DJ Max is probably the best rhythm game on the PSP, but that isn’t saying much since there aren’t too many on the system. The game has been well-known for its great song selection and addictive rhythm gameplay, but after so many iterations of the same thing, people were longing for some changes, and thankfully, Portable 3 adds something new. While it may not be enough, the game tightens some of the sloppy menus and other minor issues with the long-running series.
The new model has 3.2 and 4.2 tracks. You use the analog nub on the new sidebar that has purple streams running down it. You play the middle bar as usual, but when a purple stream runs down the side, you move the analog nub accordingly. It remixes the songs, adds a new layer of depth and fun to the game, and makes it even more addictive.
If you aren’t familiar with the series, you press the corresponding button (depending on difficulty) to see the track icons running down the screen. You are scored on timing, and a percentage will pop up after each hit, telling you how accurate that note was. You will see a little meter filling up in the middle of the screen, and when it’s full, you activate your fever mode to double your multiplier. In Portable 3, you can stack these up by getting your meter up again fast enough to add on top of the multiplier. Once you finish, you are scored, and as you level up, you unlock new gear and collectibles.
Portable 3 also lets the unlocking come much quicker, and there’s more to unlock. There are more characters, gear, notes, wallpapers, videos, etc., and it’s all great. Of course, if you get bored with the arcade mode, you can unlock missions, and these have certain parameters, such as getting a certain score, hitting a certain multiplier, or breaking under a certain number of times.
DJ Max 3 is well worth the purchase for series fans and newcomers alike. There’s enough content to unlock to keep you very busy, and replaying the excellent song roster is very enjoyable. I hope to see further changes in DJMP4 because this series has lots more potential.
Valkyria Chronicles II sets you right in the middle of a war between a government and the rebels of Gallia, but what you really get into are the characters themselves and how they cope with each other. The game is set in a fictional WWII-type setting and is completely original. This turn-based strategy game can get pretty complex and is a lot to swallow at first, but after a while, you’ll get the hang of it.
The game is pretty menu-heavy, especially before deploying into missions. You can level up your classes (instead of individual characters) as well as produce weapons for each class and your tank. These are simple enough, but you have to unlock new weapons by leveling up. What disappointed me about this is that the weapon upgrades are very minimal, and it’s not until later levels that the stat boosts are large.
Once you do all this, you can rearrange your groups because each mission requires the right kind of people. There are different classes like Lancers (anti-tank), Scouts, Shocktroopers (heavy machine gunners), Engineers (medics), Armored Techs (melee), etc. You can only have six people deployed, and only five for each area. While this may be a pain since you’ll have 5 guys in one area and 1 in another, there are strategic workarounds for this. Once you start missions, you get an overhead map that shows your guys and your enemies. Killing enemies is as simple as moving them around in real-time, but each character has a different stamina meter, so watch out.
Each character uses one CP (turns), and tanks use two, so you really have to choose your moves wisely. While you’re moving around to position, enemies can shoot at you, but you can take cover behind sandbags. Killing enemies consists of getting the right amount of shots in before you reach your limit. Instead of relying on just draining HP, you have a shot limit, and when you aim at an enemy (depending on their type as well), another number will show how many shots it will take to kill that enemy. Headshots are always your best bet, but getting in close works too.
You can also find shortcuts throughout the map since most require you to move to different areas. Using a tank, you can build bridges to flank the enemy or build ladders. Once you capture an enemy camp, you can put your troops on standby and deploy them to captured camps in other areas. Be aware, though, of enemies and recapture those, which renders you unable to deploy in the new area unless you have at least one person there.
The battles can be pretty intense, but they also require perfect strategy, and it seems that most of the time only one will work. Certain missions have special requirements, like escorting, or certain players must be deployed. If you find that you need other abilities, you can retrain troops to different classes (if you’re short on one class) or change their abilities, like making a scout a sniper or a lancer a mortar. Sometimes perks will be activated on the field that do good or bad, depending on the character. If a character doesn’t like one that’s near, it’ll have a negative effect. Details like this can really help you pin down a strategy, but most others can ignore them.
