Officially licensed PlayStation stuff. With more coming, sooner than later, they say. It’s a dream come true to finally get official PS gear from an online store you can trust. T-shirts are $20, hoodies $60 … any rock band has t-shirts for less/same/more; hoodies for about the same price. Yes, PlayStation is a rockin brand and so many fans can now wear it, use it, choose it.
Hurry over to the US PlayStation forums if you are a PlayStation MVP, look in the private MVP forums for a code you can use through March 16th.
Spotify was something I wasn’t interested in. I wanted to explore music by finding artists, groups, albums that I liked, purchase the media, and listen to it from my ripped version put to Google Play Music.
That was last week, and now I’m already a Spotify Premium member. You can Follow me on Spotify by clicking the follow button below.
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I was highly interested as I knew Spotify might be a game changer for me if I could listen ANYWHERE. Like computer, phone, tablet, PlayStation 3 or 4…. yes! My full change of heart came when I saw I could get mobile billing via Sprint, 6 months free, then 18 months of 7.99 per month … then 9.99 per month after that.
I didn’t want to do anything like try it for 30 days. I needed to feel the freedom of either paying full price or as I am actually doing it, free for 6 months. With that out of the way I was able to settle in and instantly started to profit from my move.
There is so much music I love. There is so much music I’d love to have explored in the past, but didn’t. There are many artists I’ve loved songs by, but never looked at their other content.
Everything is not on Spotify. I’m fine about the one gargantuan group not being there, I wouldn’t want to hear them. I’m sad that Tool isn’t on there. I’m sad that The Kaiser Chiefs 4th album isn’t on there for US Spotify users.
I’ve found a good amount of music wrongly tagged, so I prefer not to listen to it (I scrobble my listens and like to look at my listening data on Spotify and on last.fm, I want to track my listens and wrongly tagged stuff can wait until it’s tagged right, or never via Spotify.)
One album I was really happy to listen to was T’Pau, as it was marketed in the US. I have the LP, loved it to pieces back then. On Spotify it’s the European version, knows as Bridge of Spies.
That was last week. On Monday morning I turned on my phone to see what time it was when I woke up and had a message from Spotify splat in my face: T’Pau new album available Pleasure and Pain. Sweet! It’s a good album, love it, and what a surprise it was for me, not expecting anything like it.
The saddest part of Spotify is their FB linking. I can’t have a profile picture because I do not and will not use FB. I sure hope they change something about that, like maybe if I link Spotify to PlayStation Music, my PSN Avatar will link to my Spotify Profile. Fingers Crossed. I’d actually prefer to have Gravatars associated with it.
Crazy-Maisy wearing the Captain America costume in LBP Pod.
LittleBigPlanet – 2008 We didn’t get the game until it was out as the Game of the Year Edition. I didn’t play it much, but was involved with it as a Mother to younger children playing the game.
I’ve been playing through the Story the last couple of weeks, to get the trophies finally. Took me long enough, hey?
Crazy-Maisy in Seashore Pointe Treasure Fun, her level on LBP 2.
LittleBigPlanet 2 – 2011 We pre-ordered the game. I played the story levels some, and helped my children with the game here and there. Later on I got more interested in it and I played through the story. I lost my Saved Profile on a console move around and it really messed up everything. I had to replay it to get the stuff back to create and … some pins were messed up. Certain things are dependant on pin progress and well, I never got some of those stats back to where they were to get some things accomplished.
I did make a level that I published in 2012. Seashore Pointe Treasure Fun just a fun little run through the seashore, using R1 to touch all the discarded items. Nothing complicated, just a nice Summer seashore job for sackfolk to clean up, because one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, sackfolk included.
Crazy-Maisy in LBPV Pod, wearing a mish mosh of costume pieces.
LittleBigPlanet Vita – 2012 I was part of the PS Vita LBP Beta. It was a lot of fun and I was anxious for the game to be fully released. September 2012 was the start of the best version of LBP to that date, pretty much.
I’ve made lots of things on my PS Vita LBP game, but haven’t published anything for others to play. I have lots of ideas, just too many distractions, and not being able to create with other players was and has continued to be a downer.
