Online PSP Video Game Reviews

Rugby League Challenge PSP Game Review

2009-10-09T23:31:00.002+08:00

Rugby League Challenge PSP Game Review - games have been few and far between over the past couple of years. Fans of the sport basked in the glory of 2005's Rugby League 2 on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 consoles, but the franchise's lack of an update has left fans clamouring for more since its release. It's disappointing, then, that the latest effort to bring the sport to consoles is such a poor one, mixing dodgy AI, shallow gameplay, a lack of multiplayer support, and dud production values.

At face value, the game ticks all the right boxes. It features the complete licensed 2009 player rosters for the 16 National Rugby League teams, and 14 teams in the UK Engage Rugby League competitions. It offers both quick matches and full season mode. It also gives players the chance to take on the role of player and coach as you steer your side toward victory on and off the field. Unfortunately, the latter claim falls well short, and coaching is limited to doling out in-game training dollars before each round to upgrade the stats of your players. There's no player fitness or match form to manage here, and because there's no carry-over penalty system, you'll never worry about having to front for the tribunal for repeat tackle offenses.

Player attributes are split into eight categories: strength, speed, accuracy, stamina, kick, tackle, pass, and handling. At the easiest of the three difficulty settings, your players will start the season with many of their skills already well established. This means only minor improvements to their performance need to be made over the course of the year as you devote money to training them. Pumping up the speed and stamina of your players is the best way to allocate your training cash and allows players a burst of energy as you cut through the opposition's defensive line. Raising their stamina level will allow them to prolong their sprint. Though it may not necessarily be your first thought, cranking up the pace of your front-rowers will yield unexpected results. Though the sprint function doesn't always kick in with the button press as it should (despite depleting your stamina bar), once it does, heavy forwards will sometimes outpace lighter and faster wingers and halfbacks.

Football is as much about the facts and figures as it is about kicking the ball around on the grass. The game tracks your team's wins, losses, points for/against, and goal difference, as well as displays the information before each match. Unfortunately, there's no way to view or compare the performance of individual players. It's disappointing given your involvement in training individuals to preen their best results. Likewise, once you've completed the season, there's no way to replay a game, relive the thrill of the grand final match, or continue developing your team's skills. Starting a new season will reset your player stats, and you'll be forced to build them up from scratch. There's also no multiplayer offering to be found here, which is a disappointing omission given the clear potential for head-to-head matches with friends over the PSP's wireless networking.

When you play on the easy difficulty, there's very little strategy required. After receiving the ball, you can usually run straight-ahead without the need to fend off CPU players. Sprinting through small holes in defence will often see tacklers run into their own teammates, fall over, or run parallel alongside you without intercepting. Dummy half-defenders seldom tackle, and it's not uncommon to see score lines in the three-digit range. Your team is smart enough to tackle even if you don't, but the self-destructive CPU will usually mess things up, running the ball on the fifth tackle rather than kicking or passing back to a marked player on its team. This occurs even when it has a clean pair of heels and simply needs to cross the line to ground the ball.

Conversions are as simple as lining up your shot with an onscreen arrow and stopping the power meter at the appropriate point. There's no wind or ball swing to worry about, and even from the sideline, you'll kick dead straight through the sticks. Medium and hard difficulty modes are significantly more challenging and see the CPU tackling earlier, which requires you to pass the ball around. Medium difficulty offers the least offensive combination of AI defensive aggression and offensive ball play, but it's still common to see your opponents turn the ball over all too easily or throw away try-scoring opportunities. At the hard difficulty, you'll face strong, early tackles and spend most of your time struggling to get into the opposition's half to avoid handling errors from your own players. Fumbles from low-handling skill levels often result in conceded points.

The game camera follows the ball rather than the player and means you'll often be running blind as you attempt to scoop up your cheeky chip to ground it over the line. Penalty kicks for touch from the centre of the field mean you won't be able to see where you're kicking most of the time, and while there are a handful of camera presets to cycle through, you'll need to go with the real time strategy-style top-down view to see your whole team at once.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 PSP Game Review

2009-10-06T19:18:00.001+08:00

Marvel Alliance 2 PSP Game, an action/role-playing sequel set in the Marvel comics universe, starts with a good foundation: the excellent Civil War storyline. This storyline provides a fitting backdrop for what could have been an all-star, superpowered frolic, but the unfortunate reality is an unfinished and poorly designed button masher. The action is awkward, the level design is messy and uninspired, and the minimal dialogue and major technical problems denigrate the source material. Furthermore, the PSP version of the game has jettisoned all cooperative multiplayer options, forcing you to team up with the awful artificial intelligence in lieu of your friends. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 represents a step backward in every conceivable way and is unworthy of its illustrious license.

Nevertheless, there are some points of light twinkling in the murk that mainly come from the source material bringing the fabled heroes together. The story is based on two well-known Marvel storylines: Secret War and Civil War. A number of excellent prerendered cutscenes bring the imaginative plot to life and, more importantly, force you to make an important choice a short ways into the game. You see, our bastions of justice are split into two camps over a newly established law coercing superheroes into officially registering with the US government. Your decision impacts how the middle portion plays and which heroes from the sizeable roster you can include in your team of four before the two branching paths meet again for the final act. The divergent story is a great idea and, in theory, should provide a good reason to return for a second round to see what you missed if you were to have chosen differently. However, this bifurcated story is diminished by simplistic storytelling that fails to involve you with its characters. The thoughtful plot is thinned out by shockingly few (and sparsely written) character conversations in between missions--none of which involve multiple dialogue options, let alone divergent ones.

The first half hour of the game introduces you to all you'll need to know to get you through the missions. From an isometric camera view, you lead a team of four Marvel stars through hordes of expendable henchmen, occasionally taking detours to perform simple tasks or solve puzzles. You lead one character at a time while the other three are controlled by the AI, though you can easily switch to other characters on your team in an instant. By hammering on buttons, you string standard attacks into combos that might trip or stun your foes. Each hero can eventually perform four different superpowers, and depending on your hero, you can jump, double jump, fly, or even teleport. Unfortunately, the AI-controlled heroes are a real drag on the proceedings. They often stand around doing nothing in the midst of big fights and boss battles, so you may find yourself screaming at the Incredible Hulk to stop talking about smashing and actually do it. In a boss fight in which you must destroy a particular object within a time limit, the AI's refusal to help out is even more infuriating. The AI characters also have a habit of huddling close to you and fencing you into corners while you traverse the tight, cluttered hallways as if villain-stomping were an excuse for team bonding. At least in other versions of the game, you can ease the frustration by inviting friends to join you. The PSP version, which is essentially the same game released for the Wii, does not support cooperative play of any kind. The original game featured both ad-hoc and infrastructure multiplayer progression; the sequel forces you to deal with weak digital substitutes. There's absolutely no excuse for such a major loss.

