Monster Hunter is now synonymous with the PSP. Back in late 2004 and early 2005, that wasn't the case. Monster Hunter was a PS2 game, and Sony was still convinced that the PSP was its new Walkman.

Puzzle game Lumines, which launched in Japan in December 2004, was the PSP's killer app. It took advantage of the PSP's screen and multimedia capabilities. It's now 2011. There have been sequels, good sequels, but Lumines hasn't felt as fresh as it did back in those cold winter months of late 2004 and early 2005.

With Lumines: Electronic Symphony, Q Entertainment is bringing Lumines back to its electronic roots. According to Q Entertainment's James Mielke, the goal was to create a survey of electronic music—an electronic symphony, if you will.

The gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has played Lumines. On the PS Vita's screen, it pops and comes to life. The individual blocks that players must stack and clear are rendered in 3D—something that can be seen when moving the blocks quickly right to left and the perspective shifts ever so slightly. It's a small thing, but it makes the blocks feel far more tangible, weighty even, than in previous Lumines games.

While playing the title's short demo, I could feel myself going back into that zone that should be so familiar to Lumines players—the one where your eyes go out of focus a wee bit, and you become entranced by the music, the images, and the falling Lumines blocks.

One significant change this time around is that the player's Avatar is now connected to an Avatar Meter. When it reaches one hundred percent, players can use it to unleash a special ability. The ability in the demo was a "chain block" that would clear one of two block colors. It's randomized so you don't know which color the chain block will clear until it falls.

Q Entertainment is planning to offer nine different Avatar Meter abilities, which can be unlocked during gameplay, along with new filters and new skins. When players start the game, they must select an Avatar ability and keep said ability until they clear all the stages.

The game should have "dozens" of stages and unlockable content. There are also new game modes like a two player versus mode called "Duel Mode" and a race-against-the-clock-mode called "Stopwatch Mode".

I only saw one skin. From what I saw, Lumines: Electronic Symphony looked like Lumines on the PS Vita—and that looked pretty damn great.

At this year's Tokyo Game Show, there will be around 40 PS Vita games. Forty. And the machine isn't even out! Some of the games have already been revealed. Some haven't.

Leaks from this week's forthcoming issue of Japanese game magazine Famitsu shed light on some of the new titles. Here's a list of what's in the publication:

• Lumines: Electronic Symphony
• Rayman Origins
• Michael Jackson The Experience HD
• Dark Quest
• Sumioni
• Dream Club Zero Portable
• Moe Moe Daisensou
• Ragnarok Odyssey

Lumines is one of my favorite PSP titles and a logical Vita title. Ubisoft is bringing both Rayman Origins and Michael Jackson The Experience to PS Vita. Dream Club Zero Portable looks to be a port of Xbox 360 hostess game Dream Club Zero, while Moe Moe Daisensou is this.

There's a Gameloft app called Dark Quest, but Ubisoft is publishing this title, so it could be a different Dark Quest.

Ragnarok, a hugely popular online title, is getting a PS Vita version, enabling gamers to hunt down big monsters with various character classes.

2D action title Sumioni from Tokyo-based studio Acquire looks to be one of the more interesting titles, like it was drawn with digital ink. The art style is one of the most arresting I've seen in a while, very Japanese, very beautiful. The game uses "brush touch action", so it could stir up fond Okami memories for players.

Be sure to check back for Kotaku Tokyo Game Show coverage next week.

他Vita最新情報 [左から右へてけと～読み]

Sumioni
Sumioni
Sumioni
Ragnarok
Ragnarok
Ragnarok
List of PS Vita games

They're showed us a screenshot (bullshot?) of Rayman Origins running on the PlayStation Vita today, but the most exciting news from Ubisoft regarding their support for PlayStation Vita involved some other games.

Ubisoft will bring a new Lumines to Vita. That would be a new version of the beloved puzzle game that is regarded by some as the best PSP game of all time.

The company will also launch a new Assassin's Creed some time in 2012. The company also promises to have Asphalt, Dungeon Hunter Alliance, Michael Jackson the Experience and Rayman Origins for Vita.

Commenter St.McDuck is done downloading games for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and he'll tell us why in today's installment of Speak Up on Kotaku.

Why I'm Done with iPhone Games

I can't count how many demos or $1 games I've bought since I got an iPod Touch back in 2008. Every day I was looking for new games to try out, be it on the poorly-organized App Store charts or on mobile gaming-dedicated websites. If it was free or cheap and looked half-way decent, I'd add it to my Touch and keep it around for a rainy day, or a slow day at work.

