VITA

adam's sad gaming world circa 2012: i rarely have the time/attention span to sit and play a Major Console Game these days and i feel bad monopolizing the tv while my (non-gaming) gf just wants to watch 30 rock reruns. my 2008 vintage macbook is not really capable of playing any recent games and i am bored with emulators/dosbox/etc.

my favorite system of all time is the DS. most of my gaming time at this point is less-than-an-hour bursts with the occasional marathon. i like the idea of iOS games but find many of them lacking depth (i mostly just play ticket to ride pocket).

it seems that sony is moving toward selling smaller games at reasonable prices via download (motorstorm etc) and AAA titles via disc and that the vita is equally capable of either. is this an accurate impression?

should i buy this y/n

(ie justify my irrational desire for the vita)

you basically just described the apotheosis VITA user

cozen otm; the Vita feels like it was designed with the singular purpose of satisfying that segment of the gaming market who spends most of their time on iOS stuff these days but wants something meatier and more substantial. given the power under the hood I think it could attract a lot of attention from all the Steam indie devs too if enough people buy into the platform.

hardcore games versus casual gamers

pls to make recettear VITA

psyched for gravity daze. anyone importing?

I've heard that a bunch of EU/AUS folks are importing the cart since it's PSN-only in them thar regions

bought this, suck at fifa

Best version of FIFA yet. Loving the extra control from back screen shooting, flick kick football style free kicks, front touch through balls & passing into space.

i have to train myself to hold the vita like it is a dainty madeleine so i don't autoshoot the ball into the stands every time i hit the front 1/3 of the pitch. aside from that, yeah it's pretty excellent.

http://www.memoryprints.com/lowres/117/main/1/378842.jpg

my only complaint about Virtua Tennis 4 is that casual mode is too easy, other than that WAU WHAT A GAME

does it have a weird quest mode where you can power up a custom player and unlock new courts and stuff? old gameboy advance one had something like that and it was fun.

It most certainly does! They added a semi-annoying random board game component to it where you are basically traveling across a map with randomly generated "flight tickets" that can move you 1 to 4 spaces, plus they've added weird "accidents" that make you lose money or get hurt. That part kind of sucks but it is semi-relevant in that in the older versions basically allowed you to play pretty much every single tournament without making any choices/sacrifices; now, if you try to do that you will find yourself sidelined when the big tournaments start with accruing penalties against you for not being there on time.

I haven't played Virtua Tennis for the first one, where I thought "huh, how entertaining could a tennis game really be? Weird." Then I pop it into the Dreamcast and suddenly a world of awesome was unleashed.

hahahaha yes the Dreamcast is where my Virtua Tennis addiction began

sadly it may be the only videogame I'm actually pretty good at

i was having this little buyer's remorse panic attack last night, why do i buy these ridiculous gadgets etc etc. then i realized i had been playing fifa for 5 hours.

haha OTM, I did exactly the same thing with Wipeout 2048; I was all "jesus I don't need this why did I even buy it oh it's 2:30"

thinking dreamcast virtua tennis is in my personal top 10. it is just incredibly fun w/a group of friends. perfect mix of being totally intuitive and easy to pick up and play but being deep enough that the game doesn't get old.

and thanks for the info, djp!

Killscreen continues to be staggeringly useless

How can anyone read that site.

Giving the device the subway test, I find not only my hands, but my whole body wrapped around the Vita as if it were a cello.

lol wtf why is he trying to fuck his Vita on the subway

a sign of identification with the hardcore, another quaint idea that I assume will soon join the ranks of cyberpunk...

lol cyberpunk yeah yeah yeah but every once in a while i think about the old cyberpunk rpg and how in the main sourcebook a "cellular modem" is this crazy expensive thing that allows one's netrunner or whatever to "jack in" from anywhere he or she pleases.

http://uwbcsp.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/johnny-mnemonic-big.jpg

by which i mean iphone

sometimes I feel like the only thing the cyberpunk ppl got wrong is that we aren't all wearing jumpsuits 24/7

i really wish killscreen wasn't so goddam mawkish

xp speak for yourself, this jumpsuit is comfortable and stylish

how comes youse guyses aren't all raving about lumines: electric symphony?

I haven't played it yet

$40 feels like a lot for another lumines

I just feel no need to play more of Lumines - I don't think the price was the issue, more that it just looks like more of the same (okay, if it was a $5 download or something I'm sure I would have picked it up, because why not?). It's a little funny though, because I'm enjoying the hell of out Hot Shots Golf and Wipeout & both of those are more of the same too.

i got the monster hunter psp game and it is really fun, this whole library of psp games that i didn't get to play available on demand is a v dangerous thing

^srsly

Eurogamer had a look at Vita memory cards, concluded Sony are overcharging by at least a multiple of 4, lol
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-how-fast-are-vita-memory-cards
Sony are having a web broadcast on March 9th to announce new Vita titles. nerdz be speculating!
http://andriasang.com/con05a/vita_heaven/

psp games that are awesome besides monster hunter:

3rd birthday: parasite eve 3, makes no sense and lol japan the chick's clothes disintegrate over the course of a mission. good shooting, big bosses. read some people comparing the gameplay to mass effect 2 but idgi as this game is actually fun.

