10 Reasons to Buy a PlayStation Vita Right Now (and 10 Reasons Not To)

With the North Amer­i­can launch of PlaySta­tion Vita just days away, 1up has put together this in-depth eval­u­a­tion , which serves as a score­card of sorts to help you decide if Sony’s newest hand­held will be a wor­thy invest­ment of your hard-earned gam­ing dol­lars.  Like many gamers, I too am weigh­ing the deci­sion of whether or not to drop $250 or more on this lit­tle piece of plas­tic, how­ever slick and beau­ti­ful it looks at first glance.

After read­ing through 1UP’s four page’s worth of exhaus­tive hands-on review and com­men­tary, I’ve dis­tilled the main talk­ing points into pros and cons to help me (and hope­fully you) decide if Vita is the must-have, can’t-live-without gam­ing portable you should rush out to the store and buy immediately—of if you should save your cash and take the “wait and see” approach.

First, let’s get the fan­boy hype out of the way…

10 rea­sons to buy a Vita right now:

1.  The screen is drop-dead gor­geous.  At 5 inches with a dis­play res­o­lu­tion of 960 x 650, games look amaz­ing even at oblique angles or from a dis­tance.  OLED tech­nol­ogy means richer col­ors and pure, deep blacks.

2.  Clunky UMDs are a thing of the past.   For game soft­ware, the Vita drops uni­ver­sal media discs (UMDs), which were extremely clunky (due to all the mov­ing parts required in an opti­cal drive), in favor of pro­pri­etary, solid state flash mem­ory cards. No more acci­den­tal disc ejections!

3.  Decent bat­tery life.  Vita’s reported bat­tery life is good for up to 5 hours of inter­rupted play. 1Up observed 3.5 — 4 hours of play­time run­ning a high-performance game at full screen bright­ness. It’s not amaz­ing bat­tery life, but it’s cer­tainly on par with most other devices.

4.  Left AND right ana­log sticks for the win.   The Vita is the only hand­held that boasts proper left and right ana­log sticks (ver­sus PSP’s weird lit­tle slid­ing ana­log nub thingy). Most mod­ern games like plat­form­ers and FPSs are designed for dual ana­log sticks, so play­ing these types of games on Vita will be more com­fort­able and enjoyable.

5.  Rear touch pad and two cam­eras.  It’s a hard­ware com­bi­na­tion that should make for some very inter­est­ing games, if devel­op­ers inte­grate them wisely.

6.  Sim­ple, ele­gant, multi-touch user inter­face.   It’s clear Sony was inspired by iOS when design­ing Vita’s inter­face; except instead of lit­tle square icons with rounded cor­ners, Vita’s are cir­cu­lar. Multi-touch lets you flick and swipe the screen to move between home screens and launch and close apps.

7.  Mul­ti­task­ing is now pos­si­ble.  Unlike the PSP, you don’t have to quit your game to jump into another app. And there are sure to be plenty of 3rd-party Vita apps com­ing soon that you’ll want to have the abil­ity to switch between.

8.  Vita’s PlaySta­tion Store rocks.  Accord­ing to 1Up, it “eas­ily ranks among the best con­tent stores any­where.” Nav­i­ga­tion is easy and more direct than on PS3, and the store is sim­ple and clutter-free.

9.  Excit­ing launch titles.   The launch game line-up for Vita, though not exten­sive, includes sev­eral hotly antic­i­pated, note­wor­thy gems like UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss , Lit­tle Deviants , and Grav­ity Rush .

10.  The (some­what) afford­able pric­etag.   Yes, it’s $250, which isn’t a drop in the hat by any means. But this is Sony we’re talk­ing about. $250 for a tech­no­log­i­cally supe­rior portable gam­ing device doesn’t seem so bad when com­pared to, say, 3DS’s $250 launch pricetag.

And now for some harsh realities:

10 rea­sons NOT to buy a Vita (or at least wait a while):

1.  You’ll have to buy your PSP games all over again.  If you want to be able to play them on Vita, that is. Vita only sup­ports PSP games pur­chased from the PlaySta­tion store. So if you have pur­chased an exten­sive library of PSP games and expect to play them on Vita (which upgrades their graph­ics qual­ity sig­nif­i­cantly), guess what? You’re shit outta luck.

