PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale
Posted: September 18th, 2020, 7:58 pm
I know people look back on PSABR as a joke, but for me and in my life, it was special. Away at college, while there may have been events around, public transportation in North Carolina isn’t as robust as my home state, so I always had to consider that, and I ended up turning my love for fighting games into a tournament series, the ‘Wilson vs Everything’ (monthly?) event. I did a lot of the heavy lifting myself, which I did not mind, even making a pot of $20 out of my bank account. $10 for first, and 5/5 second and third. While my hope was to get people playing fighting games, it didn’t happen like how I thought it would in my head, but what else is new: people may have shown up, but not many. The majority of the game nights were quiet, but my spirit still burned. There were more successful nights that played on nostalgia, like Soul Caliber II which was offering (Soul Caliber V?) as a prize for first place, but that had the backing of the activity crew. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget immediately grabbing SCII off ebay, and trying to cram in as much practice as I could in order to win the whole thing. After all, I was really the only fighting game player on campus. I settled on Xianghua as she was responsive and supposedly high tier. I ended up facing one of my good friends in the finals, one of the only other competitive gamers on campus – I seriously figured he didn’t have an interest in SC and even if he did(I doubted he'd be practicing), and would be doing something else. He beat me pretty handily, but handed me the copy of SCV anyway. Odd thing, friendship is.
But in order to really bring in people, I would have to go with games that were popular enough or new enough, as much as I didn’t want to feature Smash(melee or the most current one). There’s a world of fighting games out there beyond smash, people! An entire, fully-formed, lovingly crafted world! But it brought in both the competitors and the viewers. And with that, a glimmer of hope eventually hit the horizon – PSABR. It was smash, but not – the prerelease footage led me to believe it was gonna be a game that’d attract that crowd, but look to elevate the gameplay beyond randomness. They actually WANTED you to do combos. And in order to score points, it wouldn’t be through random environmental hazards, hits, and other annoyances. This sounded like a dream – it would attract smash players with its iconic roster, and keep them there with its simplified gameplay, but most importantly, the game devs WANTED you to do well in this format. Seth Killian was there(in some capacity)! So it garnered my attention, and I set up the first tournament for it. And to my surprise, people actually came! Of course, not as many as smash bros, but they came, and I had fun! These tournament series caused my PS3 to get tripped over, which probably eventually killed my PS3(for the second time), so I never really got to delve much farther into the game, including its DLC.
It turns out the reception to the game, for most people including Sony, wasn’t good. I was none the wiser, but the balance was all over the place(Kratos can reach across the entire screen and build meter mindlessly), the character roster didn’t impress, and support for the game eventually died. There’s a number of documented requests and changes that could’ve been the difference between life and death for this game, mostly roster based. Although Sony reached far back to even revive a dead mascot to be its boss in this game, that wasn’t enough – by time this game was made, Sony’s flagship mascots had left the nest, and the industry itself was moving away from mascots being mandatory. The game clearly wasn’t meant to be a triple A front runner for Sony, but it’s production values weren’t there. At the time though, I saw it as slim and focused. Funny enough, we're starting to see fighting games not try to compete with the budget of a Nintendo or Bandai Namco now pretty frequently.
I still say PSABR tried things we haven’t seen from Smash bros proper – environmental hazards are annoying, but they aren’t the end of the world. In smash, this limits stage selection greatly, to the point they’ve come up with the omega system to have a ‘playable’ version of any stage, as necessary. Needing to build up your meter and land your ult – your level 1 would be fairly meager, but usually comboable, the level 2 would be more powerful and abusable, and level 3 would definitely score you some kills and usually envelop the screen. This, in theory, meant you needed to plan instead of just button mash. From what I gather, people ended up finding this fairly stale. But I think with a bit of refinement, it could be similar to some wrestling games in that, sure, you can deal all the damage you want with strikes and assaults, but you have to actually KO them with a hold to get the win. Another element I ended up really enjoying in this game was the stages – this is another element we still really haven’t seen from smash(I haven’t touched ultimate, so I could be wrong): This is a clashing of franchises and champions, yet all the smash bros stages are sterilized and separate from one another? The music also went into this as well. Some stages in smash did end up adopting other franchises, but their elements weren’t properly presented and such. We also got our first peeks at certain things like Bioshock Infinite. I think in some alternate universe, the series is still going, and content is introduced to tie in to new things as playstation partners and premiers with them. The other thing this game ended up doing was giving us more mature elements. Raiden effed people up, Radec actually had guns! Meanwhile, snake in smash can only have explosives(apparently Joker can use a gun with no problem now though? Talk about special treatment!), you could really feel that Sweet Tooth was a sick sonofa.
