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PSVita Released In the USA and Europe
YokimaSun writes "Sony has today released the PSVita in the U.S. and Europe. The console comes with features such as dual touch pads at the front and rear, dual cameras at the front and rear, dual analog sticks, a 5-inch OLED screen, GPS, six-axis motion sensors and a three-axis electronic compass. The PSVita is Sony's attempt at stealing the thunder away from the 3DS but also bringing back the gamers lost to the likes of Android and iOS Devices. The PSVita in Japan sold massively on its first release week but since has struggled and sold less than the PSP. With this in mind sites like Amazon have been offering many different deals to entice people to buy the console. Can Sony stop homebrewers from taking over this console?"
...when you pry one *into* my cold, dead hands.
Apparently Sony is STILL letting the Hollywood Divisions call the shots, though. There's a scathing review here.
I picked up one early. Got the 3G early Adopter's Bundle, which came with a free month of 250mb of 3G and activation, an 8 gig memory card and a free game.
So I've more than made up my losses for going 3G, but the damn thing decided to not power back on when I got to work and I wanted to check the status of it's charge. I searched around, found out you had to hold the power button for SIXTY seconds, then another 2-3.
That aside, the screen is BEAUTIFUL. I hope more devs aside from Kojima take advantage of the rear touchpad. Played with the interface a little. Very smooth. iOS smooth. I just hope owning this thing isn't the pain in the ass I fear it will be.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Can Sony stop homebrewers from taking over this console?
More important question -- will Sony stop getting in the way of people wanting to make games and thus make themselves relevant again? Can you imagine how much different the Android and iOS situation would be today if Apple and Google were trying the "make life hell for developers" strategy?
Sony decided to do a "pre-launch" in the US and EU at a 71% markup so that the early adopters could get it in their hands a week early.
Basically, shafting their own customer base who would stand in line on day one, but also creating two separate "stand in line" days, one for people whom money is not an issue and don't care the price as long as they get it now, one where the price is still significantly higher than any other handheld game console, but safely able to let their user base know "we aren't fisting you as much as we already did our early adopters!"
Thirty four characters live here.
also bringing back the gamers lost to the likes of Android and IOS Devices
LOL. The good news is, you've got a joystick. The bad news is, the games cost $40 instead of 99 cents. Couldn't be more "sony" of a product, especially the non-usb usb cable. How sony of them.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And all for a product nobody wants.
Seriously, the same problems with the PSP now plague the Vita. It doesn't do what it needs to do. It has absolutely SHIT for battery life. The web browsing experience is a cruel joke.
And the one thing that drove gamers to buy them, homebrew that FIXED most of this crap, is what Sony spent their time trying to kill and threaten people about, much in the same way Sony threatened people for trying to put OtherOS back on the PS3 after it was removed.
Sony can go fuck themselves.
That's like most Sony stuff of late. Take a good idea but hamper it with BS restrictions and let greed get in the way, then blame piracy for the lack of sales.
Sane Exec: "Lets add backwards compatibility!"
Shill Exec #1: "But only via download services."
Shill Exec #2:"Which people must again pay for."
Shill Exec #3:"And only in the Asian market."
CEO: "Yes, that sounds like a winner men."
Oh, but Sony is *letting* you re-purchase your PSP games for your PSVita at 15% off Retail (well, retail price at the time of original release of the title) for you to be able to download it to a slightly tweaked MicroSD card with a 300% markup!
They care about you, and want to enable you to continue to play the same game that you had yesterday... And to format shift your game, they are giving you a discount compared to needing to re-buy the same game over again! A discount!
They are doing *everything* that they can to make you happy, all the while helping their poor, defenseless developers who *need* to buy in at $12,500 / year to develop software for your game console. How would multinational corporations feed their children if they *didn't* charge you for continuing to use exactly what you had yesterday?
Thirty four characters live here.
Sony just can't stop screwing itself over... the last news is that Sony will NOT be offering the service available to the Japanese to turn UMD discs into downloadable games. The reason? Low sales... piracy off course.
So... who is affected by this? The pirates? Non-Sony customers? No. They are not affected. ONLY paying customers who bought Sony products are affected by this, punished to either carry two consoles or re-buy their games at near full price.
Sony is already way behind in the west so to combat this, they provide less service to the few customers they managed to get. Either this shows an amazing disconnect with the real world by Sony exec's or they don't mind sending the message "If you buy our goods, you must be stupid enough to pay twice for the same game".
