Criterion treats you right

Criterion Games loves their users, its obvious. Not only have they committed to "a year of Burnout", a year of updates and free additional features to their beautiful Burnout Paradise, but they keep improving the game's quality and distribution as well.

On the PS3 they've added proper 1080i support, using the processor to render the game at 720p and 1080i (and also added better 480p support for those pre-HD people). On both the PS3 and 360 they've added additional online content, and rules updates and a new news and calendar system. They're soon releasing their next major content update featuring bikes (motorcycles, not cyclists) and they're working on a new island full of additional content too, all for free.

As if all this weren't enough, and in case they weren't selling enough copies already, they've now announced on the official Playstation blog that they'll be releasing the full game as a download from the PSN store for just under $30 so you won't need a disc copy at all.

No, I don't know how big the download will be (although since the full game also ships for the 360 on DVD, it must be under 9GiB, not including updates). Yes, it is very clear for those who haven't played the game yet that the content on the disc version and the download version will be the same, that updates are available to both and that the motorcyle pack and coming trophy update are not for the download version only, so don't worry.

The question is, can I find someone to buy my disc copy for $30 so I can purchase the downloadable one and not need to put the disc in each time I want to play. I already play Warhawk this way, and I love my other downloaded games like Super Stardust HD for this too. I must say though, even though I upgraded my PS3 hard disk to a 120GiB 7200RPM model, its almost full again. Time to upgrade again.

Elefunk is pretty cool

It was only five dollars. It also looked cool, but for $5 how can you go wrong? I'm slightly disappointed it didn't come with trophy support, and like several other PSN games, it could use some help with its leader board display (take some hints from Super Stardust and Super Rub a Dub people), but its pretty fun.

Sorry, let me back up a moment, we're talking Elefunk. Its a cute new physics / engineering puzzle game featuring elephants trying to cross bridges that badly need some support upgrades. You add trusses, supports, ropes, wires, spans, etc. in an attempt to make them withstand the weight of the elephants (and other critters) as they cross. You're also trying to beat the clock and use as few pieces as possible if you want a high score.

The game plays quite well. Its not as complex as a bridge building simulator I once tried for kicks, but it appears to have some decent physics as they're implemented for the game. Note, as the game points out, that only joints can break -- pieces in between joints simply detach from said joints. Also, joints are always mobile; you can't make a nice solid beam 20 units wide, its like you've strung them together with putty instead of a good weld, but once you get the hang of it, its quite entertaining.

Have I beaten it yet? Nope. Got through the first few levels (up to one called something like "this is going to be tricky") before deciding to quit for the evening. I'll definitely go back and try levels over to do them faster or more efficiently, although it would be nice to see the stress on your joints in some type of colour coding before they break, to judge how close you got to failure. Also, trophies. Small puzzle games should all feature trophies.

The verdict? Definitely worth $5. Needs in-game music. Needs trophies. Very replayable. Could use higher resolution graphics -- somewhat blurry to me, not as sharp as Super Stardust for example. Music is so so, but crisp and fairly well recorded.

PSN Store Late with Qore, Novastrike

As an addendum to my entry on Qore, its worth noting that the PSN store update didn't happen for on Thursday, at least not in EST and that over 5,000 comments were made to the PSN Store update blog entry (which was intermittently unavailable for me this morning). I began my downloads this morning, and will likely have more comments in a new post later.

For now, I'd like to point out that there are some serious cry-babies in the gaming community (as will be evidenced by a reading of the aforementioned Playstation blog. I still see no reason for the hostility some people appear to have toward Qore. Perhaps they spend too much of their time swallowing the opinions of others instead of reading what Qore really is intended to be.

Many people seem under other circumstances to not understand the difference between Sony as a platform maintainer and Sony as a publisher of content, and that may be part of the problem here. Since Sony's publishing the blog and Sony's publishing the PSN store and Sony's publishing this Qore magazine, then it must be the same resources involved in each? Right? Wrong. There's potentially no cross-over in talent or resources at all in fact, much like Sid Meiers probably has nothing to do with the latest Burnout game, despite both being published by EA.

At any rate, I'd love to know the technical reasons for the Store not being updated on time but right now my PS3 is at home happily chugging away downloading several gigabytes of new content, including this month's episode of Qore and the first self-published title on the PSN, Novastrike.