Land of the rising thumb

This past week in Japan has been a fantastic one for retroheads, largely thanks to Konami's loving restoration of some of its great old shmups. The publisher released three choice PSP collections last Thursday – compilations of its Parodius, Salamander, and TwinBee series.

Parodius Portable includes the superb(ly) Sexy Parodius, which until the release of this PSP collection you'd have needed a Sega Saturn and £50 (for the premium eBay prices of its Japanese Saturn release) to enjoy.

The Parodius series began life as a bizarre parody of Konami's own Gradius games, but Sexy Parodius is a parody that's filled in with erotica. In a strange way, though, it feels less pervy to play this than it does to engage in any Dead or Alive game.

TwinBee is another fine 2D shooter (although where Parodius and Salamander are side-scrollers, TwinBee moves vertically) and this collection is all cream, no UHT milk.

The package includes the fat-rich likes of Pop'N TwinBee, which I spent too much time with on the SNES, and TwinBee Yahho, which is another Konami classic that had been lost to Japanese Saturn/arcade obscurity.

These three collections take the template used in last year's Gradius Portable: all games featured are perfect ports of the original versions, with display options to allow for 16:9 scaling. In short, they're nifty.

But that's enough nostalgia for one week. The other big portable game of the past seven days is a forward-mover: Picross DS. It's a puzzle game with an artistic objective: fill grids to paint pictures. There's a sudoku edge to it, too, with columns and lines marked by numbers that give clues as to how grids can be completed correctly.

The logic of the game is simple and the DS' stylus transforms the traditional Picross experience (yes, even Picross has a NES/SNES past) by making it more immediate and less sedate.

It still has the powers of a zoned-out brain masseur, but now there's no waiting room. Best of all, Nintendo is making available grids and pictures from previous games in the series (check out the images of Mushroom Kingdom from Mario's Picross) for free download via the DS' wi-fi service.

Until next week, then. (????????!Mata raishuu ne!)