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PSP must-have games
By CNET and GameSpot staff
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Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (Capcom)
You wouldn't think decade-old graphics could look this good, let alone that a decade-old fighting game could hold up this well. Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower is an amalgam of Capcom's other 2D fighting game series, the one that's clearly derivative of Street Fighter but features a much more imaginative and, in many ways, likable cast of characters. It's essentially a pixel-perfect port of the arcade Darkstalkers games, and it adds Wi-Fi multiplayer support and extras to the mix, to good effect. Put it this way: Darkstalkers Chronicle is probably the best portable fighting game ever made. After all, it's the first portable fighting game that meets and even exceeds the quality of its arcade ancestors.
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Lumines (Ubisoft)
In a perfect world, Lumines wouldn't have been sold separately from Sony's slick, new portable gaming system. But the world is still better off now that Lumines is in it. This ingeniously designed, addictive, and mesmerizing puzzle game from the creator of cult classics such as Rez and Space Channel 5 may not seem as out-and-out impressive as some other PSP launch titles, but it's liable to be the one you keep coming back to. In fact, between the beautiful presentation, the innovative gameplay, and the excellent single- and multiplayer modes, Lumines may very well be the greatest Tetris-style puzzle game since Tetris itself.
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Metal Gear Acid (Konami)
Solid Snake has jumped genres for the first time in his illustrious career with Metal Gear Acid, a strategy game that's arriving just in time for the launch of the PlayStation Portable. Acid supplants the familiar stealth-action gameplay of the Metal Gear series with...tactical card-battling? Yes, strange as it may sound, Acid's satisfying turn-based strategy is a great fit for the series' trademark high presentation values and quirky narrative style. It's not an easy game to get into, and if you're just looking for a portable stealth-action Metal Gear, you'll need to keep waiting. But once you get a handle on the core mechanics, you'll find in Acid a rewarding game of strategic stealth combat coupled with a quirky, intriguing storyline and some neat points of nostalgia for the longtime Metal Gear fan.
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Ridge Racer (Namco)
Namco and Sony are now officially three for three when it comes to launching a new piece of Sony game hardware with a new game from Namco's Ridge Racer series. And like those previous Ridge Racer efforts, the first PSP installment in the series does a fine job of showing off the system's technical prowess while simultaneously providing more of the same smooth Ridge Racer gameplay that still holds up after all these years. This is the smoothest-running PSP game on the block at launch--the frame rate never stops to skip a beat, and all this ties together to give the game a great sense of speed. When driving some of the game's faster cars, you really feel like you're burning up the track.
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Tiger Woods PGA Tour (EA Sports)
Tiger Woods PGA Tour for the PSP is, across the board, the best handheld golf game to date. Though it lacks the online play and a few other details found in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005, it's a better game in some ways, as it takes the sport a little more seriously. Though there isn't any direct competition for Tiger just yet, this is still one of the best choices a sports fan can make at the U.S. launch of the PSP. It's almost mind-boggling that such a complete package can be found on a handheld, and it's one that will be difficult for anyone with a taste for golf (or just golf video games) to resist.
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Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix (Activision)
For those unfamiliar with the series, the world of Tony Hawk is all about fast-moving freestyle skateboarding. The game is mostly goal-oriented, with challenges and objective-based tasks that involve pumping up your score and creating long combos of tricks. Now, just in time for the PSP launch, Activision is set to offer up a portable version of Tony Hawk's Underground 2, which was released on consoles last year. This "remix" delivers almost everything that was great about the console versions, and with the inclusion of four new levels, the single-player experience has gotten even better.
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Twisted Metal: Head-On (SCEA)
Twisted Metal: Head-On plays just like the classic games in the series. If you're not familiar with previous installments, you should know that car combat such as this actually has a lot more in common with first-person shooters than it does with other driving games. While Twisted Metal: Head-On might have been shrunk to fit onto the sleek new PSP, it has lost none of its madcap charm or its bite. A colorful cast of characters, a great presentation, exciting shooting action, and support for wireless multiplayer competition over the Internet combine to make this game one of the safest bets you can place when choosing your first PSP titles.
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Wipeout Pure (SCEA)
In the most generic terms, Wipeout Pure is a futuristic racing game, not unlike F-Zero or Extreme-G. You pilot unreasonably fast hovercrafts on narrow racetracks that have been carved into a broad spectrum of futuristic landscapes, and using your wits as well as the strategically placed weapon pickups and turbo boost pads, you try to outrun your opponents. The high-speed gameplay that has always characterized the Wipeout series is still incredibly engaging, and the visuals simply impress, on both an artistic and a technical level. Wipeout Pure is a joy to look at, and it's viscerally satisfying enough to please fans of the series and new players alike.
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FIFA Soccer (EA Sports)
When EA Sports announced its intention to release FIFA Soccer for the PSP, we naturally assumed it would be a scaled-down version of last year's FIFA Soccer 2005. While it lacks a career or franchise mode and has some frame-rate issue when playing head-to-head wirelessly, we're hapy to report FIFA Soccer is a great soccer game in almost every respect, and it has a lot more in common with its excellent console and PC counterparts than we could have guessed. Like with those versions, you can play through an entire season in any of 26 club divisions and participate in more than 20 real cup tournaments.
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