Sony PSP: Fired Up and in Pursuit

By Guy Cocker on 23 September 2005, 12:06pm

Head down London's Oxford Street today and you can't get a Sony PSP for love nor money. It's bad news for the consumer, but it means that Crave feels smug on the tube as we show off our own portable gaming jewel. We've become even smugger since we got our hands on two of the console's premier racing games, Pursuit Force and Fired Up.

So which should you lavish your hard-earned cash and precious free time on? Both games offer the immediately satisfying action that handheld gaming demands. That's code for letting you shoot things and blow stuff up from the get-go. Developed by the grandly titled Bigbig Games, the idea behind Pursuit Force is to chase down gangs of street warriors in souped-up cars. If it were set on the mean streets of Milton Keynes, it might not be so exciting, but as you do this across the highways and deserts of America it's pretty cool. You can also shoot at the 30 gangs that patrol the virtual streets and even jump across to the opponent's car and shoot them in the face. The only boring part is that you are punished for harming innocent civilians -- pesky members of the public have been the scourge of the videogaming world for far too long.

Fired Up is from Sony's Studio London, which was previously responsible for The Getaway. Fired Up plays more like Twisted Metal: Head On, and lets up to eight people jump into vehicles and blow each other up over their wireless connections. We've heard that the single player game can be completed in under five hours, so we hope that you have a friend with a PSP. The great news is that they won't need to own the game to play -- you can use the PSP's game-sharing mode to play battles against anyone else with a console. This is also true for the demos of Wipeout Pure, and MediEvil: Resurrection that are housed on the UMD -- you can try them out in multiplayer without people needing to own the game. This kind of game sharing is one of the PSP's coolest features.

They're both fun, but from our first hour of play, we reckon Pursuit Force will be occupying the UMD slot on the office PSP for some time to come. Pursuit Force is set for release on 21 October and Fired Up is on sale now. -GC