Racing games on handheld systems can be a tough sell—with a smaller screen and lower hardware horsepower, it can be difficult to convey the sense of speed that makes great racing games great. The new PlayStation Vita handheld seems designed to address the racing genre head-on—its processing power is closer to a current-gen console than any handheld before it, and its sizable OLED screen seems custom-made for driving games.

And so hey, look at that: Here's WipEout 2048, a blisteringly fast futuristic racing game from SCE Liverpool, and it's one of the strongest Vita launch-titles I've played.

Note: This review is partially incomplete, because I haven't been able to truly plumb the game's online modes. In a week or so, I'll have a better sense of how the various online campaigns work, as well as the cross-play between other Vitas and PlayStation 3s, and I will update my review accordingly. With that said, I think I've seen enough of the game to give some firm thoughts on how it shapes up. Let's do this one likes/dislikes-style.

WHAT I LIKED

Float like a hummingbird. The vehicles in WipEout 2048 float above the ground, and their frictionless feel is wholly different than either, say, Forza or Mario Kart. The whole thing is almost equal parts racing and flying game, which results in a light-feeling, exhilarating experience.

Sting like a hornet. Combat mode is a blast—rather than concerning themselves with winning a race, players must grab as many good powerups as possible and achieve hits against their opponents to get a high score. The weapons are fun to use, partly because they're difficult to use—everything is happening so quickly that a perfectly placed rockit-hit feels all the more satisfying and rewarding.

So F***ing Fast. I've never felt a sense of speed from a handheld game like I do from WipEout 2048. The framerate doesn't hit the 60fps smoothness of most racing games, but it's snappy enough, and the tubular design of the tracks combines with the Vita's humongous screen to impart a fantastic, at-times harrowing sense of speed and vertigo. In fact, WipEout 2048 feels even faster and crazier than its console counterpart. That's not always for the good, but the sense of chaos and franticness is hugely enjoyable for the most part.

Eye-Popper. WipEout 2048 is a splendid graphical showcase for the Vita—it's an explosion of color and motion, a freakout dream of speed and flashing lights. It'll turn heads, and is a simple way to demonstrate to your friends what Sony is talking about when they talk about portable HD gaming.

Cool Campaign Design. The single-player campaign in WipEout 2048 is a branching affair, with multiple event-types extending out from a main track. It plays out over three years—as of this review I'm midway through the second year, 2049, and I've already put a good chunk of hours into the game. Each level has a unique challenge, which keeps things interesting. Some are straightforward, like "get at least 4th place" or "score this many points," but others are more demanding, forcing you to use only a certain type of vehicle or stick to certain parts of the track.

So Fresh, So Clean. I like nice, clean presentation in a racing game, and WipEout 2048 has that. The touch-screen is well implemented throughout the menus, and everything looks and sounds nice. The menus can be somewhat labyrinthine and unintuitive (we'll get to that), but browsing them is aesthetically pleasing.

Cruel Mistress. WipEout 2048 is welcomely difficult, a game that really pushes you to learn each track, master each turn, and carefully plan to get the most out of your power-ups. Of course, all of that is happening at breakneck speed, so you'd better pay attention, learn quick, and be ready to fail and try again. Personally, I enjoy the steep difficulty.

Kick Out The Jams. WipEout 2048 has one hell of a good soundtrack, with rave-ish tracks from Orbital, deadmau5, The Chemical Brothers, and many other electronic-music luminaries pulsing and pushing the races forward. The sound design is fantastic as well, and the driving whine of the vehicles combines with the squanching electronic beats to make WipEout 2048 a headphones-required experience. In some of the trippier levels, particularly the neon-colored "zone mode," the music and on-screen action can induce a sort of video game synesthesia that is as startling as it is cool.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

Chaos Theory. There is a frenetic sense of fun to WipEout 2048, but that comes at a price—sometimes, there's simply too much visual noise onscreen. The game is set in a halfway-future New York, and there is a good deal more going on in the backdrop design than there was in the console-based WipEout HD. This can be cool, and I sense that this is at least in part the visual chaos is on purpose, but the occasionally over-designed backdrops can conspire to make you blow turns and junctions. Split-seconds count in this game, so that sort of thing can feel inordinately frustrating.

We're Waiting… The loading screens in WipEout 2048 are a drag, plain and simple. Every time you start a new race, it takes upwards of a minute for the level to load; that would be acceptable (if annoying) on a home console, but on the go, a minute of downtime between menu and gameplay feels like an eternity. Oftentimes I'll get on the bus, pick a level, and be a significant way into my commute before I finally start playing.

