The PSPgo launched on Oct. 1, kicking off an impressive glut of download-only games on the Playstation Store. It also marked Sony's promised push for new, triple-A games for the Playstation Portable including MotorStorm, LittleBigPlanet and Assassin's Creed titles.

Take a gander at some of the big games that hit the PSP this year. What titles would you recommend as a gift?

Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines
Price: $39.99
Genre: Action Adventure
Subject Matter: Assassin's Creed vaults onto the PSP.
Value: Players curious about what happened between Assassin's Creed I and II might want to check out this title.
Buy it for fans of AC.

Read the Full Review.

Fieldrunners

Price: $6.99
Genre: Tower Defense
Subject Matter: The popular iPhone Tower Defense game brought to the Playstation Portable.
Value: This was one of my favorite downloadable minis when the PSPgo launched. It's a great port of the original.
Buy it for fans of tower defense titles.
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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Price: $29.99
Rating: Teen
Genre: Action
Subject Matter: A arcade-style shooter loosely based on the live-action G.I. Joe movie.
Value: G.I. Joe is a movie tie-in strangely reminiscent of Konami's Contra series. One or two players take control of their favorite Joes from the movie and take on Cobra across multiple levels of run-and-gun action. There are a few unlockables catering to fans of the old cartoon series, but other than that this is strictly a movie-lover's affair.
Buy it for: Really, really big fans of the G.I. Joe live-action movie.
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Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars

Price: $39.99
Rating: Mature
Genre: Open world action-adventure
Subject Matter: Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars is a 3D, top-down adventure, putting players in the shoes of Huang Lee, a spoiled son of a Chinese gangster. The typical Grand Theft Auto rise to power through sex, drugs, violence and bad driving flows over the course of the game.
Value: There's a lengthy story to be told, with Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars throwing in plenty of side missions and mini-games to keep the player interested.
Buy it for: PSP owners looking for a chunky, fun-to-pay adventure.
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Gran Turismo

Price: $39.99
Rating: Everyone
Genre: Driving Simulation
Subject Matter: Gran Turismo offers players over 800 cars to purchase, customize and race on more than 35 tracks in a realistic setting, testing their driving skills with real-world physics.
Value: Gran Turismo offers nearly limitless replayability, thanks to the numerous cars, tracks and Driving Challenges stuffed in to the game. Long time Gran Turismo fans may be turned of by the lack of a Career Mode and Leaderboards, but this is a solid pick up and play racer.
Buy it for: The car-obsessed portable gamer who prefers a passenger seat in the real-world.
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Half-Minute Hero

Price: $29.95
Rating: E10+
Genre: Across four mode: Hyper-speed role-playing game / hyper-speed scrolling shoot-em-up / hyper-speed real-time strategy game / hyper-speed top-down dungeon-crawler
Subject Matter: A winning send-up to the genres and technology of 16-bit Japanese-made games, there's actually a lengthy adventure here that spans eras and tells the comedic/dramatic tale of heroes who repeatedly face the challenge of saving the world in 30 seconds.
Value: High, as the game offers short-session bites of play that combine into a lengthy adventure that has none of the brevity suggested by the game's title.
Buy it for: RPG fans, fans of the Super Nintendo era, and fans who are looking for something original and smart on the PSP.
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LocoRoco Midnight Carnival

Price: $14.99
Rating: Everyone
Genre: Platformer
Subject Matter: The LocoRocos are up past their bedtime and rolling and bouncing their way through a Halloween carnival-style levels.
Value: The stages might be short, but they are hard. A more satisfying (and less stressful) gaming experience was found in some of the mini-games.
Buy it for: Gamers looking for a challenge who get music stuck in their heads easily.
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MotorStorm: Arctic Edge

Price: $39.99
Rating: Teen
Genre: Racing
Subject Matter: MotorStorm: Arctic Edge is an over-the-top, semi-open world off-road racer.
Buy it for: fans of arcade race games who spend a bit of time commuting or can't afford a Playstation 3.
Value: With 12 maps, two directions to race them on, multiple courses and vehicle types, MotorStorm Arctic Edge is packed with content. Online play rounds out the experience giving you a chance to test your skills against five other players at a time.
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PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe

