I made the Vita think it was in Japan recently so I could play a couple demos and check out some free stuff. I made a couple of videos to document what I found including an extensive look at AKB1/149 Box, the crazy AR photo hunt game that Katy graciously tried to keep in frame as I ran around the kitchen.
When I was out on my brief Black Friday run I noticed quite a bit of movement of Vita games and bundles. A bewildered Mom even asked me for advice on accessories as we were waiting for a cashier to unlock the game case. Seems like there’s a lot of newfound Vita owners out there (or there will be shortly after Christmas morning), most of which will eventually ask the same question I did: why did I get this thing?
The biggest problem I see with the Vita is that the “wow factor” takes a while to set in. At first blush it’s a bigger PSP which doesn’t do the Vita any favors. The touchscreens turn off core gamers who love to hate mobile gaming and all the buttons turn off casual onlookers for appearing too complicated. I had the thing for a few days and still wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Slowly, though, I’ve really come around on the Vita and I thought I’d share some tips, tricks and suggestions if you also just got one and are wondering ‘what do I do wif it?’
1. Take advantage of how unsuccessful the Vita has been so far. I haven’t paid full price for a single game yet thanks to used game shops and clearance bins. Stores are all too happy to mark down games and free up shelf space. Be aware if you buy a used game, you may have to “reset” the card in order to earn trophies. Don’t worry, it’s a simple process.
2. Accessorize. While you’re checking clearance bins and sale racks take a look at the accessories. I’m a fringe case but I like my handheld systems to have a little extra girth so I jumped on PDP’s Trigger Grips. It helps the Vita fit better in my palms and it adds familiar trigger-style shoulder buttons. If you’re going to download much of anything you’ll also want to find a bigger memory card. Unfortunately, Sony made them proprietary so deals are hard to come by and they’re quite expensive at full retail price. Shop around and try to hold out for any kind of discount on a 16 or 32gb card.
3. Load up on free stuff. The PSN store has plenty of free rides to offer a new Vita owner. Email, Netflix, YouTube, Skype, Foursquare and Google Maps are all free and function about as well as their smartphone counterparts. Treasures of Montezuma Blitz is a rather fantastic and addictive Bejeweled Blitz clone that I check in with every single day. Frobisher Says! is both a great showcase of what the Vita hardware can do and an immensely fun WarioWare game to play with friends. Cliff Diving, Table Soccer and Fireworks are also free and show off the AR cards that come with your Vita. There’s plenty of other free stuff on the storefront but you’ll have to dig for them as there’s no way to sort or search by price.
4. Don’t forget your old PSP games. If you ever downloaded a game for PSP, chances are good that you can dig back through your history and plop it onto your Vita. From the PS Store hit ‘…’ then choose Transaction Management, Transaction History. They even let you set date ranges to search through. In the process I was reminded about Pursuit Force which Sony gave away as consolation for that nasty hack attack a few years ago. Once you’ve got a PSP game running press and hold on the touchscreen to access a ton of video and control options that make a lot of these old games much more playable.
5. Keep that charger at the ready. The Vita isn’t nearly as bad as the PSP on battery drain but an afternoon of downloading Uncharted and playing for a couple hours was enough to put it in the red. Sadly it won’t charge over USB (the USB cable plugs into the AC adapter) so you’ll want to keep the cord handy. Like my phone, I use the Vita during the day and plug it in overnight.
6. The PS button; your friend and enemy. This button does just about everything on the Vita. It can wake up the system, provides in-game access to brightness and music controls if you hold it down and lets you “tab” out of games to access other apps with a press. It also houses a series of notification lights that flash and blink with the most blinding of blue LEDs. Sometimes it flashes and there’s no notification to be found while other times notifications come in that it doesn’t alert me to. Thankfully, firmware 2.0 lets you fine tune what sets off the lights but I still wouldn’t keep it at bedside.
7. Take screenshots anywhere! The PS button also lets you take screenshots if you press it and the Start button at the same time. It’s tough to use in the middle of a game but it’s a feature every single piece of hardware with a screen should have! The photo gallery even sorts screenshots by game so you can easily keep track of them, send them to PlayStation friends or email them. You can even get all meta and set a screenshot as your Vita’s wallpaper.
