Posted by wicket 3 days ago
I still use it to this day because I can't fit my Steam Deck in my pocket.
And I concur that its potential did kinda go to waste. Imagine if we had Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls available on it.
And yes, I still consider the Vita the last true "portable". potability in my mind implies pocketability, and the Switch and every other non-phone went beyond that. Devices like the Ayaneo Air do give me hope that that "pocketable" market may make a comback sooner than we think, though.
There are "controller grips" or "controller mounts" for phones readily available and you can even pair it with Steam in-house streaming or Moonlight to play games at a quality that is impossible at this form factor for cheap.
Even at larger sizes it's difficult - The Nintendo Switch only worked because of great franchises and IP. The Steam Deck also required great technological investment into Linux and platform familiarity.
It's not hard to see why barely anyone's trying...
Yes in a technical sense. But no in a business and ecosystem sense.
PSP and Vita had very impressive game offerings that we don’t get on mobile to this day. The games felt like proper PlayStation games, only about 0.5 console generations behind. Back then it meant PS2.5 games. Today it would mean PS4.5 games on your handheld.
Switch is probably the closest today due to its first party games and very fluent support for many popular titles, unlike Steam Deck which is still a bit hacky and not everything it offers runs well. But Switch technically is several generations behind. PSP and Vita really felt like 2/3rds of your PlayStation 3.
No smartphone with a controller add on offers an experience of PlayStation 4.5 with first party titles and support. The business side was executed very well on PSP/Vita. The developers cared for that console.
I do in fact have a smartphone with a controller mount. Mostly for emulators at this point. But most of the time it can feel like no one is really taking advantadge of the hardware capabilities of modern phone hardware.
The nub was announced at the same time as an announcement where the memory was quadrupled so I think it was probably intended to be only PS1 level games on it originally.
I’m hoping strong sales of the PSPortal encourages development into a standalone mobile device, but I’m not hopeful it’ll replace my PSP3000/Vita2000 for daily driving.
Have the OLEDs all started dying or something?
* Burn in. Everyone knows about this, not a huge issue on most Vitas.
* Use degradation. Using the OLED panel will slowly cause it to become more dim, and each color dims at a different rate. Blue dims 10% by 1k hours, and by 10k hours you can expect half total brightness. The Vita was released 10 years ago, and many of them have seen thousands of hours of gameplay by now.
* UV exposure. UV radiation is damaging to OLED displays, even when powered off. Long periods of small exposure, even if kept enclosed in storage, can damage the display. For Vita displays this is the major problem. Vitas that were rarely used outside/near windows, and were stored in dark places will have the least amount of UV damage. All of them should be noticeably more dim than their time of manufacture if it were possible to compare side by side.
The OLED vita side by side with the non OLED is still my preferred display. You are right though, if you want to rack up thousands of hours and add another decade onto the decade already past, the LCD unit is the better bet.
Looking back the old screen was awesome. Going forward I think the LCD Vitas will be a better pick.
Really? That's an interesting opinion - I own both and vastly prefer the original Vita due to that OLED screen, it's just better in every way(the screen).
For that kind of cash, you might as well get the real Vita from a second-hand market. Better yet, for that kind of cash, get Steam Deck, unless you have some restrictions like OP (i.e. "SD is too big")
They were right in many regards. The casual gaming audience disappeared in real time over gen 8 to phones. Even the 3DS just did "well" as a result. So sony went all in on the PS4 and Nintendo converged handheld and console to stand out.
It's coming around again now, but through emulators (Analog Pocket and various android handhelds), the blooming market of handheld PCs (Steam Deck, GPD, Aya, etc.), and the occasional novelty device aiming for small markets (Playdate, Gameshell). I don't know if we'll ever get another handheld like the Vita with its balance of power, build, and library.
Exactly. Smartphone games were clearly the reason why Vita+3DS sold much worse than PSP+DS. The Vita failed because the market wasn't large enough anymore to support two systems, and the 3DS had more exclusive franchises.
But I doubt that was due to phones. It's more factors like set top boxes, "smart" TV's with built in streaming apps and casting, and the decline of the need for DVD/blu-ray players.
I remember the days of the PS3 where many bought it simply because it was the cheapest Blu-ray player (which is saying something, given its slow adoption rate and infamous "599 USD" reputation), but consoles as a multimedia device has definitely fallen off. It's also infamously one of the worst market reads in the industry when Xbox One decided in 2013 to advertise as a set top box on its reveal over a gaming console.
But unlike handhelds, that lost "non-gaming" market did get made up for with a growing market of dedicated gamers (indicated by games continuing to sell increasing numbers of copies). So it simply evened out instead of trending downwards.
Sony never really cracked the code of putting out good content at the consistency of Nintendo. Even though they managed to put out a handful of gems over the years, they just don't seem to know how to leverage it. And in the past few years they seem to want to actively undermine whatever they had, disbanding Sony Japan Studio, and they've floundered, spending the entirety of the PS5's life remastering PS4 games that didn't need a remaster. And sitting on Bloodborne all these years, while it's still stuck at 30fps...
At the time it came out mobile SoCs were improving so rapidly it was never going to maintain an edge over phones for the normal console lifespan. You rightly call out the storage, but it is far from clear what other options really existed. Flash/SSD storage was quite expensive at that time.
And market wise, the Sony audience (even more so then) would not have been remotely receptive to the sort of games that made the Switch popular later on.
