Rally car racing is a sport in transition. Like mixed martial arts, it’s spent the last several years carving out a slice of mindshare from sports fans eager for new spectacles. Rally has long been popular in Europe and Asia, and now has growing mainstream acceptance in America thanks to the late Colin McRae’s efforts to hitch the sport to the X Games.
Okay, it’s pretty. It’s very, very pretty. Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny is so good-looking that we can’t even say, “It looks good for a portable game.” The game looks good for a Dreamcast game, it looks good for a PS2 game – heck, we’ve seen plenty of Wii games that look cheap by comparison.
Your memory isn’t what it once was after you pass the age of, ooh, 17. We can’t even remember what we had for breakfast this morning (or, for that matter, what ‘breakfast’ actually is) let alone stuff that happened years ago. So please forgive an elderly Samwise Gamgee if the way he re-tells the story of King Aragorn to his children is a bit, ahem, ‘factually challenged’.
Any RPG fan will tell you it can take between from 30 to 60 hours of hardcore level-grinding, adventuring, and monster battling to beat an average game. If that seems way too long, you’ll greatly appreciate Half-Minute Hero’s warp-speed take on the classic RPG. It boils down the typical trappings of the genre into their primordial elements and douses the whole thing with rocket fuel.
Not one to shy away from publishing games with a quirky premise and an equally absurd presentation, NIS America is championing yet another deliciously peculiar PSP title that tips the strangeness scale on its end. If you thought the publisher’s recent Disgaea spinoff, Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?, was a mouthful, prepare to get bowled over by Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?
Ever heard of Monster Hunter? If not, we can at least rule out the possibility of living in Japan. The RPG series is the biggest thing on PSP across the Pacific, and it’s easy to see why: it essentially brings the MMO experience to a handheld, which is a difficult but clever feat to pull off.
Namco Bandai Day 2009. At this prestigious event in San Francisco where the beer flowed like wine, the ‘Radar crew got to see games Namco has cooking for the summer/fall seasons. One of the heavily featured games, Tekken 6, is the first multiplatform Tekken game and the first for this generation of systems (Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection for PSN doesn’t count).
Where did this come from?! At yesterday’s Namco Bandai Gamer’s Day, we were rushed into a secret room for the unveiling of a brand new entry in the Soulcalibur universe. We know what you’re thinking. It’s not a spin-off or something equally dreadful.
There’s been some discussion as to whether Rock Band can “work” on the PSP. Without diving into too much history and boring you with the details of which developer did what, we can quickly tell you “yes, it can,” because Harmonix has already proved this gameplay concept works. See: Frequency and Amplitude, the dev’s pre-Guitar Hero gems.
Serious golf has its place in the gaming world, but plenty of gamers would just as soon embrace the lighter, more fantastical side of it. And there have been many great but simple golf games over years, such as Mario Golf and Hot Shots. Following in their footsteps and with a few more tricks in its bag of clubs, is Pangya: Fantasy Golf for the PSP.
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