Like Sony's ambitious third iteration of their once-ubiquitous platform, the PlayStation Network - launched day and date with the tricked-out initial shipments of the system itself - was slow to start but a beast of a contender with when it kicked into top gear. Early pickings were slim to none until console-exclusive Super Stardust HD energised the PSN's core audience. What small wonders Geometry Wars wrought for Xbox Live Arcade, Housemarque's revamp of Amiga 500 favourite Stardust brought in equal measure to Microsoft's burgeoning competition; and from there on out, despite a few notable missteps, the PSN has gone from strength to strength. Two years on, its library has swelled to include the usual multi-platform assortment of downloadable offerings, yet the PlayStation Network is most notable today as a means of distributing the sort of experimental games that are in such short supply elsewhere. The Wii has World of Goo and XBLA can brag about Braid till it's blue in the face, and while it won't do to cast undue aspersions on either - both titles are tremendous achievements in their own right - they each seem significantly out of place on their respective services, elbowed into obscurity long before their time by the Black Friday barrage of mini-game collections that are desperate for attention. On the open-plan marketplace of the PSN, by comparison, art-house experiences such as Riff: Everyday Shooter and Pixeljunk Eden have the room and the opportunity to spread their wings and flourish, as they should. If downloadable games ever need saving, and I fear they may, the battle will be fought - and won, with luck - on Sony's groundbreaking service.

With that said, an incredible number of console owners are yet to buy into any one of the range of platforms for downloadable games [I've admit I've got plenty of XBLA titles but not a single PSN one so far. Ed.], so it's a canny move of Sony's to package up a few of the PSN's greatest hits for more exposure at retail. Here, then, on the PSP, are two such ostensible collections: the Puzzle Pack, and the Power Pack, neither of which, I'm afraid to say, are shining examples of the best that the service has to offer. In their own right they're each worth the nominal price of entry, with plenty of replay potential standing to represent excellent value for money, but from their no-frills presentation to a few inexplicable technical issues - not to mention the unfortunate selection of games that the pair of packs bring together - neither Puzzle nor Power will likely be enough to make believers out of those avid gamers still resisting their Sony system's online capabilities.

Leading the charge for the more action-oriented of the pair is, oddly enough, flOw, perhaps the single most relaxing experience you can have outside of listening to an hour of whale-song whilst suspended in an immersion tank. flOw began life as a Flash-based game created by one-man band Jenova Chen as research for his University thesis. When he made it available to play online and for free download, flOw attracted something like a million players - and all this before Sony had even declared its interest. When it did, amid the last unknowing hurrah of Electronic 3 in 2006, Chen formed thatgamecompany with a few code-guru compatriots and work began on a port to the PSN. Seen initially as a showcase for Sony's groundbreaking sixaxis motion control, there was a surprising amount of debate about the nature of the actual game - surprising in that a quick Google would have revealed a fully-featured Flash version for any and all comers to experience firsthand. Those enthusiastic press peeps who branded it a Geometry Wars for the PlayStation Network rather missed the mark, even though in the aforementioned Super Stardust HD there was indeed such an equivalent. In any case, there's no shooting in flOw; there are no power-ups, life bars or boss fights. There are parallel mechanics that work in similar ways to each of these things, but they're cleverly implemented; subtle, slight and years ahead of their time. Take the menus of Dead Space, acclaimed for their immersion - they're present and correct in the HUD-less waterscapes you'll explore here; and flOw did away with game over screens well before Peter Molyneux called time on them in Fable II.

Ultimately, flOw is more of a moment-to-moment journey than a game in the traditional sense, which is to say that although it shares several traits with the narrow spectrum of experiences that mainstream titles have conditioned gamers to expect, in its striking simplicity, its ethereal atmosphere and its come-one, come-all approachableness, it sets itself apart. But don't misconstrue that particular pull-quote as an assertion that the game beneath all the innovations isn't up to snuff, because what Chen and company crafted in flOw was one of most addictive entries in the early PS3 catalogue and the same exceptional experience has been well preserved for its journey to PSP. You are cast as a series of sub-cellular organisms - an eel-looking thing to begin with, a cursory investigation of which reveals a startling range of abilities: it can both move, and move a little faster. In order to lead your creature around the screen on the PlayStation 3, you had to wave your Sixaxis in an uncharacteristically apt integration of the system's motion control; on the PSP, on the other hand, your sole means of movement is the analogue nub. All of the face buttons on either system activate what you might call a special power; your protozoan eel's speed-boost, in this case, or the paralysing strike of a later evolution of the creature. In those first moments, though, in the emptiness of the sky blue space you're dropped directly into after starting the game, you need no such abilities. You swim around a little until you come across a creature with strange red markings; swim into it and you're transported to another, slightly darker plane, where you encounter a little blue organism that takes you back and another red creature that guides you deeper into the aquasphere. flOw isn't an elevator, though; a great swathe of other pseudo-aquatic creatures populate the planes as you venture further down, and these guys are for eating. Whether simply by swimming your mouthpiece into them or by gobbling up the glowing spots on the larger of them, the more you eat, the bigger your eel gets, and the bigger your eel gets, the bigger the creatures he can eat.

