PSP Games That Don't Suck

[Computer Gaming]

A few days I ago I posted about my disappointment in the US and Australian PSP Greatest Hits collections. It was fairly negative in tone, so I thought I'd balance it out with a list of some games that have made it to the PSP which were really quite good, actually.

* Loco Roco
I've just started playing this yesterday, and it's a bunch of fun. A quirky Japanese game that we're lucky made it across the Pacific, it's something like a cross between Katamari Damacy and Marble Madness done as a 2D platformer. You guide a round singing blob called a Loco Roco through a hallucinogen-induced landscape, eating things. Your Loco Roco mutters cutely to itself when danger or bonus items are near, and can split into several smaller Loco Rocos to navigate tight spots, or when it needs a whole chorus of voices to bust out a particularly cute song. Wierd but excellent. (If you're in Australia there's a free demo available for PSP download from the Oz PSP site.)

* Metal Gear Acid
I wasn't entirely kind to Solid Snake's first PSP outing when I posted my post-mortem of it, but it has to be said that it's still one of the most polished and original titles available on the system. Considering the relative dearth of quality gaming for the PSP, there's a lot to be said for a turn-based card-battling stealth action game with a distinctive Metal Gear flavour. You could do worse.

* Wipeout Pure
A good contender for the greatest Wipeout game ever, Wipeout Pure pretty much takes the strongest elements from the popular European hovership racing franchise and mixes them together to create, for my money, the most worthwhile PSP game available in Australia on launch day. Not only is the core game addictive, simple, and well designed, but it was followed by possibly the strongest online support of any PSP title yet, with a metric buttload of new courses, ships, skins, and music being offered for free download from the official PSP sites. High speeds, trance music and missiles combine for a game that should be on the shelf of any PSP owner.

* Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix
Why own a PS2 when you can have virtually the entirety of THUG 2 ported wholesale to your PSP without losing the graphics, levels, tight controls or gameplay? And what's more, you get new levels drawing from the Tony Hawk franchise history, and it's portable. A fantastic technical and design achievement and one of the two standout titles in demonstrating the platform's potential.

* Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
If Tony Hawk was impressive on the PSP, GTA took it a step further with an original full-length GTA game featuring graphics as good or better than the early PS2 entries in the franchise. Liberty City Stories operates as a direct prequel to GTA III, and is set in largely the same levels, but brings with it the developments and improvements in gameplay from some of the later games in the series, including costume changes, asset properties, motorbikes, and a whole swag of new side jobs ranging from trash collector to car salesman. Head and shoulders the best single game made for the PSP.

* Burnout Legends
Not to be confused with its appalling port to the DS, the PSP Burnout Legends successfully brings everything that makes Burnout good to a handheld console, including high speeds, spectacular crashes, great-looking scenery, tight controls, hundreds of unlockable cars, and satisfying multi-car takedowns. The popular Crashbreaker mode unfortunately suffers from the PSP being able to draw less cars on screen than its console cousin, but Legends makes up for it by bringing back the long absent Pursuit mode, which compliments an extensive list of other gameplay features that are dead-on perfect. It's genuinely a hard choice to choose between buying this, or Burnout: Revenge for the PS2 - so I got both. 8-)

* Lumines
Easily the puzzle game of choice for the PSP, and also one of the best puzzle games of the last two years, alongside Meteos for the DS. Lumines challenges you to arrange falling blocks that contain four squares in combinations of two colours, so as to form 2 x 2 or larger blocks of a single colour, which clear when a bar that drifts across the screen touches them. It's a simple premise that quickly grows complex when the blocks fall at different speeds, the speed of the bar changes, and the playfield grows cluttered. It's very close in a lot of ways to Tetris, and yet it remains fresh and exciting. The soundtrack is excellent too - it's very true to call Lumines a music-themed game, as the aural score mutates and changes to reflect your performance and progress.

Now, that's only six games. I should say I do have Tokobot, Tales of Eternia and Popolocrois sitting on my shelf, and there's every indication I'm going to enjoy them, but I haven't played them yet. Assuming I like them all, that brings us up to a total of 9. It's still not a good record of games for the PSP, when I could easily name twice that number for the DS, but at least if you've already made your handheld purchase and are casting around for something to do with it, you might get some inspiration that doesn't involve bricks or pawn shops. Good luck!