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Army Corps of Hell seems uncharacteristically grim for a company like Square Enix, whose darker moments are usually more like the scream-rock Chocobo theme from Final Fantasy XIII-2. The connections grow stranger upon learning that Entersphere Co. was formed by staff from Nintendo's Pikmin titles, and that Army Corps of Hell is a lot like Pikmin with hellish monsters in place of adorable little space imps. The star of this infernal campaign is a deposed ruler crawling back up from the depths of hell with an army in tow. In his conquest, he commands a legion of disposable goblin hordes who attack and fetch and carry things much like Pikmin. Pikmin from hell, that is.

Battles don't reward the complacent, however, so players have to keep their overlord avatar busy directing goblins about the game's various fields of carnage. The little beasts have a variety of formations for attacking and defending in their master's best interests, and they'll even rend fallen enemies into materials for the game's item-crafting system. The game's soundtrack of pounding metal also plays a role, as goblin soldiers are healed through a rhythmic mini-game, and players can discover new musical instruments as Army Corps of Hell trudges onward. Early reviews of the game criticize it as repetitive, but it's still one of the few original titles in the Vita's first wave—unless, of course, you count it as a distant Pikmin sequel.

Yes, another game system has arrived, and here stands its legally mandated Dynasty Warriors title. As common as these games may be, it's tough to deny their main selling points: taking control of various historical figures, blazing around the battlefields of ancient China, and whacking aside dozens of enemies with each blow. Dynasty Warriors Next is technically built from Dynasty Warriors 7: Extreme Legends, and it includes a lot of the franchise's staples. Using one of 65 different characters, players can re-enact massive military clashes in a quick, simple, and stress-relieving fashion. The game uses the Vita's regular face buttons for basic gameplay, and the touch screen comes into play for special attacks.

Dynasty Warriors Next delivers its battleground chaos in several different ways. Campaign Mode sets up various story scenes from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with a free choice of main character. Conquest Mode, on the other hand, has players choose a specific faction and take over other territories in a manner similar to Dynasty Warriors: Empires. More importantly, Conquest allows multiple players to share a game session using the Vita's GPS features. Of course, there's also a multiplayer ad-hoc mode for more basic violence.

The original Lumines was the best thing about the PSP's launch. A mere puzzle game it was, but the mixture of falling blocks, perfectly integrated sound effects, and background music made for a beautifully hypnotic experience. It was to the PSP what Tetris was to the Game Boy way back in 1989. And Lumines isn't so far away from that humble approach: two-color blocks descend from above, and players must fit them into increasingly large squares and rectangles in order for a rhythmic line to wipe them off the screen. As in Rez, everything gives off a certain musical tone: the blocks landing, the fusion of colors into larger shapes, and the chain reaction of a well-planned sweep.

Electronic Symphony adds a few new ideas, including a “shuffle” block that changes the colors around it. Player avatars also influence the game, as each of the 41 icons has a special skill activated by the Vita's touch screen. Then there's a soundtrack with 34 pieces of electronica and its relatives, with Air, Underworld, Aphex Twin, System F, and many other outfits. Personally, the chance to play Lumines in time with the Go! Team's “Apollo Throwdown” is enough of a draw on its own. This Lumines isn't coming out of nowhere like the first on did in 2005, but it might give the Vita the same sort of boost.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus is ideal for the Vita owners who want to know exactly what they're getting. They're getting the latest version of the Ninja Gaiden we saw on the Xbox back in 2004, when it was a fantastic action title. It wasn't really tied to the old NES Ninja Gaiden games, but it paid them homage with crafty level design and some brutal spikes in difficulty. That helped it set a standard among the action games of its generation, even if few were spurred on by the storyline. It had more in common with Tecmo's Dead or Alive, as shown in hero Ryu Hayabusa's design and a cameo appearance by Ayane. But no one cared when the game let us run on walls and dice through enemies by the truckload. And some fans were content to do all of that again when Tecmo reissued the game as Ninja Gaiden Black and ported it to the PlayStation 3 as Ninja Gaiden Sigma.

The Vita edition of Sigma has the same bonuses that the PS3 port added to the original Ninja Gaiden, including extra enemies, mid-air archery, and the chance to play as scantily clad demon-hunter Rachel. Those who went through the console version of Sigma won't see that much new, however. The Vita's motion-sensor controls the game's first-person mode, and there's a new “Hero” setting that makes everything a little easier. At least there's a good selection of “ninja trials” as side attractions, plus the promise of a decent action game to test out the Vita.

Shinobido isn't just a line of stealth games; it's a reaction. When the Tenchu series was yanked away from Acquire, the developer responded by cooking up Way of the Samurai and Shinobido. The former series came to North America many times, but the PlayStation 2's Shinobido and its PSP sequel visited only Japan and Europe. The Vita launch is the first time we're getting a Shinobido, though Tenchu fans will note many commonalities. Set a few months after the PSP title, Revenge of Zen follow its main ninja as he's betrayed and left at death's door by the Asuka clan. Zen's path (his Highlander-ish Search for Vengeance, if you will) isn't set in stone, and players can influence the game's ending by taking certain missions from certain clans.

As a stealth-action game, Shinobido 2 demands a good bit of sneaking around, though it varies the point of missions from assassinations to thievery. It also doesn't cut corners when it comes to slain foes: Zen has to hide any corpses that he makes, so it's often better to just slip past guards and soldiers. It's also to a player's advantage to grab all sorts of spoils from missions, as Shinobido offers a rather extensive item-crafting mode. The Vita's rear touch pad comes into play during the game's first-person viewpoint, which lets Zen throw kunai, a grappling hook, and other weapons. Is it worth buying a Vita just for the first Shinobido game on these shores? Perhaps not, but early adopters shouldn't ignore it.

