Play Station All Stars Battle Royale

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PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover Mascot Fighter developed by Superbot Entertainment, running on the Super Smash Bros-esque premise of a cast of Sony's gaming properties joining to beat each other senseless. Initially known as "Title Fight", the game was leaked on October 30 of 2011 by The Paul Gale Network before being officially announced by Game Trailers TV and on the Playstation blog on April 26, 2012. The game will be released in the Holiday season of 2012.

The game will feature characters and stages from:

• Bioshock (third-party game)
• Buzz!
• Fat Princess
• God of War
• Hot Shots Golf
• Jak and Daxter
• Killzone
• Little Big Planet
• Parappa the Rapper
• Patapon
• Ratchet and Clank
• Resistance
• Sly Cooper
• Twisted Metal
• Uncharted
• Wipeout

Sony has also announced that it plans to include Guest Fighters from third-party companies that have a long history with Sony, which has caused the fandom to be especially excited about the game.

The current roster:

• From God Of War: Kratos
• From Fat Princess: Fat Princess assisted by the villagers.
• From Sly Cooper: Sly Cooper
• From Killzone: Colonel Mael Radec
• From Twisted Metal: Sweet Tooth
• From Parappa the Rapper: Parappa the Rapper
• From BioShock: Big Daddy
• From Uncharted: Nathan Drake

The game provides examples of:

• Alternate Company Equivalent: This should be obvious. Interestingly, this game is being released late in the life-cycle of Sony's third major console generation. Sound familiar?
  • One odd aspect of the game's philosophies to note is that Smash Bros is primarily focused on ring-outs while PSASBR works with flashy supers. Kind of like sumo wrestling as opposed to Professional Wrestling.
• Art Shift: Each playable character will be rendered in their respectable series' distinctive art style. Even Parappa, who's two-dimensional!
• Beehive Barrier: The Gravity Shield from Wipe Out is a usable item.
• BFG: The always-powerful RPG-7 from Uncharted appears as a usable item. It holds 3 shots, like in its home series (though the reload doesn't seem especially long). There is also Radec's plasma cannon, the Sweet Bot's gatling gun and Nathan's Grenade Launcher.
• Blade on a Stick: The Spear of Destiny from God of War is a usable melee item.
• Bullet Hell: The Sandover Village/19th Hole stage becomes this later on... with golf balls.
• The Cameo
• Cool Versus Awesome: Because the guy who killed Ares fighting a psychopathic clown killer isn't either cool or awesome. Neither is an obese princess and a raccoon thief fighting a freak of nature trapped in a scuba suit and an adventurer who possesses rotten luck.
• Doing It for the Art: Superbot was handpicked and created specifically for developing this game. The team purportedly has several fighting game enthusiasts working on it as well (the lead combat designer has written several fighting game guides for Brady games). The development team team has even gone so far as to include fighting game veterans like Maj, Ed Ma as senior combat designer and Daniel "Clockw0rk" Maniago as community manager. Superbot very much wants PSASBR to be successful.
• Dueling Games: Will be (more or less) directly taking on Super Smash Bros, moreso if Nintendo reveals a new game.
• Essence Drop: AP is treated this way.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: The stages will feature many environmental hazards, such as Sandover Village, which has a giant Lurker Shark swimming beneath the stage who will eat players too slow to get back to the main platform. The Metropolis stage has the Hydra, which will periodically attack the players as well.
• Finishing Move: The game is based around these. The only way to win is to destroy opponents with them, and the main reason for attacking at all is to build AP to use a Super. Level 1 Supers usually take out one opponent over a small area, Level 2 Supers can potentially take out multiple opponents over a wide area and Level 3 Supers can often annihilate the opposition.
• Follow the Leader: Almost exactly the same concept as Super Smash Bros, but with Sony's characters and with a totally different method of defeating opponents.
• Free-Floor Fighting: The Dreamscape level is constantly being built, adding extra platforms and occasionally lowering ground. This is just one example.
• Guest Fighter: Big Daddy, at least for now.
• Hailfire Peaks: Several stages will smoosh together environments from completely different games for unique mash-ups (which includes mash-ups remixing the original game's music). The Sandover Village stage for instance will have several Hot Shots Golfers in the background sending golf balls onto the stage for low damage to those struck with them. Further, Buzz! will stand in the background of the slowly-morphing Little Big Planet stage to occasionally quiz the players. Later in the Metropolis stage, the Hydra will appear, shortly after attacking/eating Captain Qwark. Probably the strangest one is a stage that combines the underworld of God of War with Patapon.
• Homage: To name a few:
  • The Power Meter from Hot Shots Golf shows up when the golfers are about to take their swing in the Sandover Village/19th Hole stage, also serving to warn the players to dodge the oncoming hail of golf balls.
  • During Parappa's Level 3 Super, the screen starts showing his game's interface.
  • "Fever" appears on the top right corner of the Underworld stage when the Patapon are getting ready to throw their spears on the stage.
  • The level editing content thermometer from LittleBigPlanet shows up in the Dreamscape/Buzz stage.
• Interesting Situation Duel: One level has Hades trying to attack the players while fending off a band of Patapon warriors.
• Limit Break: Each character will have a meter that fills as they pummel their opponent, allowing them to use up to 3 levels of Super moves. Level 1 Supers are usually brief but very strong attacks, Level 2 Supers tend to be a wide-area attack while Level 3 Supers could be accurately compared to Final Smashes.
• Long Title: A complaint being thrown at the game, but it's hardly unjustified. The game will likely be acronymized to PSASBR.
• Mood Dissonance: Intentionally invoked. Superbot wants there to be a charm in the juxtaposition of setting lighthearted E-rated characters against M-rated murderers in stages that jump between tone and theme routinely.