You might think Sony would have been warned to provide an amazing experience after the failure of the 3DS. It wasn't just the 3D element, it was that the device was a throwback compared to the DS XL and just didn't offer a smooth or indeed even better experience then a mobile phone, let alone a tablet. Look at the 3DS again, the screens are amazingly bad considered against the latest phones. They aren't worse then previous gameboys but those didn't have any other devices people ALREADY will have in their pocket anyway.
My prediction is that the Vita will fail even harder then the PSP. The line up games are again very slim pickings with some of the bigger games still not realizing that a MOBILE games is played OUTSIDE and that therefor the display needs to be extremely clear because a sudden ray of light while in a dark area can ruin the game. In normal PC/Console games such dark moments are called atmoshere, outside they are called "I can't see a fucking thing" and then your avatar dies.
Early GBA games required you to write down a very long hex key to "save" the game... game companies seem to barely have moved on from this... except android/ios game makers. Do you know WHY angry birds is such a success? Because you can easily start it, easily resume it. If the crappy controls cause a miss, you can easily restart with no punishment. The game would do EVEN better if you could skip levels. I never bought it because I never made it past a certain point so what is the point of buying even more levels?
Mobile games have to fun, easy to play, fast to start, playable on the go and in changing light and not punish the player for having to suddenly stop playing or even accidental input. And they should be cheap.
Sony hasn't gotten any of this right. The hardware looks okay but so did the original. And as said, this time there is a LOT more competition, competition that is often consider a MUST have (can you really exist anymore without a cellphone?). What about people without a smartphone you say? Right... they do exist but if you think the overlap between (refuses to buy a smartphone) and (wants to buy a fairly expensive handheld game console) is very large... well you must be working for Sony.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The only reason I have one is because I won it from TacoBell. I can't even use some of the features because I don't have a PS3. None of my old PSP games will work on it (even the downloadable ones). None of my friends with a PS3 are interested in buying it from me at half MSRP... :(
http://unlock.tacobell.com/?utm_campaign=PSVita2012
Budding video game developers still need to make games that Anonymous Coward considers "shitty" while learning to develop less-"shitty" games, just as budding writers' initial output falls into Theodore Sturgeon's 90 percent crap.
There's a reason why Nintendo is my favorite of the big three video game companies, and it's not just nostalgia. Nintendo isn't interested in crippling their own hardware in order to "protect" their own movie studio or their own music publishing business. They don't have a giant monopoly whose profits they're using to muscle their way into other areas of business. (Back in the day if you did something similar with gas stations it was definitely illegal.)
Nintendo may have done some pretty questionable things back when they were on top in the video game industry, but even then they were still restricted to the video game industry. Maybe if they'd expanded into other areas and became just as big as Sony and Microsoft then they'd be pulling the same kind of crap, but they didn't so they aren't.
Nintendo certainly has their own problems, but currently those problems stem from trying to force the game industry towards areas i don't especially care for and failing to butter up third party developers sufficiently. I'm "forced" to invest in Sony's console if i want new "old-fashioned" games like Disgaea, however in the portable arena the DS and 3DS have plenty of content spanning all genres, including the "classic" ones, so as long as i'm willing to accept alternative games in the same genre i can avoid Sony for this particular case.
But as usual these are my own opinions, i'm sure others think Sony is a great company and love the Vita.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Well, that would be an additional mistake by Sony; because, as I said, since their choices obsolete my investment, my choice is to wander off elsewhere.
Oh, I do. Bought and paid for. But when it croaks, as it inevitably will, it won't be replaced by a Sony device, you see.
I don't care. What I care about is that I have all these games that won't run. Sony chose incompatibility; they chose poorly: I choose to abandon Sony.
I highly doubt it, but again, it has become irrelevant to me: Sony intentionally did me a large financial injury, and I decline to do further business with them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You are a moron. Sony has not, by this decision, affected your finances in any way. Lost opportunity is not the same as theft! They never hinted that you would have the ability to play PSP games on anything other than a PSP. They never promised or implied that the PSP would be manufactured indefinitely.
Choosing something else when your PSP gives up the ghost is rational, but your reasons are anything but.
And the whole rootkit scandal was blown out of proportion! They were just trying to protect you from the evils of copyright infringement! Aren't they such great people?
Boy, are you confused. First of all, I might indeed buy a used PSP, but that does absolutely nothing for Sony -- they earn no income from it. Only the previous PSP owner receives my money. I'm certainly not going to buy any more UMD's -- the format is dying on the vine and the number of machines that can run them drops by the day, specifically thanks to Sony. Again, no income for Sony. Most importantly, if Sony had made the new machine UMD-capable and game-compatible, I'd have bought it no question. When it comes time to buy a NEW machine, it'll be from someone else, because Sony has lost my trust. And I should point out that the reason that they had my trust in the first place was that my PS2 ran my PS1 games, and my PS3 ran my PS2 games. It seemed that they understood the issue. And yes, I bought all three machines, though only the PS2 and PS3 are setup in the home (no need for a PS1, you see, though we still can, and still do, play the games.)
