How Playstation All-Stars Ruined My Life

On April 27th, 2012 (yes, I unfortunately remember the date...) a new game was announced! There had been some rumors circulating toward the end of the preceding year that said a combat-heavy, Smash Bros style game featuring Sony's biggest characters was in development, with many details such as specific characters and stages included with the rumor as well. These rumors were confirmed to be just about 100%

accurate when gameplay was finally shown off several months later. The game became what we know today as Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale.

I love Nintendo and its line-up of characters and I love Smash Bros. style gameplay, but I also have a deep-rooted and long-running affection for Sony's diverse library of games. I love Sly Cooper, Jak & Daxter, Uncharted, LittleBigPlanet, Ape Escape, InFamous, and possibly my favorite of all, PaRappa the Rapper. But even beyond that, characters like Kratos from God of War, Fat Princess, and Twisted Metal's iconic Sweet Tooth were rumored to appear in the game, meaning that the roster was sure to be diverse and represent a huge assortment of games, perhaps beyond even the extent of Super Smash Bros. There are also plenty of amazing third party games heavily associated with the Playstation brand like Metal Gear Solid, Spyro the Dragon, Final Fantasy, and Crash Bandicoot! Could they be represented in the game as well? Finally, my childhood dream of a large-scale and chaotic crossover of Playstation all-stars would come to fruition!



...and shortly after release, crash and burn. I think All-Stars is a very mediocre game overall. It had a lot of promise and it's clear that hard work was put into it, but the developers simply failed to have a cohesive vision of what the end product would look like. Characters all feel unique and different from each other, but all this really results in is the most unbalanced garbage excuse for a fighting game I've ever played. You've probably got around 10 broken characters, 10 useless ones, and 3 or 4 that are actually somewhat balanced. Throw in appalling netcode, a lack of options offline, and an absolutely unreasonable amount of glitches, exploits, and obvious developer oversights and your end-product is one that simply fails to deliver. But I'm not here to talk about why this game is bad or why you shouldn't play it, I'm here to talk about the psychological damage that it's scarred me with that I'll likely never recover from.

My hype for this game was almost unreasonable, to be honest. Everything looked SO GOOD on paper! The killing system was different from Smash Bros. but still looked very intriguing and fun to play, meaning that the game would be fresh and new while still retaining that particular series' fun and chaotic elements. There were so many cool ideas that Nintendo had never implemented in Smash; for example, stages crossing over into each other! Fighting it out in Chop Chop Master Onion's dojo from PaRappa the Rapper, but suddenly a Killzone mech coming in to wreak havoc? Or reenacting Uncharted 3's Stowaways chapter, but with Songbird and other elements from Bioshock Infinite coming in midway through the fight?? This is the kind of stuff Nintendo hadn't even THOUGHT of! And of course, the characters themselves! Where else would we get to see PaRappa punching Kratos in the face??

Well after the initial reveal, these characters started to get weirder and weirder, to be honest. At E3, we got the obvious Nathan Drake reveal, but we got another character as well! Not only that, but our first THIRD PARTY character! Who could it be? Solid Snake? Cloud Strife?! Crash Bandicoot?!

...or...a Big Daddy from Bioshock. Listen, I have nothing against Bioshock and I fully realize that it had a big impact on gaming when it first came out, and that Big Daddy is probably the most fitting icon of the series to be represented in a crossover fighting game. But...um...that doesn't really have much to do with Playstation, does it? Like...I mean, it was PORTED to PS3 and all, but...well, whatever, it's one character. But then the next reveal came and gave us 2 more characters. Japanese mascot Toro Inoue (nya~) and... ANOTHER 3rd party character! Who could it be this ti-

...fucking Heihachi? Really? Okay, Tekken is more Playstation associated than something like Bioshcok for sure, but...Heihachi? Wouldn't Jin or Kazuya or...fucking anyone else make more sense? I like the idea of representing a fighting game character in a game like this, but he's hardly an accurate representation of his own series, let alone the Playstation brand. Our other 2 3rd party characters would at least be from some heavy-hitting PS franchises: Metal Gear and Devil May Cry!

