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Monthly Archives: May 2008

Review: Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds (PS3)

It was inevitable, and now it’s finally reality, despite a nearly six-month delay; the newest entry in the Hot Shots Golf franchise has arrived, and this time it’s on the PlayStation 3 for the first time. Thanks to its depth of play, cartoon-cute characters and sharp sense of humor, Hot Shots Golf has always been the sports game you give to folks who don’t normally life sports games; like MP3 players filled with only your favorite songs, it’s a package that’s hard not to like.

As the debut entry in the series on Sony’s next-gen platform, the courses look gorgeous and are as fun as ever to play, ramping up in challenge as you go. The level of detail has been amped up quite a bit, but other than that, the series maintains its classic character design sense and is probably not pushing the PS3 hardware very hard or far.

So what’s next-gen about the game? Well, believe it or not, the control scheme, though completely new, is very accessible and playable, even for a series veteran. Rather than the by-now-cliché click-meters, you can decide when to hit the X button at the apex of your stroke and again at the point of contact, simply by watching your character’s swing. If you wait too long and go beyond 100-percent at the apex, you get to swing again after your character resets. It’s all quite easy to get the hang of, and although it doesn’t exactly take advantage of motion sensitivity inherent in both the SixAxis controller, and the new DualShock 3 with SixAxis technology.

About the only real complaint I have is that adjusting the point of contact with the ball, as well as where you want to aim for down the fairway, is surprisingly a bit harder to do this time out. In previous chapters, it was easy to get to an overhead shot of the course to precisely pinpoint where you were aiming, and that’s now harder to do.

Another minor problem is that the game, while still deep, is nowhere near as deep as the last installment in the series, on the PS2. There are fewer golfers to unlock and fewer items to accumulate, even though the list is still impressive. However, word on the street is that Sony is planning to make more golfers and items available via the PlayStation Store, either via microtransactions or perhaps even some free inter-promotional downloads.

Does this mean we could see a golfer from LittleBigPlanet or something along that line? Early indications would be in the affirmative, and count me among those who’d like to see Sony strike a deal with SquareEnix to make a couple characters from Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII available at some point; who wouldn’t want to hit the greens with Aerith, Cloud or Sepheiroth?

In the meantime, anyone who has been missing their cartoon sports fix after maxing out on the previous Hot Shots Golf title can finally rest easy and play hard; Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds is sharp-looking and infinitely playable … as always.

Review: The Cutting Edge: Chasing the Dream (DVD)

The Cutting Edge is one of the more unlikely film series ever to hit the big screen. The 1992 original starring Moira Kelly and D.B. Sweeney was a touching film that did moderately well but was never heard from again until 2006, when an unexpected sequel showed up. The Cutting Edge: Going for the Gold starred little-known actors Ross Thomas and Christy Carlson Romano. Romano is supposedly the descendant of Kelly and Sweeney’s characters, but considering there was only about 14 years between the first film and the second, that’s a bit of a stretch.

The newest entry, The Cutting Edge: Chasing the Dream, was released this year and stars Matt Lanter (the cheerleader’s flying boyfriend on Heroes) and Francia Raisa. The twist this time around is that Lanter’s character is the figure skater with Olympic dreams and Raisa’s the rough-skating hockey player who must learn grace and acrobatics on ice in time to help Lanter win the gold.

Romano makes a cameo as her character from the second film to give the newest installment some continuity with those that have come before. Like Going for the Gold, Chasing the Dream began life as a made-for-television movie, so the DVD release doesn’t have a lot of special features; there’s a making of featurette and some deleted scenes and that’s it. No commentary track or any of the other usual DVD goodies.

Lanter’s a plus to the film since he’s a familiar face from his run on Heroes, and Francia Raisa’s an appealing newcomer who appears to have the potential to go on and do better things. While Cutting Edge: Chasing the Dream is a bit of a paint-by-numbers affair, it is more appealing than the somewhat lackluster Going for the Gold, though neither hold much of a candle to the theatre-release original, which was a decent mixture of romantic comedy and sports movie with two half-decent, appealing stars.

That’s not to say that Lanter and Raisa are not appealing, but it’s clear that the film was made on a made-for-TV budget. It’s not the kind of gold you hide under your mattress, but it’s good, old-fashioned filmmaking that won’t be released only in a profanity and nudity-filled unrated version; in other words, it’s pretty safe for the kids.

In that sense, this PG-13-rated fare is golden for family viewing. About my only complaint is that the acrobatic move with which this couple attempts to achieve their Olympic dreams is just a bit too close for comfort to a similar (but deadlier) move used in the recent Will Farrell comedy, Blades of Glory, and thus ends up being unintentionally amusing.

Finally, I have my DualShock3!

Finally, this weekend, my wife and I were able to get enough together to acquire our long-awaited DualShock3 controllers for our PS3. Since she’s a bit of a gamer, too, she was just as excited about this as I was.

I was able to put up with, but have never really liked, the Six-Axis controller. Playing a game with it was like trying to breathe wearing too tight a corset. Motion-sensitivity is a nice gimmick, but sacrificing force feedback was not worth the cost. I wish Sony would have patched things up with Immersion long ago, but at least it’s done now and finally here.

The first game I used it on was Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. I’m not much of a racing fan, but I’ve always loved the Gran Turismo series, and this installment is one of the first games to have full DualShock3 support built in.

I noticed that with its return, the force feedback feature is now a bit more sedate and subtle. But that’s fine with me. It’s just good to have my controller shake when it ought to once again.