LogFAQs > #876682699

One of the more notable games from 2008 is Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet. It was hyped as a DIY game with robust level creation tools. Some of their E3 presentations were pretty snappy. It had a cute mascot character and was trying to appeal to all ages. LBP had one problem though: it played like absolute garbage. You could do tons of cool stuff with it but the 2.5d perspective didn't really feel that good and the floaty physics were a lethal blow. I kind of hate this game. They made a bunch more of them but I never went past the original. LBP rated high critically but I don't feel like any fans actually liked it.

That wasn't the biggest disappointment of 2008 though. That has to go to Spore.

Nintendo had an.. interesting 2008. It started with Brawl in March. Mario Kart Wii hit in April. That game has sold some ludicrous number of copies throughout its life. Maybe 30 million? Who knows. It probably didn't outsell May's game though - Wii Fit. We had balance boards. The weight loss market flocked to what was already a cool system thanks to Wii Sports and the thing just exploded. 10 million Wiis moved in 2008, more than double what the 360 did. It almost tripled the PS3 in NA. The Wii's fad status was never stronger than in 2008.

Like most fads, the bottom fell out fast. If we're going to mock Sony's 2006 E3 showing then we have got to crush Nintendo in 2008. The star of the show was Wii Music, an embarrassing live performance that spawned so many gifs. Miyamoto playing the Wii Remote guitar and Ravi playing the waggle drums. They introduced 'Wii Motion Plus' which was either a nice mid-gen improvement or tacit acknowledgement that the Wii Remote was a piece of garbage, depending on your viewpoint. The star game this holiday was Animal Crossing. Nothing against Animal Crossing but it shouldn't be highlighting the holiday season for the platform that is far and away in first place. The timeline is hilarious: Brawl -> Mario Kart -> Wii Fit -> Ravi Drums. It's just a slow slide from game of the generation to complete joke. Gamers backlashed pretty hard and the perception of the Wii as a joke console grew large here. It was always there - two Gamecubes duct taped together - but now it was pretty much undeniable. The remaining Wii truthers out there were hyping things like The Conduit. Yeah. Meanwhile, the PS3's other killer app - Final Fantasy XIII - got announced for the Xbox 360 which triggered Sony fans everywhere. That was a Sony game, man! I bought a PS3 for this!

Back to games that matter - handhelds were strong too. The PSP showed some life in 2008! Well, Square did anyway. After a few years of downsized console games, we got Dissidia, a wacky fighting game that in my opinion was pretty terrible. It was one of those fanboy dreams, especially after Smash Bros came into existence, but the combat system was kind of unmanageable. I gave up on it pretty quickly though. Crisis Core, an FF7 spinoff featuring Black Haired Cloud, was a lot more positive. It had a good story and a great ending. Seeing Sephiroth and Cloud and others in a proper FF7 prequel was surprisingly fun. The gameplay was simple button mashing but effective. The PSP was an upgrade over the PS1 hardware so returning to the world of FF7 was neat from that perspective too. It wasn't a remake but it was something. The DS had some stuff too; another DSVania, a bad Ace Attorney, a great remake of Final Fantasy IV (as opposed to the six ports that came before it) and a new Advance Wars game. Oh, and TWEWY, a unique and stylish RPG with heavy touch screen controls. The setting and style didn't do much for me on TWEWY so I never bothered engaging with the controls when they weren't immediately intuitive. Maybe it gets good - no idea.
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xyzzy