At its simplest, the mechanics of progressions through the game boil down to swim, feed, repeat, but flOw is a brief, focused experience, and like Portal, all the better for it - especially on the PSP, where its levels are much less expansive than in the PSN version. Jenova Chen's pet project scarcely changed in the years between its Flash-based conception and its debut on Sony's online service, but flOw's evolution then seems positively radical next to the minute tweaks that SuperVillian Studios has made for its third iteration. Largely, things are just scaled back a bit, but all the game is missing on the portable platform is a bunch of empty space and some well-implemented motion control. The port is a fundamentally faithful one, showcasing the same enchanting hour or two of gameplay that made flOw such a breath of fresh air in the first place, and above all the other games brought together in the Puzzle and Power packs, its inclusion will do the most to seduce those hesitant console owners into probing the PSN for other hidden gems.

The Power Pack's second game, Beats, is a pleasant enough diversion but it doesn't come close to matching the power of flOw. If you can imagine Bizarre Creations' bizarre DDR-inspired side-project Boom Boom Rocket [Love that game! Boom-Ed.] with an ambient visualisation plug-in instead of a self-congratulatory fireworks display to ogle, you're halfway there. It follows the usual rhythm game tropes to a fault: a beat-driven pattern of the PSP's four face buttons scrolls towards the centre of the screen, where you have to match them against the corresponding icons in time with the music. Next to thatgamecompany's minimalist gradient of dreamscapes, Beats comes off as incredibly gamey - contrived, even - but that isn't to say that the familiar rhythm-game mechanics that SingStar developers SCE London have brought to the portable platform can't be a good deal of fun. With the fifteen songs there's room enough to train yourself through the wearisome tutorials and find the right difficulty to suit your abilities, but the default music is an uninspired Wipeout soundtrack on a Sunday afternoon and only on the harder settings, where the notes come in floods and you must embellish the usual button-presses with modifiers via the d-pad, does the gameplay start to challenge rather than pander. Beats comes closest to deciphering its identity when you copy across some music to your PSP's memory stick; the other, more interesting half of the equation, you see, will be familiar to all those who've ridden the choose-your-own-adventure waves of Steam success story Audiosurf. The option to import music from your personal catalogue is vital and the engine does a surprisingly decent job of generating accurate note-charts, whether you're trying to bring in hair metal or industrial trance. Of course, the more defined the beats of your music, the better the experience you'll have, but even then, the cheap visualiser effects won't be quite enough to distract you from what boils down to extended quick-time events set to a soundtrack of your own making. That is unless the soundtrack is whale-song. And you play underwater.

Gaming in an immersion tank won't help Syphon Filter: Combat Ops, however; I don't imagine you'd get much of a signal from inside one of those things and Logan's latest is a multiplayer-only affair. Somewhere between SOCOM and Metal Gear Online, Combat Ops is as easily as successful as the recent online iterations of both those powerful franchises, with as fully-featured a selection of modes and maps as you'd expect from a triple-A home console shooter. The interface is a re-coloured retrofit of the design from Sony Bend's own Logan's Shadow - it's red this time around, folks - and it plays in largely the same way; the controls, where the action is driven by the system's shoulder-mounted triggers and the face buttons substitute for its missing-in-action analogue stick, provide the best demonstration so far of a functional third person shooter on the PSP. Syphon Filter's pedigree on the portable is purebred and the gameplay of this latest entry does not disappoint. When you can find a game, the experience is as gratifyingly hardcore as ever, with a vast selection of gadgets and weaponry to take down your opponents - and there's the rub: the very nature of online-only games is that they only last as long as there's a community to sustain them, and despite being handed out as a free download with the God of War PSP bundle, the Combat Ops player-base is already desperately sparse. One can only hope that sales of the budget-priced Power Pack reinvigorates owners of the game, particularly because the level editing tools it comes with are surprisingly robust, and those highly-ranked user-created scenarios already on the servers would make for excellent stomping grounds should I have the pleasure of playing them with other people.

The line-up of the Power Pack makes for a markedly stronger package than the uneven alternative, but the same bargain-bin interface and long load times hamper both collections, and however powerful the three games brought together here may be in their own right, they're hardly compatible experiences. flOw is an excellent introduction to the indie trimmings that have collectively made the PlayStation Network relevant, and a fine game to calm you down on a rush hour bus ride. Beats, on the other hand, is a button-mashing rhythm game; a pared-down, value-added alternative to Guitar Hero that's saved from mediocrity by its My Music mode. As for Syphon Filter: Combat Ops? It's a multiplayer-only game that's sadly short of players. This is a variety pack if I ever saw one, but schizophrenic though the selection of games may be, they're an impressive bunch and, at budget price, the Power Pack is a no-brainer addition to any PSP library lacking its individual components.

Reviewed by Niall Rough for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).