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Chili Con Carnage

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Not half bad - as rocket riding, chicken fighting games go

Words: Andy Kelly, PSM3 UK

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Third-person action games rarely work on PSP. There aren't enough buttons to go around and thanks to the absence of a second stick, controlling the camera is a nightmare. Even Vice City Stories, currently the best of the genre, suffers from a wonky camera and stilted controls. But, somehow, Chili Con Carnage works like a charm. All the controls are sensibly placed and the camera always seems to be able to keep up, even when you're flipping backwards over someone's head and stealing their sombrero.

Yes, as you've no doubt already guessed, Chili Con Carnage is a sort-of-sequel to PS2's Total Overdose, the Latin-flavored action game where you went about nicking peoples' hats and performing preposterous acrobatic stunts. Chili recycles a lot of the levels and assets from its PS2 predecessor, but with new missions and a structure tailored more to handheld play. Instead of being a free-roaming GTA clone it's now a series of short missions. But that's no loss because the best bits of Total Overdose were the shooty bits, not the sections where you had to drive all over the town looking for things to do.

Jumping about killing people is the game's brainless highlight, which is mainly down to that control system we mentioned earlier. Your man Ram will leap in slow-motion, or if you're next to a wall he'll run up it and perform a gravity-defying flip. You can fire from almost any position and you're marked for style, earning points for every flourish of acrobatic prowess, or for killing multiple enemies in one combo. And you get bonus points if you're wearing a hat while you do it which, while ridiculous, is enormously entertaining as well.