Puzzle games, adventure games, RPG's, Angry Birds. They all provided minutes of fun. And then I'd delete them.

Download a demo. Play it for a life/round/minute. Delete. Download a $1 game. Get the point. Delete. Actually have some increment of fun playing something. Never come back to it again. Delete.

I don't want to do it anymore. I'm sick of it. These ‘experiences,' many based off similar ‘experiences' from other companies selling similar Apps, are lifeless. Sure, Tiny Wings is beautiful to look at, but after getting to level 6 and having the sun set, I stop caring. Sonic the Hedgehog? Sorry, touch-screen controls for platformers can disappear along with the US economy. Hero of Sparta made me both stop caring AND curse the controls at the same time.

To be blunt, iPhone games aren't fun.

When I look at my iPod Touch as a gaming device, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. It's not a gaming device. It's a music player. If it was an iPhone, it would be a music player and a phone. I have used it for games, or rather, tried to use it for games, for over three years now, and not once have I experienced my ‘Tetris Moment' (Gameboy) or my ‘Lumines Moment' (PSP) or my ‘Advance Wars Moment' (GB Advance). That moment when all that the system is and can be is absorbed into your brain. It's a moment of brilliance which is rare, and after three years of trying to find it amidst the mass of pointless, moronic, copycat, or just plain impossible-to-control ‘games' on the iPhone platform, I'm done looking for it. No more wasted time trying to find a diamond in the rough. It's beyond a needle in a haystack now. The App Store is a wasteland that I no longer feel the need to trudge through. There's so many things wrong with it that the occasional mildly-amusing cheap game that I may be missing won't matter.

I'm going to make a prediction: games on the App Store will suffer their own market collapse at some point in the next five years. Be it through lack of innovation or consumer indifference, the store will cease to be the money-printer it is right now. How many times can people pay $1 for a game they've already downloaded fifty times under a different title? How many in-game lives must be lost to horrible touch-controls that can only be rectified by actual buttons? How many minutes must be wasted downloading and installing the next mini-game, only to delete it minutes later because you've seen all there is to see?

My time is more valuable than that. I'm not against indie games, or even spirited re-imaginations of existing games, but I am against the devaluation of games as fun. The iPhone is a great device (when people don't drive with it), and kudos to Apple for innovating in a space that had become stagnant with boring cell handsets, but games shall no longer grace my iPod Touch, or my iPhone if I ever get one.

I'm a gamer. I play real games. On real systems.

Many of the games being made for Sony's PSP successor, the NGP, appear to be build upon past PlayStation greatness. If that's how it goes, might we suggest a few more?

The following are not real games — at least not as far as we know here at Kotaku. They are flights of fancy, each a game that could highlight something special about the NGP.

MAG NGP - We know the NGP will support some sort of optional 3G connection, though not necessarily for multiplayer gaming (we're not sure). Still, this gaming device has Wi-Fi, wireless and, with 3G, potentially more connectivity options than any dedicated gaming machine before it. Combine that with twin thumbsticks that make first-person shooters ergonomic on the go and why not cook that recipe into a portable spin-off of the PlayStation 3's 256-player first-person shooter?

Demon's Souls NGP - The NGP has a service called Near that is supposed to sniff out nearby NGPs and do some sort of data detection or exchange. It also has built-in GPS and an internal electronic compass. PlayStation 3 cult hit Demon's Souls didn't use any feature like that but it did do some things that could have used those tools. The primarily single-player game allowed gamers to see ghost versions of other players running through the game world. It let players leave each other messages — hints, ideally — in the game world's dark corners. It was a communal game while remaining a primarily isolated one, a grand adventure inflected with the kindness and unkindness of briefly-intersecting strangers. Surely the Near, GPS and compass tech could be used for a similar effect on a portable Demon's Souls.

Amplitude/Frequency NGP - The PlayStation 2 beat-matching music games from Rock Band studio Harmonix already got a PSP successor in the form of Rock Band Unplugged. But the PSP didn't have a touch screen on the top and a touch-panel on the back. The NGP does. Imagine all the possible ways to tap an NGP along to the beat. This could be a very good thing.