Outside the battlefield, you move around campus and talk to people to progress the story, but that’s pretty much all there is to it. The game looks really good with a nice anime art style, and the voice acting is decent but not amazing. The small map size will make fans of the PS3 original angry, but it’s perfect for a portable system. The game is pretty stat-heavy and menu-heavy, and the difficulty spikes may make you actually give up altogether. I couldn’t get past the second story-based escort missions due to the insanely powerful enemies, and you have to get the strategy down perfectly or it just won’t work out. Other than this, the game is superbly fun, and with about 40 hours of gameplay, you should be kept busy.
Ghost Recon has always been a great game, and Advanced Warfighter 2 was pretty decent on the PSP, but Predator is a complete disaster. To start, the controls are simply horrendous. Games like Syphon Filter and other third-person shooters have perfected controls on the PSP, so why not just borrow from them? The thing that breaks the game is the fact that you have to press X to go into aiming mode and then press X again to walk. So this makes the game a run-and-gun shooter since it gets so frustrating that you just hold L down to strafe and shoot your way through. Even using the cover system stinks, and it just feels like a crappy hack job by Advanced Warfighter.
The enemies are as dumb as dirt, and the mission layout, along with the levels, just plain stink. The problem mainly lies in the fact that the game is like a cardboard cutout of other Recon games, even visually. Buildings, fences, and bushes all look like they were copied and pasted right into the game. The characters’s mouths don’t move when they talk, the animations only consist of a few frames, and it just feels like a low-budget first-generation PSP game.
All the Warfighter elements are here, like the diamond HUD thing, the blurring of the screen when someone’s shooting, and customizing load-outs, but it just all feels half-baked, and this just doesn’t do Ghost Recon justice. Yes, there’s a co-op, but who would you drag into this horrendous game? The game isn’t worth a playthrough unless you really need to play every Ghost game ever made, but there are better ones out there.
The LOTR franchise has been struggling in the games department since the movies came out. While there have been amazing LoTR games, the adventure games have been slacking since Return of the King. Aragorn’s Quest is a sneaky thing because it just retells the story of the movies in Aragorn’s eyes using the movie actors, and it’s kind of lame. While the movies are great, please let’s move away from them and do something original.
The combat is lackluster and pretty disappointing. You can find abilities and equip them, and these come in pretty handy for more powerful enemies. You can buy new attacks and find new weapons, armor, and bows, and these are all pretty useful. You can level up by killing enemies, but you can’t distribute the points at all. The whole RPG thing is very bare-bones, and I would have liked to see more depth here and more customization, but it’s not there.
Actually, doing the combat is boring since you just mash heavy and light attacks, and most enemies are dumb and easy to kill. You can parry and counter-attack and use your bow for far-off enemies, but it’s been done so many times before. Every enemy attacks almost the same, and while there are a few good moments, there just aren’t enough. Running around highly linear levels and hitting this switch, finding four stones to open this door, and hitting that switch is really annoying.
The game doesn’t look very good from an isometric perspective, and it doesn’t sound too hot either. The game is just boring and easy, and it drags on longer than it should. I was really looking forward to this game, but with just a few more months, this could have been something epic.
The mash-up of Disney and Final Fantasy set fanboys squealing and shook the gaming world. It was like a huge tsunami of awesomeness that no one could have predicted. Thus, the first Kingdom Hearts was born with lots of charm and character but had a lot of problems with combat and one confusing story. The second game came out and really added depth to the game and was fan-freaking-tastic. Birth by Sleep is a prequel to the first game, and you really get a lot of stuff that was answerless in the last two games. You play as Terra, Ventus, and Aqua, who are three key blade wielders trying to stop the darkness from spreading through the world and within themselves. While the story works and is a lot simpler than in past games, it never feels like it really goes anywhere and isn’t as emotional as in other games.
With that aside, the next biggest thing is combat. While it’s a lot deeper, it’s also a lot more confusing and can be daunting to understand, especially for newcomers and younger players. You have a command deck that allows you to swap out abilities, and there are a lot of them. You can eventually equip up to nine commands, but flipping through them is tedious and not so combat-friendly. Using the D-pad to flip through commands can really kill you, especially during tough boss fights. Having to move from the analog nub to the D-pad means you stand still while switching. This leaves you vulnerable and can mean life or death if you have one hit left.
