Stand O’ Food is one of the minis I’ve been looking forward to since I first saw it on the list of possible releases. After playing for an hour or so (and having to force myself to put it down to write this!) I can say that it certainly lives up to expectations.

If you’re not familiar with this type of food service game, they’re actually really popular on the web, and some of them, including Stand O’Food, have also been ported successfully over to the iPhone. From what I’ve seen so far, the minis version is pretty much identical to the iPhone version, aside from the controls of course.

There’s a handy Tutorial to start with, where you learn the basics of how to prepare food for your customers. The trick is to keep them happy by serving them quickly. If you keep them waiting too long they’ll get comically red in the face and start squeaking with anger before leaving!

Once you’ve mastered the basics of dishing up beef, fish and chicken burgers and serving your customers promptly so that you turn a profit, you can start getting creative with your food, adding toppings and extras that can be bought at the supermarket from your profits. There are also power-ups to be had when you serve certain customers.

There are two gameplay modes to choose from – Meal Quest and Lunch Rush. Meal Quest is the main ‘story’ mode, where you basically progress from one restaurant to another across a vast city. The bigger the restaurant, the more elaborate the meals you’ll have to make, and the more customers you’ll have to serve.

In Lunch Rush mode you stay in one restaurant and simply try to serve as many customers as possible in a day. You still get the same upgrades though, and get to go shopping in the supermarket just like in Meal Quest mode.

Overall, it’s looking pretty tasty! Stand by for a full review shortly, once I’ve finished serving my customers their Snack o’ Chicks!

I didn’t even have to load up this game to get really excited about it – the demonic screensaver and chilling music that kicks in when you select the game in your PSP menu was enough to win me over immediately!

Still, I realise that you probably want a little more from this First Impressions post than me looking lovingly at the PSP home menu, so I took the plunge and actually started playing the thing, in the hope that the gameplay would live up to all the terror-ific gothic trappings. I’m glad to say I wasn’t disappointed!

When you select Play Game from the main menu you get four gameplay modes to choose from (Survival, Rush, Wave Attack and Super Survival), and three locations (Frozen Earth, Castle Hall and Grave Park). We’ll cover them in detail in the main review, but basically all modes are a variation on a theme – kill lots of monsters and don’t die!

Any such game always stands or falls on the weaponry available. When you’re consistently doing one thing over and over again it better be fun to do, and Dracula Undead Awakening certainly places a fantastic arsenal at your disposal.

It has to be said, there’s nothing quite like that feeling of picking up a really big gun and laying waste to swathes of the undead with one satisfying ‘boom’ after initially barely denting the rampaging hordes with your standard pistol.

The top-down run-and-gun gameplay reminds me a lot of old Amiga and Sega Mega Drive games such as Chaos Engine, where you simply had to mow down everything in your path and maybe collect a few things on the way. All good clean mindless violent fun!

Overall, initial impressions of the game are very favourable. The level and character design is just beautiful, and considering how small the figures of the main hero and monsters are, the detail is amazing. Stay tuned for the full review!

Blast Off is the second of Brisbane’s Halfbrick Studios’ Xbox Live Community games to be ported over as a PSP mini, with the first one being last week’s Echoes. As with Echoes, Blast Off is based on an incredibly simple concept that still manages to translate into some truly absorbing gameplay.

You play the part of a rocket ship pilot who’s on a mission to rescue lost astronauts floating in space. Quite why so many astronauts have got themselves lost in space is never explained!

After you launch the rocket ship from the home planet by pressing X, all you have to do is propel it towards the astronaut to rescue them. Only trouble is, it’s not so simple! The rocket is subject to the gravitational pull of any nearby planets or asteroids, and if you get too close to them you’ll crash and burn.

The other main challenge you face is the fact that you only have a limited supply of fuel and air, as indicated by the gauges at the bottom of the screen. Run out of fuel and you’ll be as helpless as the astronauts you’re trying to save, drifting until you run out of air.

Where the skill comes into play is in trying to steer your ship against, and sometimes with, the gravitational pull while also trying to get close enough to the astronauts to rescue them. It can be incredibly frustrating at times, but also a lot of fun. We’ll delve deeper into the finer points of the gameplay in the full upcoming review.

