Distributed by
Sony

Price: £14.99 Players: 1-online Widescreen: Yes Vote and comment on this game: View Comments PlayStation Network Collection Power Pack is one of two titles, each featuring a collection of three games, released in time for Xmas which also features online play and, in this case, all three games have a single-player offline mode too - and this is the version I played on all of them. First up, Go! Puzzle is the one I played the most. On the downside it took an age to load, but on the plus side it does have some groovy music. There are three games here, starting with Swizzle Blocks, a sort-of Tetris game but with the ability to rotate your blocks so they go next to each other and get cleared in a clump of 4 or more. The Challenge mode is such that, like a game of Tetris as the pace picks up the screen starts to get full, you're left in a panic trying anything to turn blocks round in the hope that a load of them disappear. This works for a while depending on your luck :) Battle mode puts you up against an AI opponent or someone online. It does get very frustrating with someone else chipping in, and with various hidden extras in the level some weird things happen that serve to confuse! Puzzle mode gets you clearing the board in as few swizzles as possible, while Time Attack is the same as Puzzle mode, but against the clock. The second game, Aquatica (below-right), in Challenge mode, is basically, underwater Tetris, where 3 or more items of the same colour clashing together in a line will then self-demolish and I found myself in the position of the screen almost getting full but then one massive clump of colour freed up which then led to another and eventually the screen was almost empty - which did great for longevity as I thought I was about to lose! Battle and Puzzle run along the same lines as before. The plan with Skyscraper is to get to the top of the tower by crossing each floor you see by only going along the same colour tiles (blue, yellow or green). However, there aren't always enough tiles of the same colour, but you can jump and skip one, and although you don't have to step on every tile of your designated colour, it's best to do so, so you can get all the bonus time accrued. That said, there's rarely enough time to do all this. Collecting a key on the top level will unlock the tower. Annoyingly, the later towers are physically impossible to get through all the floors in the tight time limit. Puzzle mode is same as before, but doing what you have to in the least time possible, and Race mode plays you against an AI opponent.

Next up is the classic Lemmings game, a point-and-click affair where you want them to dig down to the next level, float with the aid of an umbrella or block them to stop them from falling to their death, ultimately guiding them on their way to success... or failure. 30 levels are featured in this version with Fun, Tricky, Taxing and Mayhem modes. You cna also download extra user-created levels from yourpsp.com/lemmings. Go! Sudoku is a game that doesn't need much explaining as it's done the rounds fairly often in various guises in print and online in the last few years, and here you have a grid of 9 squares that need to be filled with the numbers from 1 to 9. It's neat and fun to play and, as they say, does exactly what it says on the tin. What I am worried about though, overall, is that even though the PSP is only just over three years old and that there's been rumours about it being discontinued and the games support decreasing, this is starting to feel like a self-fulfilling policy. It's the first pair of titles I've had through review since God of War, six months ago, and that if there were an abundance of titles due then we're well into the Xmas build-up - as it's late November as I type this - and we would've seen them by now. It would be a great shame for the PSP to come to an end as it has featured some incredible games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, the aforementioned God of War, Killzone: Liberation and SOCOM: US Tactical Strike. I'd rather have more action-based games like those than the shout-into-the-thing childish nonsense of most of the Nintendo DS games.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2008.