What's your game?

Finally, something new!

I got a PSP a couple of weeks ago, and while there are a lot of good games on the system, a couple of them have eaten large chunks of my gaming time—note that’s not portable gaming time, it’s gaming time. While I could be upstairs plastered to the PC or Xbox, I’ve been sitting quietly in the living room playing Lumines and Untold Legends.

First, a bit about the hardware. For the most part, Sony made the right choices for the hardware. The inclusion of a simple mini-USB port for PC connectivity and storing games on a fairly standard memory card format is awesome. I wish they’d gone with the cheaper, more ubiquitous SD Card format, but Memory Stick Duo is acceptable, and prices on media will drop the more PSP sales rise.

If you shell out for a larger Duo card, you can even enjoy music, videos, and photos on the player. Why view videos from a memory stick instead of just buying the special UMD-format videos that Sony is selling? Battery life and price. Right now, you can get a 1GB Duo card for the price of seven movies. With that memory card, you can watch _any_ DVD you own on the PSP, with a little transcoding. As a standalone portable media player, the PSP leaves a bit to be desired, but when you factor in the games, it’s awesome.

As for the games, Untold Legends is a typical hack n’ slash Diablo clone, that’s actually better than any of the more recent Diablo clones. It avoids many of the more annoying ‘features’ by making it easy to know what gear is good, and what is better. Only occasionally will you stumble across class-only weapons and armor, the only requirement for most gear is that you have a certain level. The boss fights are exciting without being frustrating (my hunch is that the game tones down the difficulty of a particular area after you die a couple of times), and some of the monsters are fill-up-the-entire-screen huge. It’s apparently the best selling title on the PSP, and it deserves that. The game is huge, even by Diablo-clone standards. I’ve put 15 hours into it, and barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface. Add in the dynamically generated dungeons, multiple player classes to try, and peer-to-peer multiplayer, and I can see Untold Legends absorbing a lot of time.

Lumines is a fairly typical post-Tetris puzzle game. The goal, stack falling multicolored blocks in such a way that they make four (or more) block squares of the same color. Once you make the square, those blocks are queued for removal, but here comes the trick. The blocks are removed in batches every few seconds when the scanline passes them.

This is where it gets tricky. As you progress through the game, more “skins”—combinations of block color, background animation, and music—are unlocked. Each skin’s music is a different tempo, and the tempo of the music changes the speed the scanline moves right to left across the screen, and the rate at which blocks are dropped. The upshot is simple—the game’s pace changes every few minutes. Slow paced skins require you to stack huge combos, while lightning-fast skins force you to make every placement count. As you reach the higher levels especially, the game will intermix fast scanline movement with slow block drops, and visa versa.

Once you get the knack, it’s quite addictive. One other note, you should definitely play Lumines with headphones. Not only will the ‘phones help keep you focused on the game, once you get the tempo of the music for each skin down, you’ll know where the scanline is without having to look at it.

More on Ridge Racer, Wipeout Pure, and Mercury later.