Perhaps awkward clumps of heroes without regard for personal boundaries would be easier to handle if the levels were accommodating, but alas, you spend a good amount of time walking down narrow, flavorless corridors and encountering poorly placed clusters of enemies prepared to take advantage of your team's greatest weakness: a bad camera. It's bad enough that it will nauseatingly swoop around to give you a completely different view of the action than you need, but it has an even worse habit of positioning itself just above doorways where a cluster of collaborators will be waiting to deliver a beatdown. As if to give you a fancy cinematic view, there are a few sequences in which you watch the action from the side, but most of these occasions don't work out. In one case, you view through a series of windows broken up by slats, so you can't even see the action that well. Furthermore, the game's low frame rate drops even further during these sections, which breaks up the flow and destroys any visual appeal that may have been gleaned. It seems that the camera was created to handle large, open-air environments--but Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 doesn't feature any. Even the city-street levels--the largest in the game--suffer from these issues.

The action isn't all bad, but it isn't good either. At its simplest, the button mashing, superpower-infused mayhem has a basic appeal. Yet Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 seems to go out of its way to diminish the sense of flow and might that its combat should instill. The frame rate is consistently low and the animations are choppy, which in turn translates to lag in the controls. When pressing an attack button, your character may not respond immediately, and this delay sucks the immediacy out of the combat. The more action that occurs on the screen, the less in control you feel. It's like playing an online RPG with lag: Everything becomes herky-jerky and characters look like they are teleporting around. When camera issues are thrown into the mix, the awkwardness of it all is overwhelming. These frustrations culminate in the game's bonus missions. If you want to expand your roster and add unlockable characters to your team, you have to take on these scenarios. It's too bad you don't unlock characters as you play the campaign (as in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game) because these missions are a hassle and therefore not worth the trouble. For example, to unlock Jean Grey, you have to perform a solo mission in which you must destroy a bunch of vehicles by telekinetically flinging self-destructing enemies at them. But this mission is the opposite of fun. The suicidal foes get stuck on objects and spawn in too few locations; when these issues are combined with the ungainly camera, your annoyance levels rise.

This sequel introduces a new type of skill: fusions. These two-character attacks do an extra amount of damage, and some of them light up the screen with vibrant special effects. But they aren't much fun to perform, they suffer from the same clumsy animations as the main action, and they are hampered by clumsy features. You must build up a fusion energy meter, indicated on the screen by stars. Once you reach four stars, you can unleash a fusion by holding the L button and using the D pad to choose the hero you want fused with your active character. Oddly, the revival of fallen characters is also tied to the fusion stars. Unless an enemy drops a fusion token, which immediately grants you four stars, your meter is slow to build. Reviving a downed character uses up a star, which prolongs the wait. And, those tokens have a bad habit of appearing where they're hardest to get to--in the middle of multicharacter melees. It's odd, too, that the bright visual eruptions caused by fusions aren't accompanied by energetic audio effects. They sound feeble, which makes performing them less than exciting.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

Gran Turismo PSP Game Review

2009-10-02T22:28:00.004+08:00

The Gran Turismo PSP Game is developed by Polyphony Digital and produced by Kazunori Yamauchi.

More than five years and a couple of title changes after it was announced, Gran Turismo has finally arrived on the PSP. The first handheld iteration of "the real driving simulator" isn't as fully featured as some of its predecessors, and the lack of a structured Career mode is particularly unfortunate. However, with over 800 realistically handling cars of all kinds to put through their paces on 35 impressively varied tracks, an engaging Challenge mode, and some decent multiplayer options, there's certainly no shortage of quality content.

In the absence of a Career mode, much of your time with Gran Turismo is spent setting up and competing in your own one-off events. All of the impressively varied tracks are available from the get-go, but you start with only one car in your collection, so job one is to make some money for automobile acquisition. Prize money is awarded for podium positions in any race that you care to create, and given that there only a measly four cars competing, it's rarely difficult to finish in the top three. The easiest way for you build up your bank balance early on, though, is to spend some time in the Challenge mode.

Much like the license tests in older Gran Turismo games, challenges include everything from driving around a single corner to overtaking multiple opponents while navigating a treacherous series of "S" bends. Many of these challenges double as instructional sessions that will improve your race craft not only in Gran Turismo, but also in any racing game to which real-life racing theory can be applied. It's an incredibly humbling experience to race around a hairpin and be told that in the space of just one turn, you're two whole seconds slower than you should be, but with practice (and some help from a racing line and braking zone indicator that's superimposed on the asphalt), you can shave those seconds off. Unlike some of its predecessors' similar offerings, most of Gran Turismo's challenges are easy to beat at the speed required to earn a bronze trophy. If you want to earn gold trophies and the significantly larger prize moneys attached to them, though, you're in for a much more challenging ride.

Improving your driving skills and earning prize money along the way are pretty good incentives for playing through the Challenge mode, which is just as well because other tangible rewards are sadly few and far between. Early on, you can unlock a customizable soundtrack feature that lets you listen to MP3s while you play, but beyond that and a great-looking ending movie (that's also a trailer for GT5) that you can rewatch at any time, your only reward for beating challenges is access to more challenges. It's neat that some of the bonus challenges afford you time at the controls of cars you might otherwise miss out on or overlook, but it's still no substitute for a full-fledged Career mode.

