Street dates being broken is nothing new when it comes to videogames. Pretty much every game ever gets sold too early by stores somewhere on the world, but it’s not often that it gets sold too early on it’s platform’s online store. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed was meant to come out this Friday in Europe, but Sony accidentally sold the game too early on the Playstation store. Some normal retailers are of course probably already selling the game, but it’s still entertaining to see Sony sell it early as well. I managed to buy the game before it was pulled from the store and took some screenshots.
So how does it compare to the console versions? Graphically it doesn’t really look as nice, which is to be expected since while the Vita is the most powerful gaming handheld on the current market, it’s not a Playstation 3. Still, the game looks a bit lackluster even when compared to other Vita games, mostly because of the lack of any shader effects. The framerate can also go down a bit at times, though not too much to be bothersome and the resolution is native. Also, the amount of participants in a race has been toned down from ten to eight, which again is to be expected. All of the content from the console versions is in this version, so if you don’t mind there being no shaders this should still make for a good portable version. One issue I noticed that should be easy to patch is that the d-pad doesn’t work during flying segments or all-star moves, it also cannot be used to fire power-ups backwards. The left control stick can still be used to do all of these things though.