Joystiq Impressions: PSN games

You've read about the best (and the, er, not so best) now here's some quick impressions of the rest of the PSN games Sony had on display at this year's E3 Media and Business Summit.

Go! Sports Ski

This improbably punctuated title actually describes a cute little skiing game with some impressively realistic 3D graphics ... for a downloadable title, at least. The SixAxis controller's tilting abilities are put to good use to move your skier -- lean forward to to go fast, lean left and right to carve out turns. As in real skiing, it can take a second or two to switch from a hard left to a hard right, but once you get used to this built-in delay it's remarkably easy and fun to carve out the demo's simple slaloms. A rudimentary jump and trick system also showed some promise. The demo promised customizable skiers, an online battle mode and time trials as well.

Nucleus

How many dual-stick shooters does one generation of systems need? Seriously, we all loved Geometry Wars, and Everyday Shooter is looking sharp, but for each one of them there are at least a dozen completely forgettable Robotron clones. Anyway, Nucleus yet again assigns movement to the left stick and shooting to the right. In the demo, you control a sperm-shaped ... thing that navigates sluggishly around a puke-green petri dish environment, shooting randomly appearing blobs and collecting the power-ups they drop. So far, there seems to be little to nothing to distinguish this game from its largely undistinguished company.

Toy Home

Remember Micro Machines? Remember how much fun you had racing those little cars around on the kitchen table. This is nowhere near that much fun. The Toy Home demo at E3 featured a small, wind-up R/C car dodging various accouterments on a sparsely populated kitchen table and flying over inexplicably placed jumps. The SixAxis lean-based controls weren't nearly sensitive enough -- everything turn was either a hard left or a hard right, with no subtle analog gradations in between. The springy jump button was a nice touch, but based on this early demo, this is gonna need a lot more work to stand up to the likes of XBLA's Mad Tracks.