There appears to be a growing trend of console to handheld ports, specifically with the introduction of the PSP. With some added technological prowess backing Sony’s first handheld, it seems developers are becoming more keen in porting games that were originally created for consoles onto the handheld platform.

While it’s all well and good that these games are being offered to a wider audience, is it really worthwhile? Do these straight-up ports actually work?

While playing through GUN Showdown on the PSP, I began questioning whether it really is suitable for such a game to be thrown onto the PSP. It’s essentially the same as its 2005 console brothers, except with some added mini games and a new wireless multiplayer mode. Neither additions are really significant, offering little more than an hour or two of additional gameplay worth.

What’s interesting is that the developer’s really have to fight with handheld hardware in order to get a console game to run half-decently on the platform. While the graphical power is now, there’s always the issues of controls. Unfortunately, this is what continuously bugs the console-to-handheld ports, as games that are originally created for use with two analog sticks simply don’t work effectively using one.

Or two, if you use the PSP’s face buttons as a substitute to the right analog stick. Seriously, though, it’s pretty obvious that such limiting face buttons are in no way a replacement for an intuitive analog stick.

Take GUN Showdown, for example, which sees you using the left stick for movement and the PSP’s face buttons for moving your view. It’s clunky, ineffective and often frustrating - especially when you’re being blasted by enemies, but completely unable to target them quick enough to take them down before suffering too much damage.

While it’s obvious that not all genres will see such a control problem arising when porting onto a portable platform (racing games come to mind), it’s certainly questioning when developers expect players to battle with clunky controls and still come away satisfied.

GUN experienced disappointing sales when it was ported to the Xbox 360, partly due to the developer’s pure laziness in not bothering to update the visuals to a suitable next-generation level, as well as the fact that most people interested in the game had already played it on the PS2 or Xbox. There’s more of a chance in people having not experienced it when changing to a completely different platform style (console-to-portable), but I still can’t see GUN Showdown experiencing any success at the cash registers at all.

I guess the moral of the story that needs to be learnt by developers is this: if the game doesn’t control well, and is likely to have gamers throwing it down due to pure frustration due to ineffective controls, the likelihood of the game seeing great popularity is fairly limited. Only port to portable platforms if the genre fits on it: a shooter that needs two analog sticks to play clearly doesn’t belong on a portable platform like the PSP.

- Cain Dornan