"Zig Zag Ball"? "Cup in!"? What's this?!

If you have access to the Japanese PlayStation Store and need some 32-bit happiness to cheer you up after some kind of beating, why not check out the latest round of PlayStation classics? Some of these new additions to the old Game Archives are as cheap as 300 yen – namely the titles from D3 Publisher’s generally excellent Simple 1500 series of games. Read on for the best picks – it’s list ‘em up time!

Zig Zag Ball (600 yen, pictured above) – This one is a primary-coloured amalgamation of pinball, crazy golf and billiards with four-player modes and helpful blue pixies.

The Beach Volley (300 yen) – Eight teams from around the world (including Germany but not including England, which is probably for the best) assemble on a beach of torn polygons to “spike” their way to the final.

The Fureai Simulation 2 (300 yen) – You are a 19-year student who has just failed to get into university and instead you find yourself spending the summer in a part-time job… where there just happen to be five cute girls (*each offering unique personalities!) who are on the hunt for a boyfriend. This one is carefully described by Sony as a “heartrending love story” (really).

Reverthion (600 yen) – This spidery mech shooter looks like a cross between Panzer Dragoon and Virtual On. It’s very crunchy.

The dust settles; crows circle; the blood drains slowly from your vision; another Electronic Entertainment Expo draws to a close. This year’s gaming news firestorm sparked, raged and died much like the one before, and the one before that: there were uppers and downers, raters and slaters, shocks and crocks. The details change, the dancers trade places, but the great waltz remains the same.

Here at VGD, we might not have dished out the coverage quite as rapidly and fulsomely as some other sites, but we were there to pen considered judgements on all three manufacturer keynotes and a few things besides.  Find the lot below.

Opinion: Kinect reveal was for ‘everyone’, just not for you
Microsoft’s first E3 2010 airing of the newly renamed motion technology left much to be desired.

Microsoft’s E3: slow and steady wins the race?
Microsoft’s press conference might have lacked surprises, but the quality and integrity were there.

Nintendo’s E3: welcome back, guys, we’ve missed you
Miyamoto and co take time away from casual gaming to deliver the E3 presentation their fans have been dreaming of.

Sony’s E3: making a Move on the third parties
Twisted Metal and Killzone 3 might be the toast of the PlayStation community at present, but Sony’s presser was as much about partnerships as it was home-grown games.

The price of innovation: Move, Kinect, 3DS
Our thoughts on the price-points – real and rumoured – of the next three major innovations in console gaming.

If Hideo Kojima is to be believed, the working title for MGS Peace Walker included a rather significant 5 numeral. It doesn’t take the imagination of a conspiracy theorist to see why – Having been burned by Acid twice and bemused by the clunky kidnapping simulator that was Portable Ops, PSP owners needed to believe in a portable instalment that would be treated with the same care and attention lavished on the mainline series.

This is however the very same Hideo Kojima that’s categorically stated that he wouldn’t make another MGS ever since 2001’s Sons of Liberty, but in the light of the trivial PSP offerings in the interim, we should forgive his misleading work plans and be grateful that he has once again taken the directorial helm for Peace Walker. In many ways Peace Walker delivers on Kojima’s promise, and in more still, it exceeds it.

Stretching the 480p PSP screen shots on to a monitor does them no favours but on its native hardware the game looks crisp and clean and it moves beautifully.

Set a decade after the events of Snake Eater (and four years after Portable Ops), the story picks up in 1974 South America where a bitter Naked Snake – still recovering from the betrayal of being duped into killing his mentor at the hands of a deceptive America – has put together his own army; a ragtag outfit of disgruntled soldiers going by the name of the Militaires Sans Frontiers (Soldiers Without Borders). Snake is approached by a young pacifist named Paz telling him that an unnamed military force has overtaken a defenceless Costa Rica and the country needs the MSF to chase the shady bunch away, and being the peace-loving champion of the free world that he is, Snake takes up the gig.

Metal Gear’s labyrinthine story has always been a divisive issue among fans. On one hand it’s littered with crude existentialist philosophy and painfully misguided exposition, on the other it’s home to some brilliantly inventive “what if” political scenarios, captivating sci-fi characters and touches of all-out post-modern genius. Thankfully Kojima finally seems to have imposed a modicum of self-editing in Peace Walker.

There may be nuclear holocausts to avert, but attaching bodies to balloons and launching them in the air is how you will want to spend most of your time.

