It’s been another busy week for PlayStation Mobile here in Europe with another six releases hitting the PSN Store and more updates to existing releases. Refreshingly there are some new developers on the scene once again and it’s clear that Unity is really playing a part both in terms of the steady flow of new titles and the complexity of the games we are seeing.
New Releases
- Flight World Simulator (Johan Valfridsson) – PSM’s first flight simulator and the biggest title to-date weighing in at almost 1Gb in size!
- Inflatable Maths (Cooply Solutions) – Well presented educational game
- One Image Viewer (MMA Developers) – cloud based image viewer linked to Microsoft’s One Drive
- Pong Breaker (Warren Gaspard) – cross between Pong and Breakout if the title hadn’t already given it away
- Solbrain I – Village (Lightning Game Studios – 3D exploration game
- Steam Lands (Lightning Game Studios) – side scrolling shooter
I have been extremely scathing of titles released by Lightning Game Studios over the last week but these latest titles do give me the impression now that they seem to be a publishing studio rather than a small development team. Certainly, this week’s titles are an improvement on the first releases both technically and in terms of gameplay but they still fall short of the mark in terms of what they offer overall in terms of quality gaming experiences. Lasting appeal and pricing is still an issue with Solbrain I on first impressions offering a game length of under 5 minutes for almost £6 although I will report on this properly once I’ve had the chance to fully evaluate the game.
Updates
- Behind You – updated to version 1.20
- COSMOS – updated to version 1.09
- Helicopter – updated to version 1.20
- Raptor RPG – updated to version 2.10
I’m glad you notified us about Lightning Game Studios, but it seems this weeks releases may be an improvement because the games started as assets that are freely available.Example for SteamLands, there’s a tutorial that provides resources and teaches how to build the game here: http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog/From-Zero-to-SteamLands-A-ten-part-series-on-game-building-with-Unity. For Solbrain, just search for Unity Chan.
I wasn’t actually aware of any of these prior to writing my reviews but that being the case then Sony have some serious questions to answer regarding all of these games.
If they are allowing PS Vita owners to pay anything up to £6 for what is effectively freely available source code then these games simply should not be available for sale through the PSN Store under any circumstances.
While I haven’t been able to do any further checking regarding Solbrain, they are using the Unity Chan character correctly from what I can tell (and displaying the license logo properly) although I don’t know anything about the game code although I will try to investigate this further.
No problem pointing out. I was actually interested in SteamLands at first glance, but then I thought that it looked too good to be a B.P. game given the review(s) you did for the other mass of games published by them. Thus, I did some investigating and found the tutorial. While I don’t a have a big problem with them publishing the game since they still technically had to remap controls for the Vita (which is easy in Unity), it’s more so the fact they don’t give proper credit it seems and charge quite a high price for somebody else’s work.
I’m something of a PSM completist so I was going to get it regardless but like you I was surprised to see the step up in quality for both of this week’s games from them. Building games using other people’s code is something that I absolutely loathe and the only way that something like this would be acceptable to me is if they were completely transparent about it – working with and giving credit to the original author and making it clear that it was a PSM port but instead they’ve simply claimed that it’s their own game.
As a writer I’ve had my own work credited to other authors in the past – both on an amateur and professional basis – so I can understand what the original programmer must be feeling right now, knowing that someone is profiting from his work.