Maze-Like Menus. The game's user interface is clean and nice-looking, but it can feel unintuitive from a user interface level, and lacks some functions that would have been appreciated. Notably, there is no way to change vehicles once you've started loading a race, nor is there a way to back out—the loading screen has no "cancel" button. So, if you start a race with a sub-optimal vehicle, you have to start the race, quit out, change racers, and load it all over again. If you lose a race and want to switch up your vehicle, you have to do the same. It's a surprising shortcoming and feels like one of the game's few concessions to the Vita's limitations.

Motion Controls. The motion controls in WipEout 2048 aren't bad, but they aren't great either, and so far I've found that the tracks require more precision than the accelerometer-based steering allows. Steering with motion control is both fun and functional, but it costs too much of a performance edge.

Confusing Multiplayer. I have not had that much of a chance to play WipEout 2048's online multiplayer, so I'll be back to update this part of the review once more people are online and it's easier to find a match. But for now, I can say that while the multiplayer is indeed functional, it's a bit confusing—I paired up with Stephen Totilo to find a match and at first, both of our Vitas crashed and became temporarily inoperable. Then, we had a very hard time figuring out how to start a match with just the two of us racing. The "Online Career" mode appears to only be playable by groups of four people, and only through cross-play can two players race one another. Even then, I'm not exactly sure if it's possible, or how to just set up a race with your PlayStation Network party.

I'll spend more time with the multiplayer and update this review after I have. For now—it works, it's fun to race against other people, but some of the menus and matchmaking feel overly opaque and confusing.

THE FINAL WORD

This final word is not quiiite final, since as I mentioned above, I haven't played enough of the online multiplayer to get a real feel for it. But I get the sense that once more people are playing the game it will be easy to find people to play with online, and the races will get a good deal more interesting against human opponents. I will update this review with my deeper multiplayer impressions as soon as I've had more time to dig into it.

Even with that caveat, WipEout 2048 is an easy game to recommend. It's a faster-than-hell racer that makes full use of the Vita's graphical prowess. It has a fleshed-out single-player campaign, a whole host of race-modes and unlockable vehicles, and a fantastic, pulse-quickening soundtrack. At its best (and it's very often at its best), WipEout 2048 is a riot of a good time, a strong racer in its own right and a worthy, muscular launch-title for the PlayStation Vita.

Part collectible card set, part strategic board game, the upcoming iOS app Monsterology could be another cool addition to the growing sector of the gaming industry that combines physical media with virtual interactivity.

The concept is neat; you take one of the cards created by developer Nukotoys, flick it against your iPad, and watch it appear on your screen. If you have a Wyvern card, that's the monster you get in Monsterology. Got a Catapult? You get a Catapult.

You can then use these monsters and war machines to defeat your opponent, an evil dark wizard.

Nukotoys co-CEO Rodger Raderman spoke to Kotaku about the game (which he describes as "for ages 9-99") during the New York Toy Fair on Sunday. Though he didn't want to share too much gameplay until closer to release, which will be this spring, you can get a brief glimpse of Monsterology in the above video.

When Sony unveiled its PlayStation Vita handheld at last year's E3, Uncharted: Golden Abyss was one of the first things they showed. This sent a clear message: "Our new handheld is a portable current-gen console. To prove it, we're going to show it running one of our most technically demanding current-gen games." After all, the Uncharted franchise is synonymous with everything that Sony wants people to think of when they think of the PlayStation brand—polished, fun, classy, high production values, and amazing graphics.

Now that I've played it, I can report that yes, Golden Abyss is an Uncharted game to the core. But too often it feels like an off-brand copy, and despite doing its best to make use of the Vita's unique features, it brings nothing new of substance to the table. Rather, by engaging in such diligent mimicry, Golden Abyss primarily highlights the technological gulf between the PS Vita and the PS3, as well as a sizable quality gulf between itself and its console-based brethren.

Make no mistake: Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a fine showcase for the brand-new PS Vita. It's the launch-title that many folks are going to want—it has plenty of sweeping vistas that nicely fill the Vita's huge OLED screen, and it moves and plays for the most part like a full-on console game. Playing a third-person shooter with two thumbsticks while on the go truly does feel like carrying your PS3 around with you, and it's exciting and cool.