Positioned between an origin tale and the Solid Snake chronicles, Peace Walker’s story was limited in its scope, but barring the odd anachronistic advance in AI, it is remarkably restrained (for a MGS game), focusing on Cold War paranoia, political back-stabbing and tying plot threads together rather than unravelling them further. The series calling card cut-scenes are presented in lively comic book style, once again drawn by Ashley Wood (Portable Ops and the Digital Graphic Novel) and they never outstay their welcome, being well choreographed and even cleverly interactive.

The English-language version is due on the American wing of PSN next month, but for those of you who just can’t wait to play a disc-free version of what is undoubtedly one of the good’uns in Square Enix’ hit-and-miss series of epic RPGs, well, Final Fantasy IX is now officially available for download from the Japanese PlayStation Store.

Weighing in at 1550MB (the original was split across four discs) and costing 1,500 yen, everything about the reappearance of FFIX a decade on from its original release says “BIG ADVENTURE”. Thing is, have you even finished FFXIII yet?

It’s just as well for Hideki that both of these PC-Engine titles are excellent examples of a genre popular with “hardcore” Japanese gamers – and we’re not talking bouncing boob observation sims! Nope, 600 yen will instead buy you PS3/PSP-compatible versions of Gradius (pictured above) or Deta na!! Twinbee (pictured below). Both are top titles, with Gradius edging things by a light year or two. No boobs, though, otaku pack. Blame Hideki.

This is King Of Fighters '97, which is COMPLETELY different to KOF '96 and '98, obviously.

Can you remember where you were in 1995? Can you remember where you were yesterday? If the answer to both of those questions is “No!”, you’re probably as old as me. Any which way you slice it, King Of Fighters as a series was pretty chuffing good in the 1990s, and its elitist connotations made for great bragging material (“Yeah, well I’ve got the MVS cart of KOF ’98 – beat that!”). Now it’s just dusty museum material, but hey, at least SNK is curating its corner of the Great Videogames Archive in the Sky in fine fashion:

The King Of Fighters Portable ’94-’98 Chapter of Orochi is a PSP compilation of five KOF titles that you’ve likely already MAMEd to death in the past decade. Hey-ho. This latest compi is out in Japan on June 24th and features ad-hoc two-player “antics”, training modes for each title, and stuff. That’s King Of Fighters ’94 (Baggio!), ’95 (blank), ’96 (it’s coming home!), ’97 (N64?) and ’98 (Dreamcast!) in one 21st Century-damning bundle o’ joy.

A pertinent question. Having followed closely behind Virtua Fighter in technology stakes, the Dead or Alive fighting games have always proven to be enjoyable and accessible, if ultimately shallow and disposable in the grand scheme of the genre. Where Mortal Kombat’s gimmick appealed to our base love of violence, Tecmo’s series exploited our carnal instinct – sex.

It was transparent enough and anybody that wasn’t born with the name Tomonobu Itagaki could identify the series as a puerile yet playable distraction from real fighting games, but what if we strip away the layers of cutting-edge tech and responsive high-speed gameplay? What if we trim gameplay to such a reductive level that it makes a WarioWare minigame look in-depth? What if we centre the entire experience on the charade of interacting with Tecmo’s soulless Stepford Wives? We are left with the hell that is Dead or Alive Paradise.

Rare footage of Hitomi actually spiking near the net as opposed to from the back of the court where it will always fail.

Following a titillating FMV intro showing the DoA girls cavorting about in various states of undress and seductively going down on ice creams, the stage is set with Zack (the only male you see in the game and inarguably the most irritating character in the series) once again inviting DoA’s nine female participants and one irrelevant unlockable lady to his resurrected private island for two weeks where he trys to woo them through the medium of gift swimsuits, accessories and cabbages.

Your days are divided into morning, afternoon and evening where you will be able to indulge in activities as diverse as volleyball, pool hopping, butt battling and gambling. Volleyball is the activity that most resembles an actual video game, but it’s riddled with so many flaws it’s not even funny. Your point of view is a ridiculous angle that that pans around refusing to give you a full view of the arena and your partner is so devoid of common sense that she will regularly attempt to spike the ball from the back of the court, or even more amusingly, literally ignore it when it’s well within her range – not even a cursory dive to pretend she’s actually in the game with you. DoA: Xtreme 2 at least allowed you to control your partner’s movement with the second stick – a luxury that’s obviously impossible here but irritating none the less, and while the girls had individual stats in the last game, if they did make the transition they are nearly impossible to spot.