It was doomed from conception, and the other mistakes were inevitable after that.
The Switch still happily runs games off microSD cards. The home consoles didn't get SSDs till 2020. For Vita, the cards were fast enough. The problem was the proprietary nature of the cards. They just cost way too much for the size especially as time wore on. I think at the time I imported my 64GB Vita card, a microSD card of the same size was half the price. By the end of the Vita's life the 32GB card was laughably bad value.
This is a surprisingly profound question, because the mobile people absolutely could do games that look better than that and largely found it is not worth doing so. It is partly tech, in that people prefer battery life (you also cannot spend more if your battery has run out), but also technical aspects of graphics simply don’t impress people as much as they did in the 90s. “Content”, and volumes of it, is far more important.
The Vita cards were fast enough but not big enough for games that the Sony demographic would want. For example, a Vita scale Gran Turismo or Metal Gear Solid entry is simply not going to improve on the (great) PSP entries.
By the time the Vita launched we had already been releasing Android builds for the Xperia Play which were straight up ports from the PSP, as betrayed by the almost uniform 1.6GB per game.
Edit: to add a concrete example, the developers of NBA Jam mobile (which was great) went back to 2D afterwards, and came up with a very nice engine for streaming 2D animation and a whole content pipeline system for using it. That ended up making huge amounts of money and entertained tens of millions of people for a long time.
But then again, Genshin was 8GB at launch. Definitely shouldn't underestimate how quick storage costs came down from 2012 to 2017 when the Switch launched. enabling larger games to casually be made.
I have a hacked Vita Slim and it is wonderful. The size is great, the controls are great, and the homebrew scene is incredible. It really holds up.
Fun times.
Sony really bungled it with the over draconian DRM and proprietary memory cards. Had it used microSD cards and not been SO anal about how anything got on there it could have done a lot better. And had they ditched the back touch panel and added real R2/L2 in New 3DS style and perhaps clickable thumbsticks, it could have been something!
I picked up a PSP Go a couple of years ago and that thing is awesome. It flopped hard at the time due to being digital only before people were more okay with that, and because there was no way to play any UMD games you might have already owned. But with custom firmware it’s terrific; it’s less feasible to use a microSD card (unlike the cheap adapters for the original’s Memory Stick Duo), but it has 16GB onboard flash which is perfectly serviceable given PSP ISOs max out at 1.8GB before compression.
Reminded me of Star Trek tricorders growing up. Especially with location based games which worked without GPS. Neet programming hacks was the coolest part of playing with embedded electronics.
The related developer sites aren't even online anylonger.
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/0432204/Sony-Adopt...
https://www.slashgear.com/sony-snap-connected-device-app-fra...
And for completness here are some articles about the C# SDK,
https://venturebeat.com/games/ps-vita-sdk/
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/535325/Hello-World-on-t...
The Xperia Play was too early but I'm pretty confident that now that you've got people very comfortable dropping a lot of money on a phone or the Steam Deck that Sony could've made a very nice successor to both the Vita and the Xperia Play with some kind of Android device with a captive Sony game store.
Too many of their orgs were siloed from one another. As someone who has kind of admired their products, you can only laugh at how poorly things turned out for them given what we know today.
I just dug my Vita out of a drawer last week and have been playing some portable ports of some PS3 games that I wanted to play but can’t hook up the PS3 for (ratchet and clank, sly cooper, god of war 1 and 2, and some other indie games).
Was shocked to discover the store is still functional. I bought the PS1 Armored Core games for it.
Love this thing. It really got done dirty in the market and with Sony’s support.
Tempted to jailbreak it and try to make some homebrew stuff.
I loved the Vita's mix of casual and "serious" games comparing Pixeljunk Monsters to Killzone Mercenary which was as good a 1P shooter as you'd find on a game console in a mobile package. A huge amount of Japanese content such as Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed, Danganronpa and Fate/Extella.
They disconnected it from the PS Network and I was finding that the Japanese games I liked were coming out on Steam so I let go of my Vita kit, I have to admit I miss Pixeljunk Shooter.
https://israpps.github.io/PPC-Monitor/docs/Architecture%20Ov...
> The PPC-IOP ASIC, present in SCPH-75xxx and newer PS2 models, features a hybrid hardware and software approach to emulating the MIPS R3000A processor found in the PS1 and 70K or older PS2 models. The hardware portion of this emulation comes in the form of an Auxiliary Processing Unit or APU attached to a PPC 440 core clocked at 440MHz. The software portion comes in the form of the “DECKARD” emulation software.
The PS3 has always used pure software emulation for the PS1.
†Technically only the SCPH-7500x and later slim models feature the PPC-IOP and Deckard. The SCPH-7000x works the same as fat consoles, where the CPU side of PS1 games run natively on bare metal.
The embedded world leans much further towards disassembling, breaking down, explaining, reasoning and so on and so forth compared to the software world. Not sure why, these guys go all out to probe and put together circuit diagrams and just about fucking everything. The recent Nintendo modding scene shows this to an extreme. Software Reverse engineers clutch their IDA licenses and plugins like it’s going out of style. Copetti is the kind of individual we need more of.
One thing I've been wondering for a while is whether the Vita actually includes both CPU and GPU of the PSP for backwards compatibility, or whether it's only the CPU, with the GPU being mapped to the Vita's.
This article is claiming that it's the former, but hopefully we'll learn more (with references) in the next installment.