Price: $19.99
Rating: Teen
Genre: Tower defense
Subject Matter: Classic tower defense mechanics and gameplay mixed with delicious PixelJunk aesthetics.
Buy it for: fans of the original Playstation 3 title, tower defense games or developer Q Games.
Value: Featuring new maps, enemies and towers, this is worth the cash.
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PSPgo
Price: $249
Rating: NA
Genre: Hardware
Subject Matter: Sony's latest portable platform ditches the need for a UMD drive and instead gives you a 16GB harddrive and the ability to download all of the games directly to the system.
Value: At $249, the portable platform is quite pricey, coming in at the cost of several home consoles.
Buy it for: anyone interested in being able to load up their portable with movies, TV shows, pictures, music and games without having to carry a single disc around with them.
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PSPgo Traveler Case
Price: $19.99
Rating: NA
Genre: NA
Subject Matter: This fauxe leather case protects and beautifies your PSPgo.
Value: For just under $20, this is a heck of a deal.
Buy it for: PSPgo owners looking to protect or upgrade the look of their portable.
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Rock Band Unplugged>/strong>

Price: $19.99
Rating: Teen
Genre: Rhythm game
Subject Matter: Harmonix' insanely popular Rock Band on the go.
Value: For just under $20 you get a full-fledged World Tour and about 40 tracks. You also get the ability to download new tracks to your PSP.
Buy it for: fans of rhythm games, Rock Band and good music.
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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona

Price: $39.99
Rating: Teen
Genre: RPG
Subject Matter: A remake of the original Persona for the PlayStation.
Value: A more faithful translation of the original Japanese Persona has never been seen in North America, making Persona PSP the definitive first entry in a series that's been enjoying increased popularity these past few years.
Buy it for: Any Japanese RPG fan.
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Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron

Price: $29.99
Rating: Teen
Genre: Adventure
Subject Matter: You are X-2, a Jedi clone out to help the Rebels take down the Empire and stop your brother X-1 before it's too late.
Value: Elite Squadron mixes gameplay, story and clips from the Star Wars films as it tells the story of X-2. The real replay value comes with the game's online multiplayer.
Buy it for: Star Wars fans or those looking for a PSP multiplayer experience.
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Half-Minute Hero, XSeed and Marvelous Entertainment's unusual, experimental role-playing game is smart, sharp, surprisingly long — given its title — and sloppy in a way that somehow doesn't break the game but instead makes it all the more charming.

Who knew a game that seemed like a three-note joke could accomplish so much?

Loved
Brave Design: Half-Minute Hero was made by developers with guts. They created an homage to 16-bit top-down Japanese role-playing games, but sped up the pace to force you to rush from the start of an adventure to the defeat of a boss in 30 seconds, daring to fill the script with comedy and automate the battles. The main gameplay is the time management of rushing the hero from town to battle to, maybe, secret hidden cave, leveling up in the blink of an eye and strategically spending quickly-earned money to pray to a money-hungry goddess and buy the time to get the clock back up to 30 seconds.

And that's just Hero 30, the first of the game's three main modes. The three other main modes, Princess 30, Evil Lord 30 and the unlockable Knight 30, offer similarly mad takes on side-scrolling shoot-em-ups, real-time strategy games and whatever you call the genre that involves escorting a sage through a dungeon with the help of carefully laid traps that keep enemies at bay. All of the four modes run on 30-second timers, each offering a different angle on how to extend the clock.

Your Time, Not Wasted: The game is fast, sometimes too fast. Most quests go from title screen to credit-rolling in 90 seconds — if you're slow. You don't have to press buttons during battles because, well, you don't have to think too hard about pressing them even in the many major Japanese role-playing games. So, in Half-Minute Hero, you're spared. Te battle screen switches the view of Hero 30's top-down RPG to a sideways view. Your hero automatically rushes from left to right, mauling or being mauled by his opponents. Conversation in towns — where time is frozen — is brisk and funny. Levels are unlocked fast and furiously. And leveling-up is accelerated in every mission you play. Soon enough, the player is leveling from zero to 20 and upgrading armor five times in just a minute. Makes you wonder why you ever had to spend 50 hours doing that.

