Hallow Pursuits: More PSP Reviews

Yes, it's a Halloween post that has nothing to do with Halloween. Now take these PSP reviews and this small box of raisins and scoot. And don't even think of TP-ing the house, because I know your parents' phone number.

Ultimate Block Party
Conspiracy/Artdink

The lead characters Kollon and Marinne fished
their sidekicks out of a claw machine.
I imagine they have some ugly stories
about where that claw has been...

This game was pilloried by the press for not being Lumines, but here's a crazy thought... there's room in the vast PSP library for puzzle games that aren't Lumines! Ultimate Block Party is an entirely different beast, a warmly familiar throwback to the dozens of Japanese titles released shortly after Tetris hit the NES in 1990. It most closely resembles Tetris Attack or Puzzle League, with players scrambling to match colored blocks as they're fed into the bottom of the playfield. The big difference is that you rotate the pieces into place, and can tack extra blocks onto a successful match before it disappears. The blocks come at you fast after you've gone up a dozen levels, and you'll have to be just as quick to clear them away and stay in the game.

You'll want to keep playing too, because the frantic action is accented with a cast of abstractly drawn, cleverly designed characters and a soundtrack with tunes ranging from "pretty good" to "where have you been all my life?" The track that plays in the single player challenge is the best use of steel drums since Compile released Guru Guru Logic for the Game Boy Advance back in 2001. Throw in a versus mode that lets you mess with your opponent's playfield in all kinds of nasty ways, and you've got a top-shelf puzzle game that proudly stands apart from Lumines and its sequel.

B

Puzzle Guzzle
Agetec/Irem

Omitted for the sake of your sanity:
"Stop it!" "Waah!" "Stop it!" "Waah!" "Stop..."

Ultimate Block Party proves that puzzle action on the PSP doesn't have to be limited to Lumines... but the drab Puzzle Guzzle illustrates that you at least have to put in some effort to get noticed. On one hand, the game's play mechanics are original, with the player building tangrams out of scattered triangles. On the other hand is... everything else. The presentation is aggressively bland, with a series of nondescript shapes taking the place of the brightly colored, hilariously animated stars of Ultimate Block Party. Sure, you can build your own forgettable mascot from the pieces of your vanquished opponents, but it's a feature that doesn't amount to much. 

Frankly, "doesn't amount to much" is a pretty good way to describe Puzzle Guzzle in general. Mindlessly spinning pieces provides some brief distraction, and will really annoy your roommate with the constant blipping noises streaming from your PSP, but there's not much else that can be said in the game's defense. Other puzzle games are better... yes, even ones without "Lumines" in the title.

C

Xi Coliseum
Sony/Shift

The Japanese are getting this in their version
of the Playstation Classic. What are we
getting? Tom freaking Clancy. Bah!

Funny thing about Sony... the company makes a lot of games for its Playstation line, but some of them never leave Japan, and others still are licensed to third parties for publication in the United States. Such was the case with Demon's Souls for the Playstation 3 and Bombastic for the Playstation 2. Evidently Sony didn't have enough faith in these two titles to bring them to America, and let Atlus and Capcom take that risk instead.

Sometimes the risk pays off... Demon's Souls was a surprise hit, spawning numerous sequels and starting its own sub-genre of viciously hard action adventure games. Sometimes it goes exactly as Sony expected, and the game doesn't click with Americans. That was the case with Bombastic, which is likely why its PSP counterpart Xi Coliseum never came to the United States.

Xi Coliseum looks a lot like Bombastic, using the same cel-shaded graphics and rounded fonts. However, the gameplay hearkens back to the humble debut of the series, Devil Dice. Rossi the elf still rolls dice around the playfield by racing along their tops, but when several like-numbered dice touch, they don't explode... they just turn red and melt away, lessening the excitement and limiting the opportunity for score-boosting chain reactions. 

Why Sony took a step back from the frenzied action of Bombastic is anyone's guess, but Xi Coliseum is still a strong entry in this series of addictive, if somewhat inscrutable, puzzle games. It's got a higher learning curve than Tetris, which is probably why it never caught on in America, but once you wrap your head around the play mechanics, you'll get why the Japanese love it.

B

Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Activision/Vicarious Visions

Presented by Shrinky-Dinks!

What is this, a game for Ant-Man? Marvel Ultimate Alliance gets credit for being so faithful to the home console versions, but sometimes it feels like there's just too much game here for the PSP to handle. The system's resolution and the camera, apparently set on a satellite miles above Earth, means that you'll have trouble telling the difference between Luke Cage, Wolverine, and the nameless soldiers they're supposed to fight. It's like you're playing Marvel Ultimate Amoebas through a microscope.

Yes, the camera can be adjusted, but that just leads to more proof that Marvel Ultimate Alliance fits the PSP almost as well as The Incredible Hulk fits in one of Bruce Banner's shirts. The control for everything beyond running and punching is awkward, with the player forced to press combinations of the face and shoulder buttons to use super powers and switch between teammates. It works, but it's uncomfortably constrained. If Marvel Ultimate Alliance on consoles was a first-class experience, the PSP version of this thinly disguised dungeon crawler is more like being squeezed between passengers in coach.

C+

Def Jam: The Takeover
Electronic Arts/Aki

"C'mon baby, better make it hurt."
And boy, do they.

Technically, Def Jam: The Takeover is inferior to its console counterparts. Most of the cut scenes and voice clips have been trimmed away, and the graphics have been streamlined to the point where your fighters look like the background characters in the Xbox version, and the background characters look only vaguely human. What happened to your face? Do you even have one? You shouldn't be on the sidelines of an underground fight... you should crawl back into your cloning tank!

So it's a bit of a surprise that I actually prefer this to Def Jam: Fight for New York. It dispenses with the storyline of the original and gets right to the business of fighting, and fighting dirty. The game doesn't cut corners here... you get all the fighting styles, all the outrageous moves, and of course all the pain of the console versions. You'll find yourself wincing a little when you send your opponent's head through a jukebox, or fling them into an oncoming subway train. The action seems a touch slower than it was on the Xbox, but I consider that a plus since the fights were overwhelming at their original speed.

Def Jam: The Takeover takes out some of the content from the console versions, but it kept what was most important. Namely, Xzibit sitting on his opponent's back, then punching him in the head and ass until the broken bastard has to be carried away on a stretcher.

B+