Super Stardust Portable Coming December 4

How exactly do you pull off a dual-stick shooter with only one (really small) analog stick? It looks like we’re about to find out, because Super Stardust Portable’s arrival on the PlayStation Portable is imminent.

According to the PlayStation.Blog, Super Stardust Portable will be arriving on the PlayStation Store on December 4, and will be priced at $9.99. Billed as "the most intense handheld shooter," it looks like quite a bit of work has gone into shrinking it down to portability.

"The PSP version is played on a wrapping 2D field that is optimized for the PSP screen," said Housemarque’s Kimmo Lahtinen. "There was a lot of tuning to make it not feel either crowded or too large so we could have the gameplay and levels stay as fast as before. After we found the optimum size, we felt that we had lost nothing of the old intensity in the conversion."

He also described the challenge of the controls, saying that in the end they decided to make the face buttons the second analog stick and allow the game to "interpolate the shooting direction." We’re not sure how precise that’ll turn out to be, but Lahtinen called the final result "perfect."

"Our main goals were to keep the same high intensity gameplay from the PS3 version and do it at a consistent 60 frames per second," Lahtinen said. "We feel that both goals were successfully completed, but I’ll leave the final judgement to you."

As a parting shot, Lahtinen said he would see everybody on the online high score lists, which sounds like a meaningful challenge to us. No doubt Super Stardust HD veterans will be ready to meet it, and then some.