PS Vita – Review
Buying the PS Vita (3G and Wi-Fi) for around 250 GBP on Amazon with a free memory card, as well as two games :
– Wipeout 2048 (I am an old fan of Wipeout)
– Dungeon Hunter (I was also a big fan of Dungeon Master)
Let me begin by the fact that the battery is about 5 hours, which is not too bad, but also not good enough when you are playing a RPG – You always want more battery! Also do not think that the PS Vita is a phone – It’s bigger than a Phone. A cool device to take on long plane trips or to leave in your living room. Not to bring always around with you.
The main menu (seems like Android or iOS), with the background music makes it quite a tool for relaxing (and buying in the app store)
The games take, like most of the actual gaming platform a while to load into memory, and then the game play is enjoyable. Another big plus of the PS Vita is the fact that you have a high definition screen, which renders the games fantastically – This is really one of the pluses for playing with this one. The sound could be louder, although it can be if you use a nice pair of headset.
Now, to come to the interesting point. It seems that the PS Vita is running Android, with a very high CPU power, which makes it lovely. There is Wi-Fi, 3G (Pay as you go from Vodaphone), Bluetooth. Wi-Fi connects directly you the Playstation network where you can happily register your details and credit card number to access the “App store”. Now the app store is quite good as Sony can sell all of their PSP and PS vita games, as well as “Minis” (equivalent of iPad games). There is also “Near” which permits you to find gamers around the block (using the built-in GPS of the PS Vita) – Now apart from getting comments from fellow players, i didn’t see any real interest using Near.
The chat system, if you ever have friend must be interesting. I however succeeded to talk to a few guys in Japan that were surprised of me talking to them. (Just look up for handles like Keystike, Noriko, admin, etc.. ).
Back to the app Store : You can get free demos of games (Stardust is pretty cool !), and movies/TV Show (a bit like Apple TV). There are a few apps that makes the PS Vita better than an actual game system and more like a tablet – the social apps : Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Flickr. The only real problem is the lack of other Apps (like the ones you would find on Android Market).
The browser makes a big plus for the gaming experience, as you can surf the web (You cannot download sadly: I tried to get a few apk applications – couldn’t download them !), but a good and enjoyable experience between 2 game sessions (to gather walkthrough or just see more information about the background of the games on Wikipedia). I didn’t try get the movie experience from it, but for sure, watching “The eagle” and googling about the “Roman wall in Britain” would come immediately to my mind (The future of TV lies there, folks !). The browser doesn’t seem to support flash or html5 (no youtube).
The 3G now enables you to have (for 15 GBP a month) some kind of connection to the Playstation Network. I however couldn’t download games with it (seems expensive). I could send SMS to the number given by Vodaphone, but couldn’t call through – meaning that supposedly the PS Vita is not to be a phone ! (Skype will appear the rumours says – i cannot wait to see this !)
I tried with the PS3 the remote play – however it didn’t work with Skyrim and Sonic Generations – It was promising, but i couldn’t really see an interest there.
On testing the TV shows/Movies app – for the Movies, there is a lot of nice Sony movies to play, and even some exclusive ones – which makes it really attractive. On the TV show field however, you might have only 5% of what Apple TV has – which is still OK, but you won’t find much there.
To finalise this review, if the app store would be bigger with more apps (Opening to 3rd party developers would be fantastic), and if there were more games for PS Vita. A few more possible things I’m sure for my wish list would be to be able to link to a big TV display the vita (when I’m home), to have more strategy / role playing games, and of course more Multiplayer games ! As the PS Vita has a mic and speakers, with 3G : A phone would be a big plus. I will just keep it for now and wait for all these things happen, as it’s still a very nice piece of hardware/software with lots of good games to play with.
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