Initial thoughts on those ten free PSPGo games



My PSP Go is about a fortnight old now, and of the ten free games that I downloaded on day one, my thumbs' physical memory is already skipping past a few of them on the XMB without my brain having to intervene. They (the Thumbs Of Power) have decreed what will be played and what will not, and in their small way (ie. pressing the space-bar) they will now do their bit to help organise my thoughts into transcibable words below. 

Well, there they are. The Ten. Annoyingly, five of them are examples of my least favourite genre: racing. Least favourite, that is, until they were forced, freely, into my hands and I felt obliged to play them. Having games I would not ordinarily have chosen to play has been something of a breath of fresh air. I have recently been wading, turgidly, through an ever deepening swamp of action adventures with diminishing returns. A game style I, for some reason, keep returning to despite each subsequent visit to the genre being more soul destroyingly predictable than the last, as a recent play of, eagerly anticipated, Castlevania will attest. But I digress. Those ten free games, as presented in the picture above, are: LittleBigPlanet, FIFA World Cup 2010, Gran Turismo, Motor Storm, Need For Speed, Avatar, Wipeout Pure, Pursuit Force, Beaterator and Assassins Creed Bloodlines. Assassins Creed, first.

From the off, Assassins Creed: Bloodlines was the game I booted up first just to see how, and if, Griptonite Games managed to convincingly cram the free-flow, open-world environment of it's PS3 big brother onto a hand-held machine. I was impressed immediately. This is easily among the top 5 best looking games on the PSP and many of the PS3 features have made the transition to PSP relatively unscathed. Visually and aurally it is magnificent and Griptonite should be applauded for their valiant effort. 

As I guided Altair through the market town of Limassol I was a little disappointed at the lack of inhabitants: the streets seemed sparsely populated when compared to the PS3 version. Part of the original experience for me was blending into the crowd after silently dispatching a guard using a concealed blade. In the PSP version, however, I found myself escaping, instead, up the side of a building and onto the rooftops above. It was in doing this that I realised the trade off was worth it. Sacrificing some of the population of Cyprus freed up some much needed processing power to present me with roof-top views with a very impressive draw distance. These are not static back-drops. That building you see in the distance can be reached with enough light footed hops from roof to roof.

I don't think I'll ever get bored of sneaking up on guards and silently killing them. This game, so far, panders to my sociopathic whims quite well but time will tell whether the, apparently confusing, plot gets the better of me and I consign this game to the 'Game To Boot Up Only When Wanting To Show Off PSP' folder. Hopefully not. More on Assassins Creed Bloodlines as I get further into it. But first I need to stop playing Motorstorm Arctic Edge (yeah, right).