So no. Sony made the wrong decision. In every way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In my experience, most phone games aren't worth more than $1, and many are overpriced at a dollar. They are very simple little games. Now that's fine, and indeed what I want for my phone. When I'm waiting at the doctor's office or something I want a game I can play for a bit and set down when needed.
However to pretend that they are in the same league as $40-60 computer or console games is silly. 50 Android games would not give me the same entertainment as one computer game does. Quantity doesn't out do quality always.
What if I bought a camera, and then a bunch of lenses for it.
This is slashdot - We use car analogies. What if I bought a 1949 Ford and spent a bunch of money improving it. Then, just a few years later, Ford stops making replacement parts for it and my improvements are incompatible to remove and install in their new model. I could go buy the replacement parts used, but instead I'll boycott Ford.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Ditto for the PSN hacking scandal. Some people called it "Having your identity stolen" but Sony rightly pointed out that they were just helping you make lots of new friends in eastern europe.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I picked up my 3G model this morning. It sat on my desk at work all day glowering at me, but I've been able to mess around with it a bit since I got home. My experiences thus far can be summed up in three observations:
1) As a piece of kit to hold in your hand, it is gorgeous. It looks and feels like a premium piece of kit. It's possibly a bit on the large side for a handheld, but the quality of build feels great. The display quality is amazing and the touchscreens are extremely precise.
2) As a handheld gaming console, it is excellent. The games I've tried thus far: Uncharted, Wipeout and Super Stardust are all closer to PS3 quality than to PSP/3DS quality. The dual analogue sticks are an absolute revelation and it would be very hard to go back to a portable gaming platform that didn't support them (be it the 3DS or iPad) without feeling a twinge of regret.
3) As a general user-experience it is, at best, below average. And here's where a bit of explanation is needed.
I get the machine home, fire it up and start going through the initial setup. I set my region, set the time and date and connect it to my home wifi. I decide to leave the 3G network setup for later. So far, so good. I then get prompted to link the device to my PSN account. Great - I like the idea of having the same account shared between my PS3 and my Vita and I'm sure that Sony have made the process nice and easy. So I tap the box for "I already have a PSN account" without a care in the world.
The device does a quick scan of the network and tells me that I need to do a firmware update before I can connect to the PSN. At this point, I feel a bit irritated. The PS3 has been massively compromised by the frequency of and time required for firmware updates, and it doesn't bode well that the Vita is headed down the same path. But... whatever.
I click "ok".
And now I'm back at the prompt asking me whether I have a PSN account or not. A bit confused, I tell it again that I do. Cue the message about needing a firmware update. I'm stuck in a loop.
A quick google shows me that I have to answer "no" and create a temporary account that I use to download the firmware update and then link my "proper" PSN account. At this point, I'm really starting to get quite cheesed off. This is a long way from optimal. But anyway - I follow the instructions and set the firmware update running.
10 minutes later, the machine reboots with its new firmware. Ok, that's about 5 minutes faster than the average PS3 firmware update, but it's still pretty poor.
Ok, so, the firmware's updated and the Vita can access the net through my home network. Time to get the 3G set up. I shut the machine off, insert the Vodafone pay-as-you-go SIM that's included with UK 3G models and fire it back up. There's a nice obvious icon on the start screen to set up the 3G provider, so I tap it.
At first, everything seems to be going well. The Vita opens the Vodafone website and I opt to purchase 10 GBP of credit using my credit card. I note at this point that the web-browser is a bit shit, but in fairness, I realise that the utterly crapulent nature of the Vodafone website isn't helping either.
I fill in the form with my credit card details and tap the button to pay. But what's this? An error - saying that the service isn't available at this time. I try again - same error. I try again with my emergency backup card. Same problem.
So I go to google again. A lot of trawling through the Vodafone forums finally reveals the problem; the SIM won't activate properly if the Vita tries to do its first top-up using wifi rather than the 3G connection. I need to go into the settings menu, disable wifi and then try again. I do so, and am finally able to buy my 3G credit.
Right, now, time to transfer some content off my PS3. I got rid of my old PSP for trade-in credit a few days ago, but shifted all of my downloaded games back onto my PS3, so I could stick them straight onto the Vita. I get the USB connector that came with the Vita and hook th