There are moments of real beauty here, when the camera sweeps out and Nathan Drake climbs along the edge of a cliff, flocks of birds flying up against a color-drenched sky. A couple of segments really do capture the frenetic, improvisational action of the console Uncharted games.

But the specters of past, better Uncharted games loom over Golden Abyss from start to finish. This game mimics the Uncharted formula to a fault—we all know the banter, the pacing; when a handhold is going to crumble, when enemies will turn up at an inopportune time.

More specifically, Golden Abyss is more or less an inferior carbon copy of the first game in the series, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. It takes place in and around a single jungle in Argentina, the cast is limited to four main characters, and there's even a bit where you pilot a boat down a river while blowing up guys with a grenade launcher. After spending Uncharted 2 and 3 going on globe-hoping adventures, it feels like a step backwards.

Everything feels smaller than it should. There are only three or four enemy types, and encounters never have more than four or five foes on screen at a time. There are only two or three types of encounter in the whole game, and they play out over and over again. The guns are piddly and feel insubstantial, grenades are laughably inconsistent and underpowered, and aiming feels loose and imprecise.

The touch-screen implementation in the game feels shoehorned in and awkward. Much has been made about how the platforming bits can now be performed simply by swiping one's finger along handholds, but that's actually one of the neater touch elements, partly because it's optional.

The frequent, mandatory touch-screen quicktime events, on the other hand, are just plain bad—every one is just swipeswipeswipeswipe. They're finicky and easy to miss, and often failure results in instant death. Several of the story's big climactic encounters rely entirely on such quicktime events, and are a forehead-slapping disappointment. Other smaller things—rotating and cleaning artifacts, performing boring charcoal rubbings —feel tacked-on and finicky.

For a meat-and-potatoes third-person adventure game, Golden Abyss sure has a preponderance of tacked-on junk. Photo challenges could have been a fun addition, but their implementation ends up with the player endlessly tweaking his shots, trying to perfectly match the angle and zoom of a pre-existing photo template that pops up in the corner of the screen.

The aforementioned charcoal-rubbing and artifact-scrubbing are distracting flow-killers with no challenge to them. The levels are littered with collectible treasures that all look the same, and there's no real pull to collect them. Cut-scenes even have collectible treasure, and I found myself distracted from the (admittedly meandering) historical conversations, tapping on glowing "clues" in order to collect them. Often (but not always) when you're crossing a log or plank, Drake will freak out and pause, forcing you to wobble the Vita until he "regains his balance." It's silly.

All of this serves to distract from the story and the core jumping and shooting, and does nothing to enhance the experience. It feels tacked on in a clumsy effort to make the game "a Vita game," and instead winds up making Golden Abyss feel at cross-purposes with itself.

Golden Abyss's puzzles could have leveraged the touch-screen to stand out, but they have been brutally simplified to the point that they aren't actually puzzles at all. Assembling documents from torn-up pieces of paper is a pleasant diversion, but the game automatically snaps the pieces into place, so solving each one become an exercise in sliding the pieces over the board until they lock down. A couple of combination locks require that you turn a dial with the touch-screen, but the combination is written right next to the lock, and at one point Drake even walks you through which direction you should be turning the dial. "And now right… and now left…" One puzzle appears to be a nicely challenging sliding-tile puzzle until you realize that you can simply pick up and move the tiles to any open square, thereby removing the challenge entirely.

I solved both of the game's elaborate-seeming puzzle-doors with no real idea what I was supposed to be doing. The characters just told me when I was doing the right thing, so I never had to figure out how the puzzles worked. Which was actually good, because the rules that were explained and the solutions I was shown didn't logically connect to one another. Golden Abyss's puzzles are both bafflingly designed and overly simple.

Golden Abyss seems to operate in some parallel Uncharted universe. The game's developers told Kotaku that it's not a prequel, but it's unclear in the game whether this is all happening before, after, or concurrent to the events in the main games. It wouldn't matter in most other games, but the ongoing fiction of Uncharted has long been one of its most endearing elements—with that continuity broken, the story loses a substantial chunk of soul.

The way that characters deliberately abstain from mentioning a single event from the PS3 games makes things feel strange and isolated. Who is this Nathan Drake? Why is he falling for this woman, what of his great loves and friendships and adventures, what of the journey we just took with him into his own past?

The new characters include a boring, swarthy villain, a winning and somewhat useless love interest, and a highly grating frenemy character named Dante. None of them does much to make themselves stand out, and their blandness is brought into sharp focus when a character from the PS3 games makes an appearance. I was so happy to see this person that I immediately realized how bummed out I had been spending time with the rest of these second-rate clowns.

