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Richard mentioned to me a few months ago that Sony was working on a game that could easily be seen as a ripoff of Super Smash Brothers.  Initially, I scoffed and struggled to come up with a decent amount of characters to populate the roster.

I mean, you’ve got Nathan, Sly Cooper, Sweet Tooth, Parappa, Kratos… Fat Princess?  Wasn’t that just a downloadable PSN game?

This isn’t meant to be a knock on small games, but rather a point that Sony doesn’t seem to have a ton of IPs to choose from.  At the moment, this is the roster:

Sweet Tooth, Kratos, Nathan Drake, Fat Princess, Sly Cooper, Parappa the Rapper, Colonel Radec, and a Big Daddy from Bioshock (which is multi-platform, so I guess Sony got the license for it).

While having Parappa there is totally awesome, eight characters is pretty meager for a fighting game, especially when you compare it to the most recent SSB offering.  I have to imagine that future character announcements will include Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Crash Bandicoot, plus some more licensed third party characters, but that remains to be seen.

Anyways, I had yet to see any gameplay videos of Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale (the game’s working title, updated from Title Fight) and figured that it would be unfair to call it a rip-off until I had.  Then I saw this release from E3.

Check out the video and then tell me it doesn’t look exactly like smash.

Now, the dude that’s running the conference, Omar Kendall… I really have to give that guy some credit; I don’t think I’d be able to stand on that stage in front of all those people and keep a straight face while pretending that this game is totally new and unique.  Strangely, I have yet to find any interview footage in which a journalist brings up SSB.  If anyone happens to find one, please email it to me, I totally wanna watch that.

Just a note on the gameplay itself: Playstation All-Stars seems a bit stale.  Sure the mechanics are lifted right out of SSB, but apparently (at least in the game mode they were playing) there was no way to track players scores during play; towards the end of the video Omar couldn’t tell who won after the match was over and had to wait for the victory display to show.

I feel like that would really suck the excitement out of a match; there would be no sense of urgency to score as the final seconds tick off the clock.  Again, perhaps that was just one of many game modes, but this is E3, one of the biggest gaming events of the year, shouldn’t they want to show their most exciting modes?

Oh well.

Not to keep throwing criticism towards Sony, but I mentioned in a recent Kat’s Korner that I attended a Sony Tech Expo on Monday, where I got to see new products and software coming out in Q3 and Q4 of this year.  Other than the graphical mishap mentioned in the Kat’s Korner post, the event was pretty sweet (and they upped their food offerings from last year!).

However, one fun little story you guys might get a kick out of.  While discussing the features of Acid, an audio editing program that will be released as a part of the Sony Imagination Studio, a Sony rep exclaimed, “Acid is really cool with the kids.”

The theater erupted in laughter.

In an attempt to rebound he followed up with, “Well, at least it’s better than bath salts.”

Fantastic.