Room in all of Xbox Live, Seriously, I played Game Room a little too much than it deserved. But Game Room is, wait, was a way not to present a way to play classic arcade games on your new-fangled HD console.
The idea of Game Room was to build your own arcade, decorate it, put machines in it, etc, etc... Then your friends would come to play in your Arcade, and you would earn tokens that allow you to try out new arcade machines without having to purchase them. Sounds like a good idea right? Not really...
Rather than enter your "Amazing Arcade", yeah right, most of the time I ended up just selecting games from the main menu. It's quicker, and just looks better than entering a faux arcade. Making the whole "Build your own arcade" thing a little pointless. It would've been better if these arcade games themselves were just actual Xbox Live Arcade games, rather than having them inside another interface to load up before playing them.
Thinking about this, it makes me think, why is Sony doing this? What's the point if their competitor has failed doing a similar thing. And why are the Intellivision Gen2 games playable straight on the Vita, but you have to run Home to play them on the PS3? Personally I think this is a little odd, and Sony should just release these as PSN games.
No comments:
Post a Comment