Super Stardust HD

This was one of the two free games I got from Sony's "Welcome Back" Program (a.k.a. the "We Fucked Up Big Time and We're Hoping You'll Appreciate the Two Free Games We're Giving You Enough to Continue to Trust Us With Your Privacy" Program). And I really enjoyed playing it. So, thanks, Sony. It's an arcade-style stage-based spaceship shooter in which you both avoid and destroy other spaceships and chunks of rock. In other words, it's an Asteroids clone, plain and simple. But there are a few notable differences, aside from the gorgeous HD/3D display and graphical upgrades. For starters, you have three types of weapons, a green "rock crusher," a red "gold melter," and a blue "ice blaster," each of which does significantly more damage to one of the three different types of asteroids on screen (you guessed it - rock, gold, and ice). Any weapon will damage any asteroid, but you'll rack up points faster by constantly switching weapon types to handle the different rock types. The control scheme is also much-improved over the "rotate, go straight" mechanic in Asteroids. Now, you use the left stick to move and the right stick to shoot. So you can head upwards while shooting downward and to the right. Two additional functions allow you to collect and use bombs (destroying everything in a very large radius) or use "hyper speed" to temporarily make you invincible as you dart off in one straight line for a short burst of time. Furthermore, while Asteroids took place on a toroidal plane in space, Super Stardust HD takes place on a spherical surface that surrounds a planet. Not a huge difference in terms of gameplay, but it more than doubles your "playing space relative to screen size" ratio. There are five different planets in the game (to protect form asteroids and spaceships and such) and each of them has five stages, the last of which is a boss fight. It took me many attempts to beat the first planet, thus unlocking the second one, and after I failed on the second planet's boss, I put the game away and decided I could consider it "beaten." I didn't put it away out of frustration, and I do hope to someday beat the remaining four planets (thus "completing" the game), but with sixty-plus games still in my backlog, I figure I've seen and played enough of this one to offer an insightful paragraph of text about it. (Have I done so? You be the judge.) There's a co-op feature that I'd love to try sometime (any interest, anyone?) and I'm sure I'll be launching this game form the PS3 menu several times after finishing a DVD or something, since I use my PS3 to watch those. So, yeah. Even though I'm posting about this game, I'm by no means done with it. It's very much a "pick up and play" game - arcade games usually are - and I was enjoying the hour and a half I spent on it last night enough to merit several more sessions. I probably wouldn't have bought this game - or ever even heard of it - had Sony not offered it to me for free, but I'm glad to call it part of my collection.