Even the people demoing "Fat Princess" are surprised that their little downloadable PS3 game with the catchy name has become one of the buzz games of the show. But with a title like that, how could it not be?
Shown just for a few seconds during the Sony briefing, "Fat Princess" was being demoed at Sony's booth in the Los Angeles Convention Center. It's still a work in progress, with some rough edges and room (at least I think so) for one Totilian idea.
The game is a capture-the-flag competiton playable by up to 32 players. As you can see from the screenshots, it looks cute but is drenched in blood. The goal for each team is to raid the enemies' castle, pick up the enemy princess, and carry her back to their own. Points tick up or down for each team depending on how long that team has their own and the enemy's princess in their castle. The twist is that players can feed their princess cake, fattening her up so that she's tougher to carry. Picking up a really fat princess will slow movement or, at least, require a second player or computer-controlled ally to help in the hauling.
I played the game on a symmetrical map, with castles to the left and right of a piranha-filled stream. The game will have more maps and possibly more modes, though I'm told they will probably mostly be like the one described here.
The controls were simple. I could jump, attack, hold the attack button for stronger attacks, and pick things up. Among the moveable objects were trampolines that can be used for leaping over castle walls as well as cake that grows out of the ground and can be brought back to the princess. Players can find different hats on the game map that change their character's class: from builder to swordsman, to priest and more. Artificial intellignece controls the characters not controlled by people, and a light level of squad commanding can be issued to sway the flow of action ("Attack!" "Build!", etc).
What I played was pretty fun. The action was swift and the princesses were pretty easy to capture, allowing for a lot of back-and-forth action. I was worried that the slightly tilted top-down view would create a few blind spots on the map, but the developers have smartly blocked access to them. The blood-splatter in the game is supposed to indicate how hurt the other characters are (you only see your own health bar), but I was a bit confused as to how hurt some of my enemies were.
A lot of reporters have been asking if the princess can be fed to the point of explosion. She can't be. She has four stages of "growth" and then she's at maximum girth.
I enjoyed the feeding aspect of the game so much that I suggested that players be given the ability to force-feed cake to their enemies, fattening them up and slowing them down. I got a polite chuckle for that.
The game is coming from Seattle-based Darkstar Industries early next year exclusively to the PS3's PlayStation Network. And while it seem really promising, the bigger Sony story of E3 is that PSN looks really strong across the board. I liked "Fat Princess" a lot, yet somehow it's still only my fourth-favorite PSN PS3 game at E3.
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