Welcoming Oddsock, Toggle, and Swoop to Sackboy’s Family!
LittleBigPlanet 3 – 2014 I was in the LBP 3 Beta this year. What a good game it is, and it’ll be out next week finally! I’ve had a ton of ideas through the years. I have worked in LBP 2 on many things, just done nothing to bring them to publish worthiness (I wish more sackfolk were like that. Too many horrid things are published.)
LBP 3 on PS4 is going to be a scream of delight though. It’s going to be superb, the definitive version for sure. I wish to spend less time distracted with other games and just pour my game-time into LBP from now on.
More photos:
Crazy-Maisy in her Bug Blaster outfit reward for participating in LBP Vita Beta.Crazy-Maisy in LBPV Pod (no decorating) wearing the iconic Spaceman Suit.Crazy-Maisy in LBP 2 Angry Whale Survival 2
Crazy-Maisy on the right, in a level with a couple of friends
A friend took this picture of Crazy-Maisy splat on the floor of an LBP 2 Pod.
Friends in an LBP 2 PhotoBooth level, having a blast throwing on Randomized Costumes.
Playing online with friends in LittleBigPlanet is a blast, it’s the most outrageous fun one can have, all sorts of games to play and hang out levels to goof off in … LBP 3 will just have bigger and better versions of that stuff, plus all the previous LBP content. Everything will be playable.
Pre-order: BestBuy for Hidden Creatures Pack DLC; GameStop for Mythical Creatures Pack DLC; Amazon for PlayStation Favorites Costume Pack on PSN for DLC costume you can use right now in LBP 2 and be able to start playing the digital version at midnight 11/18.
The PS4 version of LBP 3 will be in a Day One Edition and have a Plushie of Sackboy in the box plus Dragon Age Costume Pack and 4 the Players Costume Pack for all the stock out there in the beginning.
Pre-orders at Target will get a special Target Hat for Plushie Sackboy.
PS3 is also getting LBP 3 but there are no pre-order bonuses, well, you’ll get a special theme for your PS3 XMB if you pre-order LBP3 for PS3 on PSN, that’s it, and no special editions, no Plushies. (Hint, get a PS4, it’ll be better there!)
When bad things happen to things you like, then find out that they are doing something good after that … then find out it’s not so great. Nintendo wins the big prize.
2nd
Second prize goes to HumaNature Studios for Doki-Doki Universe.
1st
First prize goes to Nintendo for Swapnote nerfing to Mii Verse 3DS that is also nerfed.
Doki Doki Universe released on Tuesday for $14.99 Full Game, but then a bunch of add-ons. Everything can be gotten for one price: $24.99, which is a LIMITED TIME DEAL. So it’ll cost you way more than that later. Or not.
Or not is how I see it. Why?
Touted as a great game, a free to play quirky personality game. Small price point on a planet later on. Except there is only a DEMO version that is free. No trophies with that. Doki-Doki Mail was to be free for everyone to use. Sure it is, but it’s the “or not” part of the big price you can pay for everything.
What?
It’s Facebook connection required.
The game can be played without Doki-Doki Mail for you. You’ll get in-game “mail” from characters, but you can’t send mail to anything or anyone if you don’t have FB. Epic Fail for a personality driven game not to take notice of certain kinds of people who don’t use FB and WON’T but want to communicate with their friends in Doki-Doki Universe (no FB requirement was ever mentioned before the game launched.)
So for $14.99 plus the cost of a few add-ons that have nothing to do with “mail” … is cheaper than $24.99. A major function of the game is not use-able though, which makes me reticent to pay for it, not having any idea that they’ll update that to something more useful, or not.
Nintendo took the best thing about 3DS away on October 31, 2013 with no real hint of a solution in order for the future. In fact though Mii Verse and Nintendo Network Accounts was coming in a December update.
That update suddenly arrived on the same day Doki-Doki arrived on PSN.
What a day! A day to make me cry.