With some money in the bank, you'll no doubt be eager to put it to work by adding some cars to your collection. Selecting the "Dealerships" option from the main menu, you might initially be surprised to find that only four manufacturers are represented and that none of them ever have more than 10 cars in stock simultaneously. Don't worry, though, there are plenty more where those came from; it's just that different manufacturers rotate in and out randomly as you spend time playing, and their stock changes. It's tough having to wait for your favorite dealer to show up, especially if you've already seen it once but didn't have enough money for the car that you wanted at the time. However, this limited access to cars actually makes the collection aspect much more compelling. If you're impatient, you might spend your money on cars that you wouldn't have looked twice at had your dream car been available. If you have no problem waiting for your dream car to show up, you'll appreciate it all the more when you finally get your hands on it. Either way, you're a winner, and if you choose to share your collection with friends, they'll be winners too.

Every car in Gran Turismo is eligible either for sharing or for trade, and the former option lets you give cars to your friends without losing them from your own collection. Not all cars can be shared in this way, and those that can't--which tend to be those that are rare collector's items in real life--can only be traded on a one-for-one basis. When you and your friends aren't busily exchanging rides, you'll find that silky smooth multiplayer races for up to four players are generally more entertaining than those in single-player. AI drivers, who can be used to make the numbers up in multiplayer races if you wish, don't put up much of a fight early on, but as you prove yourself on certain tracks, you earn the right to face more competitive AI drivers. You also improve the performance of your own AI driver who, should you need to put your PSP down in the middle of an ad hoc race for some reason, will fill in for you the moment you push the start button.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

PSP Game Review: Buzz! Brain Bender

2009-02-03T09:43:00.009+08:00

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Sony's jumping on late to the brain-exercising bandwagon with Buzz Brain Bender for the PSP, its first stab at the genre made popular by the ever-smiling Dr Kawashima on the Nintendo DS. Brain Bender doesn't tread any new ground, but it does feature a series of well-presented puzzles with adjustable difficulties that should present a challenge for most craniums. It won't make you any smarter, but it can be a fun and interesting distraction.

Like its peers, Brain Bender features a series of puzzles that its creators say can help improve your mental agility (but in all likeliness it will probably just improve your skills at performing the puzzles contained within the game). In this case, the 16 included puzzles are broken up into four categories that test your observation, memory, analysis, and mathematical skills. All of the puzzles are presented in a multiple-choice format, with up to four possible answers to a problem mapped to the PSP's face buttons. You're scored on how many questions you get right after a set time limit, with the game charting your progress with each match.

Like other games in this genre, Brain Bender challenges you to improve your mental might over time. In addition to doing the individual puzzles, you can take a test that is made up of four random challenges that are then tallied into an overall score. From this, the game compares your results to a piece of electrical equipment (such as a toaster or remote-controlled car) in a pretty lame analogy of how much brain power you're pumping out. Unfortunately, the whole raison d'etre of a game like Brain Bender--that is, to test how well your mental agility improves over time--is hamstrung by the fact that it lets you test yourself as many times as you want each day. While other games in the genre limit your testing to once per day (which gives you a good indicator of progress as well as a reason to keep coming back), being able to test at any time devalues the results as, frankly, it doesn't feel as important.

There's some variety to be found in Brain Bender's puzzles, ranging from simple plus/minus equations to more complex pattern-recognition challenges. Some are quite taxing; for example, Shape Count asks you to quickly tally up the number of overlapping squares and triangles in an image, whereas Puzzle Pieces is a visual recognition task in which you have to identify which small jigsaw piece belongs in a larger image. Even if you fancy yourself as something of a mental maestro, Brain Bender features three difficulty levels for each game, so you should find a decent amount of challenge.

Going through 16 puzzles obviously isn't going to take you very long, but Brain Bender does have some tricks up its sleeves to keep you coming back. The varying difficulty levels certainly stretch out the experience, and Brain Bender includes its own set of achievements for completists to attempt. There are also 15 challenge levels that are unlocked as you play, with gameplay variations such as trying to get as many right answers as possible in a four-minute multipuzzle marathon or going for the longest streak of correct answers.

While Brain Bender can't be faulted for trying to stretch out its gameplay experience, it suffers from the same problem all games in this genre share--that is, any fun you're going to have here is all dependent on how fastidious an intellectual exerciser you are. You really need to be interested in your own mental progress to come back day after day, and even if you are, most of the puzzle types in Brain Bender just aren't interesting enough to propel it ahead of other games in the genre.

Brain Bender's puzzles are presented in a simple yet colourful manner, and it's generally pleasing to the eye. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the game's host. Virtual celebrity Buzz makes the leap from Sony's gameshow titles, and he's just as annoying and grating here. The only saving grace is that you can skip most of Buzz's introductions to the various puzzles with the press of a button.

Buzz aside, Brain Bender is a decent entry into the genre for Sony, although it doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from its peers. Nevertheless, if you're looking for a mental workout on the PSP, then Brain Bender definitely has the capacity to stretch your synapses.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

PSP Game Review: Star Ocean: First Departure

2009-01-24T00:33:00.006+08:00

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Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 features a couple of new game modes, but things are still largely unchanged in Konami's football franchise.

Star Ocean: First Departure is an enhanced remake of Star Ocean, the original Super Famicom classic and progenitor of Tri-Ace's most renowned franchise. The game has received several graphical improvements for its Western debut, highlighted by impressive anime cutscenes courtesy of the popular anime-house, Production I.G. It retains the hallmarks of the series, including a fast-paced, real-time battle system and a highly robust crafting element. But it soon deteriorates into empty button-mashing combat and a ton of tedious backtracking vaguely related to a narrow, mediocre plot. Pretty cutscenes and crafting simply cannot mask its overall shallowness.

The game opens on the primitive planet Roak, where a disease is turning people to stone. Roddick, a simple country guard, is searching for a cure but so far has come up short. Soon, however, he is joined by two Earthlings who transport him into the past with the hope of obtaining a vaccine. The overall plot is quite bland, with almost no side quests, but it is accentuated by brief character dialogues called "private action scenes" intended to add depth and intrigue. Unfortunately, this leads to roaming cities in search of new scenes, which may occasionally help you unlock party members, but are rarely informative or useful.

The bulk of the gameplay occurs on an almost barren 3D world map, where you use an improved onscreen minimap with a convenient zoom feature to locate castles and villages. Battles are random and utilize a very quick, real-time battle system in which you control the party leader while the competent AI manages your teammates. The system allows for precise strategic control by enabling you to set party tactics either across the board or individually, and as is customary with the series, you're free to switch between party members even midfight for more direct intervention. You can now roam the battlefield to dodge attacks or switch targets, which is a great improvement that more closely links the game to the rest of the series.

