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.

The PS Vita is Dead, Long Live the PS Vita

Well it's over, the dream is dead, everybody go home.  Sony have announced that as of about two days ago, the PS Vita is to be discontinued.  A sad day for gaming indeed.

The PS Vita had a hard life, it was sort of hard to justify buying one if you lived outside of Japan.  I remember seeing it when it was new and thinking that it looked cool.  I went to the store to pick one up, looked at the selection of games that were available and just INSTANTLY put it back down.  I didn't really give a fuck about that Uncharted game that was released for it and the selection of titles for the system around launch time were extremely lacking.  Eventually I moved to Japan where the selection of games was much better and even better, my wife gifted me one for my birthday.  But the Vita had another curse which was it's memory cards.  You couldn't just use a normal micro SD card or anything like that, you had to buy a special PS Vita memory card and those bastards were NOT cheap.  I got the smallest one and still had to shell out $60 or so for it.  That's a pretty high barrier to entry.

Eventually the library of games got better and I built up a pretty enjoyable library of titles, most of which are Japanese exclusive unfortunately for the Western audience but the memory cards never got any cheaper and it could just never build the same kind of hype that it's competitor, the 3DS, was creating.

If you could read Japanese then the amount of surprisingly good JRPGs and dungeon crawling titles was kind of staggering.  Due to this, the Hatsune Miku Project Diva games and the fact that it's region free, my Vita has seen WAY more use than my 3DS.  I've not played my 3DS since Bravely Default came out but I'm still using my Vita about once a week.

So let's take a moment for our fallen hero, the Vita, the little console that good.  Hopefully some kind of effort will be made to emulate it so that a bunch of fan translations can be released and people can enjoy the great library of games that never made it across the pond.

Gaming Log March 13th 2017

Here's a new blog feature for you all that will keep the written side of things flowing daily once again, a gaming log.  I know most of you don't give a flying fuck about what I'm doing day to day but I quite enjoy the idea of making a sort of public diary of my gaming so here I go!

Well this morning I did what I do every morning which is skip breakfast and fire up Persona 5.  It was a largely uneventful time although I am a little concerned with the current point in the game.  Without spoiling anything I THINK I've cleared the dungeon and done everything I have to do but there's still a big fat red countdown in the corner of my screen that basically reads "8 MORE DAYS TILL YOU LOSE!"

I'm assuming everything will be OK but the progress I stand if the story doesn't get off its arse and start moving soon is pretty great.  Still, I finished the session by heading into the optional dungeon, Mementos and fighting a boss that was susceptible to magic.  He nearly one shot my entire party in the first turn but after I survived and healed up, everything was fine and he went down pretty quickly.

Of course though, I can't spend my entire day playing P5 because I have my job to go to so that means I have to switch to something a little more portable.

Right now my current game of choice is Dungeon Travelers 2 on the Vita which I got for free a couple of months back on PS+.  So far its been a pretty enjoyable experience.  It's a competently made dungeon crawl game with an absolute metric shitton of fan service.  All the main cast with the exception of one character are cute anime girls and all the monsters are cute anime girls and at frequent points the game will show you full screen images of cute anime girls in their pants.  Well I love dungeon crawls and I love titties so everything has been pretty peachy so far.

UNTIL TODAY

The dungeon I've been currently crawling though is just bursting at the seems with complete bullshit.  Monsters doing absolute shit tons of damage with area of effect magic was just the tip of the iceberg with this place.

If you can't read Japanese then the big red text at the top of the screen basically says "No magic zone".  I'm pretty heavily reliant on magic for both killing shit and staying alive so these corridors are particularly annoying.  I don't mind being challenged in a game but this is just balls, I hate having my hands tied behind my back like this, it's just not fun.  Luckily, my main damage dealing spell caster has a rod that does instant death sometimes so it's not all bad I guess.

As if that wasn't enough though, I manage to make it to the end of the dungeon and then this bitch shows up.

HO-LY fuck the game has just thrown some impossible bullshit out of nowhere.  Every single boss up to this point has generally been pretty easy but this bitch is just smacking me all over the place.  If she isn't doing some weird party wide physical attack that comes pretty close to one shotting people, she's doing some weird debuff dance thing where at the start of her turn I just go and take a handful of damage.  Before I could figure out how to kill her I got home and stopped playing but I'm thinking that a little bit of grinding might be in order for this one.

After that I was sort of planning to stream but I made this mistake of getting into bed and lazing around for a bit and now I'm far to sleepy to do anything properly.  I'm sure there's going  to be errors in this post somewhere... Anyway I have to go to work a lot earlier than usual tomorrow so an early night and an early rise might do me some good.

 

My Vita Multiplat Frustrations

I'm one of these weirdos that actually enjoys and gets quite a lot of use out of my PS Vita.  Probably more so than my 3DS because Nintendo are a bunch of idiots who put region locking on their systems, but if you ask me, the Vita has a lot going for it.