Overall first impressions are generally favourable –the graphics are vibrant and crisp, the music is suitably spacey and soothing and the basic concept is excellent. My main concern is the longevity factor, as I managed to unlock all Easy and Medium levels in a very short space of time. We shall see!

Right from the off, with the impressive opening movie, it’s clear that Let’s Golf! is one of those highly polished mainstream minis that manages to throw in everything but the kitchen sink (including the hefty price tag!)

However, for all the fancy bits and bobs, the game looks, plays and sounds much more like an arcade-style golf game than one of the more in-depth sporting sims you’d find on other consoles.

True, at first glance it might all seem a little complicated when you tee off for the first time, what with the shot gauge and the wind speed arrow and club selection and all, but you don’t need to bother about any of those extra tweaks if you don’t want to.

Making a good shot is all about timing your button presses just right to hit the two sweet spots on the gauge (one if putting), and that really is all there is to it, although it certainly takes practice at first.

There are four different game modes, including a hot seat multiplayer mode so that you can play with your friends. We’ll cover all the modes in depth in the full review.

Players get to visit a total of four locations in all – Fiji, England, USA and Scotland – all of which have absolutely gorgeous graphics, with the emphasis being firmly on brilliant blue skies and vivid green fairways.

One thing that seems a bit strange is the apparent lack of a tutorial mode or any sort of guide to the control system, especially for a game such as this where a little guidance really would be helpful. Maybe there is one and I just haven’t found it yet. If you spot one, please let me know!

On first viewing, Let’s Golf! certainly seems like an entertaining game. I’m not usually much of a fan of golf games, but this managed to keep me amused for at least an hour or so, despite not having a tutorial! Stay tuned for the full in-depth review.

When the Pinball Dreams, Fantasies and Illusions trilogy first appeared on the Amiga in the early- to- mid-1990s, they seemed almost magical to me at the time, and to this day they’re still some of my favourite Amiga games. They always seemed so vibrant, so much like a real solid table – you could almost smell the candy floss and hear the excitable electronic cacophony of the amusement arcade when playing them.

With Pinball Fantasies, the second in the trilogy, already having been released as a mini on launch day, it’s great to see Pinball Dreams, the first game in the series (confusing much?!), finally being ported over to the PSP.

From the start, the menu screen keeps it classy but simple – there’s a Help option with a diagram explaining the controls, and the four tables to choose from. If you flip the icon for each of the tables you’ll see their individual High Scores leader boards. Each table also gives you the option to add up to eight people for some ‘hot seat’ multiplayer action if you want to do battle with your friends on the leader boards.

The four fully remastered tables look dazzling: you have Ignition, with its rocket ship theme, the western hoe-down of Steel Wheels, the cheesy pop of Beat Box, and the blood-dripping horror of Nightmare (always my favourite). They look and sound amazing, just like they always did, and they’re just as addictive to play as ever.

As with Pinball Fantasies, initial impressions are that this is a lovingly crafted recreation of a legendary game. Even if you’re too young to remember the original, you’ll still enjoy the great gameplay and graphics. Stand by for the full review!

It seems like lots of people have been waiting to see Halfbrick Studios’ Echoes as a mini, and now it’s here it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Even from the first glimpse of the menu screen you can see what a stylish and unusual game it is. The pastel illustration of game heroine Charlie with her shadowy ‘Echoes’ looming in the background briefly sets the scene, then it’s straight into the action.

At first you only have access to Arcade mode, so it’s there that you learn the ropes and unlock the other modes (Jackpot, Survival and Clockwork). The presentation, like the gameplay, is as simple as it is clever – Charlie is depicted simply by the top of her bonnet, so that even though essentially you’re controlling a small disc, you still get the sense of her as a little girl lost in a surreal universe.

The top-down gameplay involves collecting crystals and avoiding the shadowy Echoes, which ingeniously are actually echoes of your own movements, your own footsteps in time, created every time you collect a crystal. In Arcade mode, whenever you touch an Echo, you lose a life, so the aim is to collect the required number of crystals before you die. The time it takes you to achieve this determines your place on the high score leader board.

Initial thoughts after playing Echoes for an hour or so are how much fun it is to play, and how wonderfully inventive each little gaming world is, starting with the very first world, a map of Australia from the Brisbane-based Halfbrick Studios!

Stay tuned for the full review in which we’ll follow Charlie further down the rabbit hole as we explore the game in depth and explain all the different modes and power-ups.