The definition of "okay". So much nothing that I really can't even tell if there was a something to begin with. Typically I'd just have a one-sentence review that ends in something like "so it's just a modern sony game" but like let me elaborate, just this once.

I'm a pretty darn big fan of the LittleBigPlanet series of games, as I pretty much gave my entire 11th and 12th year of life playing exclusively LBP2. Doing a spin-off side game where it's just a standard 3D platformer honestly isn't that bad of an idea but the end result is so bland that I hardly can really have anything to say about it. It felt like a lot of the levels were somewhat nerfed in challenge not only to ensure that the little ones can see it through to the end but also to make sure things can still be somewhat parsable with the more hectic multiplayer camera, so I definitely see the thought put behind the design, but it's just so SAUCELESS my dudes! I tried playing both on my own and with randos online and with both I just felt like I was completely on auto pilot the entire time. It's still something that like if you are a kid that only has a playstation and NEEDS to play a mario-like it will get the job done, but that's pretty much the extent of it.

The plot is your typical generic safely-played kids game shit you've likely seen a hundred times by now.

I will say that the visuals are really nice looking, with really good usage of high resolution textures, and lots of well-used lighting and shading to really make the materials of everything look insanely realistic. Obviously different material shading has been done before in other games but the high level of fidelity everything is rendered at here is honestly really impressive and makes things stand out even more, especially if you have a higher-end TV. If there's one thing that I can give this game praise for, it's the visuals. if only the game itself had as much thought put into it amirite

As for minor nitpicks that could only come from a littlebigplanet nerd like myself, I do think it's weird that they gave sackboy a voice for grunts and screams and whatnot when he's been characteristically a mute blank slate the entire time before this game. The way that you could use the triggers to control your characters arms individually is also different and gives less overall expression, though honestly the D-pad being tied to customizable emotes instead of just 4 standard emotions is honestly not a bad idea tbh. Though I will also say that for a game in a series as creativity-focused as LBP, the player expression is very limited. No placeable stickers to color the world or your character plus the lack of connection with any other LBP game in terms of costume parts and DLC just means there's really not a lot to be creative for.

It's just really weird that this game is the way it is. Instead of being any sort of evolution on the LBP series they just made the safest, most shapeless and flavorless blob of goop and put it out as a pretty launch title. It doesn't even have the LBP namesake in its title, too! Are we really just calling this series "sackboy" now??? I mean at the very least getting something wholeheartedly inoffensive in every approachable angle is better than just having yet another sony IP thrown down the drain, so I guess I'll just take what I can get at this point. Near the end of the game, the main villain tries to take over the world by voiding craftworld of all its creative energy by enslaving hundreds of sackpeople to build a machine that uproots the tree that not only serves as a source of creativity but also is the iconic tree in the littlebigplanet logo. For a moment like that to exist in a game like this where the credits scroll through hundreds of names yet the end result deemphasizes creativity in exchange for the most generic 3D platforming with no deeper regards to its namesake though? At least the lack of user-generated content means they can't shadow-kill the servers with no warning, throwing away over a decade of peoples hard work!

PPPLLLAAAAYYYSSTTAAATTIIOOONNNNNNNNNN

Ah, clone hero. This is pretty much as close of an endgame as you can get when it comes to having an accessible casual guitar hero game out there. This shit is the swiss army knife of guitar hero, as it practically works with everything. If you have a 5-fret guitar for pretty much any console, this supports it (some PC fenangling may be required). If you want to play a song from a guitar hero or rock band game, people have converted pretty much every main and DLC song from both series to work here. If you have custom songs for either previous guitar hero clone games or custom DLC tracks for rock band games, you can easily convert them to work here too. The rock band drums and keyboard even work!!! I think that the timing windows are more forgiving than actual guitar hero games but frankly only the hardest of the hardcore players are even really going to notice that kind of thing. The only minor gripes that I have is that there's no rock-band style co-op way to play songs where everyone shares a rock meter and can revive and whatnot, there's no vocals implemented in any form, and the vibes of playing with the game-rendered mocap guitar hero bands and stages aren't preserved as this is primarily just a song player. Also for a lot of custom songs you kind of just have to hope that a custom charter has the same music taste as you because of what I can tell charting new songs is really hard so yeah (where the FUCK are my idolmaster customs?!?!?) Also Also a lot of customs are naturally difficulty creeped to accustom more seasoned players so new players usually have to stick to official rips or customs from people generous enough to do full-difficulty charts. But despite those various gripes, if you want to just get into playing a vast selection of songs either by yourself or in a party group with minimal strings attached, this game is OP. I've spent so many hours with so many different people playing all sorts of different songs with this game, it truly is one of the few games that can honestly bring everyone together in a way that the limited setlists of regular guitar hero/rock band games can't. Part of the reason why I feel like guitar hero hasn't tried another reboot attempt is just from the fact this game borderline invalidates any need for something like that to be made, the fans have basically perfected the platform at this point. Go hunt down an X-plorer and get shredding already, what are you waiting for?!?