Mii Verse is all about Me on the 3DS, there is nobody else, no, not friends. Epic Fail. Take away personal communication with that nerfing of spotpass in Swapnote 10/31 and now 12/10 give us a new thing to do that seems mostly like it, no friends and no way to find them on Mii Verse. Updates go to who’s view? Who would find me if they are my 3DS friends without me telling them something through another venue?
Yup. Getting a friend code is not very helpful since there is no way to communicate with such friends if that’s the only kind of friend they are. It’s a useless system, for me.
So the Grand Prize goes to Nintendo: for making me miserable two times in one quarter of the year. I just don’t see any reason for keeping my 3DS XL, even though I may like some games, I’m primarily a PS Vita/PS3/PS4 person.
Doki-Doki Universe might get an update for communication. Of course I have no idea, but they have options, whereas Nintendo only knows how to step on their own feet constantly.
Doki Doki Universe is a quirky, cute, game from HumaNature Studios for PlayStation. It’s to be released on December 10, 2013, for PS4, PS3 and PS Vita.
Doki Doki Universe on PSN by HumaNature Studios
It was said to be a free to play game, with a small price point once you reach a certain planet, a small fee, stated over and again since revealed at E3 in June 2013.
Today the game was finally announced as coming out on December 10, 2013 in North America, via the PlayStation US Blog. The article says that the Starter Pack is free, which gets you “16 personality quizzes, Doki-Doki Mail, QT3’s home planet, and a tutorial planet.” The FULL game will give you “story mode, 31 personality quizzes, and the Doki-Doki Mail messaging system.”
It was a little shocking to read how that was put, and the next part even more so. $14.99.
I don’t deny HumaNature Studios their due. It’s only that all year they’ve adhered to the it’ll be a small price to upgrade, or small anything for anything kind of idea.
So, I can buy the game for $14.99, download it on PS4, as well as my PS Vita and PS3. That’s great. The family can play the PS4 and PS3 versions, not just me. Only I can have the full game on my PS Vita though.
If anyone else in the family wants to play on their PS Vita, they can download the game for their PS Vita, but that’d be the Starter Pack, the free one. To play the whole thing on PS VIta, they’d have to pay $14.99 each.
From many perspectives this is OK, but they won’t pay for it. Only I will. They can at least do the messaging on their PS Vita’s, but this is precisely counter intuitive for our family. I’d have to pay over $50 to outfit our family with this game.
We liked the idea of the game, but now they can only play it on the consoles and on their PS Vita’s they won’t really play it much.
$14.99 is a lot when you are only playing it on the PS Vita only.
For the console gaming family it’s always great when you buy anything digital, the whole family can play it. But bringing the PS Vita to the mix for cross-buy games … only one PS Vita benefits, the owner of the content.
I was hearing them talk about the game all year and figured that at some point in the game it’d be 3.99 or 4.99 or something to do more. Maybe another add-on pack down the road. Now that is a nice idea on how to monetize a game. I do think that Sony putting the price at $14.99 is going to cause a lot of people to not buy it.
So how do the trophies work then, for the Starter Pack only people? Don’t know. But I do know that PS3 and PS Vita share the Trophy List, and PS4 has it’s own Trophy List, and the game Cross-Save across the platforms, saving automatically to the cloud every 5-minutes, so you can earn Double-Trophies for this game if you have a PS4 and PS3; or PS4 and PS Vita; or PS4 and PS3 and PS Vita.
💡 Before I awoke early this morning I was dreaming about my PS4. I had it hooked up and was logged in, holding the DS4 and was trying to figure out what to do, like in, which thing do I do first, download the free PS+ launch titles, download F2P games, put in this or that disc …. then I woke up. It was 5:26 a.m. Wednesday, November 13, 2013. A tad disappointing.
Just one more morning to go, and then I’ll be up all day and maybe night, maybe I’ll go to sleep after getting the PS4 going, maybe I won’t. 🙂
There’s a big thing I often think about: In the upcoming months the PS4 in our house will be alone. It’s going to be a nice machine, have awesome ability to have us game wonderfully into the next generation of games.
Alone is a big thing. Some games are single games, but so many are multiplayer online and if more than one person in the house likes the same games, that poses the question of: Can I Co-op locally?
