WeView Verdict: Just How Good Was The PS3′s Launch Line-up?

With Alex changing things up last week, this week’s verdict is certainly going to be a little different. He asked you to look at the whole of the PS3’s launch line up and share your thoughts, and share them you certainly did. However there’s no real verdict on things this week, you can’t really give a rating to the launch line-up as a whole. Instead I’ll try and pick out what proved popular and what didn’t do quite as well, what games you still love and those that quickly fell to the wayside.

One of Alex’s picks from the line-up, the original Resistance, certainly does seem popular, with many of you saying that it was amongst the first games you picked up when you purchased your console. LTG Davey said that “Resistance and its huge online battles eventually won me over,” the game swinging him in favour of buying a PS3 at launch from Argos. He called it “One of the best decisions I ever made and Resistance1 still stands as one of my favourite FPS’ of all time.”

coruscant was another Resistance devotee, with it being the only game to make its way home with their console:

The only game I got on launch was Resistance and I loved it; I still think it is the best game in the series, especially for story.

In fact there’s far too many of you who loved Resistance to list, but one voice of dissent came from Paulo Vinicius Radtke who said  “The game pace was simply not there and, for a plot driven FPS, characters where as plain as they could be.” They also complained that “…the game mechanics where not that interesting, at least for me.” Sadly they didn’t share what they did like from the launch line-up though, so we don’t know if it was just Resistance that failed to impress.

The other big winner at launch seems to have been Motorstorm, with many of you placing it alongside Resistance in your highlights. I can certainly see why the car based mayhem appealed to so many, it really is a great game.

[drop2]Amongst those praising it was OneShotWook who said “…that was the game that showed off the PS3’s potential I felt,” and MadJunkBoy. Whilst MadJunkBoy did love the game they “…only played it online about 3 times since i was totally new to online gaming back then!” How things have changed, I’m sure most launch buyers are pretty comfortable with online these days.

3shirts wasn’t quite as enamoured with the game though, even if they seem to have enjoyed it at the time. The problem? Well they noted that “…the rubber banding was a huge frustration,” which “…was made even worse in the later games.” They say that they’ve sold the game now, and probably wouldn’t want to revisit it.

Amongst the also-rans was Def Jam Icon, although apparently Youles bought it and found it pretty enjoyable. They liked the concept of the game, but did note that it was somewhat limited. If you’d like some specifics they said “…the environments were good,” and were apparently pretty thrilled by the ability to beat up rappers they hated.

Although not a launch title, unsurprisingly there were several of you who bought your PS3 with the MGS4 bundle. This seems, at least at a quick glance, to be the third most popular option for buying a PS3 amongst our community, with buying at launch coming out top. In second place for prime buying time is, predictably, the first PS3 price cut. There are clearly some fairly patient member of our community who were willing to wait if it saved them some cash.

So the big winners at launch seem to have been Resistance and Motorstorm, games I’d argue hold up even now. Ridge Racer was also fairly popular, but almost nothing else really got a look in. It seems no-one went for the abomination that was Sonic the Hedgehog, and none of you were really sold on basketball or ice hockey via NBA 2K7 and NHL 2K7 either.

There’s no poll this week, as we’ll be back with the winner of last week’s poll tomorrow. Get ready to shout “Snake!” into your Codec.