8. Customize the screens. The Vita has the familiar colored ripple as its default background but you can easily cover it up with an image (transparent PNG files look great too or change the color to your liking. Simply hold down on any icon to rearrange the screen, add new pages, change colors or add images. Here’s a couple of ever-expanding forums with all manner of awesome Vita wallpapers. NeoGAF – PS Vita Forums
9. Customize yourself. The PlayStation 3 interface added simple color options for profiles years ago but Sony blew things out considerably for the Vita. Head to your Friends list, tap yourself, hit the ‘…’ button and pick ‘Edit Profile’. Under Panel you’ll see a huge array of banners calling out PlayStation titles from the famous to the obscure. These exclusive panels fill the background on your Friends list and make for an instant identifier of who owns a Vita. You’ll also be able to choose one of many Avatar icons, though oddly you can only buy and change Premium Avatars from a PlayStation 3.
10. Multitask. While it’s not as versatile as a smartphone, the Vita can juggle several apps (not games) at once. Pressing the PS button during a game will get you back to the home screen where you can load up your Friends list or Group Party, check on Trophies, or head to the browser to read up on GameFAQs.
And here’s a bonus one: PlayStation Plus is probably a good idea… especially if you have a PlayStation 3 and a Vita. For $50 a year you get an untold number of games to play, early access to betas and demos and discounts on even more games. Sure, you’re never going to get a brand new Call of Duty “free” on Plus but it’s a great way to always have something new to check out.
Well that went longer than I expected! If you’ve got tips of your own or more questions about the Vita feel free to comment.
I AM THE TOUCH MASTER! No, not the master of the DS game Touchmaster, the master of the Vita’s generic, built-in tech demo “game”, Welcome Park. It’s a collection of sterile, mostly disinteresting minigames designed to show off the features of the hardware… but it has trophies!
To achieve this miraculous S-Rank I had to confront my lifelong nemesis: the tile-sliding picture puzzle. I’ve always been really bad at them but Welcome Park has several trophies that require finishing increasingly complex ones in less and less time. The advantage here is that you get to take the picture and it wasn’t long before I realized I could make a spreadsheet of numbers and take a photo of the monitor.
With the numbers now on screen the next hardest part was figuring out how to line up 15 tiles in 50 seconds, a feat that I thought was out of reach even after I looked up the trick to these puzzles. I tried it numerous times Friday night and got it down to the last six tiles that needed aligning but always took too much time. I was crushed when I finally finished the puzzle and found out I’d done it in 51.836 seconds. As is often the case with troublesome spots in games, though, I completely crushed it on my very first attempt the following morning. One try and 36 seconds later I’d done it and gotten the gold trophy for getting all the other trophies. PlayStation games are weird that way.
Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.
I can add one more game to the tiny list of Vita titles I’d probably buy: Earth Defense Force 3 Portable… or Portable 3, I’m not sure how accurate the Google translation is. Basically it’s the Xbox 360’s E.D.F. 2017 (E.D.F. 3 in Japan) with a very few new things thrown in. A bunch of potentially useless weapons have been added as well as a new golden ant enemy type and a new aircraft type to deal with. The biggest addition is four-player co-op and the beskirted female E.D.F. members who can fly around with jetpacks. That’s nothing new to fans of the series (they were in E.D.F. 2 on PlayStation 2) but the zippy, skybound action looks like the most appealing thing to me.
It’s September release is timed nicely for Japan as E.D.F. 4 will probably be revealed at Tokyo Game Show but so far there’s been no mention of a domestic release for either. The best I can do is go back and maybe finish Insect Armageddon which… doesn’t really sound too appealing. They never quite captured that Japanesiness that I loved so much about 2017.
It worked the last two times to cut down on the clutter so let’s jump into Sony’s Presspectacle by getting all the stuff out of the way that I don’t care about. Over the years Sony’s exclusive IPs have lost my interest so we can tiptoe right over Resistance 3, inFamous 2, God of War PSP: The Origins Collection and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.
