Daily Archives: 9/10/2006

New PSP Game: Locoroco

Carmen bought me a new game for my PSP today: Locoroco

I must admit, despite the fact that PSP hardware rocks all over the DS hardware, I spend way more time playing with my Nintendo DS than I do with the PSP. The simple fact is that there are more games I feel like playing on the DS than on the PSP. Mario Kart. Metroid Prime. Mario & Luigi, Partners in Time. Princess Peach. Starfox DS.

The only games that I really liked for the PSP was Me and My Katamari, which had the quirky gameplay that made me really like the PS2 version. So, it was with some trepidation that Carmen decided to give me Locoroco.

And, it’s very good.

The basic premise: you are a little blobby thing. When you eat orange fruity things, you clone. You can merge your clones into a big ball, or you can break yourself up into individual little guys. You try to navigate a world, and make as many clones of yourself as you can. The controls are very, very simple. You hit the L button to rotate the world left. You hit the R button to rotate the world right. You hit both of them to jump. The circle button either breaks you apart, or joins you back together. That’s it.

Unlike previous games which literally crippled my hands, this one was quite fun and relaxing, and after a couple of hours dorking around with it, I still can type. It’s a very “zen” sort of game. It’s hard to totally die, but it is also hard to maximize your points in a given level. While some of the levels seem a bit repetitive, overall, it is really quite fun. I suspect it will mean that I’ll get a bit more use out of my PSP over the next few weeks.

It’s also got a nice screencapture facility, so here are a couple of random screengrabs from the game in progress.

Locoroco Gameplay
Locoroco Gameplay

If you’re into kind of cutesy games with novel gameplay, cute graphics, and infectious theme music, consider picking this one up.

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Addendum: Videocrab has some of the music from Locoroco as an mp3 download. I was hoping that the Sony website would have these available for download, but apparently you need Flash to work to do anything useful on their website. Sigh.