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1UP COVER STORY
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF MAY 28 | E3 2012
Gaming’s Classic Spirit Finds an HD Outlet on PlayStation 3
Cover Story: Ni No Kuni and Sly Cooper bring PS3 a whimsical touch frequently lacking in modern games.
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ritty grey grimness. Bald space marines. Massive tree-trunk-like men rendered with oily ropiness by Unreal Engine 3. These are the images that dominate current-gen games — and why not? Clearly, they’re what sells to the core gaming audience, and publishers would be fools to ignore the tastes of the masses. But too much of any single thing can grow old over time, and for some gamers (myself included) the relentless badassery of HD gaming fare can feel almost suffocating. Sometimes, it would be nice to have a little humor to leaven the darkness — humor that doesn’t revolve around how hilarious it is to curbstomp a bad guy’s skull like a meat balloon — without being all cutesy or ironic about it. How about a little earnestness for once?
Thankfully, both Sony and Namco Bandai are content to be fools, bringing two beautiful, colorful, sincerely whimsical games to PlayStation 3: Sanzaru’s Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time and Level-5’s Ni No Kuni. Neither of these games are new or unexpected, but despite being known quantities they stood out at a recent industry-wide pre-E3 event by virtue of going against the grain. They lack the seriousness and realism of the other big-budget games on display, yet they aren’t aimed specifically at young audiences, either. Both Sly and Ni No Kuni recall a vanished era of games (we called it “The PlayStation 2 age” — you might have learned about it in school) when developers could take a lighthearted approach to design without being apologetic about it.
