PSP

After only having written about awesome games so far, it’s time there’s some negativity on this blog as well. So I decided to write a list with the worst PSP games I’ve played so far. Keep in mind that as always, the list is subjective, and unordered. And, there are plenty of good PSP games, so this is not a post that says anything like “the PSP sucks”.

Here we go, the worst PSP games I’ve played to date.

• Guilty Gear Judgement: I guess if you’re a fan of the Guilty Gear series, you’ll like this one. I never found a combo, just 4 repetitive attacks, always the same enemies every stage … boring.
• The Simpsons: I’m a huge Simpsons fan. The game has potential, with all the different specials and levels and whatnot. If it weren’t for the horrible, awkward, terrible camera. No go. Please, don’t make me jump to my doom by rotating the camera mid-air.
• Bubble Bobble Evolution: Artificial story (the dragons are no longer dragons but boys), a strange nemesis that helps the heroes get out of his prison, 3D features that weren’t necessary, and strange controls with enemies that I have no idea how to defeat, I tried for 30 minutes … nothing like I remember Bubble Bobble to be.
• Space Invaders Evolution: I thought I’d get Space Invaders Extreme, which got good reviews, silly old me. The Evolution one is just Space Invaders in 3D, more or less … not horribly bad, but played a million times.
• Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth: You like watching confusing 2D ingame graphic cutscenes while you’re pretending to play a game? Occasionally clicking a button (just one, mind you) every 15 minutes, for hours? I don’t. Maybe the game changes after 90 minutes though, who knows.
• Silent Hill: Origins: I liked this one, the setup, the mood, the city, the story. Until the fights started getting a bit harder, and the problem weren’t so much tough enemies as horrible controls and fiddly inventory. Sad, really.
• Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X: Supposedly brings Mega Man into 3D – which it does, to some extent. Too bad the controls are nothing like I remember them to be, and jumping and shooting are tough to coordinate. I have plenty of known good games that are easy to control, no reason to wrestle horrible controls for a potentially good game.
• SSX On Tour: This one actually does many things right – except that the PSP’s screen is much too small to make you feel like you’re actually snowboarding. Which is what bought me when I first played the very first SSX. So, sorry, wrong platform.
• Prince of Persia Revelations and Rival Swords: The problem with these is that they’re pure ports (with very few more levels). Meaning, the graphics aren’t optimized, read blurry, and while the story and levels are great they’re just copies of what you played already, or can have better on a big console or computer.
• Worms: Open Warfare 2: Occasional stuttering and being a game that hasn’t been made for the PSP’s resolution (with too small fonts and irregularly pixelated worms, much unlike the very first Worms that had intentional and controlled pixelation) make this way worse than it could and should have been, too bad.

There you go. Of course, I’ll eventually make the counterpart to this post, with all the games I like.