Before every arcade became a teeming pool of baseball caps, sweat and underage debauchery there was a golden age – a time when the high score was king and 3D visuals were just a glint in a developer’s eye. This was a time when gameplay was limited to a shot, a skip and a jump, with rogue Kiwi’s cleaning house, balloons navigating their way through mazes and invaders from space that weren’t interested in all that intrusive probing. Okay, it doesn’t seem too hot now but those days spent hunched over a cigarette-scorched games cabinet have made us what we are today and we thought we’d never get them back. Until now that is, as instead of saturating the PSP with new and innovative content to challenge the lofty status of the DS it seems developers are going backwards in order to go forwards by releasing yet another retro round-up – this time in the form of Taito Legends: Power-Up.

After achieving a modest degree of success on the PS2, a PSP counterpart was to be expected and thankfully this is a good showing with a few diamonds hidden in a fair amount of rough. A game like The New Zealand Story still holds up as an incredibly entertaining and enjoyable platformer and who could grumble at the inclusion of Elevator Action, one of the best (and only) games that let you ride up and down in an elevator shooting people in the face. Twin these with the likes of the immortal Space Invaders and the alarmingly addictive Cameltry and you’ve got the makings of a respectable old-school collection.

The line-up spans Taito’s earliest arcade offerings, which transfer surprisingly well to handheld, delivering the kind of simple and immediate fix that made them so moreish in the first place. However, once you get over the initial wave of nostalgia – which you do relatively quickly – you discover that many of the other games are only there to make up the numbers and are simply clones of one another, copyand- pasting elements together to make a slightly different game. Beard-stroking retro-sexuals might get a laugh out of the ‘enhanced’ versions of a select few games that feature updated visuals, but as graphics were never what made these titles shine in the first place their value is limited.

When Power-Up is good it’s really good with various classics keeping the scene alive, but unfortunately far too few of these titles stand the test of time making this ensemble the very definition of candyfloss gaming.

Keith Hennessey