Splendid Variety: The JRPG mode, Hero 30, is the game's main attraction. It is a strong entry in its own right, offering more than 30 quests before its conclusion and branching off in different directions depending on decisions you make during the adventure. The other three modes are entirely different, but each retain core values of the game and the JRPG genre. All are funny. All involve characters who don't take themselves too seriously. And all offer different ways to level up, access optional levels and experience that ever-satisfying progression from weakling to superstar that typifies a great role-playing game.

A Progressive Look Back: Half-Minte Hero's graphics may look 16-bit, but so many enlightened touches have been applied to them. For example, the pixelated sprite of the main character in Hero 30 changes depending on which head, chest, foot and hand items he's been equipped with. The music is a bravura tour of RPG emotion, hitting all the beats of triumph and sorrow from track to track, the music rotating for each of the game's quick levels. Even when the developers are pretending to be annoying — like when they roll the credits at the end of every Hero 30 level — they can't help but respect a modern gamer's needs by letting those credits be accelerated.

Wonderful Imbalance: Half-Minute Hero is mostly too easy, which would be a problem if completing it didn't require going through more than 120 separately laid-out levels. It's tempting to criticize how, in the RTS mode, the evil lord that the player controls can get caught in a corner and mauled by enemies even when it seems that the controls should enable some type of escape. He can summon monsters after all, so why can't he be liberated? Some of the fourth mode, Knight 30, seems like it's been made to be broken. A level or two appear to be beatable in normal mode if the player does little more than have the protagonist stand still. But it's hard to object, because those rough edges — that apparent sloppiness — fits the spirit of a game that is having so much fun with its trappings and is so quick to move on to the next quest and crack more jokes in script and gameplay.

Hated
Throwaway Level Design: Despite what I just wrote about the imbalance, the game's shoot-em-up mode, Princess 30, does disappoint. Completion of it, Evil Lord 30 (the RTS) and Hero 30 (the RPG) are required to access Knight 30 and the amazing final two unlockable modes that I will not spoil. The conceit of Princess 30 is that the Princess needs to leave her castle, find some medicine for the king and get back home by curfew. It's funny, especially because she turns from docile to destroyer as soon as she picks up her crossbow — and because of the inane logic of the plot that has her fetching bitter grass to heal dad because everyone knows good medicine is bitter — but the whole thing disappoints because the levels are barely-distinct linear rushes. Zip out of the castle with the shooting button spammed. Zip back in. Not enough changes to keep this mode as strong, so woe to the player who leaves most of Princess 30 to be played on its own. If you get the game, mix the Princess levels in. Don't save them.

I thought the appeal of Half-Minute Hero wouldn't last. And it would be if all of the levels were as quick and sometimes-silly/broken as those of Knight 30, Evil Lord 30 and Princess 30. But Hero 30 takes this one over the top. Level design in Hero 30 is clever, full of hidden secrets, fun gameplay twists and everything else that a good RPG can have — brilliantly packed into quests you can hope to clear in 60 seconds.

If more developers want to mess with conventions like this, please, please do.

(Half-Minute Hero was developed by Marvelous Entertainment and published by XSeed for the PSP on October 13. Retails for $29.95 USD. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played all quests to completion, except the bonus, crazy final post-completion one. Took me 12 hours, 15 minutes, 8 seconds.)

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The game's concept sounded simple enough to me – you play as little 8-bit characters that riff on classic role-playing game tenants and have 30 seconds to get through various levels that open up on a world map. However, when I picked up the game and actually started to play, I couldn't figure out which buttons did what. Then, with 10 seconds to spare on the clock and about two inches shy of the boss encounter, my character was suddenly naked and without a sword and shield.