"legend of heroes": "trails in the sky": lol japan again, animu rpg, people talk and talk and talk and the main character is a 16 year old girl and everyone says "..." all the time. BUT it feels as if someone with some amount of sense sat down and decided not to implement all the horrible things that typically cripple jrpgs. for example: one can O-button thru the text really fast and not accidentally miss anything or decline an impt quest or something. the text itself is almost funny sometimes. the battle system is p fast. no random encounters. crafting is available but not necessary. the magic system is basically materia which fuck the haters is the best jrpg magic system ever. music rules especially the goofy jazzy fusion battle theme.

i think i've spent more time playing video games in the past week than i did in the previous six months.

what to play Trails in the Sky but waiting to see if the heavily rumored Steam version comes out soon

If you're in North America, the vita version of Motorstorm RC is coming out tomorrow for free (for a limited time)...

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/03/05/motorstorm-rc-driving-to-ps-vita-for-free-courtesy-of-scion/

xxpost the PSP reboot of Tactics Ogre is really great too. they put in lots of work to make sure it doesn't feel like a decade-and-a-half-old SRPG (eg leveling is more reasonable, new translation for the text, etc). definitely preferable to the slowdown-prone PSP FFT game.

also hell yeah to free Motorstorm RC! I was going to buy it anyway but since I don't really care about the PS3 integration I'll gladly save my money for, idk, Super Stardust or whatever. between that and The Show 12 tomorrow's going to make me awful glad I sprang for the (hideously overpriced) 32GB card.

sound shapes! it's pretty cool

what the hell happened with this

the vita? no games man. just week into month of nothing. it's really a cool piece of hardware though.

sound shapes, it works on ps3 too, it's got the first good beck stuff since midnite vultures, it's like $12, i'm pleased. anything to keep myself from buying the persona 4 fighting game.

No games OTM, the thing I've played the most on it is... Pinball Arcade

Don't get me wrong, Pinball Arcade is awesome, just not the game I thought I was buying the system for

haha yeah pinball arcade is my favorite $250 pinball simulator

the persona 4 fighting game looks pretty cool actually - but then i feel the guilt of not playing the actual Persona games

if i got a Vita, those Persona ports would probably be my #1 pick-up

“We’re having a more difficult time than we had anticipated in terms of getting support from third-party publishers, but that’s our job,” Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studio President Shuhei Yoshida

Sony tried to get western studios on board, and neglected Japanese developers.
Western studios were uninterested though, and meanwhile Nintendo pinched PSPs break-out hit Monster Hunter and as a result 3DS is murdering Vita in Japan. Japan is the only market that seems interested in a dedicated portable gaming system though, both 3DS & Vita stinking up the sales charts in the west.

sound shapes! it's pretty cool

― adam, Wednesday, August 8

Is it a fun & challenging game to play, or is it just more of a music maker?

looking forward to retro city rampage, jetset radio, MGS3 standalone download, VC2 PSP, person 4 vita, and sound shapes

but yeah don't play this thing nearly as much as I'd like; waiting for price drop on gravity crush

oh shit I'd forgotten about JSR, thank you for the reminder

so i got one of the PS TV's free with my ps4... anyone help with a few questions?

1. Can I use a third party PS3 dual shock with this thing? Seems like the cheapest option given PS4 dualshock are still £40 :-(
2. How big on average are the games? Trying to judge what size memory card (ugh) to buy

2. retail games are roughly between 1-3GB, indies 100MB-1GB. check that the games you want can be played on the PS TV as some are blacklisted - sometimes for good reasons (e.g. game uses Vita touchscreen) and sometimes for no good reason (Danganronpa in EU, some PS1 and PSP games)

not sure if it's too late now (did they close ps mobile yet?) but if you have the chance buy Oh Deer Alpha NOW, it is an amazing outrun style game for 49 cents

I got one for Christmas. With just the stock 8GB card, so my experience has been limited thus far, but I dig it. Almost everything peripheral to the actual game playing seems like junk (countless errors trying to connect to and download from the PS Store, remote access to music and video on my PC doesn't work at all, lots of browser errors and time-outs) but I've come to expect that from my PS3 so I'm dealing. The ease of stopping and starting a game (either via navigating between windows/apps or just turning the Vita off) is perfect, as I'd been thinking that the inconvenience of finding a save point in a game would be incompatible with my need to, like, get off the train and go to work.

I've been slowly accruing a collection (through PS+ and deep discount sales) and also intentionally sidelining most of the crossplay games I've bought with the intention of eventually snagging a Vita, so I have easily 100+ Vita-compatible games to dig into now. I'm totally spoiled for choice and a little paralyzed. So naturally I've been spending most of this week playing the decades-old FF1 (transferring my saved game from the PS3 was pretty painless) and Chrono Trigger. Oh, and Touch My Katamari. Having a good, portable Katamari game just about makes this thing worthwhile all on its lonesome.

