Steam has a serious problem with shovelware. To Valve's credit though they don't really promote any of the garbage that is steadily overcrowding their library of games. PSN, on the other hand, has gone out of its way to advertise the abomination that is
Life of Black Tiger. Right off the bat, would-be-players might notice the banner art for the game is actually just a slightly reworked version of a freely available background wallpaper image. That in itself isn't a big deal, but it gets worse. Watch the trailer and you might notice some music playing in the background. It's actually a cover by "JackonTC" of the OST song "Next to You," for none other than the anime "Parasyte" ("Kiseiju," in the original Japanese). So what?...you might think. Original art and sound assets aren't necessary to make a good game, right? Technically...yes, but
Black Tiger isn't a good game by any stretch. It has graphics comparable to a PS2 title, despite being released on the PS4. It also has audio issues, non-existent collision detection, clunky controls, and English localization text that reads as follows:
It's full of smell with blood of wolves today and the smell is stronger than a few days ago. I can't bear with it. Let's kill every wolves found.
That's just one of the less jiberish-laden examples, but believe me if it hadn't originally came out for the Android three years ago I would have given it this blog's "Engrish Award" for 2017. Another point worth noting is the Android version of this game is absolutely free, while the PSN version costs 10 USD. Horrible, I know, but even worse is the fact it's not the only game on PSN that has done this.
Horse Racing 2016 (which actually came out for the PS4 in 2017) is a dollar on google play...but...well, let's just say it goes for a bit more on PSN.
Generally speaking,
Black Tiger is considered to be one of the worst, if not
the worst game currently available on the Playstation Store. A number of people strongly believe Sony is pulling some kind of elaborate joke by curating this game. I've also seen accusations of nepotism (the developer must actually be the son of a Sony CEO or something along those lines...). The publisher is a company called "1GAMES" which, as far as I can tell, has pushed out a fair amount of trash over the years. However, I haven't been able to find any specific names attached to this particular title (perhaps for somewhat obvious reasons).
The last thing I want to mention about
Black Tiger is the reviews...particularly on Metacritic. Of course there are plenty of 0/10 scores that are fairly honest about their impressions of the game, but the real enjoyment comes from reading those 10 out of ten perfect ratings. They are, in the vast majority of cases, being deliberately sarcastic about the quality of the game to the point that it can be pretty entertaining to browse through some them and see what people wrote...at least more so than actually playing the game.
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