While Golden Abyss' technical shortcomings are perhaps understandable given its less-powerful platform, there's no reason at all that the writing needed to be a drag. And yet it is. Jokes feel undercooked and forced; characters drop lame sexual innuendo, curse regularly, and say things like "God damn, it smells like shit in here!" and "I will kick you to sleep!" The very first line in the game, muttered under Drake's breath, is, "Dante, you son of a bitch. I'll see you in hell." The writing simply didn't need to be this clunky and bad. It's a shame.

Unlike the fleshed-out multiplayer and co-op offerings in Uncharted 2 and 3, Golden Abyss has no multiplayer features at all, excepting an odd asynchronous treasure-collecting minigame tied to "Near," the Vita's equivalent of the 3DS' social functions. Given how many of the Vita's other launch games feature online functionality, this feels like a missing feature and diminishes Golden Abyss' lasting value. Unless you're hardcore into collectables, there's no compelling reason to go back to it after finishing the 8-hour story. That said, while the story starts out sluggishly, it starts to gain some traction about halfway through and the final act is largely well-executed and -designed.

When all is said and done, Golden Abyss feels like a cut-rate version of the Uncharted games that most people have already played. It's mostly affable, it's functional, but it mimics its console big brothers so deliberately that its shortcomings stand out. Everything feels like the console version but smaller—smaller levels, smaller set-pieces, smaller combat encounters, smaller stakes. A bolder, more distinctive game, more-creatively designed for the platform and built around the characters we love could have been a great showcase for the Vita's unique elements and its console-like power.

In this review, I've been comparing Golden Abyss to its PlayStation 3 predecessors quite a bit. That may not feel fair, but time and again, the game all but demands the comparison. Much of the time, it feels like the folks at Sony's Bend studio have been cast as illusionists rather than game-makers. These are talented people, no doubt, and at times they have pulled off quite a trick: They have made the PS Vita appear capable of playing a fully fledged Uncharted game. But of course, a trick is just a trick, and the problems I've listed above combine to bring down the full experience.

If Uncharted: Golden Abyss lacked the Uncharted brand and wasn't accompanying the launch of a highly anticipated new handheld system, I suspect it would be much easier to simply deem it middling and move on. When I look at the things I liked about the game and compare them to the things I didn't like, I can't come away with any other conclusion: Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a disappointment.

Publisher Blizzard is partnering with Hasbro's USAopoly to release World of Warcraft Monopoly and StarCraft Risk, it said today. So now you can take breaks from your World of Warcraft and StarCraft sessions to play World of Warcraft and StarCraft.

The new version of Monopoly will feature cities and zones from the popular fantasy MMORPG, including Stormwind, Orgrimmar and the Twilight Highlands. Fans can vote on the game's Facebook page for which tokens they want to see in the final product.

StarCraft Risk boasts all three races from the sci-fi RTS (Zerg, Terran, and Protoss) and what Blizzard calls "astute deployment of military might and strategic field tactics." Blizzard says it will have three separate "play modes," so this might be a little different than actual Risk. My prediction: People will still complain that Zerg is underpowered.

We met with a company called NKOK at Toy Fair 2012. They had a Twisted Metal toy to show us. This is how they showed it to us.

There's a moment when playing Cave shooters, when your eyes glaze over, and you are no longer looking at the ship you are piloting. You start following the bullets, and as you move yourself through space, you just know where you are.

It's a bit like Luke Skywalker feeling the Force flowing through himself. And as far as arcade games go, it's my favorite experience.

Granted, it is possible to replicate that sensation at home on a console or PC. But on an iPhone? Are you bananas?

Cave's iPhone games have been hit-and-miss. Its latest effort, DoDonPachi Blissful Death, is nothing short of brilliant.

The game's trailer looked totally bonkers—the beautiful madness you expect from a Cave shooter. And from the few hours I've played with the game, it's delivered just that.

The controls are responsive, the graphics pop, and the game is a lot of fun. Even the hardest mode, "Hell", was fun.

The game's trailer looked utterly daunting. But Cave gives players the tools they need to enjoy the game. Though, I do wish the "bomb" button was in a different location, as sometimes finding it feels fiddly. From what I've played, the rest seems solid.

It's US $4.99, and if you like bullet hell shooters, this is worth checking out.

