fistfullast33l's Journal: PS3Fanboy interviews PSN's Buchert

PS3Fanboy/Joystiq have an interview posted with Rusty Buchert, senior producer at Sony Santa Monica, which is in charge of incubating and developing games for the PS Store on PS3. My opinion is that these games are currently the most underrated part of the Playstation Platform right now, but I don't own a 360 or Wii so I have no idea how they shape up. My general impression of the Wii's offerings are SNES and NES rehashes, but I don't pay that much attention. I have no idea what the 360 has.

Sony, though, has done a great job of bringing some truy innovative and fun titles with high production values to PSN. Only one game, Super Rub Dub, really was a bomb, in my opinion. But I think they've done pretty well at putting out some really fun party titles, especially Calling All Cars. Piyotoma definitely would appeal to casual gamers, as would Flow. Most of them feature some form of multiplayer action which shows that Sony "gets" what the purpose of these small titles are - party titles to show off the fun of the PS3. Sure, you can play them alone, but they are great to have around when you have a group of people over and want to quickly fire up a game to play.

I think that Buchert reinforces that in this interview, talking about the PSN as the "Sundance Channel" for independent game studios and mentioning some of the more innovative titles they have coming, including Everyday Shooter and Pixel Junk Racers, which I'm really looking forward to.

Overall, I think that Sony is really kind of holding it's breath now for HOME to release and once that is out and stable, more of these games are going to show up on the network. I think their end goal is to release HOME and slowly eliminate the PSN interface because it really is just a glorified web page that doesn't always work very well.