Halfbrick Just Made Your First Minis Purchase Easy
Echoes is now just $.99. If you don't buy it, you are pure evil.
Published: May 12, 2010
We've long held the belief that Sony's whole Minis initiative was fundamentally flawed in literally the most important part: the price. Most Minis -- the overwhelming majority of which are, frankly, not just crappy but a straight-up rip-off -- were simply priced well beyond the idea of an impulse buy. Most Minis are, by their very nature, simple little affairs meant to sort of entertain for a few minutes if you're very lucky and often are little more than iPhone ports without the touch screen aspect or, worse, feel like throwaway concepts.
There's a bright spot among the absolute deluge of crappy ideas, though: Halfbrick. The good folks from Down Under have not only started with the right idea: take a bunch of indie-published XNA games that were first born on the Xbox 360, and port those full-blown concepts to the PSP rather than trying to ram controls into a touch-based idea.
It's worked, and beautifully if we may be so bold, with no less than four Minis that aren't just "good for a Mini," they're literally some of the best games available for the bite-sized download program. Now, we're fully aware that not everyone has a PSP, but if you factor in the amount of people that have PSPs or PS3s, suddenly things get a little more interesting. A game made for a 480x272 screen isn't going to look especially gorgeous when scaled up to something approaching 720p (to say nothing of 1080p), but what's great about Halfbrick's games is that they don't really need whiz-bang visuals to sell the very simple concepts that have been fleshed out into full-blown, actual games.
Actual good games.
Halfbrick's Echoes is one of those games, one that takes the basic idea of drawing a path and expands on it to create a fantastic puzzle game. Echoes was one of the first must-have Minis on the PSP, and when Sony opened up the 100MB-or-smaller mini-games for play on the PS3, it only made more sense not to miss this one. Nope, this isn't some kind of 20 hour epic, but it is one of the cleanest, most perfectly contained experiences you can get. And now, to celebrate the fact that Halfbrick has kicked out a quartet of downright must-have offerings, they're leading the charge to make Minis the kind of "eh, why not?" impulse buy decision the platform so badly needed.
That's right, kids, Echoes is now less than a buck. That means you should buy it. Like right now. Like, stop reading this and just go download it. Trust us on this, it'll be the best $.99 you've ever spent on the PSN. Better than some poorly-drawn anime girl, better than a dynamic theme you bought on one of the foreign Stores because we have so very few great ones here, better than... well, there aren't many things on the PSN that are less than a buck. Please show Sony that it's a great idea to drop the price of all their Minis and thank Halfbrick for making it oh so simple to imbibe their particularly awesome brand of bite-sized fun by picking it up, won't you?
There's a bright spot among the absolute deluge of crappy ideas, though: Halfbrick. The good folks from Down Under have not only started with the right idea: take a bunch of indie-published XNA games that were first born on the Xbox 360, and port those full-blown concepts to the PSP rather than trying to ram controls into a touch-based idea.
It's worked, and beautifully if we may be so bold, with no less than four Minis that aren't just "good for a Mini," they're literally some of the best games available for the bite-sized download program. Now, we're fully aware that not everyone has a PSP, but if you factor in the amount of people that have PSPs or PS3s, suddenly things get a little more interesting. A game made for a 480x272 screen isn't going to look especially gorgeous when scaled up to something approaching 720p (to say nothing of 1080p), but what's great about Halfbrick's games is that they don't really need whiz-bang visuals to sell the very simple concepts that have been fleshed out into full-blown, actual games.
Actual good games.
Halfbrick's Echoes is one of those games, one that takes the basic idea of drawing a path and expands on it to create a fantastic puzzle game. Echoes was one of the first must-have Minis on the PSP, and when Sony opened up the 100MB-or-smaller mini-games for play on the PS3, it only made more sense not to miss this one. Nope, this isn't some kind of 20 hour epic, but it is one of the cleanest, most perfectly contained experiences you can get. And now, to celebrate the fact that Halfbrick has kicked out a quartet of downright must-have offerings, they're leading the charge to make Minis the kind of "eh, why not?" impulse buy decision the platform so badly needed.
That's right, kids, Echoes is now less than a buck. That means you should buy it. Like right now. Like, stop reading this and just go download it. Trust us on this, it'll be the best $.99 you've ever spent on the PSN. Better than some poorly-drawn anime girl, better than a dynamic theme you bought on one of the foreign Stores because we have so very few great ones here, better than... well, there aren't many things on the PSN that are less than a buck. Please show Sony that it's a great idea to drop the price of all their Minis and thank Halfbrick for making it oh so simple to imbibe their particularly awesome brand of bite-sized fun by picking it up, won't you?