DoDonPachi Blissful Death [iTunes]

The next line of Skylanders toys—those figures that can be synced to video games of the same name—include some sort of "light technology." Whatever. I ran into the guy who runs the Skylanders development studio at the airport last week and mocked that silly bit of hype.

They have lights in them, I told him. So what?

You got it wrong, he said, smiling. They do have lights in them... but they light up only when you move them near the game's Portal of Power. How? It's "dumb magic," he called it. Really, it's physics. A radio frequency emitted from the portal triggers illumination in the figure. The strength of the frequency affects the brightness of the lights.

Our guys went to Toy Fair to see if this was true. It is! Check it out in this clip shot by our Chris Person.

It's time to make your Monday better through the magic of video games. We present to you our first daily installment of Watch This, Play This. For 30 minutes, we'll give you things to... watch or play, all linked to from this page.

WATCH: Let's start with the video up top. A most absurd Skyrim mod. (If it doesn't play, click here to watch it.)

WATCH: The magic of Skylanders toys that light up... because they're near something. It's amazing!

PLAY: Dondonpachi Blissful Death is the best game you can download for your iPhone today.

WATCH: When Toy Fair demos go a little bit wrong.

Stuff to play, stuff to see, here comes Watch This, Play This. Confused? Read this.

The first thing I ever heard about the PlayStation Vita game Little Deviants was that you could touch the Vita's rear touch panel to poke flat ground in the game into hills. Doing that would cause a spherical deviant who was sitting on the flat ground to roll.

Brilliant, I thought!

The first thing I did when I got Little Deviants was poke the ground with the rear touch panel.

I... didn't like it at all.

The problem with Little Deviants is that it is all gimmick. It is a collection of mini-games starring little alien critters that look like melting jelly beans and yelp like Ewoks (that design actually works!). Each mini-game is designed to showcase one of the Vita's many control options. The game's stat screen even tallies the ones you've used. You get to play games that require Vita tilting. Others require touch-screen tapping. Some involve back-panel poking. They've even got ones that force you to sing to the system.

If you've played a lot of video games, you might be thinking "WarioWare". That's Nintendo's micro-game series that has recently been used to show off the gadgetry and gimmickry of the Wii and DS. But WarioWare was born on the Game Boy Advance where it simply got to be a good game that showcased good gameplay.

Little Deviants feels like a strained batch of tech demos. It's like some bundle of wood and cloth that might be sold with a Swiss Army Knife just so you'd have something with which to test the scissors, knife, tweezers and magnifying glass.

If only Little Deviants mini-games were much fun to play. They're not. Some are tolerable if unoriginal, usually involving rolling a spherical Deviant through a maze or down a track. The ones that involve playing the Vita vertically pleasingly emulate some of the vertical platforming games popular on the iPhone and Android phones.

The worst games, sadly, are the showpiece land deformation mini-games, which are just frustrating. The back-panel land-poking trick is neat, but it's hard to manage. There's a tactile dissonance between touching the flat back panel with fingers you can't see in order to affect land that is presented with three-dimensional foreshortening on the front screen. You're supposed to deform the land in order to roll a Deviant past enemies and through electrified gates. It's hard to do and, well, the worst thing I can say about a game's controls is that they'd obviously be better with an input method other than the one a developer is forcing me to use.

Little Deviants is graphically attractive and musically joyful. Plus, you get to find and collect a cat in each level. These are cute, charming things. These are not enough, however, to balance what feels like a game made by hardware hard-sellers. Not only do we have mini-games that are made to show off various aspects of the hardware, but even the game's front menu is a ticker-tape of possible friend requests. Just in case you needed to be told that the Vita can do friend requests! No, Little Deviants, I don't want to send a friend request to that guy who my Vita encountered in the system's Near app. Nor that other guy, nor that other other person. But that other guy? I would, but his friends list is full, so please stop asking me.

Little Deviants proves to be a useful laboratory for what works and doesn't work on the Vita. I'm glad it exists to warn future developers to more cleanly re-set the zero point for tilt-based games. I'm glad it shows off how well the Vita's cameras can allow for the kind of augmented reality games (games involving shooting little spacemen who appear to be flying through your living room) that the 3DS was previously doing decently. I'm glad it exists to show developers to not go bananas with the rear touch panel but to consider sometimes running a Vita game vertically on the screen instead of horizontally.

This game is a batch of experiments. May it enable some good games that I can recommend for you to play. This one, however, is a skip.