Sidewaysgravity Blog

One game that has always called my attention has been Lair. It was an early release for the ps3 and got a lot of criticism for the controls and it really hurt the overall sales of the game. I heard that they eventually came out with a patch for the game that allowed players to use the analog sticks instead of using the 6 axis for flying. While I could not bring myself to pay the full price for the game; now years after the release it is pretty easy to pick up for less than $20 at any major game trading store. So finally I decided to pick up the game at Gamestop for only $15.

My first impressions of the game were good. Once I got my Y-Axis inverted and got used to the basic controls it seemed pretty simple. For one of the first games to come out on the ps3, the graphics of the game are pretty good too. Overall the game has a lot of potential. Although I only about half way done with the game, you can still see how the control structure is a major downfall to the game. You almost need someone who has played the game to sit beside you and tell you how and what to do. There have been a few times where I have spent all my lives playing a level, and only right before my last death, I finally figure out what it is I am supposed to do. The game will tend to be very detailed about what you should do, and then later say nothing at all. So you think, if its not obvious, they will tell me like they did before, so you wait and die, until you eventually find out they are not going to tell you.

It reminds me of playing some of the original tekken games against my older brothers. They knew all the combos and would always beat me, so my only chance was to pound the control and hit every button as hard and fast as I could and hope that one of them would work. With Lair, I find myself doing that a lot as well. My character will give me encouraging signs, confirming what I am doing is right (pounding all the buttons). I will say that with time I have begun to notice certain patterns to how to defeat enemies, and it is getting easier. But at the same time, I die a lot still and think that there are certain things that I am missing about the game, and that if only I knew what it was, I could do much better.

When I am not totally frustrated at the game, I do enjoy it. It still is fun to land in the midst of a large group of enemy infantry (R2 and L2) and burn, swipe and eat your occasional enemy. For $14.99, it is a pretty good game. Just take into account that it can be extremely frustrating at times, and you may not have a single clue as to what you are doing. I found it useful to watch some online videos and read up about the controls of the game. If your just starting the game and you cant figure out how to beat your enemy when you are flying along side him… just make a quick movement of the controller in the left or right direction… seems simple but it took me a while to figure out. If you can get the game for $10, I would say give it a try.

I just finished a quick look around with the new system update to version 3.0. As always, I think it is easier to see what’s wrong and the bugs than to see the benfits. One item that I immediatly love is that the battery indicator no longer covers the clock. One thing I hate is the “what’s new” news ticker that shows up below the clock. They have moved where you go to disable it, it’s now under the system settings but apparently they forgot to make it work. You can set it to on or off and it makes no difference. Hopefully they will patch it soon.

The only other change I was not thrilled about was how clunky the buddy list seems now. I have yet to find a way to slim it down. It seems like the older version seemed a little cleaner. The new one seems more cluttered although I didn’t see any major updates to that area.

I do like that you can now access your recieved messages by buddy instead of having to view them all throught the recieved folder. There are a couple more features that have been included as well, such as a greater integration of the playstation store into the XMB, but I am still not sure how I feel about that. I can already see my XMB becoming the next ad space for Sony, and it is starting with 3.0. Overall I have mixed feelings about this update with some features I love and others I will have to live with and hope they address at a future date.

Today I noticed a feature of the iPod touch that I had not known before. It behaves like windows! I have had my iPod for a little over a year now and it seems to slow down and have more problems the longer I have had it… similar to windows. It all came close to a grinding hault last night, as it took 30 to 40 sections to get between the screens in the mail program. It seems that the mail program always ran a little slow, with delays switching between screens. With last night being unbearable I decided to do what I do to my windows XP machine when it gets slow, delete everything and restore it to its original software.

With iTunes this is made easy. After connecting my iPod and opening iTunes to my iPod menu, I told it to restore my iPod. It prompted me to back it up, which I did, and later asked if I wanted to restore it to a back up or just its factory default. I selected to restore to a back up. I left the computer and came back a couple hours later to see that the update and backup was done, and it was running lightning fast…. or just a lot faster. There was a noticable difference in speed of the mail application even from when I first purchased the iPod and it has continued to do well. Although my iPod was up to date, I think doing a clean restore to back up really helped resolve any issues that it had.

Over one month has past since the initial (delayed) launch of littlebigplanet. I decided to take some time to look back and see how things are going.

The initial launch, including the delay in the game was a fairly bumpy ride. After running the software update that was available the first time I played the game was plagued with dropped connections and server timeouts which caused the whole game to lock up. The first couple days I looked forward to when they turned the servers off just so I could play without the game freezing on me. After a week or so it seemed that the servers became more stable an since then have been running well. All the while we haven’t heard much from media molecule.

Since the server connection issues have been mostly taken care of after the game launch it doesn’t seem like to much has changed. The problem is that there are still parts of the game that don’t function correctly and it’s over a month after launch. The one obvious problem, although it does not affect get play, is the fact that it always shows 0 0 0 for your play, create, an share stats. I have heard that these stats were part of the reason the servers had such a hard time in the first place so they turned them off. The other issue that I am aware of is the shared levels themselves. I’m am not sure if anyone else has this problem or not but depending on the day, I can only access a certain number of online levels, and it varies from day to day. Some days there will be 30+ pages of levels and other days only 7. There is a great news system built directly into the game so mediamolecule can easily give updates to all users but so far hasn’t produced much.

Overall given all the difficulties that this game has suffered since launch, it is still a fun game that I enjoy playing. It appears that they have it stable enough to enjoy and have fun, but they still have some smaller bugs to work out.