You can use the shot lock command, which is like a special attack that requires focus. You go into first-person mode and lock on the target for a few seconds, and it unleashes a pretty devastating attack. Summons are no longer available; instead, they are replaced with the less spectacular D-links. As you beat worlds, Disney characters can be selected, and basically, you just have a different set of commands to choose from. Your health replenishes, but this doesn’t seem as exciting as seeing the character fight with you.
You can meld commands together and add boosts to create new commands. This can be really interesting, and you can make commands you can’t normally buy or find. Other than this, the menus are usual with character bios, documents, and whatnot, but once you get used to the menu, you will have no problems. The biggest issue with combat is the stupid camera. Relying on a camera is critical with PSP games due to the lack of a second analog nub, but this camera is stupid. Locking on seems like a good idea until the lock-on breaks for some unknown reason and you lose sight of the enemy. This is really irritating during highly intense boss fights because you lose sight of them and can walk right into their traps. The camera likes to flip-flop around constantly, and fighting enemies above you is like going down into a swirling toilet with needles stabbing your eyes. It jitters and jitters and spasms, and it feels like the game is having an epileptic fit.
Despite this, it’s manageable, and you get so used to it that you just deal with it. Exploration is still the same yawn fest, but even more so since most of the environments aren’t as active or lush as KH2. The worlds are super short, and you can get to each boss without even fighting a single enemy, but if you return, they respawn, and this is only because of the irritating amount of level grinding. No matter what you do or what level you are at, bosses can kill you in just a few hits. At level 25, I was still getting my butt kicked by a boss late into the game. This leads to each character’s story completion time of about 10 hours. The words just don’t feel as alive and exciting as in KH2, and they just seem like bite-sized samples of what they should be. There are a few original worlds that are a nice touch, but they could have made the game so much better.
There is a command-board game that is so complicated and boring that you may not even care about it. You move around a board trying to collect new commands, and it’s overly complicated, as all Square mini-games are. This is more like a mini-mind meltdown than anything else, and co-op doesn’t make it any more fun. The game’s best feature is its technical achievement, being one of the very few games that pushes the PSP to the max. You could easily mistake this game for a PS2 game, but there are some frame rate issues, and if you don’t install your data on your memory stick, you are most likely going to experience horrendous load times. The voice acting is a bit iffy, but the game looks amazing. The enemies are pretty boring and generic, and they could have been a lot better.
Overall, Birth by Sleep is a great start, and I hope this isn’t the last KH on the PSP. If they improve the game’s many flaws, we are looking at the best portable game ever made. What the game really needs is a reboot because this formula is tasting a bit stale in 2010.
I always hate to talk about casual gamers since they almost ruin everything for hardcore gamers (Kinect and Wii), and everybody always forgets about us, hardcore guys, but Sony always knows how to balance it just right (the Move is a perfect example) to please both sides (this is kind of like politics). The Hot Shots series has always been a great game for both sides because you can completely ignore stats and have fun, but also delve into them and fine-tune your game. Tennis is no exception, with a good amount of stat tracking but also just quick and fun tennis for casual gamers.
On the court, the game is fairly simple yet surprisingly deep. You can perform three different swings: slice, lob, and stroke. Using the nub or D-pad allows you to decide where the ball goes, but it’s a nice grid-type structure, so if you’re running right, the ball will go right, etc. The longer you wait to hit the ball, the more accurate your shot will be on that dot, so timing is key. Or if you just like swinging away, you can still have a good challenge. You can outsmart the players by looking at what their play style is, and you can even trick them during serves, which is always fun. Lobbing the ball will show a yellow dot, and if your opponent lobs, you have to run to that spot and hit X at just the right time, and you could get a Smash Ace.
While the game is super fun on the court, you can change attributes by selecting courts with bounce and hardness, but you can also totally ignore that and still have fun. You can collect clothes for your character, but each piece has a stat boost. If you just want to deck out your character, you can still win. Before each match, you can choose No-Ad for a quicker game, change rackets, and if you play characters long enough, they will level up and play better on the court.
