Games Play: New PSP Games : Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas, PQ2 : Practical Intelligence Quotient, Puzzle Scape, Zendoku

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

Ubisoft is bringing its upcoming Clancy sequel to Sony's handheld, though it's not just a cheap port of the console version. We get a gander at Vegas PSP.

It should come as no surprise that Ubisoft is working on a handheld version of Rainbow Six Vegas--the upcoming fifth installment in the popular Tom Clancy-inspired tactical shooting series--for the PlayStation Portable. But it might surprise you that the PSP version of Vegas is more than just a straight, stripped-down port of the game soon to hit the Xbox 360 and PS3.

The PSP's Vegas is actually a related but separate game being created by a 50-person team at Ubisoft's Quebec City studio, and we got to try out a bit of the game's single- and multiplayer modes to see how it's coming along in advance of its early-December release date.

Like its console brethren, Vegas on the PSP will take place in and around, well, Las Vegas--but otherwise, the storyline and characters are different. On the PSP, you'll primarily take control of Rainbow operative Brian Armstrong, who has teamed up with sniper specialist Shawn Rivers on what seems like a routine rescue mission. But before long, a new threat is revealed: a covert terrorist organization led by an evil guy named Lucas Picares, who's bent on poisoning the local public-water supply, among other things. Naturally, Armstrong and Rivers' objective quickly shifts to stopping Picares and his minions from wreaking whatever brands of havoc they've come up with.

The single-player portion of Vegas on the PSP plays similarly to most other first-person shooters you've seen on the platform, with customizable controls that can put movement and looking on the face buttons, D pad, or analog stick. Aside from that, Vegas seems to feature most of the features you'd want out of a Rainbow Six game, and in fact it borrows some of the new gameplay features from the console versions of Vegas. You can back up against cover in a third-person view, and the game luckily features a lock-on that will let you select between body and head shots.

The under-the-door snake camera will also make an appearance here so you can see what kind of tangos you'll be facing in the next room. Finally, you'll get to switch from Armstrong to Rivers at key moments in the story, such as when precision sniping is required. The campaign is said to take place across a number of environments--including a ranch, private airport, water filtration plant, and a dam (perhaps that little Hoover one?)--as you chase Picares and his cronies from one location to the next.

On the multiplayer side, Vegas will present a fairly modest six-player offering that will at least work with both ad hoc and infrastructure modes. Survival and team survival modes will be on offer, which are essentially Rainbow Six's slightly more tactical versions of deathmatch and team deathmatch. We didn't get to see a list of the available maps when we got to play a quick survival match, but Ubisoft says this competitive mode will feature "classic" multiplayer maps from past games that fans should recognize.

Rainbow Six Vegas seems to be shaping up into a competent shooter so far, and it's nice to see Ubi putting some effort into making its own beast on the PSP, rather than just dumbing down the console version and shoving it out the door. The platform hasn't traditionally been very hospitable to FPS games, but hopefully Rainbow Six's more slowly paced, strategic brand of shooting action will translate well to the available controls. We'll have the final word when Rainbow Six Vegas ships on the PSP in December.

PQ2 : Practical Intelligence Quotient

PQ2 uses a measuring system that was created under the guidance of Professor Masuo Koyasu of Kyoto University in Japan that determines players' 'Practical Intelligence Quotient' or PQ.