PSP Minis are cause for celebration

Relative to other games on the market this holiday season, not much has been said about the recently unveiled PSP Minis, except perhaps in the context of the PSPGo and its lack of a UMD drive. But this series of inexpensive ($3-$6 or thereabouts) and tiny games is actually cause for celebration for the hard-casual gamer.

PSP Minis are small games, each under 100 megabytes, and though their quality varies greatly, the ones that are good are really good – like, better than many UMD games I have paid full price for. Their low price isn’t the only appeal – their small file size means that most gamers, even owners of older PSPs, probably won’t need to shell out for a bigger memory card to enjoy a bunch of them.

I’ve purchased and played a handful of these games, and let me tell you, the quality varies wildly – some feel like the shovelware that one comes to expect from shadier corners of the iPhone app store, while others are Mini-masterpieces that will occupy you for hours. The latter group are especially desirable to the hard-casual gamer, as they offer short bouts of play time ensconced in larger campaigns that can play out over time. Very satisfying.

Here are the good ones that I have experienced so far:

Fieldrunners is the pick of the litter. It has all of the best aspects of tower defense games, and none of the bad ones. There are only four types of towers, making this one a simple game to get up-to-speed on. But each of those types can be upgraded, and the wide open playing field lends itself to infinite creativity – you’re not just slashing at bad guys moving through a pre-planned forest path, you’re building the path yourself. A crazy amount of fun.

Fortix is a reimagining of the classic arcade game Qix, transported to a medieval setting and given a campaign story. As in Qix, you travel the periphery of the playing area, straying out where possible to seal off additional blocks of real estate. In this case, a turreted castle shoots at you, while dragons fly around trying to bust you in mid-block. There are power-ups along the way, and just enough of a story mode to keep you playing for just one more game.

Mahjongg Artifacts 2 is just about the perfect portable game, especially for people like me who are predisposed to love the classic tile-matching mechanism. The core game is nothing new – Asian-inspired tile sets, laid out in increasingly arcane patterns, and it’s your job to remove them two-at-a-time without getting stuck. What makes this implementation so great is a perfectly designed auto-zoom function which removes all frustration, and a neat story mode made up of comic book interstitials between cleared boards.

So far, I’ve only encountered one real dud, and that’s Brainpipe. Avoid at all costs.