Gamers love a good console war, and so while waiting for the Xbox 360 vs PlayStation 3 debate to heat up, the fanboys have been warming up with the Nintendo DS vs the Sony PSP match.

To date, it hasn’t been much of a contest, Sony launched its PSP in Japan, then made us in Europe wait a year to get our hands on (sound familiar?) and when it did arrive the silence of the games released was deafening.

In the meantime, Nintendo launched the DS with inferior graphics and a weird control system and then promptly wiped the floor with PSP with game after game that converted both the hardcore gamers and then the mainstream with more accessible games like Nintendogs and Brain Training. Again, is any of this sounding familiar?

So, the war for gaming on the move was won by Nintendo and the last gamer off the PSP was due to turn out the lights. Except that isn’t happening. The PSP has been constantly updated by Sony to turn it into a pretty impressive multimedia device – watch films, view your photos, listen to music, browse the web, etc – but where its creator seems to have let it down, amazingly, is in the release of games.

Step up the third party developers. Maybe it has taken them a long time to get familiar with the peculiarities of developing for the hardware. It is notoriously difficult to code for, as Steve Lycett, producer at Sumo Digital explained in issue 2 of HGZine: “For [the] PSP we really only have 24MB of memory to play with as 8MB is used up by the system to run.”

Whatever the reason, there is now a set of games being released exclusively on the PSP which are showing the console’s gaming capabilities off and getting gamers excited, but perhaps more importantly, giving PSP owners some gamers worth playing: games like Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Dungeon Siege Throne of Agony and Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops. The line up of PSP games previews in HGZine, the free PSP and DS magazine, also shows a brighter future, with WipEout Pulse, Worms (also coming on DS) and others generating excitement.

Whether this is going to be enough to rescue the PSP – sales of the PSP unit itself would suggest it had never been in as much trouble as people made out – remains to be seen, but if Sony is going to release a PSP 2 (which seems likely as the rumour keeps getting denied) then the games fanbase needs to grow and the PSP needs to have a strong set of titles to do that. At long last, after a two year wait, it seems this may be happening.

David M E Taylor is Publishing Director of GamerZines, the free videogames magazine publisher. All the games mentioned are covered in the free PSP and DS magazine, HGZine.

There are also free games magazines for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC games. David has worked in the games and technology magazine industry for fifteen years.