Though the battle system has finally joined the 21st century, it quickly grows wearisome because of the game's barebones three-hit combos, lack of enemy variety, and limited skill slots that restrict your melee leader to two special attacks. Little to no strategy is involved even for boss fights, and while some enemies exhibit elemental weaknesses, they rarely impact skill or spell usage. This results in a lot of monotonous button mashing. You may also find it difficult to outmaneuver or block attacks, which is especially irritating when you're being pummeled from all sides and the targeting reticle is locked bouncing between foes.

When you're tired of battling enemies, you may enjoy exploring the comprehensive skill system and crafting options, which provide nearly all of the game's depth. Skill points, which are acquired by leveling, can be spent on skills to learn special abilities once you've mastered them in the right combination. For example, in order to master art, you need to distribute skill points into both aesthetics and sketching. There are numerous abilities for you to unlock, including item appraisal, crafting, and cooking. These should please item collectors, but unlocking them is largely an unnecessary, time-consuming venture given the ease with which you require money and items. You'll probably find it more useful to spend skill points to directly modify character stats for greater character customization or to enhance combat by unlocking special battle abilities that ignore enemy defense, decrease casting time, and the like. A final set of skills exists for additional tweaking, called specialties and super specialties, which activate unique skills that adjust experience or skill points earned in battle.

Star Ocean's most disappointing aspect is that it feels devoid of everything except random battles and an optional crafting system. There aren't that many villages to explore and even fewer quests. There are few full dungeons to complete as well, and those that you are given are easy to navigate. In fact, there's not much for you to do other than shop and enjoy pretty cutscenes. Tri-Ace compensates for this lack of "stuff" by requiring frequent backtracking, which usually culminates in another cutscene that orders you straight back to where you came from--on the other side of the world. There is a port system that will normally take you to a sister port on another continent, but the majority of travel is done on foot between landlocked villages. This frequent backtracking is accompanied by pointless random battles against foes you defeated 20 levels ago and combines with slightly overpowered casters to make the game so easy that you can often set the PSP aside to let your party members do all the work for you.

Every element of the presentation has been significantly updated, beginning with the inclusion of Production I.G.'s beautiful, vibrantly colored anime cutscenes that are so striking it's confusing as to why they're so rarely utilized. Full dialogue voicing complements these sequences and is rarely annoying except during battles, when characters tend to scream out their attacks as they spam them. Character sprites are now more colorful, and the sharp, prerendered environments that are the game's most obvious visual improvement are highly detailed. However, you may now find it difficult to locate the proper entrances and exists because they tend to blend in with the walls. Battle environments are 3D, but they are just as bland as the world map, although spell effects and special abilities are quite flashy, enlivening any fight. Music is very reminiscent of the Super Nintendo era and usually consists of charming melodies that provide a good exploration backdrop.

You should finish the main quest line within 20 hours, which is normally a healthy range for portable RPGs, but in this case, you'll spend the majority of your play time watching cutscenes, backtracking, or demolishing vastly underpowered foes by mashing the action button. The intensity does increase after you reach the epilogue, where a second quest and a bonus dungeon open up. However, it's a short segment and a shame that the gameplay is such a breeze until the end. Unlocking new characters or crafting extends the game a bit, but the crafting is rather useless considering that everything is cheap and it's so easy to make money.

Star Ocean: First Departure offers good fanfare with stunning anime sequences and a fresh look. However, it's also padded with backtracking, crafting, and cutscene dialogue that hide its sparse dungeons, as well as its quests. There are simply too many better RPGs on the market that offer pretty visuals and depth to broaden Star Ocean's appeal.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

PSP Game Review: Pro Evolution Soccer 2009

2009-01-22T20:38:00.005+08:00

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Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 features a couple of new game modes, but things are still largely unchanged in Konami's football franchise.

Pro Evolution Soccer has become an established franchise on the PSP, and the 2009 version is the fifth for the console. This year's edition makes a few new additions, including the new Become a Legend mode, online play, and a soundtrack that doesn't make you cringe. But with outdated visuals, as well as an absence of licensed clubs and leagues, there's still plenty of room for improvement.

The gameplay in PES 2009 remains largely unchanged from last year, but matches are still challenging and fun to play, and the controls are still intuitive and responsive. It's easy to link passes and moves using the face buttons, but tricks are awkwardly performed by double-tapping the shoulder buttons. Matches feel fluid; you can easily pass and cross the ball to teammates, setting up some spectacular goals in the process. You'll need to keep an eye on Pro Evo's always-challenging AI, which is constantly looking for opportunities to snatch the ball from you, and this makes scoring goals all the more rewarding. There are plenty of game modes packed onto the UMD, with Exhibitions, Leagues, Regional Cups, a World Tour and the Master League all vying for your attention. The latter allows you to take control of your team's management as you play all of the league and cup matches a real team would play. The only really disappointing game mode is Training, which offers no tutorials to provide tips to Pro Evo newcomers; just the opportunity to hone tricks without hassle from opposition players.

Become a Legend is a brand new mode for this year's game, which shifts your focus from controlling an entire team to just one individual player. You take a fresh-faced teen from obscurity to the international spotlight as you work your way up from a minor team through to a professional club, international stardom, and eventually retirement. You can customise player attributes for your virtual self, including name, appearance, footedness, and you can even choose from more than 70 different goal celebrations. On the pitch, the camera focuses on your single player, while the rest of the team is controlled by the AI.

Ultimately, Become a Legend is a novel but dull take on Pro Evolution Soccer. At the start of your career, you can spend a considerable amount of time on the bench, and while you can speed up the game when spectating, it's still a boring process. Once your team's had some on-field success, you'll be able to move to more impressive clubs, but you're not rewarded for being a team player by performing passes and making tackles. The result is that much of your success comes down to the effectiveness of your AI teammates, which makes for an unrewarding experience.

PES 2009 features online play for the first time, pitting you one-on-one against players from around the world. This is a welcome addition, because playing real people is certainly more rewarding than playing against an AI opponent. However, with occasional lag and an archaic registration system that makes you type in your login credentials every time you play, it can be a frustrating experience. If you find a decent connection, then online gameplay can offer the same enjoyable feel and experience as local multiplayer, but with only five- or 10-minute exhibition matches on offer, it's a basic mode that offers little in the way of longevity.

