One of the benefits, if you can call them that, of the PlayStation Network getting hacked and being down for a few weeks is that they are fairly desperate to make it up to customers now that they’re starting to restore the service. One of the things they’re doing is offering customers two free games from a fairly short list, and I picked “Super Stardust HD” as one of my games.
If you’ve never seen it, it’s basically “Asteroids” cranked up to the point of madness, and it’s a perfect “I have fifteen minutes and just want to play one quick game of something” title. If you’ve got a 3D TV, you can even play the game in 3D, and it is totally lunatic when you do so. Playing the game, I’ve been impressed by the way it is basically just one of the first arcade games of all time, with graphics that are updated but gameplay that is pure throwback. I didn’t even realize how much I loved “Asteroids” until I started playing this.
It’s funny that “Asteroids” would be on my mind this morning, since Universal appears to still be serious about making and actually releasing a movie based on the game And now, it appears they are trying to hire Roland Emmerich to direct the movie, which may be the single greatest match of filmmaker and material in the history of cinema. He has spent much of his career determined to destroy the Earth, and now, he’s going to make a movie in which that event has actually happened, and now mankind makes its home in an asteroid belt, side-by-side with an alien race that may have a sinister secret.
Matt Lopez is the writer on the film, and Lorenzo Di Bonaventura is set to produce, and I am guessing that we won’t see a greenlight on this until Universal releases “Battleship” to test the waters on the whole “let’s add aliens to a game title I recognize from several decades ago” market.
Oh… and regarding the PlayStation Network, one of those two free games they offered me to make up for the crappy technical service and poor security? Vanished completely when I tried to redeem it. Way to go, PlayStation. It just does everything… sometimes.