...
NO
YOU CAN'T DO THAT
WHAT THE HELL

Longtime series protagonist Solid Snake and the classic white-haired Dante are nowhere to be found, despite being arguably two of the most iconic and Playstation associated third party characters there are. Instead, we get Raiden because of his (at the time) upcoming spin-off and the universally shat upon Dante redesign from the (at the time) upcoming reboot! Fantastic! Well, we'd get one more third party character before things are all over, so there's still hope that some classic Playstation franchises would get some fair representation in what was meant to be a celebration of Playstation histor-

...
Isaac...Clarke? From...Dead Space? Isaac...FUCKING...CLARKE?! 

WHY

WHY

WHAT ARE YOU DOING

WHY ARE YOU BASING THE SELECTION OF YOUR ROSTER'S THIRD PARTY CHARACTERS SOLELY AROUND PROMOTING UPCOMING GAMES

 ...sorry, I get like that sometimes. Anyway, I'll be honest, of the 5 non-Sony owned characters in this game, I don't really have a problem with any of them as characters, or even their inclusion in the game, I guess. But at the same time, for these 5 characters, there could have been 5 characters that are actually relevant to the Playstation platforms or brought more unique movesets to the game! Off the top of my head, Cloud, Snake, Crash, Spyro, even Lara fucking Croft would've made a lot more sense than any of these choices. I'm not one to get upset over something as arbitrary as character rosters very often, but this completely messed up series of choices still has me scratching my head over a year after the game came out. That said, the first-party character choices make a lot more sense and there aren't any big names that they missed. However, it's clear that their primary goal with a lot of the character selection was based around promoting upcoming games. DmC's Dante, Dead Space 3's Isaac Clarke, Metal Gear Rising's Raiden, and items and stages from Bioshock Infinite. For fuck's sake, Zeus was a DLC character when God of War: Ascension came out. How much more blatant can you get?

But I'm getting off-track here. Rewinding to Summer 2012, I was still very much excited for this game and loving every little bit of information I could find regarding it. A Hong Kong exclusive beta came out that supported 4 player online matches, and though I'd regret it later, I spent $15 on a Hong Kong PSN card to get in on it and play (...d-don't look at me like that!!). It included 4 stages and 6 characters, and since the only supported mode was a 4 player free-for-all, it's not like I really had any way to practice besides just going online and pitting myself against others. Despite the god-awful netcode and abundance of glitches, I thought the gameplay itself was very fun and that the stage and character design was completely unique and creative. I didn't really understand how to play the game at the time, so I just applied a lot of strategies from Smash Bros. (timing with blocking/dodging, moving around the screen quickly) and won very nearly every match I played for the couple of months that this beta was around. It did a good job of whetting my appetite for the game's release in October 2012!

...SHIT!

Well, to make up for the delay, a new beta was put out with numerous bug fixes and a couple big new additions: first, 2v2 matchmaking! Myself and a handful of friends killed countless hours playing online again, but this time, together! The other big addition was an offline tutorial mode where you could only play as PaRappa (luckily, the character I was intending to main). A friend and I figured out a couple of awesome combos that would really help me improve my understanding of playing that character, so I took my skills online! How did I do?

Dude, I kicked some ASS at this game! I was frequently winning games by HUGE margins, I honestly can't recall more than 1 or 2 matches I lost. Do you know how that feels? Do you know how it feels legitimately being among the best in the world at a new game that you've been looking forward to for MONTHS? It's fucking awesome! I was a master at a game I had been anticipating for the majority of that year, and a lot of my friends were interested in it as well! This was going to be one of the biggest game releases for me in YEARS!

November 20th (the game's launch date) came and I had 3 close friends over to bring the game in together. We stayed up into the early hours of the morning playing 2v2 and free-for-all matches offline and online, it was seriously some of the most fun I had had in a very long time with a game. I was playing not only with my main character PaRappa, but 19 other characters, 14 of which I hadn't tried yet! They had also announced plans to continue supporting the game with DLC characters and stages post-release, giving me even more options to mess around with in a game I was having the time of my life with!