While the Dutch, French, and Italian leagues appear in full this year, Liverpool and Manchester United are the only officially licensed Premier League teams. The rest of England's top leagues are stuck with generic regional names. For example, Tottenham Hotspur is back to being named North East London, despite making a brief licensed appearance in last year's edition. The Scottish Premier League suffers even greater indignity, with only Celtic and Rangers present in licensed form and only as extra teams to be added to custom leagues. Other popular leagues, including the German Bundesliga, USA's Major League Soccer, and Australia's A-League, are completely missing. It's also a shame that Konami's much-touted Champions League licence hasn't made it to the PSP.

Pro Evo 2009 isn't an ugly game, but the player models and animations are starting to look a bit dated. The character animations lack fluidity and variation. Although players are easy to control, they certainly don't look realistic. The main menu has received a pop-art facelift this year, but the pregame menus and in-game displays look stale. Thankfully, the pervasive menu advertising from PES 2008 is gone. While there are regular advertising billboards around the pitch, they're not obtrusive and fit the setting. The soundtrack has also undergone an overhaul, replacing the J-pop numbers of PES 2008 with a mix of alt-rock and pop, which suits the tone of the game.

At its core, Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 doesn't deviate from previous entries in the series, and while there are new game modes this year, they don't offer a compelling reason to upgrade. The new online mode, while shallow, is still fun to play, and the Become a Legend mode is a novel but boring take on the standard game. This is still an enjoyable football experience at heart, but it's only for those willing to look past the game's flaws.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

PSP Game Review: Midnight Club, LA Remix

2009-01-21T22:48:00.006+08:00

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Almost as much an RPG as it is a racer, Midnight Club: LA Remix would be a very good addition to any patient car nut's portable library.

The last PSP version of Midnight Club, Dub Edition, was plagued with frame rate problems, insanely long load times, and hammy acting during its crummy story bits. The only issue that remains in its newly released sequel, LA Remix, is the duration of the loading screens. Actually, there are still some over-the-top trash-talking and too-extreme-for-you characters, but the thin story serves its purpose to motivate you to demolish the competition. With its big list of varied vehicles, a substantially sized city, and great visuals, Midnight Club: LA Remix is a surprisingly dense PSP game. Remix is packed to the brim with hours of intensely fast racing as well as addictive aesthetic and performance upgrades, making for a well-rounded racing experience. Its crushing difficulty will have you agonizingly restarting races during anything tougher than the easy-rank challenges as you arduously advance through a slow career--but even that won't deter you from having a good time behind the portable wheel.

Intricate shortcuts litter the metropolitan playground and you'll be forced to find and exploit them to get ahead of the overly talented competition. Whether you're sprinting to reach a goal or doing laps around the city center you'll immediately notice that the AI competitors are a tough crowd. Opposition suddenly becomes violently aggressive when you graduate beyond the easy-class matches, forcing you to restart races at a constant and aggravating rate. Though you can easily be smashed off course and into a wall by the annoying trash-talkers that burn past you, they will barely budge when nudged, slammed, or grinded against. It's almost as if they are immovable on a preset course. Blasting by the competition at almost 200 miles per hour after a turbo boost or drafting an opponent's rear-end slipstream to finish first is an immensely satisfying feeling, though it rarely happens without you limping through the city in a dozen tries as you attempt to figure out the critical path to the finish line.

In spite of this punishing career challenge, Midnight Club: LA Remix is ridiculously fun. Tearing across cities, launching over freeways, and drifting through tightly woven Los Angeles traffic is surprisingly exhilarating on a portable screen. The sense of speed, heightened by a subtle screen shake, makes for intense and exaggerated driving with surprisingly tight vehicle controls on the PSP's analog nub. And whether you're rotating in midair or dipping between lanes on two wheels, you'll find that you're almost always able to navigate your ride exactly as you intend.

When you're not in the middle of one of the high-octane races you'll be navigating the shrunken version of Los Angeles in a free-roaming mode in search of new events or rival racers. When you approach one of them, flashing your headlights with the D pad initiates the race, or a minigame-like race to the starting line that can earn you a little bit of reputation before the real deal kicks off. The reputation, or rep, is very similar to a role-playing game's experience system. Each win earns you a certain amount of experience with increased difficulty yielding more rep as you build up your name as one of LA's finest racers. Once you've earned a ridiculous amount of rep, you can take a trip to Tokyo for an entirely new layout with all the same fun and frustrations. Since you're earning so few rep points at a time, however, you might start to feel like LA Remix is a little too like an RPG at times. Though it never stops being fun, the repetition of driving the same routes in the city's racetracks begins to irk as you grind your way to a better rep with repeated matches. It's a slow burn, but you'll feel the reward when you unlock delivery or payback missions to break up the standard competition.

Vehicular customization is also a rewarding process, and it's where Midnight Club shines. Pining over which hood would look best with your brand-new Camaro concept car is something you wouldn't expect to have such a profound effect on you, but detailing your vehicle with personalized parts and paint jobs allows for incredible aesthetic tailoring. While it's not quite as deep, performance customization offers an incentive to save some of your earned scratch to drop on better engines or exhaust instead of patterned paint jobs and side skirts with boosts in acceleration and handling to help you in your rep-race to the top.

You'll definitely see advancement in your own skill as you progress, but it seems to do little against the previously mentioned crushing AI. You'll find yourself relying on your vehicle's special abilities and power-ups when you're in a tight squeeze: slowing down time with the Zone ability allows you to focus on sharp turns or slaloming between pedestrian traffic, while Roar sees you blasting traffic out of the way with a deep pound and Agro allows you to simply smash through it without consequence. More special abilities like the vehicle-launching Pulse or slick-controlling Ice are available during the four-player competitive ad hoc multiplayer. You can take any of your 58 tightly tuned cars or bikes against a few friends in standard races as well as a few other unique game types: Capture the Flag is full of ramming and slamming as you try to steal the flag marker from your opponents to score points; Paint is a trial of checkpoints as you try and paint the city in your colors before the clock runs out; and Tag is exactly as you remember it on the playground--except you're T-boning and fishtailing opponents' rides instead of tapping their shoulder.

