Taito Legends Powered Up review (PSP)

Let’s be perfectly honest, retro compilations are big business at the moment. Every major arcade manufacturer of the last 30 years seem to be offering their own individually baked retro pies and are serving them en mass to a hungry gaming public. Taito are one of the more respected developers to join the party and their first portable arcade feast includes some pretty juicy titles.

Eeeny meeny miney mo

Taito Legends Powered Up is a collection of 21 classic Taito titles in one nicely rounded package for PSP consumers. Not an enormous amount considering the quota of games available in its big brother Xbox and PS2 flavours but as a special sweetener Taito have also included graphical remakes of four key titles exclusive to this version, which sneakily bumps the total to 25 depending on your viewpoint.

The complete list is quite a handful: Alpine Ski, Balloon Bomber, Cameltry, Chack 'n Pop, Crazy Balloon, Elevator Action, The Fairyland Story, KiKi KaiKai, Kuri Kinton, Legend Of Kage, Lunar Rescue, New Zealand Story, Phoenix Qix, Raimais, Rastan Saga, Return Of The Invaders, Space Chaser, Space Dungeon, Space Invaders and Space Invaders Part 2. The four enhanced titles are Balloon Bomber, Cameltry, Crazy Balloon and Legend Of Kage but more on them later.

That rotund walrus will be the death of me

The title that immediately stood out for me was New Zealand Story. Taito's story of the trainer donned platforming kiwi bird sucked up so many coins and gaming hours in my youth I was positively itching to play through it again. I was greeted on starting up the game with some simple navigation menus which are clean and easy to use and quickly found my way to my favourite platformer.

Emulation is full speed and faultless and the clarity of the PSP screen brings a beautifully animated title to life, and a level of vibrancy to the colours I hadn’t seen before. It’s a testament to the team at Taito that this is likely to be the best this title will ever look on any machine. Games are played with credits just like the arcade original and these are added with a simple button press. The controls are surprisingly responsive and I managed to play through to the end of the game comfortably albeit using a rather embarrassing amount of continues.

Love in an elevator

The almighty classic Elevator Action was the second test subject one of the greatest arcade action titles ever produced it ran faultlessly and proved just as moreish as its original incarnation. Space Invaders followed and subsequently Space Invaders 2 (or Deluxe Space Invaders as it was known to our US friends). Surprisingly still fun despite its age, I soon managed to rack up a respectable high score.

It has to be said however including multiple versions of what is essentially the same game is a little lazy of the developer and those spots could have been taken up with more deserving titles from the back catalogue. All of the games in the collection have great emulation and look clean and functional on the PSP screen, graphically they obviously don’t push the machine in anyway but compilations like this live and die on the quality of the conversions and Taito have done their heritage proud with this release.

Shiny but not necessarily better

The four ‘enhanced’ titles unfortunately offer little in the way of improvement apart from Cameltry. The classic maze puzzler is infinitely playable in its original format but the new graphical facelift adds a layer of 3D colourful gloss that just makes it ten times more enjoyable. It also changes the gameplay slightly by adding a range of new power-ups to the proceedings and makes use of the PSP’s full widescreen display. Controlled at its best with the analogue nub it was so delectable it actually made me wish the principle was expanded into a full portable puzzle title, fans of Mercury may find it a tad simple but it’s a welcome surprise none the less.

Blip blop bloop

The compilations audio is superb as expected, it doesn’t take much to get the old arcade BMG’s sounding spot on with the excellent audio architecture of the PSP but it’s good to see there are no problems here. All original games also have a range of viewing options allowing you to stretch the screen to your desired play style. Personally I would recommend keeping the original aspect ratio as it doesn’t squash the sprites and the borders are quite attractive and not particularly intrusive.

Overall Taito has contributed a welcome library of titles to the PSP’s growing retro cannon. It’s a quick loading short burst gamers paradise that suits handheld play very well, although it’s hard to recommend to anyone who already owns the collection on any other platform. The lack of a more comprehensive games list and a few filler titles are the only real negatives to take note of and lets be honest anything involving a game with floating kiwi birds and walrus boss creatures can’t be too bad can it?