Tap for short jumps, hold for long. Match colours for bonus points. Riveting.

Pool hopping is a simple Guitar Hero-like button matching exercise that requires timing and observation but has even less depth than the shallow pool it takes place in. The butt battle makes its unwanted return as an unlockable after a lot of grief and even this sentence is giving it more recognition than it deserves. Finally we have gambling games which amount to poker, blackjack and the slots. Sure, they work, but if you needed a full-price UMD to play cards, you probably have bigger things to worry about. Cut from previous games in the series are the jet ski race, water slide, beach flag and tug of war games, leaving a severely undernourished gameplay experience.

"But it's not as good as the Saturn version..." - WRONG!

600 yen goes a long way in Japan. It can get you two 500ml cans of Yebisu beer. Or a copy of Famitsu. Or six items from a 100 yen-shop, if you don’t factor in sales tax. Much, much better, though, is that it can get you a game from the online retro gamer’s paradise that is PSN-J’s Game Archives.

And as of now that includes a little game called Thunderforce V Perfect System, a bloody marvelous shmup from TechnoSoft (RIP) that has way more features than the admittedly lovely Saturn version. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

Other recent additions to the PlayStation-games-for-download service include Nihon Bussan’s 1996 mediocrity Dead Heat Road, a board game called Family Diamond that weighs in at just 5MB (and they wasted a whole CD publishing this back in 2002!), and – wait for it – The PRO Mahjong: Initiation Into the Secrets of the Art, which is, to be blunt, just a mahjong game from 1998.

It has been said that if you laid all the ninjas and dynasties slayed in the extensive back-catalogue of hack and slash super-studio Tecmo-Koei head to toe, they would loop the world all the way from Neo Tokyo to the Great Wall several hundred times over.

At least it has now.  In such capable hands you might expect the introduction of a new IP that marries the slicing and dicing of a K-T game with the real-time character management of Pikmin or Overlord to be an exciting prospect.

Your undead army can be used to destroy threats, clog up traps and quite regularly to form bridges atop one another

Set in an undisclosed European Kingdom, Undead Knights tells the tale of a cuckolded king maneuvered into killing his own daughter and husband-to-be along with a loyal knight, though rather than settling for an after-life of providing sustenance for worms, Sylvia and brothers Romulus and Remus accept the gift of a rebirth from a shadowy death-like figure who also grants them the power to create armies of the undead to control with a touch. The three return to exact revenge on the king, the wicked queen and anybody else who may have been involved along the way.

In terms of maintaining a consistent art direction, Undead Knights is something of a mish-mash. Imagine the gothic mischief of Castlevania mixed with a very angsty foul-mouthed teen and you’re half way there. The world is constructed of predictably typical defense garrisons and uninspired castle interiors, with very little to distinguish one area from the next.

In its defence, Undead Knights does manage to display quite a number of enemies and even more of your undead on screen at one time with little in the way of slowdown, and commanding your denizens to kill results in a pleasing display of butchery, though the entire design is lacking any kind of individual stamp of direction and screams generic video game zombie fodder.

Kyuin: one of the best cute PlayStation shmups, and no longer ridiculously expensive!

I’ve spent the past hour flying a vacuum cleaner and shooting frogs. That’s right, I’ve been playing Kyuin! This is almost up there with Harmful Park at the top of the cutesy PSX shmup tree. Kyuin (the sound made by a Hoover) is completely daft, has delightful music, runs at 60fps without any slowdown, scrolls in all directions, has a nifty two-player mode that doubles the fun, and is just generally charming throughout. All this from a virtually unknown developer with the generic name of “Media Entertainment”.

Kyuin was originally released in Japan in 1996 (there was a re-release in 2000), but it’s never been cheaper or more easily accessible than it is now: as of yesterday, anyone with a Japanese PSN account can get it for 600 yen via the Game Archives section of the J-PS Store. I’d suggest that’s a much more sensible option than paying 16,000 yen (£107/$175 – no, really!) for this sealed original copy on Yahoo! Auctions or even blowing $50 on this eBay import. At 600 yen this is absolutely essential. If you have the means, get it now!

This is the bridesmaid boss at the end of Level 1. Not quite sure of the premise, but you have to shoot her with your vacuum cleaner until she shrinks. What a game!