I liked the Vita more than the 3DS

 

I feel like today there's not a lot going on in the realms of portable gaming.  Sure, the Switch has a "portable" mode and the Steam Deck exists but both of these systems are wide and unwieldly, not the kind of thing I can just yank out of a pocket on a work commute and play for a short time.  But not that long ago we had the dual choice of either a Nintendo 3DS or the Playstation Vita and while most people preferred the 3DS or never touched a Vita, I was one of these mutants that opted for the Vita significantly more than my 3DS.

Now for the record, I own both systems and I like both of them.  What I am NOT saying with this post is that the 3DS is a shitty system.  I know in most gaming spaces the idea of liking 2 "opposing" things is an impossibility but I don't roll like that.  The 3DS had Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Persona Q for fucks sake, I'm not just going to write it off.  That said though, the Vita feels like a system that was almost made entirely for me and my weird tastes as well as my unusual situation at the time that I got it and therefore got significantly more play time.

The first reason for the preference, the big one, was that the Vita was region free.  I bought my 3DS from a friend while at University in England and with it I got a handful of games which was very cool.  However shortly after making this purchase I moved to Japan where I was basically locked out of buying more software for the thing.  I WANTED to give Nintendo my money for new games and they said "what's that? you're an British expat in Japan? well why don't you go fuck yourself, eh?" and thus no new games were ever bought.  Well almost no new games, I bought a copy of Persona Q and by "I bought" I mean I had my mother buy for me and send to me here in Japan which was unfair to her, making her go to game stores looking for weebshit and was a pain in the ass for me in wait times, potential package theft and subsequent repaying of game price.  I didn't even play Shin Megami Tensei 4 on my own 3DS, I borrowed a friends American 3DS with a copy of the game downloaded to it off the e-shop.  I couldn't use the e-shop because the British e-shop wouldn't accept my Japanese credit card and I didn't own a British one so even the digital path was blocked off to me.  And I know there's some fucking gimp reading this post going "jUsT hAcK iT" to which I say that you can go fuck yourself.  I can't be bothered with that and its not something I should HAVE to do just to play new games.

The Vita on the other hand was more than willing to accomodate my multi-region needs at the time.  Bought for my by my wife in Japan, then taken to Sweden, England and America for various reasons and I bought games in all of these countries and just popped them in and had a grand old time.  Not to mention that my PS+ subscription was giving me 2 Vita games a month for free as well as 2 PS4 so I had quite the collection of games and I didn't even have to spend all that much to get it.

Speaking of the games, that's the other reason I like the Vita so much.  I don't care all that much about the 3DS library.  Bravely Default was pretty good and SMT4 and 4A were fun but I can't recall much that really stands out in my mind.  Even flagship titles like A Link Between Worlds, while not shitty, were unmemorable and not the kind of games I'm ever going to rush back and play.  Hell, as I wrote this post I went to go dig out my little box of 30 or so 3DS carts just to make sure there wasn't something amazing that had slipped my mind but all I got was disappointment.  I had middling amounts of fun with the 3DS when playing it, but nothing that stuck out.

The Vita on the other hand seemed to be made EXACTLY for me.  I bought it with a copy of Project Diva F and anyone who watches my streams knows how much of a sucker I am for my weird vocaloid rhythm games.  At the time, the Vita was also the only way to play Persona 4 Golden so that got a great many hours put into it too.  But most of all, the Vita seems to have a large supply of what I like to call "Windows Screensaver Games".  They are usually known as "first person dungeon crawlers" but "dungeon crawler" has been co-opted by idiots who put things like Diablo and Baldurs Gate in the category as well so I like my name better.  Dungeon Travelers, Wizardry, Zanki Zero, Mary Skelter, Labyrinth of Galleria are just a few of the more obvious ones but my Vita's memory card is full to BURSTING with these fucking things.  Tons of obscure Japan only dungeon crawls for me to satiate my weird niche interest that I can just slide into my jacket pocket and play anywhere I want?  Actual gaming heaven.  Hell, about a week before writing this post I JUST bought Meikyuu Cross Blood off Amazon for the Vita, its fucking 2024 and I'm still discovering new dungeon crawls to enjoy for the bloody thing.  So between the rhythm games and the catering to a niche genre that only I and a few others care for, the Vita got the majority of my love and attention.