Local Co-op
Killzone: Shadowfall is one game we want Co-op locally on. It’s not going to happen unless they release DLC or an update to allow it, and I’m not holding my breathe.
We have 3 PS3’s. Only 1 PS4 is scheduled to be purchased this year. I don’t know if we’ll buy another next year. I know I’ll be happy enough to buy games on disc and only have to buy 1 copy of said game. Multiple devices needing or wanting a game can become quite pricey.
In my house two of us wanted The Last of Us in June. That’s $100 in discs. I mostly don’t buy digital games that. I want the case(s) for one thing, and just love how putting discs in feels, and frankly disc games have more value than that since I can sell it to someone else if I don’t want it anymore.
Digital Content
I have a lot of digital content for my PS3. Older stuff I can put on all three of our PS3’s, but most stuff we’d prefer to do that for, we can’t. The rules changed in November 2012 to allow most digital content to be put on 2 devices. That’s one reason to buy digital vs. disc, when the software is able to be used by two different consoles and PSN ID’s at the same time. (That’s not always the case, so when one buys digital games they should ALWAYS read everything in the description, to be sure.)
PS + is about Digital all the way. Game saves are digital whether or not it’s a digital game. Cloud Storage for Game Data is awesome. On the PS3 it’s something I’ve enjoyed, allowing me to go anywhere on any PS3 easily. On the PS4 that will work, and it’ll be more than that. I’ll be able to log onto another PS4 anywhere and download ANY of my PS4 Digital content.
That’s where it’s sticky though. I know how the PS3 licence for digital stuff goes. I can only use PS+ on one PS3 to auto-update and all the benefits of PS+, so it’s similar to the idea of PRIMARY PS4 for PS Plus being one machine. But how it is on PS3 right now is I can put my content on TWO PS3’s permanently. On PS4 it sounds like there is no second permanent, but that’s not entirely a sure thing. Maybe we can do that, maybe not.
Multiple PS4 Consoles
If we had 2 PS4’s I would have PS+ and another family member would have PS+ –both machines would be covered. If I bought a game (not a PS Plus free game) could I put it on both machines or only on 1 and temporarily put it on another. But how that works seems silly … if we wanted to both play that game at the same time, like an online co-op or multiplayer … then we’d have to flip-flop which machine we’d play on. My content couldn’t sit on the second PS4 permanently. It’d just be a temporary situation, and I’d HAVE to play on that machine for that game session. Seems too unfriendly to families.
Easiest thing would be to buy the games digitally twice. Me and them. Sigh. Back to the discs we’d go.
It’s officially November now, only 15 or so (whichever way you count days) to go until PS4 is released!
PS4 Package
We have three PS3’s and won’t be getting rid of them. They have a high use place in our house. We’ll have one new PS4 at first, and maybe we’ll move a PS3 to another spot to make room in the living room, since our TV only has two HDMI slots.
The games available on launch aren’t the ones I most looking forward to play on PS4. inFamous Second Son, The Order: 1886 are the ones I most look forward to, oh, and WatchDogs.
I am looking forward also to playing LEGO Marvel Superheroes on PS4. I don’t have the game for PS3 nor PS Vita yet either.
Gaming isn’t the cheapest hobby. It is fulfilling, like buying and listening to music, or movies. These are entertainment things, but that is exactly what’s important for us to do, play, have fun. Enriched lives.
PlayStation Plus
PlayStation has a great program for $49.99 a year. PS+ (PlayStation Plus) gives you many games free to play every year on PS3 and also PS Vita, and the PS4 will also be included. The IGC (Instant Game Collection) is the current offerenings. Buy the subscription and you have access to all those games free. You must stay subscribed to keep using the games, but once you have PS+ maybe you’ll be like me, keep it going.
PS+ subscriptions can be stacked, so if you are currently subscribed and want to add-on to that time period, just buy another subscription with the same PSN ID and it automatically is added-on.
If you do let PS+ lapse, you have an ability to re-subscribe and access those games again.