What’s so great about this game is that if you just want to jump into a couple quick games, you can do so without concentrating on stats, and the game will almost play the same. Unfortunately, it doesn’t reward hardcore stat trackers too much since it does lean a little more toward the casual side. Despite all this, you are on a world tour to make everyone happy by using tennis. Not the best story, but it’s nice to see the cute characters talk it out in an open adventure format, and you can click around and find hidden items, but it’s more of a distraction than anything really.
With another person, you can really have a lot of fun, but the best part about Tennis is that it’s addictive, and you always want to keep coming back thanks to the good AI. You want to keep finding new items for your characters; you want to boost your characters as much as possible and make them the ultimate tennis swatting machine. If only the game had some sort of special power ability to make narrow wins turntables, but other than that, the game is super fun.
Hot Tunes does for Korea what Fever did for the US: deliver the popular Korean rhythm game as a “best of,” but adds nothing new to the table that Fever didn’t already provide. The only thing you will notice right off the bat is the new “Lite” 4-button mode.
DJ Max is a huge rhythm game hit in Korea that uses a DDR-type gameplay style. There is obviously no dance mat, so you have to use the face buttons, and this works out just fine. There are 4-button, 5, 6, and 8-button modes. While 4 is the easiest, 8 can be damn near impossible. You select a song for each of the four stages, and each stage has harder and harder songs.
The game has some RPG elements, such as leveling up to unlock more gear, images, songs, etc. Notes, gear (the whole box in which the notes fall), and your character can have certain attributes that earn you more exp, gold, etc. There is even a speed modifier for people who want more of a challenge or if the game is going too fast for them. This can be changed during the song or before it.
After you get a certain score on a song, you can play a harder version of that song on the same stage by pressing left or right. During play, you must hit each note when it hits the bottom. Depending on your accuracy, a percentage will appear. If you miss a note, you will break your combo, but if you fill your fever bar and use it, your combo will double for a short amount of time. You don’t just hit single notes, however; there are held notes and even “scratched notes” that require you to spin the analog stick.
Once you finish a song, you are scored on how well you performed and given a grade, some experience, and gold. Gold is used to buy more gear. There are 50 songs, and each one has a wonderfully illustrated music video that streams in the background. If you get bored with the main mode, you can complete challenges that have set goals. Reach this score, don’t break more than this many times, etc. If you really love the music in here, you can even listen to the OST or watch the videos. There are dozens of images to unlock and lots of goodies for fans to keep playing.
The game may sound perfect, but it has flaws. There are already five other DJ Max games (including Clazziqai and Black Square Edition), and this is exactly the same as those. Hot Tunes takes some of the more popular songs from those games, but it is still missing some key gems. Playing with more than four buttons will frustrate most players; there’s no way to transfer the OST to your memory stick, and you can’t transfer songs from the other versions like you can within those. If you already own Fever or have even played the other entries, you’re not missing anything with Hot Tunes, but if you’re brand new to the series, this is a great entry.
I don’t mind sexually driven games, but I like them to be good and done right. Dead or Alive Paradise is a direct port of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, which was an Xbox 360 exclusive. Everything is intact, with a few additions. One new character is added, Rio, and, as you would guess, the graphics are dumbed down as well as the gambling for some odd reason. No longer are you in a 3D casino, but you get to choose from a list of a few games such as BlackJack, slot machines, and poker, but roulette is now missing.
The whole point of the game is to play mini-games with other DoA ladies and earn their trust and friendship, and this is harder than it seems. The game plays similar to a Japanese dating sim game, and it can take forever to buy a lot of the items and learn how to become friends with these lovely ladies. You have to figure out what each lady likes, loves, and hates and send them gifts accordingly. All you get is a visual guide for each lady with pictures of what they like, but this doesn’t help much. After you spend a whole two weeks at New Zack Island, you pretty much give up trying to gain trust and friendship since it’s so hard to figure out without some in-depth guidance. After a try, you end up just playing the mini-games, ogling the scantily clad women lying around, and even dancing.
