Bomberman [PSP]

Dating all the way back to 1987, the Bomberman series is not far off being the oldest still-running video game series there is. Although it's had its fair share of ups and downs, most notably hitting a low ebb with the recent Act Zero on the 360, this tightly designed PSP version nails the classic feel near-perfectly. The game's intense, retribution-heavy focus doesn't work so well on your own, but get some friends together and you'll -- quite literally -- have a blast.

Yes, there's a plot, but it's not important. Know just that Bomberman's objective is to run around a simple maze, planting bombs in an attempt to blow the living daylights out of anything that moves and isn't you. Powerups appear periodically and let you plant more bombs at once, increase their explosive power, or grant you special powers like invulnerability, or the ability to kick bombs. Complex this is not.

It has visuals to suit. Simple, clean and bright, the uncluttered graphics make the most of the PSP's screen without being too confusing or busy. Bomberman plays the odd 3D trick, zooming into the playfield at the start and end of the bouts, but is canny enough to keep all that nonsense away from the real gameplay. It'll be very familiar to Bomberman fans, and for all the right reasons.

If all you try is the single player modes, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Bomberman includes plenty of solo stages, grouped into "planets" with different themes, but although the AI passes a cursory inspection it's not going to put up much of a challenge, nor is it going to hold your interest for very long.

Criticizing the single player mode misses one simple fact, however - hardly anyone buys these games to play on their own. Fundamentally, much of the pleasure in Bomberman games comes from blowing up other people, preferably in ways that are as inescapable and humiliating as possible. Take the howls and curses of frustration out of that equation, and the game is nowhere near as fun.

No, multiplayer is where it's at, and Bomberman delivers an appropriately explosive package of four-at-a-time thrills. Although you need one PSP per player, of course, you can game-share with a single UMD to up to three friends. You can set the game up how you like, across a wide variety of maps, game styles, rules and configurations.

With that in mind, it would have been wonderful to see a proper infrastructure online mode, so Bomberman fans could take on challengers from all over the world instead of just those in a 100-foot radius. Still, you can't have everything, and Bomberman's multiplayer leaves us with very few gripes.

In the wake of the horrible Bomberman: Act Zero on the 360, Bomberman PSP proves that sometimes thinking smaller and simpler can provide better results. It's just as much fun now as it was ten or twenty years ago, and that's enough for us to crown it one of the most worthwhile multiplayer PSP games around. If you have friends, and at least some of them have PSPs, you need this game. It's that simple.