"In terms of integrating them all into the same world, part of this is supposed to feel like a mash up. We're not just trying to sanitise everything, we kind of want them to stand apart from one another - that's where the irreverence and the humour comes from. It's a challenge, but ultimately we've found a pretty decent balance of getting them all to live in the same world." —Director Chan Park, Kotaku interview

• Name's the Same: The PlayStation library has quite a few that could be potentially confusing, such as Nathan Drake as opposed to Resistance's early lead Nathan Hale. Another example would be Shadow of the Colossus' lead "The Wanderer" and "The Wanderer," Fan Nickname for the nameless protagonist of Journey.
• One-Hit Kill: Supers and certain environmental hazards.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: The game is heavily based around chaotic, highly offensive yet mostly ineffectual combat. No amount of combos will kill a character and moves which drain AP are rare (item attacks, environmental hazards and Sly's invisible strike). Attacks exist specifically to build meter and built meter remains the same even when a character dies. The game's lack of a health bar can make it seem like this.
• Power Creep, Power Seep: Invoked when you take Parappa, who fights with music and karate, and pit him against Radec, who is a cold-blooded Colonel Badass and owns a lot of heavy firepower. Right now, taken to its logical extreme with Nathan Drake, who hails from one of the more realistic (sort of) series featured in-game and has no powers whatsoever.

"While no one doubts Fat Princess’ moxy, she probably wouldn’t fair too well against Kratos’ homicidal rages and penchant for ripping the heads off of enemies. Balance is key." —Digital Trends

• Pop Quiz: Picking up the Buzz! remote item has the player call upon Buzz himself, who will quiz the players with random Playstation trivia, with incorrect answers being punished by pie thrown from off-screen. This is also incorporated into the Dreamscape level, where Buzz appears later in the match.
• Production Foreshadowing: Sony's "Michael" ad campaign created quite a bit of speculation over a potential Crossover. Suddenly the ad gains even more impact.
  • Jack Tretton specifically brought up the commercial while introducing the game during Sony's E3 press conference.
  • Speculation has already begun on who from the commercial will be making it into the game.
• Sincerest Form of Flattery: It's pretty clear from gameplay and screenshots that it's heavily inspired by Super Smash Bros Probably not a bad thing, though.
• The Computer Shall Taunt You: Buzz will verbally abuse players that answer his quizzes incorrectly.
• The Unexpected:
  • Fat Princess and Parappa the Rapper as playable characters.
    • Given the perceived notion that Sony "Doesn't have enough icons," there's a good chance the entire cast will turn out to be this to those people.
  • Out of all the potential Guest Fighters, who expected Big Daddy? And to be the first announced?!
• Trick Bomb: The Hedgehog Grenade from Resistance is a usable item.
• Victory Pose: The Victor during the match-end screen also does this.
• What Could Have Been: The was a planned stage based on the Bridge of Asylia from Lair that was dropped during the development process, according to the Paul Gale network.
  • Supposedly Rico Velasquez was up for playable consideration.
• The Wiki Rule: Yes.
• Working Title: Title Fight.