Midnight Club: LA Remix is an extensive game with loads to offer, but the difficulty might hamper your experience. You'll spend plenty of time retrying and redoing races as you attempt to rack up your rep, but the grinding rarely becomes a problem because you're enjoying the intensity of kicking off of ramps for crazy hang time, drifting around tight bends with the help of automotive super powers, and creaming your pals in the crash-heavy multiplayer modes. As one of the better-looking and best-controlling PSP racing games on the market, LA Remix is a must-play for portable racing pros thanks to the variety of game modes, substance of the city, and a mess of great customizable rides.

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2009-01-20T21:27:00.002+08:00

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PSP Game Review: Neverland Card Battles

2009-01-18T20:32:00.007+08:00

Neverland Card Battles gets off to a poor start and goes downhill from there.

Turn-based strategy and collectible-card gaming collide in Neverland Card Battles, the latest release in the little-known Cardinal Arc franchise from Japan. And when we say "collide," we mean it, because this strategy-card hybrid is awfully close to a train wreck. Breaking out a regular deck of cards for some 52 Pick-Up is a better use of your spare time than firing up this exercise in frustration, which is afflicted with an obtuse tutorial, brutal difficulty, tedious gameplay, and eight-bit visuals.

Even with all those negatives, Neverland Card Battles could have been a contender. Developer Idea Factory certainly starts from an interesting place. The single-player campaign's backstory (there is also a storyless ad-hoc multiplayer mode) is based on tales told in the Japanese anime-influenced Neverland universe, which gives the game something of an exotic vibe from the very beginning. You play Galahad, a human gambler blessed with the ownership of a pack of magical Spectral Cards, shards of a gate that imprisons the evil god Hellgaia, who wants to destroy humanity. Given that this gate is in the process of breaking down, you are summoned to do battle by Egma, the leprechaun-like teen guardian of the gods, with the survival of the entire world of Neverland at stake. Or so it seems. Making sense of the story developed here relies on you already knowing something about the world on which everything is based, and we don't, so some of the finer details may be a bit off-kilter.

Game mechanics are also mildly innovative. Play is based on an oddly fitting mishmash of the classic board game Othello and traditional collectible-card gaming in the style of Magic: The Gathering. Instead of building decks and throwing down cards in straightforward duels, you earn the points needed to play cards by taking control of spaces in checkerboard battle arenas. In each turn, you move both your hero Galahad and any summoned allies to change the color of the board and thereby gain more card-playing power. The idea is of course to take control of more boxes than your opponent and use the points earned to play and maintain the most formidable card army on the board. Combat itself plays out in a fairly conventional fashion for a collectible-card game, with each card representing warriors, mages, monsters, and spell effects. All have various special attributes: stats such as hit points and attack damage, costs for use and maintenance, and so forth. As with every other card-based game out there, battles involve a mix of strategy and luck. You need good fortune when drawing cards and solid tactical thinking when it comes to determining the right time to play them.

Sound simple? It sort of is, although Neverland Card Battles sure doesn't take it easy on you. The tutorial is more of a sample battle than an actual primer on how to play the game. Your supposed teacher, Egma, tosses off a couple of brief comments about the fundamentals of play, but then simply settles in to a duel that is awfully tough for a novice to win. No actual tips are provided regarding card selection, movement strategy, when to play specific cards, or even how to move. You're just stranded in the middle of a match and have to figure out what to do by watching your opponent's moves. Expect to lose this opening "tutorial" battle a couple of times while figuring things out. You can't skip this fight, either, because the campaign isn't unlocked until you emerge from it with a victory. Even a draw isn't good enough.

Things don't get any easier when you progress to the actual campaign. Battles are extremely tough, considering that you have to face a computer-controlled opponent that not only knows the deck inside and out, but also seems to get some incredibly favorable draws while you get stuck with underpowered crap that you don't want to play or overpowered crap that you can't afford to play. The learning curve levels off somewhat as you move through the dozen or so matches, but it still takes many hours before you learn the deck well enough to feel like you're on a level playing field. The game's checkerboard battlefields tend to be huge, too, which drags out the frustration early on because it takes so long to stumble through each match. Even after you've mostly sussed everything out, the big maps still put too much territory between you and your enemies when duels begin. Limiting you to drawing just a single card per turn throughout games, even when you're down to holding one card in your hand, also slows everything to a crawl. Almost all of these irritants would have been avoided with a more thorough and comprehensive tutorial, which could have at least explained the card limitation and the strategy that you might employ when starting at such a long distance from your opponent. It's hard to imagine why the developers didn't make more of an effort here. A proper walkthrough of the deck and the strategic concepts behind play is sorely needed, especially for those without collectible-card-game experience.

You don't need to have any experience with other collectible-card games to know that this one is ugly. Aside from the close-ups of the oft-beautiful card art displayed when you go into battle or pull up a card to check its numbers, everything here is blurry. The battle visuals are so rough and indistinct that it is just about impossible to tell one summoned creature from another; they're all little more than colored blobs on a checkerboard. Dueling screens are even worse, with slightly larger blobs duking it out via simplistic animations that you would normally need a time machine to see in this day and age. Audio is similarly old-timey. The soundtrack is the same old triumphal ode that has been featured in games going back to the Sega Genesis, and the voice acting is the standard sub-Saturday-morning-cartoon junk depressingly common to anything inspired by anime. Vocals are at least unintentionally hilarious at times, especially when characters start yelling in the middle of sentences for no reason whatsoever.

A sense of promise wasted is what lingers after giving up on Neverland Card Battles. Combining turn-based strategy with card-based combat is certainly an intriguing concept, but a series of terrible design decisions blows any opportunity of blending these concepts into a successful game.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

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2009-01-18T18:54:00.013+08:00

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PSP Game Review: LocoRoco 2

2009-01-14T22:08:00.007+08:00

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Still hands-down the cutest franchise on the PSP, LocoRoco 2 adds enough new ideas to its already unique gameplay to make it a great improvement on the original game.