Every month new games are added, some are taken out to make room. If you have the games in your Download List you can keep downloading and using them on up to 2 PS3’s and 2 PS Vita’s (but on PS Vita you have to have your devices all associated with the buying account, the PS+ enabled PSN ID, in other words. The same goes for PS3, but on the PS3 the console shares content with anyone else on that machine. PS Vita is one PSN ID specific user only.)
If you’ve been a PS+ member for awhile, your Download List maybe quite long. Mine is. I mostly “buy” whatever is offered, not absolutely, but for the most part. Even if I’m not interested in it, I or someone else in my family might be one day. So it’s there in my Download List just in case.
PS4 will get two new games a month in IGC. Pretty good since it’s a totally new platform, all new games! It’s not clear how many PS4’s we can use in one house with our content. There is something about making one PS4 your Active device, and then logging in anywhere on anyone’s PS4 and being able to download and play your games from your Download List. This doesn’t speak to whether or not we can actually have the 2-device download thing, like on PS3. I keep two PS3’s with my digital content. It might get a bit squirrely for a family if they have more than one PS4 … I do know that PS+ will only cover 1 PS4 statically, the one set as Primary.
Online Play
Online Multiplayer for PS4 will require a PS4 with a PS Plus Primary user on it. Anyone on the console can play online then.
Some Free-To-Play games will have free multiplayer online play. Most games are not even online play, so it’s only going to affect users who aren’t PS+ but want to play a purchased multiplayer online game.
In the past we had Online Passes associated with one’s PSN ID. This limited so much. Thankfully Sony recently ditched Online Passes for new games.
Examples:
For PS Vita, we have Resistance Burning Skies on PS Vita Game Card. My son played it first, he got it for his birthday. He put in the Online Pass.
I can play that game, but I can't play Online since I don't have an Online Pass for that game. I could buy one for $9.99, but it's not that I want to play online, just would HAVE to to get all the trophies and platinum it. So I don't play it.
Killzone Mercenary for PS Vita came out in September 2013. No Online Pass. Yippeee! So if my daughter wants to use my copy of the game, she can. We have 2 copies.
I know my previous post is a giant us.playstation.com forums complaint, connected to PS Vita and Killzone Mercenary. I’m very bothered by it still, but because of that I stumbled onto the best of the best.
It’s a really cool stats site. You can check out all your own stats, and from your PSN Friends list you can easily find the stats for your friends that play the game too.
You can see all the weapons, which ones you have, how much Vechtan cash you have, have earned, spent, all that.
Valor, campaign, multiplayer, all the different modes, maps, heat maps, REPLAY of the last mph games you were in, or a friend was in.
Leaderboard stats.
It is deep and beautiful. Guerrilla Cambridge went all out for us on this site.
I was interested in Assassin’s Creed back when it was first out or early on. Not HIGHLY interested, just knew about it and wanted to pursue it, but didn’t and here we are.
E3 is something I follow, more-so PlayStation than anyone, and this year I streamed all the stuff via my PC —> HDMI —> HDTV –the USTREAM Playstation live feed. Monday night for the Press Conference, and then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday early afternoon to evening, and each day a tad earlier than the one before.
In the Press Conference Assassin’s Creed III was awesome. I don’t know exactly when I really jumped on it, it just is the thing that’s coming out sooner than most of the stuff out there, something that REALLY I WANT TO PLAY! Game Informer had wonderful cover and coverage of it in their April 2012 issue. It’s just beautiful and because of this I am finally going to get into the franchise with Assassin’s Creed for PS3 … the first one. I’m totally hoping I like it, and really have to FORCE myself to get through it and get to Assassin’s Creed II and be ready for October 30th.
Thursday they interviewed the developer of Assassin’s Creed III (PS3) as well as the developer for Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation (PS Vita). That last game interview was supposed to be on Tuesday, but technical difficulties of some sort kept it out of Tues. and Wed. and finally on Thursday it was inserted into the schedule! Hurray!
Both games look great, totally stoking great. I can say how hungry I am for them. And I’ve never played Assassin’s Creed before. I should have, but haven’t. Now I will. I have AC on my desk.