That said, I'm having one problem with it recently and no its not the obscene amount of pervy anime games, I don't mind those.  It's the fucking PS4 multi platform titles that are pissing me off.  Some good examples of these would be Dragons Crown, Exist Archive and Yoru No Nai Kuni.  Buying games used to be so damn simple and now I have to do a whole bunch of research on the different versions because of shit like this.

I always find myself being torn when trying to make a purchase with these kind of games.  Do I want the title on the Vita so I can play it on the go, or do I want it for my PS4 so I can play it on my big ass TV and from the comfort of my nice couch.  Do I want I want portability and convenience or do I want comfort and easy access to streaming the title in question?!  I just don't fucking know anymore

You know, the one easy answer to this would be allow me to play my Vita games on my TV, kind of like how you can use the Vita as a secondary screen for your PS4 but the other way round.  Well this was a viable option for a while with the Vita TV but the thing fucking bombed and was discontinued before I could get my hands on one, so fuck that solution.  Plus I couldn't stream from the Vita TV so it only half solved the problem really.

I get why Sony are doing it, not many people bought the Vita overseas as far as I can tell so they want to make their titles available on both platforms so no one misses out.  It's a kind move but in their kindness that have filled my purchases for these systems way more stressful than it needs to be.

Maybe I'm being over dramatic for the sake of making a blog post about this "issue".  That said, it is annoying and I wish the situation wasn't like this.  Props to Sony for making sure everyone can play their games without owning the Vita, because in the west that thing kinda sucks, but goddamn it's annoying for me.

Too Much Moe Spoils The System

I like the Vita, a lot of people give it a lot of stick for having no games or for being a bit shitty in the west, which may be true, but it's a solid system with enough good titles to make it worth owning.

Now, I'm not against a bit of fan service in games quite the contrary.  I don't want to play deep cerebral experiences all the damn time, sometimes I just want to fire up a game and shoot stuff, fight people or ogle pretty girls.  These games need to exist because I don't want 100% of gaming to be all emotionally draining shit like Nier or Shadow of the Colossus or have crazy thought provoking narratives like Silent Hill, sometimes a guy just wants to unwind with something easy.

There does come a point though where it starts to feel like too much though.  Whenever I enter a game store in Japan I walk over to the Vita section and the only thing I can see from one side of the shelf to the other is fan service type moe games.  I can't help but feel it's getting to the point where it's too much for the same reason I don't as previously mentioned.  Sometimes I just want to unwind with something easy to understand and stimulating to a very base part of my brain but sometimes I want more than that and well, the Vita is disappointing me on that area.

Not to say that there aren't any deeper experiences to be had on the Vita but they are buried under piles of doe eyed anime girls not wearing much and casting insane magic spells.  I don't spend much time using PSN so I'm hoping that maybe there are some downloadable titles with a bit more depth to them but if you want to get physical like I like to do your collection might make you look a bit strange.

C'mon, I love my Vita but I want to be able to use it outside, as intended, without feeling like I'm being judged by every passer by in the street.  Hopefully my trip to TGS next week will show me some games that I can get really excited for and tell other people about without looking like a lonely otaku.

The Last of Us: Remastered Vs Persona 4 Golden

Somewhere buried in this blog, there's a post where I had a moan about The Last of Us Remastered.  I moaned because the idea of "remaking" or "remastering" games from the last gen is nothing more than a shitty cash grab to try and make people buy the same game twice. 

So I'm playing Persona 4 Golden on my Vita when I start thinking, what is it about The Last of Us on PS4 that makes me angry while P4G doesn't?  Both are games that aren't all that old except while TLoU feels like a shitty cash grab P4G doesn't.

Before I start, I just want to say I'm not commenting on the quality of The Last of Us as a game, the game is a'ite.  I don't think it's the second coming of Jesus or the best story ever written for a game but it plays well and it's fun.  I've also not played Remastered but I've spent a damn long time googling the version differences before I made this post and with what I found I can safely say, if you bought Remastered (after owning the original), you are a moron.  If you bought it on PS4 because you didn't own it on PS3, fair enough.

Anyway, let's start with what I found regarding TLoU: Remastered.  What I found is that Remastered comes with all the DLC, features a photo mode, some commentary and runs at a higher frame rate.  BIG FUCKIN' WHOOP.  I googled the price on Amazon too and they want fucking £35 goddamn pounds for this shit.  Are the added "features" in this version worth another full price sale?  I don't fucking think so.  The big fucking hubub seems to be that it runs at 60fps on PS4 but is there any reason I couldn't have done that on PS3?  I'm pretty sure Metal Gear Rising runs at 60fps and that shits a lot more hectic than TLoU so what the fuck is going on there? 

I suppose you could argue that with all the DLC thrown in, it's kind of worth it but fuck the DLC.  The single player add on is like 2 hours long and who gives a fuck about the multiplayer?  There are much better games if you want multiplayer shooting. 