The mini-games are the most fun of the game, with pool hopping, flag running, and beach volleyball, except jet skiing and the water slide were scrapped from the game, and that’s not a good thing. Pool hopping consists of pressing the buttons according to what is shown on the floaties. This game tends to be very hard since it requires precise timing. Flag-running is pretty simple, but the best game is probably volleyball. It has tight mechanics and controls, and it can be a blast to play. After you earn enough money from playing mini-games, you can purchase a camera, take sexy photos of the ladies, and view them later in your album.
The casino is the second major part of the game that lets you really earn some bucks. All the games are pretty self-explanatory, but BlackJack is interesting since Rio is dressed in a sexy dealer outfit and spews cute sayings at you with some cute animations. Like I mentioned earlier, roulette is missing, and this was the most intense casino game in the original game, so I have no idea why it was scrapped.
The game really has no purpose except to ogle your favorite DoA girls and try to buy the skimpiest bikini for them. The graphics are pretty good for the PSP and resemble the first DoA Xtreme game for the Xbox. If you are lucky enough to have a hacked PSP with custom firmware, you can use a program called CWCheat and use the “nude” code for the game. Don’t get too excited since the girls have Barbie doll-esque bodies and the really naughty bits aren’t shown, but it does make the game that much more interesting for those lucky enough to figure this out. The audio is pretty mundane, with Japanese audio tracks to cover the horrible English voice actresses. The game isn’t serious, but it could be so much more, and I just hope DoA Xtreme 3 becomes more deep and involved. The game will make you choke your chicken, so DoA fanboys (girls?) should pick this game up and enjoy its simplicity.
Patchwork Heroes is one of those strange, quirky games that makes you really appreciate indie games. Heroes are all about strategy and are less puzzle-like, and I liked this a lot. You play as a team of kids who are hell-bent on destroying airships and scrapping them for parts. There’s really no story involved, but the cutscenes break up the levels nicely.
The main mechanic of the game is sawing parts off a 2D ship. Each ship is measured in feet at the beginning of the stage, and your goal is to cut it all off. There are obstacles on the ship, such as enemies and even prisons, that have your friends trapped. If you break them out, you can use them as bombs to blow up parts of the ship that can’t be cut by your saw, such as metal. Some enemies can patch up what you cut, so you have to distract them by cutting an area that’s not near your target and watching them fall.
You can find power-ups that let you move faster, slow downtime, etc. Once you saw off enough pieces, you can get a special power that will let you continually see up to a certain amount of time without stopping. After you sawed off almost the entire ship, you had to avoid the self-destructing bombs and saw off one final piece. While all this sounds easy, it’s kind of fun at the same time. The graphics are really charming, and the 2Dness of them brings the whole game to life.
I honestly think this is one of the best sleeper handheld hits of the year. It should have gone multi-platform on the DS and iPhone and would have done better on touch screens. Nevertheless, Patchwork Heroes is a great game to pass the time and shouldn’t be passed up.
The echo series is a very cerebral puzzle series that really is not for everyone, and echoshift is no exception. The game just makes you really think and screws with your perspective in a way that requires a lot of trial and error, and mainly memorization.
echoshift lets you directly control your echo, but this game uses a time mechanic instead of perspective. Every level is a 2D side view, and you are mainly pressing switches, walking through doors, and basically trying to find the fastest route to the exit. You get 50 seconds for your first echo to try and clear the way. Then your echo will do what you just did. This is the key element in echoshift to solve puzzles, since you can’t always solve them in 50 seconds.
Let’s say you have five sets of switches, but you can only do three in 50 seconds. There are 5 blocks on each set, and only one is the right switch. You would have your first echo solve three, then while that echo redoes what you did, you go solve the third (the final switch your last echo will press), and then you solve the last two. Confused? I don’t blame you since it takes a lot of critical thinking to get these 50 or so levels solved. You get rated on how many echos you had to use, and if you beat the level, you can go back and solve the version to find the key, which really has no purpose.
The graphics are very simple, just black and white, and all the items you interact with are in color. The game is also very slow-paced, so only the patient will find any fun in this game. Echoshift is one of those rare puzzle games that makes you think so much that your brain will explode, and I can’t stress this enough. There were times when I was too tired to think to play this game, but it gets the thinking juices flowing and can be a good exercise to get into the flow of school or any office work.
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Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.