Not that it was a perfect system.  The 3DS certainly had better portibility, the Vita's design is sort of similar to the Switch and Steam Deck but JUST small enough to not be a pain in the cock, but only just.  Also the 3DS let you slam any old SD card into it for memory but the Vita had these absurdly expensive Sony memory cards the largers versions of which were as much as 2 or 3 games in terms of price.  Sony can really lick my balls on that one, worst part of its design by a lot.  Also the Vita has this stupid back touch screen which I don't think I've ever used once personally and I only know 1 game off the top of my head that uses it at all.

I can fully understand why the 3DS greatly outlasted the Vita and why it enjoyed significantly more popularity from general audiences.  However, the Vita, for me, seemed so attuned to my weird tastes for grid based weebshit that there's no way Nintendo ever stood a chance in my household.

God bless you, PS Vita, I don't think there will ever be a system with a library quite like yours ever again.

Do I just have shit hands?

A long while ago I bought a 3DS off a friend of mine, but until my latest plane journey to Japan I hadn't touched the damn thing.

All I've really played on it is Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia for the DS, but I've had a little experience trying out the whole 3D thing with stuff like Mario and Zelda and to be honest I don't see the fuss.  The system has some good games now, at least, but I think I'll be keeping that 3D slider off as much as I can.

Anyway my biggest complaint with this system is the entire left hand side of the fucking thing.  Maybe it's just me, but I find moving a character around the screen on the 3DS to be really awkward.  The stick just feels strange and I hate using it and the D-Pad is just in this weird position that doesn't feel comfortable to use either. 

Also I can't really fully explain why but the buttons on the right hand side feel a bit crappy too.  In fact that's the best way to sum up the whole thing.  The 3DS just sucks to handle and even when your playing a good game it's just not fun because the hardware is so much shit to use.

Still, maybe the later models don't have this problem, I'm only talking about the original 3DS model here.  Since the things are fucking region locked I'm going to buy myself a shiny new updated 3DS sometime in the future.  Maybe that won't be such a massive piece of shit to handle.

The Vita

So a while ago I was given a Playstation Vita and I think it's about time to give my thoughts on the system.

So I'll start with how the thing looks, and I think it looks pretty damn good.  It's that same sleek black that we had with the PSP, but that shit works, it looks nice.  I'll admit that the analogue sticks look and feel a little bit cheap, at least to me, but they do the job so I'm not moaning all that much.  It sits well in your hands and everything just feels right.

The menus when you turn it on are easy to navigate too.  If you've used any kind of smart phone ever you'll be able to find your way around this thing, it's pretty user friendly.  It also has this cool paper peeling effect when you want to close an application, and I know it sounds like a stupid thing to enjoy but goddamn I really like it.

Now the big thing, the games.  Right now I own 3 games, and one of them is a HD remake of 2 PS2 games (Metal Gear).  The library right now is a little lack luster with nothing REALLY standing out except for something like Gravity Daze which I've heard is really good.  Then again the console is still young and I'd bet a good amount of money that once the console gets a little older there will be some proper belters available.

The tl;dr version of this whole post is pretty good, looking forward to the future.

I miss the floppy disk

God damn do you remember these things?!  Well we have reached an age where there are now a significant number of people who fucking don't, and that's sad.

These plastic squares could hold an absolutely massive 1.44 megabytes of data and it was the games came on for shit like the Amiga and other systems.  I never owned an Amiga myself, but I do remember having some kind of computer thing with a green and black screen that played some kind of golf game that came on a floppy disk, that was the shit back then.

Back in my old school days, I remember we used to get a free floppy disk from the library, and we'd fill it full of stupid pictures from some picture website and go giggle at them at home.  It was dumb but I have a lot of fond memories with this old file storage format.

The best thing about these damn things though was the sound it makes when you put it in the drive.  It would make this awesome kind of click sound, pushing one of these bastards in was so satisfying.  On top of that, one way to stave off boredom during the IT classes was to flick the metal bit on the top back and forth, I could do that shit for hours.

But alas, the floppy disk is no more, but I'm glad I got to experience the tail end of their existence.  Maybe one day we can have something that looks like a floppy but has shit tons of storage on it, that would be nice.

Can't give a shit about the WiiU

Read the title again just in case you saw it and got angry.  It's not "don't" give a shit about the WiiU, it's "can't" give a shit.  I've been trying really hard to get myself hyped up for this new bit of hardware from Nintendo, but I just don't give a fuck and I can't bring myself to give a fuck.

Initially, I was really interested in this thing, mainly for it's controller with a screen in it.  When I first saw it announced and got a glimpse of that thing my mind started thinking about all the cool concepts that could come out of a bit of gear like that. 

