Interesting how the Kotaku article shares similar sentiments and is seen as the ultimate enemy of every playstation fanboy, because the author dared to criticize the company for letting go to waste so many classic experiences.
But I agree here with gamerant (and I actually read the articles here on N4G, as opposed to reading a headline and slugline and commenting like 99.9 do here).
Little Big Planet came at a perfect time, and Media Molecule embraced the creativity and celebrated DIY levels and aesthetics from their franchises as well as the company itself.
I remember wanting ModNation Racers to be the kart racer version of LBP, but it just didn’t do it for me.
I’m not going to regurgitate every other person’s line of “I just miss fun games! not games with dlc or empty open worlds, or ‘cinematic experiences'”, because those games have their place. But it shouldn’t be a majority.
Devolver did a wonderful thing by bringing back AA game development and celebrating it as such.
We need to get back to mechanically interesting games, and hopefully Astro Bot spurs on enough momentum to get the heads at Sony back in the game and find a way to revitalize 3d platformers.
EDIT: something to note: I always found it interesting how so many people would lament the death of the mascot platformer, yet Nintendo keeps on trucking along making the types of games that both Sony and Microsoft have all but killed off.
What Sony and MS don’t seem to understand is that we aren’t looking for Yooka-Laylee. We don’t need an exact emulation of a n64 platformer, because those games (if people take off their rose-tinted glasses to revisit them as I did as a 33 year old millennial) have massive problems.
We don’t need a hub and spoke model to house a litany of fetch quest collect-a-thons. We want silky smooth rendered worlds that use the core action of jumping in new and exciting ways. And it doesn’t need to be just super cartoony, either.
But for anyone who remembers the very opening of Mario 64, when you are outside the princess’s castle, the simple act of controlling mario, having him flip from side to side, dive into dirt, climb trees, swim, even just running and jumping felt so strangely organic and intuitive. The same way that CastleVania and Metroid games are often considered “pixel-perfect” in their mechanics. If you die, it was your fault, not because of the game.
Hopefully we get more titles like Astro Bot, but they did what basically everyone was shouting at a studio like them to do: harness the power of your next-gen (“current gen”) console to incorporate new ideas into an existing framework, and expand outword to reinvent a type of subgenre that has been all but decimated but defined by the perjorative tropes of earlier iterations.
