PlayStation Vita parties like it’s the age of removable, proprietary media
Slide to Play reviews the PlayStation Vita:
The battery lasts about four hours, which isn’t great.
[The] overall interface is cluttered and somewhat unintuitive.
The touchscreen also feels occasionally unresponsive on both the home screen and in games.
The main cameras are definitely not up to par with the quality of the iPhone’s
The Vita is also rather bulky—especially next to an iPhone
It’s like a shopping list of ‘gnh’, and it feels as if Sony’s living in a little bubble where Apple and Android devices don’t exist, and where no-one’s switching to iOS and Android devices for all-in-one entertainment. Note that the review shows Vita does have some good points—it’s powerful, has a great screen, provides some innovation in the form of a rear touch panel, offers GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth, has cloud sync for progress, and you can also control a PS3 with the handheld; but this next bit makes me slam my head into the desk with such force that it breaks in half and the sides fly up and hit me in the ears:
Probably the biggest complaint is Sony’s insistence on using a new and completely proprietary memory card format. The 16 GB card is about $60 and the 32 GB is $100, and unlike the standard Micro SD card that virtually every other device uses, these tiny cards are only for the Vita.
Really, Sony? Really? Did you not learn your lesson with UMD? Good grief. Still, at least the system is, according to Slide to Play, “very focused on online commerce thanks to Sony’s beefy online store”. Although whether people will be happy paying out for “$10–$50 Vita games” when iOS and Android equivalents are a fraction of that remains to be seen.
I suspect a core number of gamers will inevitably flock to the Vita, but I do wonder if the day of the dedicated gaming handheld is coming to a close. Even with Sony’s admission that apps beyond games are necessary on its console, adults and children alike enjoy the scope more ambitious devices bring them. It wouldn’t shock me to see a situation in a few years where PlayStation becomes a brand on Android devices and Nintendo becomes a Mario-flavoured version of Sega, releasing games for a range of devices that it didn’t create itself.
Insanity. The proprietary memory and lack of UMD migration path mean it has zero percent chance of being purchased. Silly Sony
Sony’s misguided fixation on proprietary media formats continues. Possible correction: did you mean that Nintendo would become like Sega, not Sony?
To be fair, this has little to do with UMD. It’s just how you select how much internal memory you want your Vita to have, similar to picking a proprietary hard disk for the Xbox 360. You buy one of these proprietary memory card, once, stick it in the Vita, and forget about it.
It sucks, but it’s not analogous to UMD at all.
Sony sent me a Vita a few weeks ago, and I didn’t notice some of the criticisms outlined above. The touchscreen worked wonderfully well (inclusive multitouch), and the two analog sticks are a dream to use. The UI has some weird aspects (like tearing down the “sheet” to “close” an application), but I didn’t find it to be cluttered or confusing.
The cameras are horrible, but they are *fast*. Which is relevant, because they’re being used for augmented reality games. You don’t want any lag, and unlike on the iPhone or the 3DS, there is *no* lag. It’s fantastic. For what they’re intended, the cameras are perfect.
The Vita is bulky, but how would you make it smaller? It’s a huge screen with a d-pad, four buttons, and two sticks attached to it. The only way to make it smaller would be to make the screen smaller.
The battery does indeed suck, though. When playing Uncharted, it held about 3.5 hours for me.
All told, I like it. It’s way better than the PSP. Will it sell? Who knows, but I’ll point out that the 3DS started selling rather well after Nintendo released the new Mario game.
(Also, about the comment that “equivalent” games on IOS cost a fraction of a Vita game’s price: this may be true for shovelware like Little Deviants, but where’s the iOS equivalent to games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss?)
@room34: Thanks for the correction. (For some reason, WP has been crashing when submitting articles today, so I’ve been rapidly rewriting bits of them.)
@LKM: UMD isn’t a direct comparison, but it does once again highlight Sony’s penchant for proprietary media. It could very easily have used an existing format for its new console. As for sales of the 3DS, they might have been boosted by the new Mario game, but that hasn’t been enough to stop Nintendo posting pretty dire financial results.
It’s probably also worth noting that I’m certainly not salivating at the thought of Sony and Nintendo failing—the very best thing in any space is for there to be multiple dominant players challenging each other and forcing innovation. But the more I look at the handheld space, the more dedicated devices seem like a relic—gaming’s iPod Classics or Walkmans.
“As for sales of the 3DS, they might have been boosted by the new Mario game, but that hasn’t been enough to stop Nintendo posting pretty dire financial results.”
And they were never going to, because Nintendo cut the price on the 3DS, and now probably barely breaks even on the device.
At any rate, Nintendo screwed up the launch of the 3DS. Nobody disputes that. That doesn’t mean that there’s no market for these kinds of devices anymore.
By the end of 2011, Nintendo had sold more than 15 million 3DS consoles. That’s a good number compared to pretty much any other portable console in the history of gaming (by comparison, Sony has sold 60 million PS3s by now).
If phones had killed the market for portable gaming systems, we’d probably see rather different numbers for the 3DS.
“But the more I look at the handheld space, the more dedicated devices seem like a relic—gaming’s iPod Classics or Walkmans.”
Phones won’t kill handhelds the same way PCs haven’t killed TV consoles. The market for handheld consoles will probably shrink, but as long as all phones don’t come with d-pads, buttons, and analog sticks, there will be a healthy market of people who want dedicated portable gaming devices.
I will probably get a 3DS before I get a Vita… and even then, my recent purchase of an iPad means that any future handheld system would probably be bought/gifted to me towards the end of this year. Giving both systems more time to prove that they have the games and infrastructure to interest me.
And the memory card thing? Makes little sense to me. People already have high capacity SD cards sitting around. It’s mostly about Sony living in a fenced-off world to try and stop piracy, not about offering a genuinely new technological edge.
I don’t really think it’s about piracy. I think it’s mostly a way of making the Vita look cheaper than it is, by not including any memory on the device, and then forcing Vita buyers to buy a proprietary memory card along with the console itself.
Mario 3DS isn’t that great. Far too easy, and the missing camera controls made me feel rather constrained. Not comparable to fun and challenging NSMB Wii or the Galaxies.
Vita is pretty meh to me. I have no need for a separate gaming handheld, especially one from a company without a history of fun 2D or 2.5D games. Without Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission (GBA, but still playable), Zelda Phantom Hourglass and NSMB, my original DS wouldnt have had much use.
I am even contemplating jailbreaking my iPad to pair a Wiimote. Sad the Wiimote can not emulate iCade controls, otherwise I’d already have tried it.
“Mario 3DS isn’t that great. Far too easy”
The second half of the game (after you’ve beat it for the first time, and you get an all-new world of expert levels) must be right up there with the hardest Mario levels I’ve ever played.
I liked it much better than Galaxy; the levels made me want to explore them, find hidden stuff. In Galaxy, I never got that feeling. Personally, I think Mario 3DS ranks among the best Mario games.
By the way, the one major complaint I have about the Vita are the loading times. They’re atrociously ridiculous. It’s not uncommon to wait 40 seconds or more just for the next level in a game to load. If the Vita has a crippling fault, it’s the loading times.
The reason Sony use a proprietary memory card is to help stop piracy as it forces you to use the vita’s software to transfer files through the “Content Manager Assistant” software which you install on your PC.
The reason for Sony not including internal memory is most likely cost cutting which is a stupid move on Sony’s behalf
then again the 3ds doesn’t include internal memory ( it comes with a 2GB memory card.