Twisted Metal - Head-On - Extra Twisted Edition

Most ports of handheld games arrive with a new coat of paint and nothing else. This one came with a crime scene. Tucked alongside the console conversion of the PSP's car-combat entry is Twisted Metal: Lost, three salvaged levels from an abandoned follow-up to Twisted Metal: Black, left in roughly the state the studio dropped them in — untuned, unfinished, and more interesting for it. Incognito didn't polish the corpse. They labelled it and let players wander through.

The main game is the one that mattered most to the series' long-term fans, because it is the direct sequel to Twisted Metal 2 rather than the grim, institutional Black. Bright arenas, cartoon menace, a roster built on recognisable faces. The combat still runs on the old grammar: pick up homing missiles and napalm, hold them for the right moment, and treat the special weapon as the thing that actually wins fights. Learning the energy attack's input shortcuts, the ones that let you fire off a freeze or a blast without the charge-up, is the difference between surviving a four-way brawl and becoming scrap in it.

As a translation it's unusually clean. The PSP original was designed around small, dense arenas with clear sightlines, which suits a TV far better than it had any right to, and the split-screen support gives the PS2 version the one thing the handheld couldn't really offer at the time. Two players, one couch, a Tokyo rooftop. That's the version of this series people actually remember playing.

The extras are where the package earns its subtitle. Developer commentary over the Lost levels, cutscene material cut from earlier games, and the endings assembled as a kind of archive — all of it aimed squarely at people who had been following David Jaffe's increasingly strange character epilogues since the mid-nineties. It is a strange, generous thing for a publisher to sanction: a retail disc that documents its own series' dead ends.

What holds up is the handling. Cars feel heavy and skittish in the way arcade combat needs, the arenas reward vertical knowledge, and the difficulty spikes in boss fights land about where you'd expect from a lineage this old. What doesn't is the camera in tight corridors and a story mode that assumes you already care about Calypso's contract loopholes. Fair trade. This remains the last proper Twisted Metal of its kind, and it knew it — which is why it spent half its disc space on a funeral.