But I'm not really one for following hype so the WiiU dropped off my radar for a while, then I eventually got round to looking at a list of launch titles for it and good lord was I disappointed.  Everything that's coming out for this damn thing already exists on another system, is garbage aimed at non-gamers, or is just not very interesting.

ZombieU was the game I paid the most attention too, but it still doesn't seem all that interesting to me.  The controller screen stuff is cool, but you don't NEED the controller screen to have those features, it feels like a gimmick and nothing more.  That's the problem with the WiiU I think, for me at least, it feels like a gimmick.

That said, I thought the exact same thing about the DS and the exact same thing about the Wii, and after it gained some steam we got some really impressive games out of those systems.  So, either hurry up and come up with a really cool game concept with that controller screen thing OR release a Trauma Centre, because that'll do it really.

Sega Saturn Peripherals

Like every console, the Sega Saturn had a number of extra bits and bobs that you could buy to enhance your gaming experience.  So for those that didn't own a Saturn, I thought I'd give a bit of a mention to the ones that stood out.

Well the first one I never actually owned back when you could still buy Saturn games in the store.  It was known as the 3D controller, and as far as I know its main purpose was for playing Nights: Into Dreams.  The differences between this pad and the regular pad as the addition of an analogue stick and some changes to the shoulder buttons.  The reason it was made is because if you've ever played Nights on a regular pad, it can wear on the palms after a while, so it was made to make playing that game more comfortable.

The next peripheral I want to talk about is the Super Cobra light gun.  Light Guns are not exactly uncommon for consoles, even the NES had a light gun, but this thing was an absolute beast of a weapon.  It was heavier than any other light gun I had used up to that point, and constantly shooting outside of the screen in House of the Dead felt more like lifting weights than playing an arcade rail shooter.   Also it was cool as fuck, whenever you pulled the trigger, the lights down the side would light up, back when I was a kid, that was the coolest shit.  Also it was compatible with the Sony Playstation so I think you could play Resident Evil: Gun Survivor with it.

The final thing I'll be talking about is another peripheral that I didn't own at the time, and this little thing is known as the Sega NetLink.  A lot of people give credit to the Dreamcast for being the first console with online features, but they would be really wrong.  If we're just talking about Sega, the Mega Drive had an online feature that didn't really take off, and then the Saturn the the NetLink, and while it only worked for a few games at ran at a whopping 28.8kb/s, it still worked to get you playing games online before the Dreamcast and its fancy 56k turned up.  It also came with a browser and auto connected you to an IRC channel as far as I understand the information I found on the internet.  After giving the wikipedia entry a quick read as well, the reason I probably never owned the damn thing is because it cost a massive $200, something I or my family would not have been willing to buy at the time.

The Saturn had some other cool bits of kit, but these are the ones that stood out in my memory, a quick google search can get you a complete list of all the peripherals available if you care that much.

Now That's Some Bullshit #8: Sega Saturn Battery

Due to some problems with my ability to stream it's a bullshit double bill today!  Although this round of bullshit is Saturn related so that it fits in with Saturn Month.

The Sega Saturn had quite a weird set of internals.  For example the thing had dual CPU's, and while this has a load of technical implications that I don't understand because I'm not a developer, what I do understand is it basically made the whole system a gigantic pain in the ass to develop games for.

But the people making the games were not the only ones who had to deal with strange shit going on inside the Saturn.  If you look at the above picture, you can see a little space where a battery goes in.  This was the battery backup system for the Saturn and whenever you saved a game, it would save here. 

Now it's not battery backups that are bullshit, but it's the fact that this thing isn't really mentioned inside the system manual (which most people don't fucking read anyway) and there is no indication for when the power is low and you have to replace it, it's a load of ass.

I mean, I got the Saturn when I was a kid, I didn't know how the fuck it was saving my games and my parents knew jack shit about gaming systems, so they weren't aware of it either.  It wasn't until a couple of years ago when I hooked up my old Saturn and played Panzer Dragoon Saga for about 4 hours that I discovered what to do.  I saved the game, which worked just fine, but when I returned the save had been erased because the battery inside the fucking thing had died.

Plus it was one of those really awkward flat batteries that were quite hard to get hold of in the area where I lived in the UK.  Most shops didn't stock anything outside of AA and AAA batteries.

So, if after Saturn Month you decide to go grab one at a flea market or off E-Bay or something, either get that cartridge saving thing that I could never find, or replace the damn battery! 

You have been warned!