#guess who finally upgraded from a 5 year old version of PS

[lil-shiro]

2018 | Bombardier - The Cockpit Experience with Lance Stroll

[mlpsimta]

The Struggles of Vita

Just a couple of moments ago I decided to browse the PS Store because of the current Summer Sale Deals in hope to find something good for cheap. So after a few minutes of scrolling in the badly designed PS Store I found Mortal Kombat 9 for 10 or so bucks. Now MK9 is my most favourite fighting game mainly because it is the only one that I’m tolerable at so I decided to pick it up. Now from the title you can guess that the version I ended up choosing is the Vita one. I picked this one because it has the most stuff in it and well playing Mortal Kombat on the toilet is a good thing. After dusting of my Vita and recharged it and started to play the game I couldn’t stop myself thinking about how Sony could have fucked up one of the (if not the best) handheld gaming system ever. So why not look at back the sad history of the PlayStation Vita and point out the bad decisions that Sony has made with it!

It is a really good port! You should get it!

The system came out back in 2012 February 22 and it was the most powerful handheld dedicated gaming system that has ever made ‘till that day. With an amazing OLED multi-touch supported display and dual analogue sticks Sony was clearly targeted the more hardcore audience of the gaming community and with a starting price of 250$ it wasn’t a system too out of reach. Heck even the launch line up was massive with a whopping 25 titles to play from day one! Not to mention that Sony promised that you can stream your PS3 games to the Vita to play on it and you can even download PSP and PS1 games from day one! How could this go wrong? Well easily...

Even Kat saw the signs

Because the Vita is a handheld system it needs a memory card to store the games you purchased (even if you bought it physically) which shouldn’t be a big issue. I mean I just store a few games on the internal storage until I go and pick up a memory card. What do you mean that the Vita doesn’t have an internal storage? Okay no problem I just go and pick up a microSD card for dirt cheap and I’m good to go! What now?! Why wouldn’t the Vita use microSD card? What the hell is it using then? Oh they made a design of their own? No problem than I pick up one of theirs. What 4GB for 20$?! Fuck it!

You should have listened to Yosuke Sony!

The first and biggest problem that the Vita still even has today is their overpriced memory cards. For comparison you could pick up a 4GB microSD card for like 5$ or so. Now I wouldn’t mind paying premium for anything especially if for that price the product delivers and take me to dinner but for the plus we have (gosh I wish to say had) to cough up we don’t get a speed boost and sure as hell not a storage upgrade either. Now buying some memory is a hidden cost that everyone who plays games aren’t going to get surprised but with this high of a cost that means you had to pick up the Vita for 250$ a 16GB of memory Card (because let’s face it anything under than that is just won’t cut it) for 70$ and you would might as well pick up a game to play with on the system, so let that game be Uncharted The Golden Abyss for 50$ (50$ for a handheld game we will cover that too) and we just spent 370$! Nearly the cost of a brand new console during that time when the next gens rumours were getting more and more believable. So while the system was fairly priced the necessary overpriced memory card and the nearly full priced games made the system more out of reach for the majority of people.

High memory card cost means less anime waifues that you can store!

Also because Sony was targeted the more hardcore audience of the gaming community the games on the system really had to deliver on that promise. So games ended up costing 50 bucks because studios poured a ton of effort into their games (well most of the time) and for comparison most games on the 3DS -the main adversary of the Vita- only cost 30$. Now back in the old days of 2011 it was unheard of portable games to cost that much so people weren’t that happy about it. Not to mention that all this happened around the time when mobile games started to become more and more popular and most of the games on it are “free”.

Sony also should have listened to Yukiko how to beat competitions!

Pricing issues aside any gaming system can become successful if the actual games on it are good and most importantly the ones during the launch because those are the games that will always show what a system is capable of. The Vita launched with 25 games on its release date which in my opinion was kinda a good thing. Kicking of a console with a lot of titles helps people to find one that they are going to enjoy and assures that they want to buy the system for that title. On the other hand launching with that many games also can be confusing for the customers as they find themselves overwhelmed with a lot of options and it makes it hard for them to choose. Not to mention the first party titles always have to be on top quality even if there’s only one (see Breath of the Wild) and if there’s a lot of first party games on development before launch that can divide the attention of the developers. In short trying to make too many games for launch can make developers and publisher lose their focus also working on one game is cheaper than working on many others at the same time. I personally was very pleased with the launch line up that the Vita had to offer. Games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss, wipEout, Plants VS Zombies, Rayman Origins and with other genially good games that every Vita owner should have.

Gravity Rush was an amazing opening game also!

