So just in case anyone’s wondering what I’m up to and why I haven’t posted anything in a while, well basically I’ve been just having some time off from everything I’ve spent most of my time recently indoors programming and doing other such things that I just needed some time off to literally just chill for a bit… you could basically say this is pretty much my holiday for the year.

The other thing is that I’ve got to spend a little bit of time here and there is trying to sort out my portfolio and get that underway. Trying to come up with a mixture of small projects that I can put in there as-well as some of the previous stuff that I have worked on, which should hopefully show my talents in a mixture of areas, programming languages and tools. Eventually I will putting up my portfolio on this site in its own little area.

On a development note, Some people have actually came up with some really interesting apps that would be quite cool to have on the vita, so over the coming weeks I may have a look into them.

On a business note while I’ve been out and about on my “Holiday” you might say :/ I’ve met a few people some of which have reasonably talented Artists, Basically I asked someone whether they could create a logo for me and gave them very little to go on… an interesting business strategy I know :D, I’m kinda interested what they’re going to produce… so err I’ll guess I’ll see how that goes… The only real insight I gave is that ideally it wants to be a bit different maybe messed up. Something Unorthodox really.

So basically I managed to get my hands on a copy of Lego Batman 2 for the PS Vita, Thank you lovefilm. Anyway I’ve always been a big fan of the Lego games and have found them to have really good replay-ability and especially fun to play with friends. I spent many hours furiously playing through the Xbox version of Lego Indiana Jones with one of my close friends till the early hours of the morning accumulating every achievement possible, although the achievements are a bit buggy It’s not quite as frustrating as you may think as it was incredibly fun to play.  Anyway so there’s a bit of my background played Lego games in the past very much enjoyed them including of course the original batman Lego game on 360 although not quite as good as Indy in my opinion but nether the less a good edition.

Now moving onto Lego Batman 2, This is a game I had herd very little about and hadn’t really done much research into it. I saw it on Lovefilm and thought to myself YES something awesome to play on the vita because to be honest there aren’t that many good titles yet, or well many titles available at all. So yeah though awesome something interesting to play on the vita.

When I played it though it though it was actually a bit of a let down, As soon as the first cut scene I was horrified to see the quality of the video to be absolutely horrific, so I was like OK somethings gone wrong here obviously due to downscale and compression or something, first thoughts really were it should have been flagged during play testing but OK maybe I can live with it if the game play is OK.  Now as far as the game play is concerned you play as both characters batman and robin with the ability to switch between characters to be able to preform character specific abilities needed in order to progress as seen in previous lego games, but as well as that they actually have various other costumes they can switch into that give them different abilities basically. As far as this concerned Its fairly fun although very straight forward it does increase the puzzle elements in the game.

As far as the story is concerned I found it very dull, not very compelling really. Its very much feels like the story is off the top of someones head not much thought has gone into it.

Right so anyway after having played it for a bit done a few missions, had a swim round the bat cave and everything. My brother said some things mentioning he was getting it for xbox because it had free roam and everything and I was a little bit confused because there’s no free roam on the vita. I thought hmm right lets have a look online to see what other people are thinking and why the cut scenes are so bad and why things are missing. And It actually turns out the PS Vita version of Lego Batman 2 is nothings more than a DS port of the game and absolute outrage if I may say so. So obviously the reason the cut-scenes were so bad is because they were up-scaled from the ds which is absoulutly ridiculous. I mean its not really to a professional standard, it probably means this video has been scaled and compressed multiple times which everybody knows is a bad idea. The thing that annoyed me the most is how little effort they have obviously gone to with this port. Its not just a port is a half arsed port they haven’t even attempted to bring some elements up to a satisfactory level of quality.  They have quite obviously decided to port it to the PS Vita just to get some extra money on the side. I probably would’t have cared so much if they had done a proper job when they were porting the assets. Down scaling from the console versions.

So the obvious big annoyance is the lack of the free roam, According to what I herd its due to the consoles being unable to support these features. I’m not entirely certain of the PS Vitas capabilities to be honest but I believe it could be possible. And I’m sure the reason there is no free roam on the vita is because the ds couldn’t support it, so I suspect they didn’t even look into adding the feature on the vita and have no interest at all. Which is a shame because many people seem very disappointed by this including myself.

I’m sure the Xbox, PS3 and PC versions of the game are better so please don ‘t let me discourage you from buying the game. And although the PS Vita versions has some issues its still good fun to play.