As A 47 Danger writes below, the PSP game selection in the US is pretty stagnant. Thankfully for us, the little tag on the back of Japanese PSP games that says “for Japan only” is a bald-faced lie. They’ve got several more fun, non-Lumines games available, which may or may not be eventually heading our way. Tellingly, they’re all retreads of one kind or another, but they may nonetheless be worth a look.

Let me pause and ask a question of Joe here, hopefully to be answered in the comments: remind me, did you pick up Star Soldier in Tokyo? The reason I ask him is that Star Soldier looks like a pretty spiffy little game. It’s a scrolling shooter in the Xevious/Gradius vein, and the hook here is that it is intended to be played with the Gorgeous 16:9 Screen (TM) tipped up sideways, with the d-pad/analog slider end at the bottom. I’ve always been pretty terrible at this type of game, but it does look pretty. The game is a sort of port of the GameCube/PS2 entry in a series that spans back to the original Star Soldier on NES (A creation of Hudson Soft, that first game is available as a Famicom Mini game in Japan).

Next is Puzzle Bobble Pocket. This is the latest installment in the puzzle series called Bust-a-Move stateside that started in the arcades in 1994, and has been released on pretty much every system since the Playstation and the Game Boy Color. The series has been a pretty serviceable good time all along, although the mechanic of shooting balls/bubbles/tiles up at the mess you’re clearing was maybe done better in the Windows cult shareware game Snood. Anyway, on the PSP, it’s just as fun of a single-player puzzle or a two-player battle, and worth a look if you happen to be in Japan. If you have a DS, save your import money, as the DS version is scheduled in the US, but this version isn’t.

Lastly is Taiko no Tatsujin Portable, known to us gaijin as Taiko Drum Master Portable. This hasn’t been scheduled here, and I heartily reccomend giving it a look if you like rhythm games in particular, or the American PS2 port of the arcade version of this game. The bright, bold, cutesy graphics look fantastic on the Gorgeous 16:9 Screen (TM), and the gameplay translates surprisingly well to button-pushing in lieu of expensive-peripheral-drum-smacking. I haven’t figured all of the menus and modes out yet, but there are a couple 1P and a couple 2p modes, including a battle mode based on Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots - awesome. It’s no Lumines (what is?), but it’s the second-best game I’ve played on PSP.

It is curious and unexpected where we find the next-gen portable market right now. It turns out that despite developers still figuring out how to use the DS, the handful of decent games on that system, coupled with GBA back-compatability (and Nintendogs, oddly enough) has landed Nintendo in a much better position to compete with the PSP’s one killer app, basket of superfluous features, and Gorgeous 16:9 Screen (TM).