A far cry from your local “Mega Bowl” with its nauseating carpet designs and questionable facilities, High Velocity Bowling is a beautifully crafted game and the first on PSN (and possibly in PS3 history) to get the SIXAXIS just right.
This is without a doubt, Sony’s answer to the huge success that is Nintendo’s Wii Sports, and they have done incredibly well to show off the advantages of the SixAxis controller. The speed in which you bowl is determined by how hard you dare swing your arms in your friend’s studio flat and the positioning of your player is controlled by subtle movements to the SIXAXIS. Unlike the Wii, however, the spin of your ball is controlled by the shoulder buttons rather than the motion sensor, making it a bit easier to look a pro. Of course like anything new it takes a short time to get used to, but it is by no means a steep learning curve and after twenty minutes I had grasped the basics. From this point on the game does a good job increasing your skills at a steady and manageable pace.
As a PSN title I wasn’t expecting earth shattering graphics, but what is on offer is very nice indeed. The colours are rich and vibrant, everything has a “neon” feel which is in tune with the whole bowling atmosphere and great as a party game. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this also runs natively at 1080p and at 60 FPS, which is one of few PSN titles that do. As a result the game looks and feels very slick with no noticeable slow down.
What makes this game complete is the soundtrack, and in High Velocity Bowling the sound track is anything you choose. That’s right, custom soundtracks. All tracks you have installed on your PS3 hard drive are accessible in game as background music, you’re even able to skip tracks during game play with a simple push of a button. The custom soundtrack feature isn’t an add-on, this is a feature present from its incarnation outlining the amount of thought that has gone into this game. All of this on top of high quality ambient 5.1 surround sound, you can almost feel the suspiciously sticky floor that often frequents any local bowling ally.
There is only one area that High Velocity Bowling fails to achieve strike, and this is online play. It simply amazes me Sony decided that online play wasn’t needed, or possible. Could it be Sony`s 1080p, 60fps Bowl-a-rama isn’t capable of running at high resolutions online? I find this hard to believe and expect Sony will attempt to cash in on online play with an update later in the year.
I didn’t have high expectations for this game, but on downloading it I have rolled away many hours trying to get that perfect game. Sony have tried and succeeded in making a great party game, a game that you can pick up and enjoy almost instantly, and at $10 USD this is a cheap purchase in return for a very robust and entertaining game. Further more this is a game that appeals to the masses, so no need to trade off use of the TV in return for putting out the bin.
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Level: 4
August 28, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Never did like sport games…no score
Level: 1
August 31, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Is bowling a sport? I guess this explains why im so bad at it!