PlayStation Store Update – 22nd December 2009
4 new minis this week.
Interestingly enough, only 3 of them work on the PS3. Assuming Sony have done there best with the minis emulator, it makes you wonder what a developer does to make their game not compatible. Surely not opening their game up to the PS3 audience isn’t something they would do by choice.
So the 4 new titles this week are Cubixx, International Snooker, Tiger Trouble and Bowling 3D, with the latter being playable only on the PSP.
Stay tuned for reviews.
Here’s the release list:
*Red = New worldwide
US Minis
- * Bowling 3D ($4.99) PSP Only
European Minis
- * Bowling 3D (£3.99/€4.99) PSP Only
- * Cubixx (£2.49/€2.99)
- * International Snooker (£3.99/€4.99)
- * Tiger Trouble (£1.99/€2.99)
Oceania Minis
- * Bowling 3D ($8.45) PSP Only
- * Tiger Trouble ($4.95)
I really suspect it must be some sort of licensing issue. At least that seems obvious for Tetris. But Bowling 3D?
Indeed, from what I can tell, Bowling 3D seems to be a port of Sims Bowling 3D for the ipod, minus the Sims. (If you read the description, both mention Strike-O-Thon and Spare-A-Thon)
But EA owns the Sims license, so that wouldn’t make sense. Maybe they are planning another PS3 only bowling game? Or maybe it’s because the game was originally ported ot the Ipod from some sort of phone, and might still have some wierd code they only have a license to use on some platforms (the PSP but not PS3).
Anyway, a pretty disappointing end to 2009 for the minis, at least in NA. With 26, that was only about half the supposed 50 that were due by the end of the year. Europe did a lot better, I guess close to 40? But still sort of underwhelming and depressing when you see games announced as minis (ones I wanted) being released for other platforms…
Also note, in the US, Zombie Tycoon had a price drop to $4.99.
emulators are an incredibly complex thing.
the way i see it they are a sort of translator,
and i think the only reason that not all the mini’s work, to put it simply, is the minis emulator has a limited vocabulary at the moment,
what i mean is, there are some lines of code that it doesn’t yet understand, and therefore some games cant be played using the emulator.
although i do think Jeremy is right that licensing is part of the issue, i believe the main problem is just that emulators are a really complicated program, even ps1 emulators cant run every game.
and even some (most) of the ones that do run are a little glitchy, so i think its also possible that even if the games do run, sony wants to make sure they run perfect before letting ps3 owners play them.
Yeah, that is a good point.
Maybe EA wasn’t willing to go through the 3 extra weeks that Cubixx did to get
working properly?
On the other hand, there are apparently regular PSP titles on PSN that simply don’t work very well on the PSP. Silent Hill Origins, supposedly has problems with cutscenes.
And the DLC for DIsgaea 2 was broken when released (eventually got pulled and still hasn’t been fixed)
So I’m not sure how much Sony cares about things working perfectly. And it is curious that both the games that don’t work are from EA (yet some EA titles do work, like Sudoku)
We had sound issues with our game on the PS3 emulator. The music would just not play.
Also on Fortix on the PS3 emulator the dragons flicker which does not happen on the PSP version…. Odd!
Tiger Trouble? How appropriate!!!
Also released in Canada was Zombie Tycoon French edition.
I bought International Snooker, oh, what a mistake…
. Terrible camera, terrible gameplay… 