Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational
Hiding underneath the cute, almost saccharine exterior here is a golf game with a lot of depth and some great physics modeling. The well-designed courses are full of situations where you have to choose whether to go for the risky, shorter play through trees and bunkers, or to go around the long way on the safer fairway. The button-based camera controls take a little getting used to while planning your shots, though a fine replay system lets you watch your ball flying across the wonderfully detailed courses from a wide variety of angles.
Hot Shots Golf also offers some of the oddest uses of the Vita's unique features, including an augmented reality mode where the entire course is projected in front of the real world scene behind the system. You can also use this mode to look around the course from a first-person perspective simply by tilting the Vita around. The rear touch pad lets you plan out future shots by tapping to see how far any set point is from the hole. All of these features are fun to try once, but none really adds to the strong, button-based gameplay.
Overall, Hot Shots Golf isn't the kind of game most people will find themselves buying a system for, but it's easily the type of game an existing system owner should check out once they're done with those must-have purchases. Look out if you're buying a used copy, though, as you'll need to buy a $10 online pass to play on the Internet.
If you're not a fan of sports games in general, or of soccer games in particular, this portable version is unlikely to change your mind. For those who are into the sport, though, this full-featured portable version adds some Vita-specific controls that really enhance the gameplay.
Tapping the touchscreen, for instance, allows you to make a precision pass to any point on the pitch, making it easy to kick the ball just out of the reach of defenders. You can also tap on the rear touchpad to fire a shot on goal, with the positioning of your tap determining which part of the goal box you hit. It takes some practice to avoid sailing the ball over the post and out of bounds, but eventually you'll be pinging shots to the corners this way without a second thought.
More than any other launch title, FIFA Soccer shows the Vita's potential for joining traditional, button-based controls with occasional touchpad additions. For that alone, it might be worth checking out even if you're not a sports fan.
Michael Jackson: The Experience HD
I wasn't expecting much out of a touchscreen-based version of a console game that's played by actually dancing in your living room, but I was pleasantly surprised by the simple rhythmic gameplay on display here. The actual interface consists of a series of symbols indicating straight line swipes, circular swoops, and taps, which appear along the edges of the screen. The key is to make the indicated motion on the touchscreen, then lift your finger in precise time with the music as the symbols come together on-screen.
The action gets pretty hairy pretty quickly, as conflicting symbols fly around the screen at a rapid pace, requiring you to split your attention many ways. Before long you'll be alternating fingers and even using both hands simultaneously just to keep up.
How much you get out of this one depends largely on how much you dig Michael Jackson's music catalog, and how enamored you are with the virtual MJ dance moves that provide the screen filler for the gameplay. I have to admit, though, I got a bit caught up in the simplistic gameplay, grooving out to the rhythm as I let my mind wander and my muscle memory take over.
Dungeon Hunter Alliance
If you look up "generic dungeon crawler" in the dictionary, a picture of this game is likely to accompany the entry. In my few hours playing, the game's cliched and ridiculous-proper-name-filled story utterly failed to draw me in. Ditto for the dungeons themselves, which looked like they were put together as pre-made building blocks and featured wave after wave of generic goblins and the like mindlessly ganging up on you.
Still, I have to admit the game was more fun when played online with other people, and it includes the welcome option to let random Internet strangers easily pop in to fight alongside you (though when I tried to set up an online session with someone I actually knew, the request inevitably failed). If you're the kind of role-player that gets off on pure character advancement, there's a wide variety of items, armor, weapons, and skills to develop, too. Hard to say how this title might develop if I had more time to spend on it.