Killzone Liberation NGP - Someone is already making a Killzone for the NGP. That game appears to be a shooter, similar to the console Killzone games. Back on the PSP, however, Killzone Liberation was a more strategic war game, played from an quasi-overhead perspective. The PSP game required careful movement, use of cover and lots of well-arced grenades. It wasn't turn-based but it played a little closer to the pace of the great Nintendo handheld series Advance Wars than almost anything else Sony made for the PSP. Surely, a game like this would run well on NGP, controlled with taps, swipes and pinches on the system's multi-touch OLED screen.

Lumines NGP - Surely, this game is already being made? Q Entertainment, creators of the original Lumines, are already listed as an official NGP development studio. Surely, anything that even smells like a new PSP should have what was for many people the definitive PSP launch game, the wonderful Tetris-at-a-rave puzzle game Lumines?

If NGP is going to be partially used as a platform to remake or reinvent classic PlayStation games and series, what would you like to see? Okami NGP? Tobal NGP? Mark of Kri NGP?

Worried about Kinect lag? Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the game designer behind Rez and Lumines, is here to quell your fears.

Mizuguchi is hard at work on a multi-platform rhythm game, Child of Eden, for both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. About Kinect, he told website CVG, "Every day the technology and software improves, so we're constantly tuning it. Nothing is optimal at the beginning of a new technology, but it's been getting better and better the more we work with it."

As CVG points out, Microsoft has argued that any lag should be judged in respects to experience and not "milliseconds".

Like with any hardware, the more time developers spend with it, the better it will gradually become.

News: Kinect tech 'improving every day' [CVG]

The newly canceled 1 vs 100 Xbox Live game show isn't the only clever idea for the Xbox 360 that has met its meteor. Let's review some 360 initiatives that seemed cool but now seem dead.

Re-Invented Music Videos

Back in 2006, Lumines Live was going to mix the wonderful horizontally-oriented Tetris-style game Lumines with music videos. For example, Microsoft and development studio Q Entertainment let us play Lumines with a video of Madonna's song Sorry integrated into the background. The game was released with the promise that other MTV-style music videos would get the Lumines Live treatment. Here is a list of the MTV-style music videos that actually got that Lumines Live treatment: 1) Madonna's Sorry. Short list!

This idea went nowhere. It briefly seemed that Microsoft might have a smart way to make music videos newly relevant to gamers. Instead, I figured out there was trouble when I got a call from one of the people involved with the game asking if I could connect them with any music labels. I may have worked as a reporter for MTV at the time, but, man, if they were approaching me....

A Racing Game For The Entire Xbox Live Community

In 2009, Microsoft declared that upcoming racing game Joy Ride would support Xbox Avatars and be free. The first part of that is still true, but when Joy Ride launches later this Fall with Kinect support, it will probably cost money — at least the price of a Kinect if, in the best case scenario, it is bundled with the new hands-free controller sensor.

Imagine the potential of a game that's free to all users of a console, one that could allow everyone to play together and compete in some way against the full Xbox Live userbase. Could the free non-Kinect Joy Ride have been the Xbox 360's FarmVille? Today, it's not even Sodium, the free game inside the free Home service on the PlayStation 3.

Xbox Live Primetime

Maybe Xbox Primetime still exists. But if it exists, it exists very quietly. Back in 2008 we heard Microsoft crow about the launch of interactive Xbox Live experiences that we would make an appointment to check out.

As we posted then: "The channel is said to also feature 'concepts' in the 'Trivia, Reality TV, Puzzles and Sports' genres with live events and plans to feature real-world and virtual prizes." Imagine, game shows played over Xbox Live. Reality shows aired through Xbox Live. Sports. You would set your calendar and your clock to these events.

The first program was going to be launched in late 2008, was delayed until 2009 and ran two seasons. That was 1 Vs 100, which was canceled today. There is no Primetime channel on the Xbox 360 now, no appointment viewing. There are appointment playdates, scheduled sessions against various developers and gamer community groups. But Primetime is gone.

To Be Fair...

Has Microsoft followed through on anything? Of course! Since the Xbox 360 launched the company re-did its dashboard, added a new channel full of user-made Indie games, created Avatars and Avatar items, was the first to grant on-console access to Netflix, added Twitter, added Facebook, added HD video-streaming and is next adding a version of Internet sports channel ESPN 3.

Microsoft has evolved the Xbox 360 a lot, but if in the course of the last few years you thought you'd be playing more video game versions of music videos, trying more free-to-play racing games and rushing home for some massively multiplayer/multispectator gaming-game-show-sports-reality hybrid, well, you were wrong.

No console does everything. On the Xbox 360 these three innovative tries did not work out.