The historic day when my friend and I mopped the floor with
the scummy douchebag at the top of the leaderboards.

But other people got to use these 20 characters too, and naturally, found some very cheap stuff and brought it into the online mode. While my advanced PaRappa techniques did me very well the first few months of playing this game online (top 100 in the leaderboards from launch until February), eventually, advanced techniques for other characters began popping up. Infinite loops with Drake, unfair hit-confirms into kills with Raiden, Kratos requiring literally no skill to pull off massive combos with, and Sly Cooper having the most ridiculous assortment of tools I've ever seen in one fighting game character, to give a few examples. And while this handful of characters continued to look more and more difficult to beat, characters like Sir Daniel, Spike, Radec, and Jak were having trouble finding any sort of combos or advanced tactics whatsoever. My favorite character, PaRappa, was at this weird middle-ground. At his best he was pretty good, but that best is very basic; once you've mastered the basics, there's little room for growth. Sometimes I'd go on losing streaks and think "What in the world did I do wrong? What could I have done better to win that match?" and simply come to the conclusion that there was nothing I could have done any better than I had. PaRappa at his very best still doesn't have the tools necessary to defeat higher-level players using characters that are simply more powerful than him. This actually applies to a lot of the characters, top-tier or garbage: once you find some easy, bread-and-butter combos and techniques, you rarely experience any growth with your understanding of this character. This makes playing the game eventually just get very predictable and repetitive, you can usually predict the outcome of the match just based on what characters are involved and what stage it's taking place on.

However, I kept playing this game for months to come. I have no idea what compelled me to do so, because after about a month I could already tell you that there it was flawed much more deeply than I had thought at first. But I was addicted! I'd brush off school work to play matches until 1:00 AM! Whether I was pissed off, sad, tired, whatever, I'd find a way to squeeze a few more matches in. My initially outstanding win-loss record started to falter, but I couldn't stop. I didn't find the game charming, I absolutely hated the community,

my friends were all losing interest as well, but every day I'd walk home, turn on my PS3, and sit there and play more of the game that was slowly but surely draining the life out of me. I kept going until school was out, I even played a bit during the Summer, and I've had a few lapses from my PSAS-soberity where I've engaged in some more sets of online matches. And I hate myself for it.

I went from thinking the game was amazing, to thinking it was okay, to thinking it was pretty bad, to thinking it was literally starting to bring me down and effect my inner-thoughts and self-esteem. I started to go from simply not enjoying it to downright hating it, and I kept playing anyway. Why? Because I was good at it, I guess. But even then, as more and more cheap tactics were discovered with the characters who were already the best in the game, I was falling behind. I think another part of it is that I usually played 2v2 matches and it was really fun to team up with my friends, but even then, I would notice that every time I walked away from the game I wouldn't think "man, that was fun", I'd be either angry or outright depressed about the session I had just played. And the worst part is? All the time I put into this game, this game that I had been looking forward to for a year and became one of the best in the world at?

It was completely meaningless. The game sucked shit. There weren't really any tournaments for it, save for maybe a couple. It's not like I made money from my skills, it's not like I became recognized by the community, I just kept playing it because I made myself want to play it. I think I can divide my life into two periods: pre All-Stars and post All-Stars. I used to be an enthusiastic young man, eager to show off my skills and have fun with a game that he enjoyed. But now I look in the mirror and all I see is a broken and defeated soul. And I think I can honestly trace a lot of that back to the time I wasted playing Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale.

Sometimes I hear people talk about it. People who've played it once or twice at a friend's house or something, and say things like "man, that game is awesome!" or "that game's just some shitty Smash Bros. ripoff!" And you know what? I get mad. I get mad and I want to say something. Not because they do or don't enjoy it, I get mad that these people think they have a right to judge this game. Look at me. Look what I've been through. Look what putting months and months into becoming a high-level Playstation All-Stars player did to me, look where it got me in life. I can judge this game.

I am the ONLY one who can judge this game.