So what about Persona 4 Golden?  Why is that so much better?

Well fuck, if I tried to list of the reasons it would take all day because there's A LOT of shit going on with P4G.  While graphically there isn't much going on, there are so many things added to the game itself it'll make your fucking head spin.

There's extra dungeons, extra social links, extra arcanas for your monsters, extra cutscenes, new dialogue, re-worked combat, extra anime scenes for those who like that and this is just a small selection of things.  When I first fired up P4G I was expecting the same thing as the PS2 version but I ended up getting all this extra shit for no extra cost.

Now let's talk cost.  If you happen to live in the UK and you want to play P4G, it only costs about £13 off Amazon.  £13! Hell, you could buy the PS3 version of The Last of Us and get P4G with the money you saved.  Persona 4 isn't fucking around either, this is a meaty game with tons of shit to do that will last you way WAY longer.  Then, if you're a perfectionist, you even get some replay value for your £13 and there's even an insane difficulty mode for the true SMT masters.

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I'm expecting someone to pop up at some point and call me a prick for ragging on TLoU: Remastered but it pisses me off because it's a cashgrab of the most transparent kind.  Go look at the wikipedia page and it says that development on Remastered began straight after they finish the original game so obviously Naughty Dog think their customers are fucking idiots and judging from sales figures, a lot are.  Like I said, if you bought it because you didn't own the original and thought you'd get the "better" version, then fair enough I guess but remaking a game from one generation ago is fucking disgusting and it shows me how little respect some of this AAA game devs and publishers have for their customers.

Finally, before anyone calls me a hypocrite for buying P4G, all my PS2 games were stolen and I lost my original PS2 copy.  But even if that wasn't the case, P4G is still worth buying because it has tons of extra shit for a super low price. 

The Vita: Good System, Needs Some Work

I own both a Vita and a 3DS, so what I'm not here to do is have a stupid one man portable console war.  I will say very briefly though, that I do prefer my vita to my 3DS.  It feels better to use and the games on it (Project Diva F and P4G, for example) I feel like playing way more than anything on my 3DS.

Anyway, if you do a bit of googling around for the Playstation Vita, it's not hard to see that really it's not selling all that well.  It's not doing awfully badly in its own right but it keeps trailing behind basically every other system on the market.

Now Sony have made some good steps getting all these indie developers involved.  The inclusion of The Binding of Isaac and Hotline Miami on the Vita is really good, but if Sony want this thing to do well they need to do more.  I think the biggest problem is that while the system is a nice piece of hardware, there really isn't anything good to get people to buy it.

Sony got kind of lucky with me, since I had a great deal of my shit stolen.  The port of P4G and Muramasa made me really excited because I would be able to play updated versions without having to overspend on original PS2 and Wii copies, which was nice.  But one look around the shops in the EU make it very clear that the Vita isn't getting much love in the games department. 

The situation in Japan isn't much better either though.  The selection is far far greater out here than it is in Sweden or the UK, but the problem is that the current game library for the Vita is mimicking the late PSP library.  What I mean by this is that there is nothing that really stands out, everything is just school girl dating sims or generic looking anime RPGs that only the most hardcore otakus would be remotely interested in.

If Sony just buckled down and put out lets say, 3 absolutely stellar games with good amount of content and quality, sales would skyrocket I imagine.  The Vita is a really nice piece of kit, people just need something to fucking play on it.

Project Diva F: Freely Tomorrow Perfect Play!

Well, I have started a new play through but my headset went and broke again.  In the mean time, I've been trying to record full combo videos from Project Diva F on the Vita, but it's a little bit awkward and full comboing a song becomes twice as hard.

Anyway, today I got one, so check it out! The song is Freely Tomorrow

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.

Portable Price Drops

A while ago there was a lot of people talking about how the Vita is the worst thing ever and scoffing heartily at it since sales were pretty low.  THEN, there was a price cut on the Vita in Japan and sales shot above the goddamn WiiU.

Now I'm not going to jump on any sides here, I own a 3DS and a Vita and I enjoy both of them, but anyone making comments on portable system sales before a price drop seems pretty stupid.  Hell, I got my Vita before the price drop but I got it for about the same price, used, in a place called Book Off.

Anyway the reason why commenting on system sales pre price drop is dumb is because almost every system gets one at some point.  There are HUGE numbers of people who are like "I want that, but there is no point to buy it now because the price will drop".  So this causes sales to look really bad until the cut hits and BAM, sales go out the arse because people knew this shit was going to happen.

I wasn't even going to buy a 3DS originally, not because I was waiting for a price cut but because I knew that there was obviously going to be a 3DS slim, or XL or some bullshit, so I figured I would just get that.

The new generation looks exciting, so instead of arguing about sales figures and whatnot just fucking enjoy the games, because chances are that when it comes to company finances you don't really know what your talking about anyway (myself included)