Obviously PSABR wasn’t the best first start, but neither was street fighter 1. Hear me out – let’s rename the series, make it a F2P game gifted to PS+ subscribers, and keep it updated!
PS: Fun Cane and Rinse Fact – Kat is top tier!
But in order to really bring in people, I would have to go with games that were popular enough or new enough, as much as I didn’t want to feature Smash(melee or the most current one). There’s a world of fighting games out there beyond smash, people! An entire, fully-formed, lovingly crafted world! But it brought in both the competitors and the viewers. And with that, a glimmer of hope eventually hit the horizon – PSABR. It was smash, but not – the prerelease footage led me to believe it was gonna be a game that’d attract that crowd, but look to elevate the gameplay beyond randomness. They actually WANTED you to do combos. And in order to score points, it wouldn’t be through random environmental hazards, hits, and other annoyances. This sounded like a dream – it would attract smash players with its iconic roster, and keep them there with its simplified gameplay, but most importantly, the game devs WANTED you to do well in this format. Seth Killian was there(in some capacity)! So it garnered my attention, and I set up the first tournament for it. And to my surprise, people actually came! Of course, not as many as smash bros, but they came, and I had fun! These tournament series caused my PS3 to get tripped over, which probably eventually killed my PS3(for the second time), so I never really got to delve much farther into the game, including its DLC.
It turns out the reception to the game, for most people including Sony, wasn’t good. I was none the wiser, but the balance was all over the place(Kratos can reach across the entire screen and build meter mindlessly), the character roster didn’t impress, and support for the game eventually died. There’s a number of documented requests and changes that could’ve been the difference between life and death for this game, mostly roster based. Although Sony reached far back to even revive a dead mascot to be its boss in this game, that wasn’t enough – by time this game was made, Sony’s flagship mascots had left the nest, and the industry itself was moving away from mascots being mandatory. The game clearly wasn’t meant to be a triple A front runner for Sony, but it’s production values weren’t there. At the time though, I saw it as slim and focused. Funny enough, we're starting to see fighting games not try to compete with the budget of a Nintendo or Bandai Namco now pretty frequently.
I still say PSABR tried things we haven’t seen from Smash bros proper – environmental hazards are annoying, but they aren’t the end of the world. In smash, this limits stage selection greatly, to the point they’ve come up with the omega system to have a ‘playable’ version of any stage, as necessary. Needing to build up your meter and land your ult – your level 1 would be fairly meager, but usually comboable, the level 2 would be more powerful and abusable, and level 3 would definitely score you some kills and usually envelop the screen. This, in theory, meant you needed to plan instead of just button mash. From what I gather, people ended up finding this fairly stale. But I think with a bit of refinement, it could be similar to some wrestling games in that, sure, you can deal all the damage you want with strikes and assaults, but you have to actually KO them with a hold to get the win. Another element I ended up really enjoying in this game was the stages – this is another element we still really haven’t seen from smash(I haven’t touched ultimate, so I could be wrong): This is a clashing of franchises and champions, yet all the smash bros stages are sterilized and separate from one another? The music also went into this as well. Some stages in smash did end up adopting other franchises, but their elements weren’t properly presented and such. We also got our first peeks at certain things like Bioshock Infinite. I think in some alternate universe, the series is still going, and content is introduced to tie in to new things as playstation partners and premiers with them. The other thing this game ended up doing was giving us more mature elements. Raiden effed people up, Radec actually had guns! Meanwhile, snake in smash can only have explosives(apparently Joker can use a gun with no problem now though? Talk about special treatment!), you could really feel that Sweet Tooth was a sick sonofa.
Obviously PSABR wasn’t the best first start, but neither was street fighter 1. Hear me out – let’s rename the series, make it a F2P game gifted to PS+ subscribers, and keep it updated!
PS: Fun Cane and Rinse Fact – Kat is top tier!