I finally got round to doing this, sorry for the delay.   

Opening my Christmas presents I was delighted to see the packaging of what looked like a PSP and sure enough it was. Taking out my brand new PSP, I admired the sleek look of it and the nice feel of the machine, although I was quite concerned about how easy the screen would be to scratch, however I put that at the back of my mind and fitted in the half charge battery to see it this console really did live up to the hype. Did it? 

In one word YES.

First of all, I will give you the impressions of the games I got…

 Grand Theft Auto Liberty City stories: One reviewer described this game as ‘GTA lite’, and it is in a way but that would be unfair to compare to it PS2 and Xbox versions for obvious reasons. Although it took a little while to get used to the analog stick on the PSP, once I got used to it, I found driving around the city a breeze and also the ‘Lock On’ feature for weapons is still here so no need to be wishing for a mouse every time you had to shoot someone. The graphics are sublime and really do capture the sort of run down, polluted and dangerous atmosphere of Liberty City. Sound again excellent with good dialog and decent voice acting, you can’t go wrong!

 Overall 8.5/10

 Star Wars Battlefront 2: Well flying your snow speeder into an army of Imperial Walkers while sitting in the car sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately nothing can hide the fact that this is a rushed game looking to capitalize on the success of the other console versions. First off the graphics, all I can say Is that they are extremely poor, muddy textures, poor lighting and awful draw distance are some of the technical issues that ruin this game. GTA: LCS showed off the power of the PSP and honestly gives the PS2 a run for its money at times, but the graphics in this game do the system no sort of justice atoll. I’m sorry but I thought the days of PS graphics were over… seems not. The controls are a little difficult at first as well but after playing the game for 20 minutes you somewhat get used to them, even though accurate aiming is almost impossible in vehicles.

 Overall 6.5/10

 WRC Rally:  Not really played this game too much so can’t really comment, but from what I have seen of it, it looks like a solid racer.

 7.0/10

 Coded Arms:

 Coded Arms. It is the first person shooter on the PSP and the best, in my opinion. The story is about a military simulator called AIDA, in which human minds could be put into. The thing is abandoned because of a fatal fault. AIDA gets a virus, which makes it intelligent, and spreads over the computer network, and has plenty of defenses to keep it safe from hackers, lusting after the rare files. Thin is, to go into the Simulator, you need to put in your entire personality without back-ups in get into the software. So if you die, you become an “Sleeper”, a person who has no personality, and basically dead. You’ll have 5 attributes on weapons and armour. Physical, (Assault rifle and shotgun) Heat, (Flamethrowers and Infernos.) Virus, (Virus PSTL) and more. There is about 30 guns, and which you can only have 5 at a time, but all the other weapons are stored in your plug-in file, ready to use. The enemies, are quite varied, but rather stupid and not very challenging . The story is very good and interesting. And also, the controls are be a bit hard to master (Like Halo, BTW) but are simple. The sound is well, alright, Not too good. One bit that I love is that all the ammunition is like files, same with health, with the little tags on the end. An example is this: “Opt_key.DXL” which gives it a good feel. In all, the game is one of the best, and only has a few faults. A solid shooter, and a brilliant game to just charge in and mow down all of those bugs and bots. In all, I give it,

9.0/10

 Special thanks to my little brother for his review of Coded Arms!