Of course other than the launch titles Sony promised that the Vita is capable of playing PSP and PS1 (why not PS2 too I don’t know) and all of our favourite old games will be there for download from day one, except they weren’t. To this day the Vita still lacks a lot of crucial PS1 and PSP classic and if you are an idiot like me who dared to born in Hungary and have a Hungarian PSN account than your choices are even more limited. Not delivering on the backwards compatibility promise was a huge disappointment for us. Previously I spoke about why too many launch games can be bad, but that same policy does not apply for virtual titles. Those games are already had been made so if your system already has an emulator to play older titles there’s literally no good reason to not put up all of them onto the store for cheap (of course after you did the testing). The good thing about those titles is nostalgia. Who wouldn’t anyone pick up his/her favourite old games if it was on the store? Also they can provide distraction while a new game for the system is on the way so you can play something between releases. Not to mention getting to run games from the previous generations are getting more and more trickier as time passes so having an option to play those games on a modern system would be amazing. Also the Vita is portable so you can play them everywhere! Like on the toilet! But as of 2017 the Vita still misses some crucial old games on its store like all the Star Wars Battlefront games that were on the PSP, the first Persona game, the old Harry Potter titles, the Army Man ones, and I think everybody can point out what is missing.

Well at least P3P is on the HUN PSN.

Other than broken backwards compatibility promises the PS3 streaming is went nowhere either at all. Luckily this feature was nearly perfectly implemented for the PS4 (and I think this is the main reason why the PS3 one was dropped). This feature for me is not something that I miss at all, of course it would have been nice to play more than 27 games but if when your system already stumbling at day one delivering on its promises than maybe you should try to keep as many as possible.

Me and best girl Yukiko looking at the wasted potential of the Vita

Finally there’s one big personal complain that I have to make. Again a reminder the year is 2011 and there’s one franchise that is going strong and its name is Call of Duty. CoD is still a stable of the gaming community and back in the day if your system didn’t have it than what were you doing (in comparison even the Wii and the WiiU had nearly all of them). Now because Sony was promising console like experience on its handheld everybody was imagining and wishing for a CoD game for the system and sadly our prayers were listened. Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified come out in 2012 November and it was a huge failure. The game was buggy, the aiming down sight just simply wasn’t working and it was simply just a broken mess. Heck I got so frustrated that I have even wrote one of my very first reviews just to bash on that game. (read it here: http://mlpsimta.tumblr.com/post/121297005557/black-ops-declassified-review) The quality of the title was so bad that it made me question Sony’s quality control for the system and their faith for it. Luckily Sony delivered some time later with Killzone Mercenaries but Killzone as amazing as that game is (the best Killzone that I have ever played and I highly recommend to pick up a Vita just for it) just didn’t have the recognition and following as the CoD franchise. So failing to deliver one was clearly a huge let down for the majority of the gaming audience back in the day.

I have nothing witty to say. Fuck this game...

In conclusion what killed the system is Sony’s own arrogance. They struck gold with the PSP and they thought that they couldn’t do wrong and the audience would fall for it because of the previous success with their handheld. Which is baffling now that I think about it because this isn’t the first time Sony did such a thing. Remember the utter failure of the PS3’s launch? Sony did the same thing back then and learnt nothing from it and because of it great systems suffered. This is what I like to call the upper dog effect. When you are on the top and thinking that you can’t do anything wrong and start doing everything wrong. Overpricing the unavoidable memory cards, lack of quality control during the start and the broken promises sadly killed the Vita.

It even has an open world Assassin’s Creed on it and it alright!

But could the Vita make a comeback still? Of course it could. Dropping the memory card prices and focusing on bringing more older titles for the system from the PS1 and PSP area as they promised also maybe throwing in some PS2 games for good measure can still be a game changer and could revive the Vita. Also implementing more apps like YouTube (which for some reason no longer available), Crunchyroll, TumblR and other social media stuff could also be very beneficial as it gives more stuff that you can do on the system, and why not try and revive old features like the near app which was supposed to be the Vita’s StreetPass? (It there’s something that I learned from Persona 5 is that there’s every time at least one guy with a Vita on the Metro) Finally why not make the PS4 controllers much easier to connect to the vita? It’s a real hassle to do it.

Just some of the apps that I’m frequently using.

Sadly I highly doubt that would ever happen. Sony clearly stopped caring about the system for years now and seeing how they handle backwards compatibility (they don’t at all) the Vita will not have its comeback sadly. Which is such a shame... From the system that has Persona 4 Golden, Freedom Wars, Soul Sacrifice and now even Undertale it’s really heartbreaking to see a great little console struggling.

You can date a Skeleton in Undertale. With the Vita you can date a Skeleton in Undertale while on the toilet! 

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