ps vita - bringing mobile gaming to the next level

by Acat, ze Oosband.

okay so i was eyeing the ps vita ever since it was announced last year. i had a pink fat psp which i sold off to buy a nintendo ds. but that's another story. anyways, the vita was definitely something of a gadget freak wet dream when it was announced.

so i was of course more than chuffed when i managed to cajole toughcookee into getting me one for my birthday. well its not until much later la of course but with the vita only recently being announced in singapore the price of grey imports were brought down quite significantly. the 3g version was selling for as high as RM2,500 in KLCC. of course that's your tourist price. but typically when u ask around, the average price is around RM1,700.

with the release of the singapore version, i think those folks who stocked up on the hong kong units may be forced to take some losses. in terms of compatibility its pretty similar. however buyers need to be careful when buying 3g units from the US as they are carrier locked which means that u can't use it with a local sim.

another thing that buyers need to know, since malaysia has not officially launched the ps vita, if you use a Malaysian playstation network id, you will not be able to access the ps store on the vita. yep. i tried using my main id and when i opened the ps store it just say that ur country is not supported. luckily i had a singapore unit and i could access the store. the only problem is the app selection and games were very limited. so i ended up creating another id. this time a US-based one and i think this could be the best option yet. not only are there more games selection, the apps are also a bit more. there's facebook, foursquare, etc. and there are also free games available to be downloaded occasionally.

so with that all of the way, i think i can start to do a proper review of the games console. but before we do that let's take a look at some pictures eh.

what u get with a value pack..

the bundled accessory pack

what u get in the main pack

the memory card and game..

proprietary memory card

charging the console..

okay now that the pictures are all out of the way, lets get to the nitty gritty review shall we? first and foremost the ps vita is a games console. and a games console is only as good as the games that can be played on it. and games are of course a bit of a subjective issue. what makes a game great? is it the gameplay? is it the graphics? sony has always nailed the graphics on its console. but in terms of gameplay nintendo is still the pioneer in terms of introducing touchscreen gameplay on the ds.

sony is however trying to catch up with the vita. the vita essentially is familiar if you are a sony fan. it improves from the old psp by introducing dual analog thumb controls, a touch screen and a fancy touch sensitive panel at the back. now i for one was a bit skeptical with the back panel but having played uncharted for a bit, the use of the back panel becomes almost natural.

sony has ditched the UMD format and has come up with another format for its ps vita game. now, you have the option of downloading the games from the ps store, but you definitely need a big memory card for that. the memory card that came with the bundle unit is only 4GB, and the size of the games are pretty huge. u will run out of space fairly quick. example, the uncharted is 3.2GB in size. imagine downloading that off the net.

the ps vita gamecard.

one criticism that folks had for the vita was the lack of built in storage. yeah. i guess it would have made sense to build that in but hey then you can't make money from selling proprietary cards innit?

okay now for the boring science bit. the vita is powered by a quad core cpu and a quad core gpu. it sports a 5 inch OLED screen. it comes with 512MB of RAM which is actually more RAM than a ps3. imma link you to the wikipedia entry for easy reference. connectivity wise, my vita is a 3G version. i'm using a digi simcard with it. it auto detects the settings but u can change the APN manually. there's also wifi and bluetooth which you can use as per whatever you normally use those for.

so basically the vita's user interface is governed by the live area. this is where you navigate to see all your apps and games. when you insert a game card, some game requires some storage on a memory card and essentially won't work if you don't have a memory card. same goes with apps.

speaking of apps, depending on ur ID, there's, facebook, foursquare, flickr and twitter app all free to be downloaded. this marks a change from the old psp. apps. now one would wonder if sony would have done better to stick android onto the vita and make it a more all rounded device. but hey i think they wouldn't wanna cannibalize sales of their phones.

so i think this should be enough for a start right? will update this review with more hands on usage later.. much much later.. well if i can put down the vita long enough to write the review la right? :)

have you checked it out yet?