E3 2011: Hands-on with the PS Vita
Stepping into Uncharted territory
Sony's much anticipated E3 2011 press conference came to an end at around 18:45 Pacific Time.
At that point, I immediately started queuing to play on one of the 150* PlayStation Vitas that Jack Tretton claimed would be available after the presentation**.
At 21:45 PST, I finally got to the end of the queue, three hours after I joined it***, and the security man at the door told me I had five games to play for four minutes each.
If a console could choose its critic's frame of mind, it wouldn't have chosen the one I had. Thankfully, I was in a far better mood when I put the PS Vita down than I was when I picked it up.
The Colour and the ShapeI'll start with the device. The PS Vita has a five-inch multi-touch OLED touchscreen, a rear touchpad, cameras on the front and the back, and a form factor rather like a DualShock controller, albeit flatter and without R2 and L2.
It reportedly contains a quad-core A9 processor and 256MB of RAM, down from 512MB, sparking rumours that it's had its specs slashed for a cheaper price. If so, the plan has worked. It's only $249 for the wi-fi model, and $299 for the 3G-enabled device.
It's surprisingly light. You expect a powerhouse portable console to be hefty, like a gold brick, but it feels considerably lighter than that. As a result, it also feels a bit flimsy, but we've got no reason to believe it actually is.
One thing I thought might be an issue before picking it up was the width of the touchscreen. Having played action games on Apple's iPad, I feared the PS Vita would exhibit the same problem of making you reach too far with your thumbs.
In practice, it's completely fine – my thumbs aren't long, and I could reach every part of the screen comfortably.
The graphics, predictably, are stunning. Depending on the game. Here they are in the order I played them.
LittleBigPlanetMedia Molecule's classic social platformer uses the features of the PS Vita quite sensitively, introducing moves that feel at home in the game.
One, for instance, requires you to spin a wheel with your finger on the touchscreen, while another requires you to tilt your device. This may be the most promising PS Vita prospect – even above Uncharted: Golden Abyss.
Virtua TennisSega's tennis update – which is a PS Vita launch title – makes extensive use of the portable's touchscreen. All you can do, as far I could tell, is swipe up to place a hard shot, down to play the ball short and slow, and down and then up to play a lob. You can also move your player with the left analogue stick.
It looks incredible, but it gets boring pretty quickly.
Little DeviantsWe heard about this one last week. I suspected then that it's a title conceived and produced entirely to showcase the PS Vita's capabilities, and I'm afraid my short hands-on confirmed this suspicion.
There were two mini-games on show. The first was an AR shooter in which you hold up your device and shoot generic baddies against the backdrop, well, the background. This mini-game also deploys the gyroscope, forcing you to spin around.
The second mini-game simply involves tilting your device to guide a falling sprite towards pickups and away from danger. It's perfectly competent, but neither mini-game seems particularly fun at this stage in Little Deviants's development.
Sound ShapesAn odd one. I only got to play a single level during my hands-on time, and perhaps for that reason it was a slightly incoherent experience. The game itself plays a bit like a slow, grey, easy Super Meat Boy with an indistinct musical theme.
Then you open up the level editor, however, and the music really comes into its own. A bar sweeps repeatedly from left to right, and you can place instruments on the screen to make the bar plunk or press or wield them on its way past, like the mechanism in a music box.
Here you can add various instruments and other kinds of block, stretching or rotating them with two fingers on the rear touchsreen. It's all very nice, but it doesn't really feel like it's taken shape yet.
Uncharted: Golden AbyssUncharted: Golden Abyss is visually stunning, and in most respects it plays just like the PS3 Uncharted games. The differences lie in the control system, which once again encourages you to use the PS Vita's new features.
For instance, if you want to take an enemy out, you can now just tap on him with your finger. If you want to make a jump, you just have to tap where you want to land. Best of all, you can direct Drake to climb a series of outcrops and ledges by 'painting' them with your finger.
It's a nice idea, but quite soon I found myself reverting to the manual style. It's hard to say what approach will win out over an extended play, but in the early stages painting quickly feels like a solution to a nonexistent problem.
Sony Bend has cleverly forestalled this issue by letting you choose your own control methods on the fly. While everybody's bound to use some of the new methods, other new controls are liable to get forgotten about.
But that's no reason whatsoever not to be excited about this iteration of Uncharted. It's a classic Sony handheld game – impressive, epic, and doing the one thing neither Apple nor Nintendo can do: it puts good old-fashioned blockbuster console gaming in your pocket.
*This revelation got a round of applause, but I was sceptical at the time. 150 PS Vitas may sound like a lot, but there were thousands of people at the event. A rare instance of correctness on my part. **At first, I queued up, rather optimistically, at the VIP NGP section (the signs still referred to it thus). After ten minutes of watching very important people glide past my short but unmoving queue, a helpful attendant told me that there were more NGPs elsewhere in the hall. It occurred to me later that I should have shown her a business card, but I didn't dwell on this thought. When a man spends three hours in a queue, he wants there to be a good reason. *** I hadn't eaten, either. Other people in the queue sent their friends off on buffet runs, but I was there all alone.