Top 10 most anticipated PlayStation Vita games

Sony's ultra-powerful PlayStation Vita has had an enviable showing at E3. The quad-core portable appeared alongside a bumper crop of must-have games, some essential services, and that unexpectedly merciful price tag.

Now that the sexy gadget has rocketed to the top spot of our Christmas wish list, we need to decide on the games we'll be buying on launch day, and within the first few months of release.

Sony promises that 80 games are under development and we've seen full reveals, sneaky glimpses, and teasing hints of about 30 of them.

We've further narrowed it down to just ten games that you'll definitely need to play once the device is out in the wild.

Is Golden Abyss the most gorgeous handheld game ever? By mixing Vita's quad-core brunt with Uncharted's leafy jungles, gushing streams, and motion-captured animations, it might just well be.

Proving that portables are no slouch, this Uncharted semi-prequel features over two hours of motion-captured and voice-acted story sequences, sandwiched between the usual mix of jungle parkour and hectic shootouts.

The Vita's many gizmos will come into play for optional control schemes: you can tap on ledges and bad guys to climb and murder, snake your finger up a cliff face to automatically bounce between outcroppings, and use the gyroscope to line up sniper shots.

The Vita-exclusive 2048 takes place much earlier than any other Wipeout game. By 2048, the sport of antigravity racing is about as widely adopted as planking, and most races take place on near-future streets, rather than neon-lit tracks.

Sure, it might not matter much in the grand scheme of things - simply background noise to the game's high-octane races and fierce rocket-swapping - but it's a nice touch.

The game's multiplayer has been given a revamp, too: you can play against pals on PlayStation 3 and there are campaign-style missions to beat, like stubbornly sticking to the top half of a designated leaderboard.

If you've played this spherical twin-stick blaster on PS3, you'll know what to expect here. You orbit a planet, shooting enemies and nuisance space rock with a handful of different weapons.

This Vita edition adds a few new features: you can shift the camera's perspective just by twisting and tilting the console, shake the console to unleash shockwaves, and tap the touchscreen to use your special power-ups.

Those include the ability to halt time, blast off a barrage of missiles, and generate matter-sucking black holes. As one of the most efficient time sinks on PS3, Delta sounds like the perfect excuse to get addicted all over again on Vita.

This innovative indie game comes from the mind behind queasy music-blaster Everyday Shooter. And, as the name would suggest, this new Vita release has a heavy music component, too.

There's no composed soundtrack to the game - you make the platformer's backing track by interacting with objects, jumping onto different platforms, and navigating past enemies. Each move produces noises, chimes, chords and strums.

You can also make your own levels, but you do this by creating music instead of platforms. Once your masterpiece is composed, Sound Shapes will generate platforms, enemies, and challenges for you, based on your unique rhythm.

Sounds trippy.

In this gravity-defying platformer from Team Siren, the world is falling apart. The space-time continuum is ripping it to shreds, and it's left your world as an incohesive jumble of paths, walkways, and bridges.

Luckily for you, the game's cast of sexy vixens can leap from floor to wall to ceiling without worrying about physics, which proves handy when taking out enemies.

It's all rendered with gorgeous cel-shaded visuals, too. With a veteran developer at the helm, this will be one to investigate in 2012.

Little Deviants is exactly the sort of forward-thinking game that will explain, straight out of the gate, why the Vita has a camera, microphone, touchscreen, gyroscope, and touch-sensitive pad on its butt.

This bumper mini-game collection comes packed with toys and games to show off how each sensor and gizmo will work during gameplay.

One familar ball-rolling puzzler mixes up the action by having you poke your finger into the back panel to morph and raise the landscape. Another has monsters on-screen, either facing towards or away from you. You'll need to use both touchpads to poke their bulbous bellies.

A side-scrolling shoot-'em-up, meanwhile, is controlled entirely by motion, a defence game is played with your voice, and an AR game uses your camera to superimpose enemies into the real world.

This crossover brawler from Namco features the usual raft of pugilists: martial artists like Ryu, Chun-Li, and Guile from Capcom's Street Fighter series, and King of Iron Fist contenders like Kazuya, Nina, and King of Tekken fame.

But if you play it on PlayStation Vita, you'll get to light up the arena as superpowered bike messenger Cole MacGrath - the morally flexible (anti-)hero from inFamous.

Don't worry about an unfair fight, though: Cole might be able to cast lightning storms, but Ryu can conjure up fireballs, and Chun-Li has thighs as thick as tree trunks. It all evens out in the end.

Vita's touchscreen adds a whole new sense of toy-like, playful fun to LittleBigPlanet's patchwork proceedings. You'll be able to grab onto objects with your pinky, move platforms by dragging them, and spin gears and wheels with a twirl.

The back touch panel makes an appearance, too. You can pop platforms out of hiding by nudging their backs, and then shove them back into place by poking them on front. Expect some seriously devious puzzles with this.

These brand new ideas, however, mean this Vita-edition won't play stages from the PS3 DIY level maker. No worries - it won't take long before the Vita community has filled the sackworld to ripping point with new ideas, creations, and contraptions.

"Sometimes you just wanna sit on the couch, and play on the big screen," a developer behind this action RPG explains.

In a move reminiscent of Nintendo and its recently announced Wii U, Sony will encourage owners of a PlayStation 3 and a Vita to save their Ruin data to the cloud, and pick up their progress on either system.

Makes sense for a loot-hunting, rat-bashing Diablo-'em-up.

Ruin looks to be exactly the sort of perilously addictive experience that you won't want to put down, even if you need to head to work, walk the dog, or evacuate your bowels.

It's billed as a social RPG, too, because the always online adventure lets you trade, battle, and mess with buddies, as you leap into their lairs or defend your dungeon from real-world intruders.

ModNation Racers shares LittleBigPlanet's hands-on mantra of Play, Create, Share. You not only get a cute and cuddly kart racer to play, but you can also build your own courses and play tracks from amateur designers online.

But unlike LBP's PSP edition, this completely customisable racer taps into the overflowing reservoir of homemade tracks from its PS3 sibling. Turn on ModNnation Racers when it launches in 2012, and you'll already have hundreds of thousands of tracks to race on.

You can also make levels on the portable version, and it couldn't be easier to do so. You drag and drop objects from the touchscreen, and morph the landscape by tickling the rear touchpad. You'll have created Silverstone in minutes.