75 reasons to buy PlayStation Portable

Another PlayStation Meeting export. This time it's a line-up of previously unconfirmed first and third-party PSP software, including the likes of Winning Eleven 8, Tony Hawk's and Harvest Moon...

News by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief

Updated on 17 Dec 2004

31 comments

A vast list of rumoured and largely unknown PlayStation Portable titles is the latest scrap of tantalising information to find its way out of Sony's Japanese PlayStation Meeting 2004 this week, following revelations about PSP multiplayer and PS3 on Monday and Tuesday.

The list, which consists of some 75 titles, includes only a couple of previously confirmed games, the most notable of which is Burnout from UK-based Criterion, and a confirmation of several rumoured titles (like Transformers from Atari's Melbourne House, which was first mooted in a Eurogamer interview earlier this year). Aside from those games, it's almost exclusively new product.

Even better, while many of the new titles are Japanese oddities we have no frame of reference for (Ninja Bunny Warriors, anyone?), there are some truly exciting prospects nobody had any idea about either, including a Harvest Moon title, Tony Hawk's Underground 2, and even Konami's Winning Eleven 8 - the latest in the long-running football series, and the game that will form the basis of much of the recently unveiled Pro Evolution Soccer 4.

Europe is strongly represented too, with the likes of This Is Football 2005 and Formula One '04 coming straight out of Sony's UK development studios, and entries for Eutechnyx (Big Mutha Truckers 2) and Argonaut (Zero Hour) amongst others.

Add to the line-up the likes of Metal Gear Acid, Ridge Racer, Wipeout Pure, Ape Escape, Gran Turismo, Everybody's Golf and Death Jr., all of which appeared or were trailed at E3 this year, and the PSP is suddenly awash with promising franchise titles. And that's before we consider any platform-specific IP that Sony or other developers might plan to launch.

It's worth pointing out that, as with many of the PlayStation Meeting revelations, there isn't much context at this point (despite making many of its biggest announcements in years at the Tokyo conference, Sony neglected to translate any of it into English for the Western press), so it's impossible to speculate how many will be launch titles, how many will appear in the first year, or anything like that.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting glimpse of the future of the PSP, and following Nintendo's rundown of many tens of untold DS titles at E3, Sony finally has a product line-up in the public domain that's more than fit to compare.

For more on this week's PlayStation Meeting announcements, see here for PlayStation 3 and here for news on PSP translation software and wireless multiplayer.

The full list, courtesy of The Magic Box: