PSVita review

Alright, My first console review, The PSVita.

The PSVita is Sony's newest handheld. The Vita sports dual thumbsticks, a d-pad, the standard playstation buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, and most importantly, a HD touchscreen, and a rear touch pad.

First off the Vita sports amazing graphics, I can easily imagine the Vita competing with the Xbox 360, the 3DS(no contest), and to a lesser extent the PS3.

The dual thumbsticks and the graphics invite developers to create shooters and other games(can we say Portal on the Vita?).

The Vita's touchscreen is easily on par with the iPhone and iPod touch and the Vita also sports a gyroscope (or accelerometer, not sure.) and I am sure it is pretty safe to assume that some iPhone and android based games will definitely make a Vita experience.

Now my only complaint with the Vita is not a hardware issue, the problem is that the hardware appears to be extremely underutilized. The Vita so far does not support online video(youtube and other videos) and no netflix to my knowledge. Also in the game I played to test the controls (Ultimate Marvel VS. Capcom 3) I found that the touchscreen and touchpad had been severely under utilized. I was disappointed that in Simple and touch mode the only Hypercombos I could perform was the level one attacks, What might have been better was to be able to set certain attacks to be activated by tapping different areas of the rear touchpad, similar to the 3DS using the bottom screen in street fighter. I do have to say that I would probably play the game if I could do that because I am a horrible fighting player and have never intentionally used a move in street fighter type games. This feature might be able to be added as an update but I am not sure how that will work on the Vita as of yet.

The web browser is very snappy as well, not as snappy as safari on an iPhone but a definite improvement over the PSP, the touchscreen keyboard alone makes it more bearable, add in Youtube support and I will be really sold.

It might also be an idea to be able to view media from a network hard drive.

So far I haven't been able to come up with any thing that can't be improved upon.

So my final analysis is:

Very nice specs and solid design.
Good graphics and sound, with solid controls.
A very friendly interface.
A great improvement over the PSP and hopefully for Sony redemption for the Go.
A hefty but not out of this world price tag.
A bit disappointing list of launch titles.
A solid platform with a lot of potential.

Worth it? I would say yes. The system may be more expensive than the 3DS but it has some very solid specs to expand upon.

My last thought and it is very last second but a shout out to Majong, This would be a very good platform for Minecraft in my opinion.