Land of the Rising Thumb

You've gotta love the Tokyo Game Show. Not only is it swarming with thousands of leggy young women who have mastered the art of wearing perma-smiles and never blinking - even when being 'charmed' by journos who look like cousins of The Simpsons's Comic Book Guy - but it's also the only event in the world where you can play the latest Japanese mobile and handheld games while being instructed by said perma-smilers. So everyone's a winner.

This year's TGS was a boon for PSP, DS and keitai (mobile) users. So, in the name of Methodology, allow me to tell you what I thought was best on each of those formats:

PSP punches

Dissidia: Final Fantasy (pictured) is a good PSP game - don't let the Final Fantasy bit put you off. Really, Dissidia is about as far removed from FF as you can get without invoking feathered Chocobo spin-offs. It's a beat-'em-up, you see, and not just a Smash Bros for Square Enix's legions of spiky-haired heroes (although that would have been entertaining, perhaps), but a fighter infused with role-playing elements and played out using short, middle and long-range attacks. And specials. And HP bars that can increase during battle - not just deplete uniformly to an inevitable KO. In short, it's a bit interesting. Looks pretty too.

LocoRoco 2 and Patapon 2 were also on show and in fine form, as you'd expect, although I was surprised to see a PSP version of Namco Bandai's daft-but-popular The Idolm@ster. If you've ever dreamed of managing an all-female J-pop/idol troupe, well, uh, what can I say? At any rate, you'll likely want to import a copy of The Idolm@ster, and then play it discreetly…

DS delights

Sega had a virtual monopoly on the promising new DS games at TGS 08, although Taito's Gardening Mama was fun for a few minutes. Elsewhere, Square Enix had the deep Valkyrie Profile DS on show to appeal to fans of slow gaming.

But back to Sega. PlatinumGames's Infinite Space (pictured) could be something special. You control a spaceship and spend most of your time (in the TGS demo, at least) exchanging attacks with aggressing vessels in the most dramatic space opera battles I've ever seen on a handheld's screen(s). It's tactical and absorbing, and the music is so good that playing without headphones would be nonsense.

Phantasy Star Zero, meanwhile, sees the old Dreamcast series getting back to its best while also building on the multiplayer aspect of the PSP's Phantasy Star Portable. However I remain unconvinced that Shining Force Feather (another new SEGA DS RPG), is anywhere near the heights of Shining Force III, but it's clearly more focused and true-to-its-roots than any of the PS2 Shining Force games of recent years.

Mobile marvels

Virtua Racing on a keitai? Yes, please! The ambitious mobile port of SEGA's underrated early nineties polygonal racing coin-op is almost there, insofar as it's playable and looks better than the old Mega Drive conversion (pictured).

In Japanese phone provider KDDI's bright orange corner of TGS, the focus was on Bluetooth-powered multiplayer experiences. Local multiplayer games (i.e. competitive or co-op play where you can see your friends) are dead popular on the PSP in Japan right now, thanks largely to Capcom's Monster Hunter Portable series, so it's natural that mobile game developers are following suit.

I competed with a Japanese businessman in a round of Minna no Golf 2 (this is the latest mobile version of Everybody's Golf; it's technically a match for the first PlayStation game in the series) and, uh, lost. I was also defeated by a perma-smiling KDDI girl in a game of Gachinko Baseball, which is a bizarre fruit machine-baseball crossover where you never know what's going to happen next.

Apart from those humiliating defeats, the only serious downer at this year's show was the complete absence of any DSi hardware or DSi-specific software. Admittedly Nintendo wasn't at TGS (and never is; apparently it's a point of principle), but it would have been nice to see some early third-party DSi stuff. It wasn't to be, although if Satoru Iwata's latest hunch is as spot-on as his previous ideas, TGS 2009 will probably be overrun by copycat camera-games. That's something to look forward to.

Say 'cheese' ladies...