From the land targets to protect, the way the screen points in the direction you are facing, and the minimap on the bottom of the screen, this surely is activision-flavored defender. It's certainly less chaotic than actual defender, the controls are a bit more sensical and the game isn't nearly as fueled with a hatred desire to kill your ship as quickly and mercilessly as possible. You have to protect some trucks driving along the ground and there are these planes and helicopters that zip around back and forth shooting these bullets that split vertically to either catch you off guard and kill you or to hit the trucks on the ground. The further you go, the faster it gets, there's not much really else to it. Hell, even the manuals challenge to get in the commando club was pretty trivially easy, as it just asks of you to get 10k points specifically on the easy difficulty (how would they know what difficulty you are on?) 10k is the point threshold to get an extra life so it's really not a high number to strive towards, I was able to crack twice that in only like 10 minutes of learning how the game works. It's an overall solid but pretty literally derivative atari game. This did come out at the same year as the 2600 port of defender, so my best guess was this was an attempt by activision to give defender fans an alternative to buying the atari-developed version.

Definitely had this game on my radar for the longest time, so I'm glad to finally have gotten around to it. I was curious to see whether or not this was actually going to play like the previous PS1 Aquanauts holiday games or if it was just going to share the name and do its own thing, and I was honestly pleasantly surprised with what they came up with. The original Aquanauts holiday games were vibe games in the most literal sense; there pretty much was no narrative or literally anything with regards to extrinsic player motivation, just one big hand-crafted oceanscape filled with fish that you can explore as much as you want at your own pace. Experimental stuff like that worked in a pretty novel sense back in the blossoming 3D PS1 days, but this is the PS triple we are talking about here, so they actually did a really good job keeping the essence of the PS1 titles while modernizing it to suit the current gamerman trends.

Rather than having one giant oceanscape where it's like "here's the ocean, do whatever idgaf", the ocean in this game is more like a wide linear path that is segmented by different ocean landmark pieces all pieced together through these sonobuoys that extend the range in which you can explore, gradually unlocking each section piece-by-piece alongside a plot that unfolds about finding a researcher that has gone missing. In order to use the range-extending sonobuoys, you have to charge them with batteries that have to be purchased with research funds, and the only way to earn more research funds is by discovering as many landmarks and different species of fish as you can. Basically the game does a good job integrating the exploration of the ocean sea in a way where your reward for exploring is getting more things to explore, making things feel way more guided and nuanced than its predecessors and gamifying the bumbling around that you really are going to be doing anyways with a game like this.

The plot is certainly something, that's for sure. Without going into spoiler territory things definitely go a little into the occultish territory as the game progresses, but not in any like cliche "it was aliens/ghosts/whatever" type of beat. If anything, I think that the way the game sort of doesn't explain what's really going on adds to that mystique about the ocean, how its a part of our earth yet still so undiscovered and full of mystery. There are two assistants from your aqua research team that you can talk to when outside of diving, and they have decent banter. There's a girl assistant that is overly romantic and free-thinking and an old man supervisor that's overly logical and narcissistic. I did enjoy that both of them have several moments where they just ramble on these insanely wordy tangents (that the game auto-skips) when slightly prompted about something, because it just shows that at the heart of it all everyone working at Aqua Heaven is just a doofy passionate ocean nerd. This game never got an official US/EU release, but the Chinese and Korean versions have an English translation, and it's rough. Tons of typos, misspellings, grammar errors, overly literal translations, it really does feel like a very low-budget first draft just to get the game in SOME form of English. I kind of found it a bit charming though in its own right though, but yeah if you are a translation stickler this shit is an F-. It's not like nonsensically bad in the way that putting everything in google translate would likely give out, and I understood what was going on for the most part, but yeah. Also for some godforsaken reason they decided to call the communication between your submarine and your fish "Twitter", and the resources you get from doing so being called "Meme". There are times where the game and its characters will prompt you to twitter with fish to earn meme, with plenty of dialog focused on trying to discover the secrets of fish twitter and their resulting memes. I wish I was joking, but yeah it certainly makes things hard to take seriously, especially combined with the fact that your assistants in-game portraits look like stock photos. Truly a narrative ahead of its time in 2008.