Well, this cements it: Nathan Drake is Sony's mascot now. Not Crash Bandicoot, not Parappa, and certainly not anyone from Battle Arena Toshinden. They're all relics of a bygone era, as today's audiences like an adventurous everyman who's always quick with a joke when he's gunning down hundreds of people. Granted, those people are usually murderous thugs and rival treasure hunters, and Drake will meet many more of them in Golden Abyss. It's actually set before the first Uncharted game, so the story's free to throw in all sorts of things that don't affect the franchise's main arc; things like a romance with the granddaughter of a missing archeologist, the stage of a lost city, and the legend of some Spanish explorers who disappeared while looking for that city centuries ago.

Golden Abyss is arguably the biggest Vita launch title, as it packs one of Sony's major franchises into a handheld with a lot to prove. This of course means that everything's scaled down a bit in terms of design, and there's no multiplayer option. That said, the game delivers the same sort of gorgeous scenery that made Uncharted stick so firmly in players' minds, and that may be just what the Vita needs right out of the gate.

At E3 and Comic Con last year, Capcom wisely had an Asura's Wrath demo that found its multi-armed, perpetually outraged hero fighting a boss who, upon defeat, grew larger than the planet itself and tried to squash Asura with one finger. Make no mistake, CyberConnect2 set sights squarely on the realm of over-the-top action games, aiming for extravagances bigger, grander, and possibly dumber than anything seen before. Their creation mines Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and other faiths just as bizarrely as God of War twisted the Greek pantheon, with the titular Asura starting out as a revered imperial general in a world of curiously advanced ancient technology. Yet he's framed for the emperor's murder and turned into a statue for about twelve thousand years. Upon awakening, he sets out to rescue his daughter, Mithra, from the conspirators who murdered the emperor and, well, basically ruled the world for the past dozen millennia. Oh, and he has six arms. That's two more than those Mortal Kombat guys!

Much of Asura's Wrath is down and dirty fighting, with Asura pounding, throwing, and rending asunder all sorts of creatures in a future that's part ancient Buddhist art, part Star Wars. As in God of War and countless other action titles, though, players are prompted to jab specific buttons at certain points, whether it's a simple tap in the midst of combat or a flailing fight to push back an oversized boss. Other challenges find Asura firing energy bolts like bullets and dodging return fire. It's all quite over-the-top, and Asura's Wrath has an undeniably unique look in its stone-and-flesh deities who leap between planets with ease. It stands out a bit less in the story department, judging by Asura's mid-fight lines like “I'll rip out your blind eyes!” One also hopes that Asura's Wrath won't be as much of a pushover as CyberConnect2's last project, Solatorobo, but Asura's manic machismo suggests at least a fair challenge.

The unconventionally spelled eXceed shooters are a perfectly good example of how a franchise can flourish entirely within Japan's gaming underground, remaining largely unknown to Western players who don't frequent indie shooter circles. Well, eXceed is no longer a thing of obscurity, as ten bucks now gets any PC owner eXceed – Gun Bullet Children, eXceed 2nd – Vampire REX, and eXceed 3rd — Jade Penetrate Black Package. The three games all look similar at a glance, as they all share the same style of enormous-eyed sorceresses with names like “Celestia Lindwurm” unraveling plots about angels and demons as they flit through waves of glowing enemy bullets.

Yet the three games differ a bit in their underlying play. Gun Bullet Children outfits its three playable leads with fairly standard shooter attacks and bombs, though the game borrows from Castle of Shikigami by rewarding players who come as close as possible to touching enemy fire. Vampire REX introduces an Ikaruga-like polarity system, where enemies come in “Saintly” and “Evil” varieties. Characters can switch between the two moral codes, absorbing bullet of the same polarity and inflicting greater damage on enemies of the opposite breed. Jade Penetrate Black Package, aside from having the most amazing title of the three, returns to the original game's bullet-grazing concepts and sports the best production values, complete with a heavy soundtrack. And all three titles make The eXceed Collection a good introduction to the world of Japanese 2-D shooters—and also a recommended buy for anyone hoping to see similar games get official English releases.

This 3DS edition of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater goes way back. It was first shown as a tech demo, entitled The Naked Sample, at the 2010 E3, and Konami decided to make a complete port of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater not long after that. Originally a PlayStation 2 release from 2004, Snake Eater enjoys a fairly good reputation, as it didn't polarize fans like Metal Gear Solid 2 did. No, Snake Eater's a relatively unpretentious tale of special operative Naked Snake infiltrating a USSR jungle hideout, where rogue Soviets are making a mobile nuclear tank. We say “relatively” unpretentious because Snake Eater is still filled with Hideo Kojima's usual twists: a psychic who makes you tread through the ghosts of murdered enemies, a sniper who can be killed by old age, and all sorts of strange, metafictional oddities that tie into other Metal Gear titles. It also forces Snake to adapt to the environment by camouflaging himself or by killing and eating whatever animals cross his path.

Snake Eater gets a few new features for its 3DS outing. The system's camera can turn just about any photo into a camo pattern, and the gyroscope comes into play when Snake balances on ledges or crosses bridges. If you bought one of those CirclePad attachments for your 3DS, you'll find that the second analog nub controls the camera in Snake Eater, just as in the original version. And it's in stereoscopic 3-D, but that's pretty much implicit with any 3DS game, isn't it?