Ones to Watch on PS3, PSP for July 2009

By Paul Munn | July 1, 2009

The July release lists for PS3 and PSP look to be a bit shorter from the surprisingly busy June, but there are a couple of titles I’m looking forward to.

The Punisher: No Mercy for the PS3 hits the PlayStation Store on July 2nd at $9.99. The Unreal Engine person shooter from Zen Studios sounds nice, but I’m just going to say that for $15-$20 you can get a far deeper game: Unreal Tournament III.

The Bigs 2 from 2K Sports comes in on the 7th and NCAA Football 10 from EA bounces in on the 14th. Both the PS3 and PSP get versions of these games and while I heard good things about The Bigs from friends I haven’t taken the demo of The Bigs 2 on the PlayStation Store for a spin yet.

The PlayStation Network is known for quirky and unique games and the PSP gets a nice digital-download-only game July 16th called Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? The smartly localized demo already on the store is pretty funny stuff and while challenging it brings one of my favorite genres to the handheld — that of being the evil ruler who is trying to defend his dungeon realms from goody-goody heroes. It will retail for $19.99.

The second of two Watchmen: The End is Nigh games appears this month but I heard it’s not appearing as a PSN game. The first did do ok score-wise as a by-the-numbers brawler — something notable for a movie tie-in, but must not have sold well enough at its $20 price point. Part 2 will be released in a bundle with Part 1 on the disc with the Blu-ray movie release of The Watchmen movie on July 21st. This is the first hybrid Blu-ray and game disc release of its kind so it should interesting to watch how well the movie sells. I saw The Watchmen in the theater without having read the book and found it to be very entertaining and fun to watch but I haven’t played the game yet.

Fighting game fans get two 2D fighters this month with BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger — which has already gotten a gushing 9.4 review from IGN — and King of Fighters XII. The nice thing about BBCT is that the first run of the game at retail is actually a Limited Edition of the game with some very nice extras at a regular retail price. Both games have a July 28th release date.