Also can I just say how freakin good this games vibe is? There's definitely points where you are just swimming around and the PS3 shits the bed as it tries to render a whole school of individually-modeled fish but for the most part the game looks and sounds incredible. They really used the power of the PS3 to make the lighting effects of the water look really nice, especially when surfacing from a deep place. Each area in the game feels like the ocean has a slightly different shade of blue to it, and the game has a good sense of scale with regards to the ocean and fish surrounding you. The soundtrack is vibes too, with the actual diving music that changes between the area reminding me the most of Pikmin, of all things. There's also TWO vocal themes in a (to my knowledge) fictional language, fuck yeah! just look at the intro and title screen, and you'll know EXACTLY the kinds of vibes that this game brings to the table. If you have a nice TV and speaker setup, this game is a hella good audiovisual experience.

I think the game is cool and it's a shame it's such an overlooked entry in the PS3 library. I can't really blame it for that though given that I don't think this game had a digital release and the asia english version of the game is incredibly rare, which in todays stupid collector market means this game costs hundreds of dollars to play legit. Let me tell you right now, that english translation ain't even worth 20 bucks, let alone 500. The japanese version is significantly more common and cheap at the cost of only being in Japanese. If you can read it though, that's the way to go. If not, this is a huge killer app for evilnat if you catch my drift. The game only took me like 8 hours to go through the main story, and that was at a pretty leisurely pace, too. If you like the PS3 this is not a title you'd want to pass up through any means.

i miss japan studio and artdink...

they weren't kidding, this really is a game of pressure. Knowing how unpredictable atari games are though I honestly thought that this could be a game where you do nothing but use a virtual pressure cooker lmao.

The game involves going back and forth between a top and bottom screen where you need to make burgers according to customer demands on the top section and sort out which order goes where on the bottom section. Because our friend Short-Order Sam makes burgers in his proprietary burger dojo, the ingredients in the kitchen are flung at random towards him where he must either pick up the ingredients he needs or parry that shit back to the ingredient box. The burgers chug along a conveyor belt so you gotta be quick on your feet collecting what you need and sorting it out without making any mistakes.

and boy howdy do you NOT need to make any mistakes!! Instead of a life counter you have a "performance score" where if it hits 0 its game over. You start with 50 points and missing an ingredient costs 1 point, mis-sorting a burger or dropping it altogether costs 5 points, and having a burger fall off the conveyor belt costs a whopping 10 points. If you lose your mojo and get in a bad rhythm of burger-making, it's incredibly easy for the burger losses to stack up quickly and end your game before you even know it. I will definitely say that the RNG nature of both the random order of what ingredients get thrown AND the customer demands can sometimes put you in a very difficult or borderline unwinnable scenerio, so sometimes its better to tank a burger loss or two to reset your groove and try to recoup your lost points. Every 10k points you get 10 performance points added to your total, and it's through clearing levels with as many performance points remaining as possible that you will get a really high score. My only real gameplay gripe is that while you CAN parry away any ingredients that you might not need to get rid of them, that's only able to be done if you aren't holding anything. If you accidentally pick up something that no customers are clamoring for, there's no way to get rid of it and it can very easily ruin an entire run as you usually have to sacrifice a whole burger to get rid of it and then by that point the mojo has been ruined and that's that. If you are trying to score high and hit that 45k point threshold to enter the prestigious Short Order Squad, it is imperative that you don't make mistakes, as your score is heavily punished for screwups, and they will build up over time. I was able to hit 49k through a decent run bolstered by good RNG, so it's not an impossibly high goal. My protip is to just always play at the highest difficulty (game 7) as it's only marginally faster than the lower difficulties yet yields way higher point gains. The manual surprisingly doesn't even mention what the difficulties do, but it does for some reason have an entire page dedicated to burger facts. Did you know the first Cheeseburger in America was served in Los Angeles in 1929? You do now!

This is a highkey banger for the system, it has a perfect level of depth, difficulty, and responsiveness to get me going alongside RNG elements that aren't absolute bullshit but just enough to constantly keep me hitting that reset button with that "i can do better next time" energy. Absolutely worth a play, probably one of my new atari favorites thus far. Activision hits it out of the park once again, so far of what I've played these guys have made better games than atari themselves!!