No other game has ever made me say "What the $%&@" out loud before. It took me and four other games journalists half an hour to figure out what exactly happened. Apparently, when you stop in a town (where the timer so graciously pauses most of the time), you can pray at a Goddess statue to reset the timer back to 30 seconds. To do this, you have to shell out 100 gold initially and then 200 gold the next time you do it and so on. If you don't have enough gold, the Goddess will still reset the time, but at some random point during your game, she'll show up and strip you naked — also, the timer apparently won't pause in towns anymore.

Really, it was the damndest thing — not just being naked, but the whole concept of only have 30 seconds to get from one end of a map to another. Half-Minute Hero feels more like a puzzle game than an action game, really. The sooner the player grasps that and starts plotting out exactly where to go and when to pay the Goddess to reset the timer, the less time they'll spend yelling "What the $%&@" at their PSPs.

Here, have some screens:

Half-Minute Hero is a PSP game that rested unattended at a New York City event for XSeed games that I attended last night. It was an assuming oddity in the corner, running on the console that doesn't have many games that people are talking about these days. In other words, it would have been easy to miss.

It's a game that just may be the most marvelous answer to the criticism that Japanese role-playing games are tediously-paced.

This game, at least its hero mode, plays a full RPG quest in 30 seconds, at a pace that makes WarioWare seem relaxed. And would you believe it's the first RPG I've played that had me hoping for more random encounters?

What Is It?

Half-Minute Hero is a PSP game developed by Marvelous Entertainment and Opus Studio with eight-bit graphics but a thoroughly modern send-up to top-down Japanese role-playing games.

What We Saw

The game is said to have four modes of play, including a magician mode and princess mode that play like riffs off of genres other than the JRPGs lampooned in the hero mode I tired. I got to play two missions. Each set my hero down on an old Final Fantasy SNES-era world map with a timer counting down 30 seconds until game-ending catastrophe. I had just a half-minute to save the world from some comically evil dark lords.

How Far Along Is It?

The game is slated for a Fall 2009 release. The two missions I played were fully localized and feature-complete. I don't know how far along the rest of the game is.

What Needs Improvement?

Not Much: The game hyper-accelerates the pace of the traditional role-playing game flawlessly. The demo missions were a little hard, but I didn't mind. It was confusing to figure out which health items on sale in the shops did what, but that wasn't a big problem either.

What Should Stay The Same?

Most of It: You control the hero with the d-pad and walk (or run) him around the map. You have just 30 seconds — sort of. Entering castles, towns or other locations represented by buildings pauses the game's countdown. In those locations, the game switches to 2D-side-scrolling and lets you talk or buy items such as better swords, shields or even a potion that refills the countdown clock. None of the talking was serious. And the spirit of the game compels the player to get on with it. Out in the overworld wilderness, I discovered that random encounters transition the game into battle mode. These battles are also rendered in 2D and are run automatically. Your hero dashes to the right, sword pointed at enemy. All I could do was wait for his repeated attacks to succeed. Or I could make him flee. All of this happens in Charlie-Chaplin-style high speed. A battle is over in two seconds. Experience points are tallied, gold is earned. Leveling up commences (I went up six levels in half a minute). Leveling is fun, but the goal is to rush to the boss — hoping that by the time you get near his lair you've been prompted with the "You > Evil." That alert indicates that victory is attainable. So you crush the boss. With hundredths of seconds to spare. Very vague echoes of Majora's Mask.

Respects For The Gamer: I am weary of JRPGs that waste players' time with cumbersome menus as well as inane and unessential dialogue. Half-Minute Hero seems to be designed by people who agree and have sped things along. Gameplay and fun appear to have been prioritized over tedious item management and maudlin narrative.

Final Thoughts

XSeed was showing only a tiny portion of the game. The official fact sheet for the title promises 15 hours of gameplay, spread across four modes of play that have 30 missions each. While missions can last more than 30-seconds if you make the necessary time-extension purchases in some missions, that still doesn't add up. But who's counting?

It may well be that the other modes of the game — conspicuously absent from the demo I was able to play — don't share the hero mode's ingenuity. That's a key thing to look for as the game's fall 2009 release approaches. Nevertheless, the game made the best first-impression of any new title I sampled this week.