AU REVIEW--The first LocoRoco was like an injection of sugar syrup directly to the brain, and its cute design and catchy soundtrack made it a tough game to dislike even if you found faults with its unique but ultimately repetitive gameplay. LocoRoco 2 improves on its predecessor in almost every aspect, with new play mechanics and even more minigames wrapped around the same blob-bouncing interior. It's still a game best played in short bursts, but when you do spend time in the shiny, squishy world that the LocoRocos inhabit, it's hard not to get swept along by its infectious cheeriness.

It's that cheeriness that sets LocoRoco 2 apart. Its colorful style and immensely hummable tunes make it the game equivalent of a baby panda stuffed with kittens. You'd have to have a heart made of stone (or a fringe made of emo) not to fall in love with the round, amorphous blobs of goo that are the LocoRocos as they fight to rid their planet of the evil Mojas, who are back with their king Banmucho after being driven off in the original LocoRoco. Narrative isn't what this game is about, though, given that the story is told in mostly nonsensical cutscenes that only roughly convey what's happening in the plot.

LocoRoco 2 retains all of the key gameplay elements of the original, which in itself is not a bad thing, considering that the game's simple-to-grasp yet tough-to-master gameplay still remains unique among its platforming competitors. You control the LocoRocos as they roll around the surface of the planet, using the shoulder buttons of the PlayStation Portable to tilt the playing field left and right. LocoRocos can be made to bounce by pressing both shoulder buttons at once, which is also their main method of attack against any enemy creatures. As they navigate through the world, LocoRocos "grow" by collecting fruit, which increases the number of units under your control at once. Pressing and holding down the circle button will cause all of your creatures to join together to create one blob, whereas a quick tap of the same button will cause them to separate. Just like in the first game, it's preferable to travel as one blob for most of LocoRoco 2, with breaking up recommended only for getting them through the occasional tight space.

Although rolling and jumping will take up most of your time, the game gives the LocoRocos a few interesting new abilities. For example, your units can now swim through several underwater levels in which you navigate by holding down the circle button to sink and tapping it to rise. Occasionally, you'll also find creatures whose shells the LocoRoco can climb into, allowing them to roll around the environment and smash through obstacles. LocoRocos will also learn new moves as the game progresses, such as the ability to bite onto little tufts of grass to shake out hidden objects and a more powerful jump attack. There are also some minigames thrown into the mix, some of which are more compelling than others. These range from a basic race in which you bet on which LocoRoco will navigate an obstacle course the quickest (this section is completely hands-off) to a whack-a-mole variant in which you use the D pad and four face buttons to hit creatures as they pop up from holes. The best of these is a fun little 2D side-scrolling shooter, which sees you piloting a small MuiMui ship to take on fleet after fleet of enemies.

Music, which has always been an integral if passive part of the LocoRoco experience, actually has a gameplay role in the sequel thanks to a basic rhythm minigame that can be found in most levels. These minigames aren't any more complex than tapping the circle button in time to a simple melody, but it does let you collect the new in-game collectible of musical notes. If you collect enough musical notes in a level, it will give you bonuses, such as items being placed in easier-to-reach locations or even more abilities for your LocoRoco.

All of these additions result in a LocoRoco experience that is more fun than the first game thanks to its increased variety. This is further helped by some great level design. One standout sees you travelling inside a gigantic penguin, with the orientation of the playfield changing as the penguin decides to get up from its horizontal position halfway through the level. Another is set on a series of bouncy platforms that send the LocoRocos flying with every touch. Levels like these--along with the new LocoRoco abilities--means that feeling of repetitiveness isn't as much of an issue in this game as it was in the first one. There's also a fair bit of replay value, particularly if you're mad about collecting. With 20 LocoRocos hidden in each level, as well as hundreds of musical notes, picories (little flies that act as currency to play minigames), items such as stickers, and more, there's the potential to sink plenty of hours into this game to unlock all it has to offer. Nevertheless, there are also some downsides. Boss fights aren't that challenging, with even the end boss offering only a smidgen of resistance. And though you have the opportunity to reclaim LocoRocos that separate from the pack if you collide with stray spikes or hungry Mojas, there's only a small window of opportunity in which to do so, which makes it extremely frustrating to lose them when you're going for the holy grail of a full LocoRoco count at the end of each level.

Of course, frustration never stays too long when you're in this gameworld, and LocoRoco 2's upbeat presentation is sure to constantly wring a smile out of you. The round LocoRocos themselves are as cute as ever, with the supporting cast of creatures such as the hedgehog-like Olmee to the angry little BuiBui all appealing in their own strange and varied ways. The music is another highlight, made up of catchy ditties all sung in a nonsense language that changes in pitch and tone depending on which color of LocoRoco you're currently controlling. Some songs are recycled from the first game, but there are a few new tracks here that are darn near impossible to get out of your head once you've heard them a few times.

Just like its music, LocoRoco 2 does recycle plenty of ideas from the first game, but its new additions are enough to make it an easy game to recommend for any PSP owner. With boundless charm, improved gameplay, and plenty of replayability, LocoRoco 2 is a definite bounce in the right direction for the cheery series.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

PSP Game Review: Pinball Hall of Fame

2009-01-13T21:57:00.006+08:00

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This collection of 10 pinball tables offers more than enough variety to justify the price that you pay for infinite credits.

The glory days of pinball are back, at least according to the packaging for Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. That's not true, no matter how much we'd like it to be, but there's no denying that this collection of 10 tables has plenty to offer for anyone with a penchant for pinball. Not all of the featured tables can be considered classics, but if the lineup was chosen specifically to offer plenty of variety, then it's most definitely a success. Older tables like 1970's Jive Time bear little resemblance to the likes of Whirlwind and Funhouse that were released 20 years later, and playing through this collection in chronological order is a fun way to see how Williams' offerings evolved during that time.

The moment you step into the virtual arcade that serves as the game's menu system, it's clear that The Williams Collection's goal is to re-create as accurately as possible the experience of visiting an arcade to play pinball. You can choose to practice on tables in a mode that awards you tokens based on your scores and the completion of table-specific goals; you can play against up to three friends in tournaments that span multiple tables; or you can take on the time-consuming Williams Challenge. The challenge mode tasks you with achieving target scores on all 10 tables one after another. You get three attempts at each table, and if you fail you have to go back to the first table again. The scores aren't tough to beat once you learn your way around the tables, which is just as well given that your reward for completing the mode is disappointing to say the least. What do you get? You get a score that you can tell your friends about, and a ranking based on how much you beat the target scores by. Being told that you're a "Tommy wannabe" is a nice reference to The Who's dark, pinball-themed rock opera, but it really isn't what you want to hear after taking the time to achieve high scores on 10 tables.