I’m glad they addressed the PSN outage but it never felt truly genuine. I guess when you’re Jack Tretton and you’re on a stage to wow the world with your wares it’s hard not to come off rehearsed. I accept, Sony, just take this as seriously as you say you do and don’t let it happen again.
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. I could write volumes just about the demo they showed. Since I promised to be brief, however, I’ll just say that it’s clearly this game’s ‘Train level’ from Uncharted 2 and that the water simulation (and simulation within a simulation) made this damn near Game of the Show for me. Cannot wait to play the whole game and I’m officially on media blackout until it’s released!
The next surprise was the 24″ 3D display they’ll be selling soon. At first I wrote it off as another lame push for 3D but when they mentioned the two-players-on-one-screen angle a lone neuron sparked in my head. Years ago, I wanna say 2007, I first read about a means to show two simultaneous images, full screen on one screen, to two different viewers. It’s been so long I assumed it was a theory that never paid off but 5 years later, here it is, PlayStation branded even. Since the reveal word has come in of some ghosting problems and it still requires you to wear shuttered glasses but I love the concept nonetheless.
MOVE-ing along, Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest piqued my attention as I thought I was about to see the return of Sir Daniel Fortesque. Sadly, it’s a Move game that looks like an on-rails action game with archery, sword fighting and other moves you may have pulled off in Sports Champions. It looked kind of fun but isn’t MOVE-ing me to go buy a Move.
Next up was Dust 514, the online sci-fi strategy/teamwork/shooter project by EVE Online creators, CCP. It wasn’t immediately exciting until they mentioned that the victories and advancements that take place here will somehow impact the world of EVE and vice versa. The idea of two radically different games effecting one another is enough to get me on board at this early stage.
Just when things were getting good out comes Ken Levine who (after an admittedly awesome demo of Bioshock Infinite) starts tittering on about how he disparaged motion controls in the past but has seen the light and is working on *something* for PlayStation Vita. If you were wondering where the money Sony saved by skimping on PSN security went, here’s your answer. This led into a slew of disappointing news like how a bunch of upcoming PS3 games (Bioshock Infinite, Battlefield 3) will feature the entire previous game right on the disc. Weren’t they just going on about how much space games are taking up on blu-ray discs and now they can miraculously fit TWO modern games inside? I got a cramp in my eyebrow from how fast it snapped into position.
Kicking the sleaze into high gear was news that several EA games would feature exclusive content only on PlayStation 3. Most of it is pre-order caliber stuff but SSX (one of the games I’m most looking forward to) will see the entire Mt. Fuji level with 20 starting points locked away on PS3. It’s terrible when retail stores pay for exclusives like this and if Sony’s going to throw money around they might as well make the entire game an exclusive, not just bits and pieces of it.
PlayStation Vita: The Whole World in Play
Just when I was expecting Kaz Hirai to come out and praise an exclusive paint job for a car in Ridge Racer Unbounded he whips out an NGP and puts that prototypical acronym to rest forever. PlayStation Vita it is and over the next several minutes my opinion goes from passing fancy to internal struggle over whether to buy one. The tech is impressive — even more impressive is how little they left out, this thing has seemingly everything — but I kept reminding myself the same was true of the original PSP.
AT&T service aside, everything they showed impressed me, from Uncharted: Golden Abyss’ combo controls that use buttons and/or the touchscreens (both front and rear) to the Transfarring-like features of Ruin that let you near-instantly hop from PSV to PS3 versions of the game. What sold me the hardest, however, were LittleBigPlanet and ModNation Racers. Both of the DIY games suddenly seemed perfect with touch controls to create objects and worlds with the most absurd simplicity. They also showed a Dynasty Warriors demo which looked awesome in the worst possible ways. But the surprise of the show was the price: $249 for the wifi-only model. Between the equally-priced 3DS and PSV there is no debate in my mind. That is, if I were a handheld gamer. That’s a whole other discussion but it’s already pretty hard to not want a PSV on Day One, whenever that is.
And that was about it for the Sony show. The heartless prattle of Jack Tretton didn’t cast any magic on me but I still wound up pretty excited about the Vita and a few of the PS3 games. Looks like the console holds its place on the TV stand for the foreseeable future.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Jun | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
Luv Us
