Super Stardust Delta

Super Stardust Delta was one of the first games to show on PlayStation Vita that arcade action loses nothing coming from a handheld. The player controls a small ship orbiting a round planet and must defend it from an avalanche of asteroids and enemy vessels that accelerate and multiply with every wave. The key to survival lies in choosing the right weapon: rocky asteroids need to be shattered with one type of fire, icy ones melted with another, and metallic ones torn apart with a third, so the player is constantly switching modes depending on what's flying at them at that moment. The result is a game that looks simple but demands total concentration and the ability to read the chaos on screen.

The Vita version made use of the console's capabilities beyond the usual dual-stick control. Touch can release a shockwave that blasts everything nearby away, and tilting the console controls some of the bonus modes, a solution some players embraced enthusiastically and others preferred to turn off. Besides the main arcade mode, the game offers time-limited challenges and survive-as-long-as-possible modes, plus leaderboards that turn every attempt into a contest against your friends' results.

Visually it's a fireworks show: planet surfaces are detailed, explosions flood the screen with light, and on the Vita's high-contrast display it looks especially striking, backed by rhythmic electronic music. Reviews received the title very well as one of the best launch titles, with the caveat that the tilt-controlled modes aren't always pleasant. Today it remains a perfect example of a game you switch on for ten minutes and don't put down until an hour later. Housemarque has long kept the tradition of arcade shooters alive with this series at a time when major publishers tended to avoid them, and Super Stardust Delta is one of its most finely tuned entries. It also shows nicely why the genre thrives especially on portable devices: you grasp the rules within a few seconds, but mastering every last detail takes months.