Yeah, I know I’m late to the party. Ya know what though? The party doesn’t begin until I get there anyway, right? Well, now that I’m on the PS3 gravy train, I’m gonna share some of my many thoughts on a bunch of PSN games that I picked up to go along with my shiny copy of Lair and Motorstorm that I picked up on day one.

Here’s the quick and dirty about Pixel Junk Monsters, Everyday Shooter and Calling All Cars.

Before I begin, I’ve got to say that while PSN has WAY fewer games offered for download, the quality to crap ratio seems to be much higher than the XBLA offerings. While there are some standout titles on XBLA it seems to me that for every Pac Man: CE, there’s ten Astropops.

Anyway, onward to the good stuff:

Everyday Shooter

It seems to be a standard two stick shooter at first, however, I found this to be a pretty fun experience. Instead of a pounding techno beat, ES offers guitar music that is enhanced or compounded by the player. You see, when you blow stuff up, instead of explosions, you’ll get guitar chords. The trick to the game is the multiplier. On each level there will be something that you can destroy that will cause a chain reaction and destroy everything else around it, resulting in a cascade of guitar riffs and music to erupt. The only issue with this is that the game makes you work to find each “multiplier” on each stage. So for instance, on one level, if you shoot the flashing bad guy, the chain reaction will start, but on other levels, subtle telltale cues will let you know that it’s the multiplier. Therein lies the fun.

Overall, I found it to be a relaxing change of pace from most of the games in my collection and the music ain’t half bad either. If you have an extra $10 in your PSN wallet, go pick it up, but for me, it’s not necessarily a “Must Buy.”

Calling all Cars

Initially, this game appeared to be made of all kinds of win. It looks great, the controls are pretty tight and you have a nice selection of cars to choose from. The game is fast, furious and, at least initially, was a lot of fun. I just want to preface this mini-review by mentioning that I haven’t played this with friends yet, so I’m sure a four player human match would be way more fun than playing with the damn, dirty, stinking, cheating, AI, so I just wanted to be clear.

To me, after playing the game for a couple of hours, I felt that the game was really shallow. There’s only three weapons that you’ll get to use, and the gameplay really never changes. Once you figure out a level and have played with the different weapons, the game goes from being fun, to being a grind fest with a damn, dirty, stinking, cheating AI. All I’m gonna say is that on more than one occasion, just as I was about to score, the AI pulled off the most ridiculously intricate maneuvers to steal the bad guy from my car and then score. This happened all the time, to the point where I felt that the game wasn’t fun anymore, especially when i was about to take a lead.

I will try this with friends, but for me, this is an “Avoid.”

Pixel Junk Monsters

The crown jewel of all of the games that I purchased from PSN. This is basically a redux of Desktop Tower Defense, but with cutesy graphics and without the ability to make your own maze to lead the attackers through. While, at first, I thought that not being able to make my own maze would take away from the game, I found that once you take the maze part out of the equation, the difficulty really ramps up. You’ll basically play preset mazes and you’ll be tasked to defend your village from a variety of monsters.

You’ll have a variety of weapons to choose from, although the majority of weapons will be locked until you find enough jewels, dropped by dead monsters, to unlock them. Basically you will get coins and jewels from dead baddies. Coin is used to buy stuff (duh) and the jewels are used to research new weapons. As each map will have their own quirks, there’s a bit of a “trial and error” factor to the maps and you’ll need to figure out which uber weapons to research for certain maps to ensure success. While this may be frustrating in other games, this is a type of game where you’ll WANT to play maps over, try new things out and see if you can score a “perfect” score and unlock a “rainbow,” that you’ll use to access other areas of the world map. When you beat certain maps you’ll also unlock additional power ups such as increased speed and so on, which definitely spices things up.

This game is a must buy. It’s a great change of pace and also is perfect for when your gaming time is limited. Probably one of my, if not my favorite, arcade game for either console.

Well, like it or not, there’s my quick and dirty on some stuff you may find on PSN. Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the forums.

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