Sunday 2 April 2017

PlayStation Vita my updated oppinion on it.


So back in 2014 I posted a blog entry called Week one as a Vita owner. I figured that as its now 2017 and I dont think I have really talked about the machine much I should do a Vita update post, the Vita is kind of half dead now days so I sort of see this as an ode to the life of the system or to be more precise and ode to my time with the system

So ironically the thing that sort of pushed me most of the way to getting a Vita was what I considerd to be poor customer service and poor decisions made by Nintendo, now dont get me wrong I still own a 3DS and use it so it wasnt a screw you Nintendo I am going to side with Sony thing and more of a well I will throw some cash at Sony and see how I feel about them and the services they provide. I would like to be able to comment on this and compare Sony's treatment to Nintendo's but in honest truth despite a whole lot of use nothing has at any point gone wrong with my Vita, I have never had to call or contact Sony in relation  to either my Vita, PSP or PS4 or PS3 but I guess maybe that says something in and off itself.

I got my Vita with a 16gig memory card and a voucher to download ten games for £150 which seemed like a bargain and in all honesty I think it was. The ten games included Little big planet vita, Little Deviants, Wipeout 2048, which are all full sized vita games that on their original release were all full price titles. Sure some of the others were a lot more budget in nature but it was a good way to start of with a system, after all how often do you end up having to get a machine and like one game at first and then have to sit playing just that one game until your sick of the sight of it?

I will just insert my very quick review of Wipeout from my original post here as I feel its very important as it sets the tone of what I thought of the very first Vita game I played. ''The first thing I decided to play was Wipeout 2048 and I have to say I was very impressed by it, the opening trailer was amazing, it was like a quick history lesson of how racing cars developed in the wipeout universe starting with 50s style racing cars, making its way to the kind of cars we have now in this world and then carrying on showing these cars slowly get closer and closer to the ones you race as in wipeout. It left me breathless; I really didnt expect to be that pleasantly surprised. When I started playing the game I soon found out that the game was equally impressive.'' As my introduction to the Vita iself I feel that this was a great place to start it really got me grounded in a sense of what the machine was capable of and it got me excited to try more.

I cant say I enjoyed every game I played on the Vita as much as I would hope in fact some people might be surprised to hear that I didnt really enjoy Little Big Planet at all. It wasnt that Little Big Planet was a bad game I am sure lots of people thought it was great but it was exactly the same as the 2 PS3 and the PSP Little Bit Planet games and I guess I had just had my fill of them.  I played the PS Vita Uncharted game and I really enjoyed it, yes it was also a lot more of the same but it just seemed to be a lot more exciting and stand on its own.

 
As I previously stated in my 1 week review of the PS Vita I played the games I had got before moving on to the games I could get through the ps+ service, through the PS + service I downloaded and played a great many games on the Vita,some of them being what would have been full price retail games like Mod Nation racers, Soul Sacrifice, Gravity rush and then all kinds of amazing indy games one of my favourates at the one week mark is still one of my favourates now  Guacamelee, but then there was other stuff like Hotline Maimi and its sequel. Indy games and awesome Japanese games are one of the areas where the Vita has really been kicking ass, Yes it has never and never will be as well regarded overall as the 3DS but for less mainstream gamers people who want to play more stuff and diffrent stuff it is a heck of a little machine.

I finished Gravity Rush and enjoyed every second of it, it was a really unique fun game with an awesome story, its a shame I havent gotten its sequel on the PS4 yet but as they say so many games so little time. I played a lot of Soul Sacrifice it is a great game a lot of content but also very tough, I hate to admit this as someone who thinks that they are a pretty good gamer but the difficulty kind of wore me down. Then there is Little King Story, I loved the game, I had played the Wii version before but for some reason never got that in to it, I guess something about the game made it work well as a handheld title. I have not yet finished it but I poured a good deal of time in to it and fully enjoyed it. Two titles I did finish were Guacamelee and Hotline Maim. Guacamelee was the most Metroid like none Metroid game I have ever played, it wasnt just a darn good game though it also had an amazing sense of humour, it got tough at points but it was just so fun that I couldnt help but keep playing it, in fact once I finished it on the Vita I actually started playing it again on other systems, this is not something I often do and it really speaks to the quality of the title.

I had mentioned that unlike with Nintendo's machines your user accounts is not directly tied to the machine, you have an account on the web which you then can pair with your Sony devices, your PS3, vita, PS4 and a record of everything you have brought is online and if a game exists on both the PS3 and Vita (or PS4 and Vita) well then a lot of the time if you have paid for it on one system you own it and can play it on both systems for no additional cost. I thought this was amazing back when I first looked at the machine but in truth this only gets better and better the longer you have the machine for,.

 I originally mentioned that there was a tonne of PS1 games on the playstation store that you could pay for and download and that most of them are around the £3.99 price point. I compared this£3.99 for a PS1 game (that I could then play on both my Vita and PS3),  to what was available on the Nintendo 3DS saying that Nintendo wanted you to pay £3.50 for a NES game to play on your Wii U and that hen if you wanted to play it on the 3DS they wanted you to pay £3.50 again. I said that this made Sony look very generous and Nintendo look very greedy.This is something I stand by and over the last few years Sony have put thePS1 games up for sale at reduced prices so often that I have managed to claim enough RPG PS1 games at around £2 each or less that I could happily play them for years, I have even claimed games which were never before released in Europe for PS1 as a downloadables including various RPG games and a Japanese shoot em up.

I could talk about all of the PS1 games I have played on my Vita but then I would just be going on and on, therefore all I will say is that there is a good libery of titles on there which would suit a lot of tastes but it is particually good if you like your RPG's, you can download for a few pounds games which if you were to try and get ahold of physical copies would cost you a small fortune, this alone given the fact you can then play them on the go makes the Vita a sound investment. The one thing I will say is that the Memory cards for Vita still cost too much, they are a pain in the butt however it is one of the only faults I can really come up with when talking about the PlayStation Vita.

I sit now with countless downloaded Vita games and around 30 physically owned games including many RPG games which I am very happy to have sat in my collection, I have to admit that in the past 6 months the Vita has taken a bit of a back step in my life, it got put on a shelf and I have viewed it as more of a piece of my games collection than I have looked at it as an actual usable games console but this is something I plan to change. I misplaced the charger and didnt do anything about it because of pride, and yet when I would see a good game going cheap I would grab it and put it on the pile, I have decided that I am going to give myself 1 week to find its charger and failing that I will buy a replacment. In a way this post was meant as a look at the whole lifespan of my Vita my thoughts on it as I put it to bed, but looking back and going through what I have and what I have done with the system has pursuaded me that there is some life in the old dog yet and rather than call it a day its time to scream Game On and give it another round or two. Hopefully latter in the month I will be able to talk about how this has gone and some of the games I have played.

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