Daniel P. Wright

My PC has been giving me a terrible time of it these past couple of weeks. It’s a long time since I upgraded or maintained it, and I think it’s getting fed up. It’s started turning itself off to spite me. I’m really not sure whether I’m going to fix it this time, or whether I should just bite the bullet and pick up a new machine. A nice shiny fast one, perhaps, which looks like this:-

Anyway, as a result of my computer woes I’ve not been playing it nearly as much recently – luckily it didn’t die until shortly after I completed Portal – so for the past few weeks I’ve been sticking, for the most part, to playing games on my PSP. I’ve only got three games for it so far, and I must say that while I still prefer the Nintendo DS overall, the PSP does have something to offer, and with the new slim & lite edition the problems with battery life and price have largely been done away with.

Against all expectations, the PSP’s greatest asset is its quirky puzzle games. We expected this of the DS of course, but the PSP? As far as I can tell, apart from myriad cutdown PS2 games (yuck), puzzlers are about all it has going for it. I had a choice of four games in the PSP bundle I purchased, out of which I selected Lemmings. I won’t say much about that, because you pretty much know what you’re getting with lemmings – though moving the cursor with the D-Pad and the camera with the analogue stick seems like utter madness in my opinion. I also won’t talk about Wipeout Pure, except to say that it’s actually quite good.

Which leaves the third game in my extensive PSP games collection: Crush. I recently interviewed at the studio which developed this game, Zoë Mode, which if I’m honest was the main reason I bought it in the first place. I was pleased to discover that it’s actually really good, making me all the more keen to make the move to Brighton. You play a guy called Danny who suffers from chronic insomnia, and after having exhausted traditional therapy decides to try an experimental new system called C.R.U.S.H. The machine allows Danny to enter into the world of his psyche and explore the issues that are keeping him up at night.

Quite a story, for a puzzle game! Indeed, the storyline is one of the things I love about Crush. It’s really very engaging, and encourages you to go through the trials and torment of completing some of the ridiculously tricky levels later into the game. That plus I share the main character’s name, so I really felt like the doctor was talking directly to me in all the soundclips.

The main mechanic behind Crush is that of moving between 2D and 3D. By rotating the camera in 3D and then “crushing” the world into 2D you can move into areas that would have been impossible to reach otherwise. The crush mechanic is a powerful one and, surprisingly, doesn’t descend into being a simple gimmick. The level design is awesome and it’s obvious the designers have put a lot of effort into really exploring what this mechanic gives them to work with.

All in all, then, I’ve been pleasantly surprised since buying the PSP. It’s almost a shame it’s been so universally unsuccessful – I imagine those games which have come out for it exclusively have suffered as a result. True, the DS probably deserves its victory – it’s more innovative, brilliantly marketed, and generally cooler – but the PSP… it’s not that bad.