Last month I was lucky enough to get a hands on with Sony’s brand new gaming hand-held – The Vita. Now, before I give you my initial reactions to the system, it is important to highlight a couple things.
Firstly, I do not own a Playstation 3 and have no intention to do so apart from a brief stint back before its release. I found the PS3 to be a massive power house trying to achieve everything with a rather poor launch lineup and not many exclusives, and that doesn’t appeal to me – even to this day. However the PS3 has massively picked up pace and has the games to show and since then. I have missed out on some fantastic games for the system; MGS 4, heavy rain [for example] but I am so locked into my Xbox identity; my profile, my achievements, that I cannot fathom having two separate consoles so my allegiance is with Xbox. I did however purchase a 3DS on launch and was extremely impressed with the system itself. It’s lineup, again, not so much, and that is why a couple months later it was traded in. It is only now that Nintendo have started to gain momentum with it.
Then we come to the PSV. A great looking system with great potential. Though, admittedly, I lacked any interest until I got my hands on it. The first thing I noticed was how incredibly light the system is – it’s incredibly comfy and a by far improvement cosmetically to the PSP and the embarrassment that is the PSP Go. I couldn’t deny that it was pretty and felt comfortable. The touch screen is extremely responsive to an almost iPod responsiveness which is very impressive. The interface is clear and easy to navigate (almost exactly the same as an iPod with a home button), setting the standard that PS3 should have in cross game and party chat and non clunky menus.
Like when I had a preview of the 3DS, I was visually impressed. But I knew from experience the meat is in the games, and so I fired up Uncharted.
Now at this point I’m very aware of my possible bias because I am not a fan of the series at all – mostly due to having not really played them, but I always found the game play was never as solid as the rest of the game and I was never interested in the story. Visually, the game looked stunning with characters and environments rendered to great effect and moving Nathan felt relatively smooth. I found the environment incredibly dark however, and extremely difficult to know where to go or what pieces of the wall were scalable. I found it difficult to maintain the flow trying to use the touch screen to climb and yes I could trace a line and watch, but again it was unclear where to go because of the environment and darkness – very dark to the point where it really didn’t show of the OLED screen at all (although this could have been to preserve power and was therefore on a very low setting).
There’s also a lot of confusion with the Cross Play functionality with many people believing you can play every ps3 game on the Vita and this simply isn’t the case. Only certain games will feature this cross platform play that will be released for both systems and you will be required to own BOTH versions of the game. Unfortunately this wasn’t a feature I was able to have any time with.
Ultimately I was impressed with the Vita but not enough to consider buying one anytime soon, especially with the line up of games which, like the PS3 launch, does not appeal to me in the slightest. Still, I will keep a watchful eye on its progress and perhaps like the 3DS, a year or so down the line we will start to see games that validate a purchase. I for one am definitely interested in how the Call of Duty game will play on this.