2.  It’s not truly “back­wards com­pat­i­ble.” Even though Sony’s push­ing this as a sell­ing point.  Yes, you can play PSP games on Vita and they look amaz­ing with upscaled graph­ics, but with no way of play­ing your PSP UMDs on Vita with­out hav­ing to re-purchase your games, is it really fair to make this claim?

3. The ana­log sticks are likely to break.  Hav­ing dual ana­log sticks on a portable is great, but not when they jut out so far from the device that they could eas­ily break off. 1Up rec­om­mends pur­chas­ing a hard-shell Vita case to help shield them from acci­den­tal drops, or being snagged on some­thing (like when you’re stash­ing it away in your bag).

4.  The rear touch pad is awk­ward, uncom­fort­able.   Gamers with large hands may have trou­ble hold­ing the device com­fort­ably, since merely graz­ing the rear touch pad acci­den­tally with your fin­gers can trig­ger “back touch,” Sony’s new touch-based sen­sor on the back of the sys­tem. You’ll most likely need to con­stantly adjust your grip while play­ing games, which doesn’t sound very com­fort­able to me at all.

5. Vita’s stor­age media is ridicu­lously expen­sive.  Sony only uses pro­pri­etary (read: expen­sive) stor­age cards for Vita. A 32 GB PlaySta­tion Vita mem­ory card costs $100.  For comparison’s sake, you can buy a 32 GB SD card for about 30 bucks.  And accord­ing to every­thing I’ve read, you’re going to need a lot  of stor­age for Vita’s library of games.

6.  The touch screen con­trols are incon­sis­tent.   Rather than giv­ing gamers a choice between touch AND D-pad con­trols, you’ll be forced to use only touch screen con­trols when nav­i­gat­ing the Vita’s menu sys­tems.  This is counter intu­itive and incon­sis­tent with some games like UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss , where play­ers have the choice to use either/or.

7.  The Vita games library is promis­ing, but not stel­lar.   Other than a few key Vita titles, the library at launch time mostly includes ports and re-worked games from other platforms.

8. That $250 pric­etag is actu­ally more like $400.   By the time you pur­chase a mem­ory card, a pro­tec­tive car­ry­ing case (which you’re going to need, due to the ana­log stick design flaws men­tioned above), and a game, you’re look­ing at a total spend of around $400 or more.

9.  Other than look­ing impres­sive, what does Vita really offer?   Apart from the rear touch con­trol (which, from the sound of it, is less cool in real­ity) there’s not much in the way of inno­va­tion here other than being able to play beautiful-looking games on a handheld.

10.  Is there room in our lives for another portable gam­ing device?  Most gamers already own a DS (maybe even a 3Ds) and a PSP in addi­tion to their smart­phones, tablets, Kin­dles, and other expen­sive gad­gets that can also play games.  That begs the ques­tion: where does PlaySta­tion Vita fit in?

The main ques­tion for me is:  Do I really need this much gam­ing power in my pocket?  Being real­is­tic about the price, am I will­ing to drop around $400 for a device that doesn’t offer me any sig­nif­i­cant value other than look­ing slick and being able to play a small hand­ful of beautiful-looking games?  The thing that would be most likely to get me to change my mind at this point is offer­ing more exclu­sive, must-have titles that would jus­tify and sup­port my pur­chase.   UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss is a good start.  But what else?

As I did with the PS3, I think I’ll take the “wait and see” approach for PlaySta­tion Vita.  How about you?

This is so much fail…

Don’t ask why, but I was idly brows­ing the Har­riet Carter site, a glo­ri­ous domes­tic baz­zare of gifts for old peo­ple and As Seen On TV prod­ucts, when I stum­bled upon the com­plete fail­ure above.

“Gui­tar Hero® hand­held game packs all the action of the mon­ster video game into a pocket-sized ver­sion you can play any­where!”

O RLY? I bet Free Bird sounds AWESOME on that tiny speaker.  For $17.98 plus ship­ping and han­dling, it even has a cara­biner, so you can clip it to your belt and walk around with an over­priced piece of plas­tic shame dan­gling from your waist.  This is exactly the type of bull­shit clue­less par­ents buy their kids,  try­ing to save a few bucks, only to find it quickly dis­posed and for­got­ten.  They could just take their money to GameStop and buy a used copy of the real Gui­tar Hero for about the same price.

This deserves a spot on my Worst Gifts for Gamers list. Per­haps a Part 2 is in order.