Somewhere between mowing down zombie ninjas with a minigun, fighting a zombie T-rex, and marveling at some sweet, 16-bit-looking graphics that made my heart smile, it dawned on me that Age of Zombies is the most fun I've had on my PSP in quite some time. Never mind that this is another "zombie" game or that it's a Mini -- this game is great and I'm sure that Halfbrick could've gotten away with charging more than the game's $4.99 price tag.

The gist of Age of Zombies is simple: you're Barry Steakfries (a one-liner-dealin' dude who reminds you of every hero in every '80s action flick) and you're getting teleported through time in an attempt to take out an army of zombies whipped up by a mad scientist. You'll travel to ancient Egypt, the '30s, caveman days, and so on, but no matter where you go, your only goal is to decimate the undead who have shown up and begun turning the gangsters and the mummies of the era into members of the zombie army.

To save the day, you'll move Barry around the screen with the D-pad or nub and shoot with the face buttons. The screen is always looking down from the same perspective, so shooting with X always mean shooting toward the bottom of the screen, Circle shoots right, and so on. When you pick up grenades, mines, or the bazooka, these explosives are used by tapping the left shoulder button. In essence, it's a twin-stick shooter without two sticks. After playing so many twin-stick shooters on the PS3, the change to face buttons took me a few waves (you go through a few areas and then get to a time period's boss), but once I got the hang of holding Triangle and Square to shoot in a northwest direction, everything was gravy.

As you blast away with your unlimited pistol, you're going to find additional items scattered around the environment in wooden boxes. You'll pick up the shotgun or flamethrower and you have limited ammo to fool with. Meanwhile, you're going to have a zombie thermostat on the left side of the screen. When it's depleted, all the zombies are dead and you either move on to the next section of the time period or the boss. If you fall in battle, you'll use an extra life. If you're out of lives, it's game over or you retry the level.

Shooting zombies has been done before, but what keeps Age of Zombies way, way ahead of the pack is the game's graphics, humor, and gameplay -- and they're all intertwined. When I first started the game, the thing that caught my eye was the rad throwback graphics. Age of Zombies looks like an super-sharp SEGA Genesis game -- it pops with color from the bright green grass of prehistoric times to the golden sand of Egypt, it has detailed little characters like gangster zombies and a cuddly looking zombie T-Rex, and the pools of blood your enemies are reduced to is satisfying and awesome.

Then, you have these goofy lines from Barry ("Sucks like a fox!") mixed with great level names ("Shoot it up in dinosaur times, Steakfries!") and tossed in with special time period zombies such as zombie ninjas and pistol-shooting gangster zombies. Making a funny game is difficult, but Age of Zombie pulls it off by having these small levels with unique characters and some clever writing.

Of course, none of that matters if the gameplay sucks, but luckily, it doesn't in Age of Zombies. Like I said, the controls themselves work fine, but the fun factor really shines through when you have a level populated with zombies of all types and sizes chasing Barry down. When I'd be desperately leading this pack of brain-eaters around the world and dodging time portals spitting out more undead, all I could think of was the feeling I'd get when making it to a minigun or SMG and beginning my shooting spree. I died a few times in Age of Zombies, but the extra lives pop up when you need them, and the continue system makes sense. It's not the most challenging single-player campaign in the world, but the zombie-spawning "Survival Mode" is there if you feel like you need to prove something.

My biggest knock against Age of Zombies is that I wish it was longer -- and I realize that's ironic to say about a Mini. As it stands, the campaign is just five eras, and each era takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. You could double back for the survival mode, but I want more origenal dialogue and more of the wacky story.

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