Regardless of which table you're playing, you'll find that Pinball Hall of Fame's controls are flawless--at least when you're holding the PSP the traditional way. The shoulder buttons are perfectly positioned for their role of triggering the left and right flippers, and the analog stick is great for launching balls and for tilting the table. The flippers on these tables never feel unresponsive or sticky, as their real-life counterparts sometimes do, but realism is definitely the name of the game and the all-important ball physics are nigh on perfect. Furthermore, the tables' various targets, bumpers, slingshots, switches, and ramps are every bit as believable as the ball that you're trying to hit them with, which ultimately makes The Williams Collection's gameplay difficult to fault.

If you feel the need to, you can easily change the camera angle using the face buttons while you're playing. Cameras can be problematic in pinball games, but the dynamic camera used here masterfully displays the whole table and zooms in on areas when it's appropriate to do so. Other camera modes include one with a static option that always shows the entire table and another that lets you play while holding the PSP at a 90-degree angle to make better use of the handheld's screen. Playing this way affords you a better view of the action at the top of the table, but the face buttons are a little awkward to use for the flippers, and reaching the analog stick, which still launches balls and tilts tables, is something that only a contortionist should attempt. We can't say enough about how intelligently and smoothly the default camera does its thing, though an option to play from a traditional top-down perspective that showcased the tables' artwork would have been a welcome addition.

Like the home console versions of the game, The Williams Collection on the PSP supports up to four players who must take turns. Unlike other versions, the PSP game also supports simultaneous wireless play for two, and you need only a single copy of the game to take advantage of it. All 10 tables can be shared with another player using a second PSP, but only one at a time. After sharing your chosen table, the pair of you then have the option to do your own thing or to go head-to-head so that you can see each other's scores while playing. Simultaneous play is a lot more fun than passing the PSP around and having to wait for your turn, and sharing tables is quick and painless.

All of the tables in Pinball Hall of Fame look and sound authentic, right down to the labels detailing how much it costs to play and how many balls you get for a single credit, and the loud knocking sound when you earn an extra ball. It's not always easy to see where some of the table features are because the artwork on raised areas blends in with that on the playfield, but these rare moments of confusion aren't detrimental to gameplay since they invariably occur at the top of the table where you don't have to worry about losing a ball.

Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection doesn't have a lot of competition, so saying that it's the best pinball game currently available for the PSP wouldn't count for much. With its great selection of tables and believable physics this is one of the better pinball games to be released for any platform in recent memory, though, and it's a lot more affordable than a pinball table to boot.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com

PSP Game Review: Buzz! Brain Bender

2009-01-13T14:53:00.007+08:00

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Brain Bender has some challenging puzzles, but it doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from the pack.

Sony's jumping on late to the brain-exercising bandwagon with Buzz Brain Bender for the PSP, its first stab at the genre made popular by the ever-smiling Dr Kawashima on the Nintendo DS. Brain Bender doesn't tread any new ground, but it does feature a series of well-presented puzzles with adjustable difficulties that should present a challenge for most craniums. It won't make you any smarter, but it can be a fun and interesting distraction.

Like its peers, Brain Bender features a series of puzzles that its creators say can help improve your mental agility (but in all likeliness it will probably just improve your skills at performing the puzzles contained within the game). In this case, the 16 included puzzles are broken up into four categories that test your observation, memory, analysis, and mathematical skills. All of the puzzles are presented in a multiple-choice format, with up to four possible answers to a problem mapped to the PSP's face buttons. You're scored on how many questions you get right after a set time limit, with the game charting your progress with each match.

Like other games in this genre, Brain Bender challenges you to improve your mental might over time. In addition to doing the individual puzzles, you can take a test that is made up of four random challenges that are then tallied into an overall score. From this, the game compares your results to a piece of electrical equipment (such as a toaster or remote-controlled car) in a pretty lame analogy of how much brain power you're pumping out. Unfortunately, the whole raison d'etre of a game like Brain Bender--that is, to test how well your mental agility improves over time--is hamstrung by the fact that it lets you test yourself as many times as you want each day. While other games in the genre limit your testing to once per day (which gives you a good indicator of progress as well as a reason to keep coming back), being able to test at any time devalues the results as, frankly, it doesn't feel as important.

There's some variety to be found in Brain Bender's puzzles, ranging from simple plus/minus equations to more complex pattern-recognition challenges. Some are quite taxing; for example, Shape Count asks you to quickly tally up the number of overlapping squares and triangles in an image, whereas Puzzle Pieces is a visual recognition task in which you have to identify which small jigsaw piece belongs in a larger image. Even if you fancy yourself as something of a mental maestro, Brain Bender features three difficulty levels for each game, so you should find a decent amount of challenge.

Going through 16 puzzles obviously isn't going to take you very long, but Brain Bender does have some tricks up its sleeves to keep you coming back. The varying difficulty levels certainly stretch out the experience, and Brain Bender includes its own set of achievements for completists to attempt. There are also 15 challenge levels that are unlocked as you play, with gameplay variations such as trying to get as many right answers as possible in a four-minute multipuzzle marathon or going for the longest streak of correct answers.

While Brain Bender can't be faulted for trying to stretch out its gameplay experience, it suffers from the same problem all games in this genre share--that is, any fun you're going to have here is all dependent on how fastidious an intellectual exerciser you are. You really need to be interested in your own mental progress to come back day after day, and even if you are, most of the puzzle types in Brain Bender just aren't interesting enough to propel it ahead of other games in the genre.

Brain Bender's puzzles are presented in a simple yet colourful manner, and it's generally pleasing to the eye. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the game's host. Virtual celebrity Buzz makes the leap from Sony's gameshow titles, and he's just as annoying and grating here. The only saving grace is that you can skip most of Buzz's introductions to the various puzzles with the press of a button.

Buzz aside, Brain Bender is a decent entry into the genre for Sony, although it doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from its peers. Nevertheless, if you're looking for a mental workout on the PSP, then Brain Bender definitely has the capacity to stretch your synapses.

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Content Reviews are from GameSpot.com