Okay, an extended Katamari jag this morning was my first physical experience of overplaying a game. Headache, blurred vision, nausea, all the stuff they warn you about but that I've always scoffed at. And I've played a lot of games for way too long before with no ill effects. Don't know if it was just that game specifically or staring at the Vita screen for too long but that's something I'll need to be mindful of.

we might just get double-digit ILX Vita owners before Sony gives up on this thing entirely

Sony technically has, yeah? I thought I'd read that only third-party developers were making Vita games at this point.

I'm way into it. It's nice to be able to play games on the train and it's nice that a lot of the games seem geared towards shorter playtimes. Beyond the Vita-specific games, there are a ton of PS1 and PSP classics I haven't gotten around to. PS3 cross play and cross save has been pretty painless on the games that support it. Remote play (even leaving aside the fact that only like seven PS3 games support it) is pretty much a laggy bust, unfortunately.

I can't even imagine what magic lies ahead once I can afford to buy a memory card larger than the perfunctory 8gb one that came with the system.

agreed, the Vita library is super stacked; you are in for a good time. I would have guessed that Sony would have wanted to keep memory cards cheap in order to incentivize people into buying more stuff on PSN, but maybe proprietary memory cards are the harsh truth of being the company that runs an Amazon Prime-level awesome deal like PS+

proprietary memory cards are the harsh reality of a company with a history of shitty proprietary formats, from DAT tapes to minidisc to ATRAC to MemorySticks. The prices they charge for their Vita memory cards can be 8 times the equivalent microSD card, fuck supporting that bullshit.

yeah but that screen

A lot of Sony's practices which seem like unfair cash grabs are ultimately and counterintuitively geared towards disincentivizing the consumer from giving Sony even more of their money. Like, for instance, if the PS3 could support more than a 1TB drive or if I could save all of my downloaded PSN games to an external hard drive for later retrieval and installation, I would buy literal shitloads of games. But I'm pretty much limited to buying a more sensible amount of whatever will actually fit on my console. If 64GB Vita cards weren't so expensive, I'd buy several of them and happily fill them up. So because Sony wants to charge $100+ for their proprietary nonsense, they've potentially lost out on hundreds of dollars more in game sales. And I'm just one Vita owner.

I really need to upgrade my memory card. So many games to try but I can only park a handful on my system at a time.

Zero search results for Orgarhythm! Haven't played too much yet but it's kinda great. A real-time strategy/rhythm game with a dancing god and his dancing troops taking down enemies on the beat.

if I could save all of my downloaded PSN games to an external hard drive for later retrieval and installation

pretty sure that the online content is redownloadable forever, including the PS+ content

which is odd and irritating because, even if not gaming, it's worth going in and clicking on each game to add it to your library... even if you don't own that platform, because if you later own it, all those clicks become useful

holy shit - 2k apparently released a port of Enemy Unknown a few days ago! apparently it's pretty buggy but this + Earthbound showing up just in time for my trip to Knoxville for Big Ears is delightful news

and now it looks like the GOTY edition of Civ Rev 2 is coming out on Tuesday, lord have mercy

FYI, y'all, I've taken to combing through the Vita listings in the PSN store every week because I always seem to find sale items that aren't listed on, y'know, the weekly sale page. That seriously has to be the most inept corporate website I've ever encountered.

Seconded, only i now have too much back inventory to even check anymore

For instance, Earth Defense Force 2 and the new Corpse Party are both currently on sale and neither is listed as such.

I inherited one of these; is there anything I need to be playing?

EDF 2 and Persona 4 Golden

There are two Zero Escape games available... Virtue's Last Reward and and Zero Time Dilemma. The first one, 999, may also be, I can't remember. Tbh I've only played ZE2, but it is surprisingly fantastic.

Big, big, big second on Persona 4 Golden. Pretty much one of the only JRPGs I've had the patience to complete in the past ~5 years (this, and Tactics Ogre PSP, and Persona 3 Portable, pretty much).

Danganronpa 1 and 2 are fantastic as well.

A bunch of stuff you may have played on other consoles, are very good on the Vita... Spelunky, Everyday Shooter, Telltale stuff (Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us), Fez, Hotline Miami, Dragon's Crown... if I think of any more I'll post but that's almost 20 games, should keep you busy (esp. with the length of Persona 4).

And then there's the PSP library you can play too...

I honestly don't think I've played all that many Vita exclusives, tbh. I have a bunch but I still haven't upgraded past the 8 GB memory card so that limits my options. I use it mainly for PS1 classics/old stuff in general and anything cross-platform. It's a pretty great portable RPG machine, if that's your bag. I've been playing a lot of XCOM and Dragon's Crown lately.

I can imagine that people might pooh-pooh the Vita out of hand for its dearth of impressive exclusives, but it's pretty cool to be able to play a lot of those non-exclusive games on a handheld platform, imo. RPGs, f'rinstance, that I'd likely never get through at home but that I can easily chip away at an hour at a time on the train.

i have been playing the first persona game. it is not a very good game. it's interesting the ways it seems to have been retrofit in light of the success of the latter iterations tho