168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation Vita was the first console I bought with my own money. During the latter years of secondary school, I took up a job at a 🐟local Chinese takeaway and spent my weekend picking up the phone to take orders, frying chips, and conversing with a chef who didn’t speak much English. It was hard but fun work, and earned me enough cash 🉐to spoil myself a little bit.

So instead of putting my money away for university, I went to my local gaming shop to buy a pre-owned Vita and copies of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gravity Rush, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and PSN credit that I would soon spend on a laundry list of PlayStation classics.ඣ I didn’t even wait until I got home to ꩲcheck it out, popping into a coffee shop with my boyfriend at the time to unbox it.

PlayStation Vita Will Forever Be An Underrated Gem Of A Machine

But my excitement over spending my very first earnings on a pre-owned console is far from the point of this article. Instead I want to talk about how ahead of its time the PS Vita wound up being, and how, even a deౠcade later, it still manages to do some incredible things. When compared to the PSP, the Vita was a massive step up in every conceivable way, amounting to a PS2 in your pocket that could play excellent games, make use of social media, and even send text messages if you were foolish enough to buy the overpriced 3G model. I was not...

The display was a major selling point, making the Vita one of the few affordable devices pushing OLED (at least at first, eventually it was revised to implement a cheaper LCD equivalent). It was bright and colourful to the extreme, allowing existing classics to be seen in a new light, while beloved exclusives like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Persona 4 Golden took full advantage of it. I developed a habit 🐼of changing up the wallpaper every few weekꦏs, mostly in the form of cutesy anime and pop-punk bands, because I was still an emo weeaboo at heart.

It blew every single portable console before it out of the water, and made the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nintendo 3DS appear archaic by comparison. It’s juܫst a shame Sony didn’t opt to support it with a library of exclusives worth caring about. Even today, the Vita catalogue is slim and most of the things wort💃h playing have been ported out of portable purgatory. That doesn’t negate the fun I had with it though, nor does it stop a PlayStation handheld from existing in the modern era.

Obviously, it had a handful of gimmicks that felt ideal at the time, but haven’t aged well. I had completely forgotten that the Vita had a touch panel on the back which was used in only one or two games, including some cool sections in Golden Abyss where you would perform quick chalk rubbings or hold it up to light to solve puzzles. Aside from that, it was kinda annoying💜 it played the role of an additional set of shoulder buttons in other classic games. I just wanted to press L2/R2, not touch up the back of my console searching desperately for input.

The Vita Tried To Adapt To Its Own Failure

As the PS4 was launching, Sony tried to justify the Vita’s existence outside its exclusive games, essentially positioning it as a companion to its next-gen console for remote play. In an ideal world you could be playing Knack on your television, 🐻and then switch over to your Vita to continue playing it in bed✨. I would give the example of your partner coming in to use the television and asking nicely for you to stop playing Knack, but considering you’re playing it in the first place, you definitely live alone. But now you have two places to play this masterful platformer.

While it was pitched as an ingenious use of technology, I think Sony was using it as a final effort to bolster Vita sales and cement it as a serious competitor to the 3DS. While ahead of its time, without the games to support it, the Vita became a console of hardcore players and not much else. So it was slowly but surely discontinued as the only new games were ports of smaller titles or niche JRPGs as the hardware continued to find success in Japan. I keep on thinking about another reality where the Vita succeeded and changed everything, but now its only successor is the PlayStation Portal that only exists to stream games from your PS5.

What Would A Modern Vita Even Look Like?

That’s a good question, and it’s hard to imagine a new portable outing from Sony not taking direct inspiration from the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nintendo Switch and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Steam Deck. Those machines have changed the current definition of handheld gaming, showing that playing things natively will always rise above the cloud strea💟ming of portals and smartphones, even if it’s nic♈e to have that feature, too.

I also don’t think being a native platform of its own will cut it nowadays, not when PSP and Vita were both sorely lacking in exclusives worth playing. It was their downfall, so imagine if the next PlayStation♔ handheld took into account your entire digital library with select titles all being compatible through bespoke updates or builds. Developers would need to put in the work, but so long as the selection remained decent, it would have a chance at success. It could also support existing PlayStation classics, cloud streaming, and work with the PS5 in significant, purpose-built ways, unlike the Vita which was crowbarred into the equation.

There is a world where it could work though, where a portable console could allow studios a greater opportunity to experiment with smaller and more diverse games that complemented the core platform while standing proudly on its own. It's an ecosystem PlayStation would benefit from, but only if it learns from past mistakes while acknowledging exact🌱ly what made the Vita so special.