Short-form video game reviews, none of which are comprehensive.

Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation (PS Vita)

This is genuinely such a peculiar video game, and at no moment did I find it particularly enjoyable. The only thing this game has going for it is its graphical fidelity (not it’s performance!) on this particular system.

First up: the narrative. From what I know, there are 3 parts to it. I played as far as halfway through the second part, but my thoughts seem to extrapolate to the third as well. The narratives are extremely disjointed! You start the game in a town and do stuff there, and then without much warning they plop you into the second part of the story which takes place in a swamp. I thought they’d give me some kind of explanation as to why I’m now in a swamp doing stuff for a different person, but (as far as I played) they didn’t!

Then comes the gameplay. Traversing the world works well and combat is okay (not to my taste but I wouldn’t call it bad). There are a few gimmicky moments here and there, but they’re pretty small/negligible.

Nothing really kept me hooked here. The subpar story, and okay-ish gameplay paired an less-than-stellar framerate (even when overclocked) gave me no reason to stay!

Borderlands 2 (PS Vita)

I’m not going to be reviewing the game itself, more so the port.

This game on this platform specifically is quite a technical achievement, and despite its technical flaws, I still think it’s very impressive, even today. However, these flaws are not negligible and are why I dropped this game.

These screenshots are from the PS Vita! If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise!

Here’s the major issue: framerate. For a fast-paced shooter like this, you NEED, at the very least, a STABLE framerate. This game does NOT achieve this by any stretch of the imagination, even when you overclock. Maybe there are other graphical tweaks I could have made, but this is the experience I had.

Overclocking yielded a more stable 30 FPS, but very often it would dip below 25 FPS and even below 20! The location Sanctuary in the game is a well known example of how abysmal performance can get! Overclocked, I would get around 10-15 FPS.

People often talk of this game crashing on them (on this platform specifically), and I can verify that this does happen.

This is a great game, but the PS Vita is NOT the platform to play it on. And keep in mind: I’m not particularly picky about my framerates!

And here’s the kicker: I know this game can run just fine on this platform. I don’t recall which mission specifically, but there was a decently long side mission which took place in some kind of factory. For that entire mission, I found the framerate to be PERFECTLY stable at 30 FPS. It felt properly smooth and playable, and if most of the game took place at that framerate, I would have no problems! I’d even ignore the crashing!

All things considered, I was able to have some fun with this game here and I still think it’s pretty impressive.

Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

Preface: I have not finished this game, but I plan to in the future.

As it stands, I love pretty much everything about this game except for the portion that takes up the majority of gameplay time: the battle system.

Maybe I just haven’t understood the battle system properly or I’m not taking proper advantage of it, but in this context, I found the Active Time Battle (ATB) system incredibly finicky.

I have two issues with it:

1. There were a number of times in battles when I (and the enemy) would just sit there for a good while doing absolutely nothing while the ATB guage filled. Say what you will about the ATB system, but if this is a somewhat regular occurance, then the system isn’t great.

2. The battles never seemed to “flow” (if you get what I mean). You know how in other regular turn-based battle games, you issue commands to your party as fast as YOU want to? If you have a set strategy, you can use that pretty easily since the turn order is (mostly) predictable. That doesn’t happen here! Turn order feels very inconsistent!

The premise of ATB sounds very nice, but at least in this game, I found it rather frustrating.

However, I really enjoyed pretty much everything else about the game. Characters, story, soundtrack and visuals (I LOVE the pre-rendered backgrounds) were great!

Gran Turismo (PSP)

This has the ENTIRE foundation needed to make a good game. Good graphics, great framerate (60 FPS!), nice car selection, good track variety, so on and so forth. The only issue here is that it lacks, for the most part, any game at all!

The deal here is that you select a car, select a track, select a gamemode (one from time trial, drift and race), and then race to earn money to buy more cars. That’s literally it!

This style of gameplay would be fine as a separate gamemode, but here it’s THE gamemode. There simply isn’t much to do.

Toyota Prius What I suspect is an effort to spice up the game, the dealership is rather peculiar. At any one moment, there are a total of 4 brands available with only a selection of cars from each to purchase. The brands available changes every 2 in-game days. Essentially, if you see a car you’d like to buy but don’t have enough funds, you’re screwed! Unless you do a bunch of laps of the Nurburgring to acquire a large stash of funds through one race only.

I suppose it works for whenever I get the itch to play a sim-racer, but honestly speaking, the lack of a career mode hurts this game a lot. The only thing you could consider a career mode are the license tests ✨.

Jet Set Radio (PS Vita)

I loved this! Very nice visuals, soundtrack and gameplay loop. HOWEVER, the only thing that might let this down for you are the controls. You can get used to them and they aren’t too bad once you do, but they’re definitely not great. They often feel rather unresponsive.

Story definitely isn’t the focus of this title, but there’s lots of character here.

Gameplay mostly revolves around spraying graffiti in a number of locations within a set time limit. The time limits look generous but you can very easily lose track of time while finding each location or collecting paint cans (these are like your graffiti ammunition). This game definitely rewards knowledge of each map, and because of this, I found a number of levels taking a few attempts to clear.

Lumines: Electronic Symphony (PS Vita)

Compared to its PSP predecessor, this definitely lacks a few gamemodes. BUT, that isn’t much of a downside since the core gameplay is here with lots of visual variety.

This seems like one of those games you can play in short bursts but that NEVER happens. It’s very easy to sink lots of time into this.

Gameplay here is pretty standard fare, but there are a number of powerups/special abilites you can unlock which grant you perks once they’re ready, which does take a while. I recently found you can speed this up by 1% every time you tap the rear touchpad.

Midnight Club: L.A. Remix (PSP)

Pretty good open-world arcade racer with nice visuals and a lot of content, but can get very repetitive.

To clarify: I enjoyed this game but I never really played this for long stretches because of how repetitive it is.

I don’t think the repetitiveness comes from the race variety. In that sense, it’s similar to other open-world racers. It’s just that (I thought) each career mode was fairly long, and there are two of them!

One of the careers takes place in L.A. (hence the name of the game), but the other takes place in Tokyo. The L.A. map was more varied but Tokyo looked better. Each career had its own selection of cars.

The only issue is that each career mode, save for the differences in location, cars and “characters”, is the same thing!

Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath (PS Vita)

Gameplay here is a mix of a stealth platformer and a shooter, and it works surprisingly well. My only qualm with this is how the story is structured. The gameplay loop is as such: you get a mission to eliminate/capture a criminal, so you go to that guy’s hideout (this is where you find the mix of platforming and shooting) and have a boss fight with him. This works well enough. However, from the amount I’ve played, you just keep doing this again and again and again and the story doesn’t seem to progress very much.

But if story doesn’t matter to you, the gameplay is pretty good.

Also, I’ll quickly talk about the soundtrack. It’s ambient, but it works so nicely in creating atmosphere. There are times when things feel quite tense because of it. It’s less of a soundtrack you’re going to listen to in your free time, but it works AMAZINGLY for the purposes of ambiance.

Ridge Racer (PSP)

Nice racing game with a good chunk of content, nice user interface and good graphics (except for some of the cars which can look exceptionally chunky).

The main thing about this game is the arcade handling model. It’s unique; it feels rather awkward at first and looks quite ridiculous sometimes (i.e. your vehicle moving straight when it’s perpendicular to the track). It’s tuned for drifting your vehicles long distances and it feels good for that purpose.

There’s a good variety of cars, tracks and music here, mostly because this is a kind of compilation game featuring content from previous entries in the series.