You might be wondering what I did last night at Sony's Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake event, well, that's what I'm here to tell you!
The event was in the top floor of a bar/restaurant in San Fransisco called Orson. There were multiple PSP's set up each with their own game. Some games were older such as Echoshift, Patchwork Heroes, and Eye of Judgment Legends. However, there were also a few unreleased PSP games to check out, such as ModNation Racers PSP, Invizimals, Hot Shots Tennis: Get a Grip, and Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake. I was able to play almost every game there aside from Hot Shots Tennis, which had some technical difficulties throughout the night.
I'll start with ModNation Racers PSP becuase it was the first game I played last night. Right from the start ModNation PSP ModNation PSP experience is that it's an extremely well done "port" of the PS3 version. looks exactly like it's "older brother" on the PS3, which is defiantly a good thing. Actually, the best way I can describe the entire
I'm not fully aware if it is an actual 100% port, although I can imagine the track creator must be tweaked a bit differently for a single analog control scheme. One thing about the single analog controls is that I felt your racer would "over-turn" very easily, and so I used the D-pad for most of my racing, which worked out great. Overall I'd say its a very well put together game, but I'd have to play with the track editor first to really see how good or bad it's put together.
After playing with ModNation for a bit I played with Invizimals, which is already out in Europe, and it will be coming to North America later this year. Invizimals is a really interesting "augmented reality" game that uses the PSP's camera attachment so that you can see "invisible monsters" around your house. The gameplay is very similar to Pokemon in the sense that you take turns attacking each other, and after fights your monster can level-up/evolve. There's also various monsters you can catch during different times of day, and each monster has their own type of weakness.
The battle system is turn based, but disguised very cleverly with lots of action on the screen all the time. You'll have to keep an eye on stamina and health bars, while also trying to time defensive and offensives moves in order to max/min as much as possible. The premise of the game seems to work best when put into the hands of an 8-14 year old who doesn't fully understand how augmented reality works. Once you try to look "behind the curtain" of how these monsters are generated, it takes a lot of the game's "magic" away.
I played several other games throughout the night, some of which I will write about later, but for now I think this leaves you with a pretty good idea...About last night.
P.S. I'm deciding whether or not I should write one of these "About last night" features every time I go an event or expo. If you hated or liked it, I'd love for you!
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