Short impressions on the PSVita

Short impressions on the PSVita

Recently I went into my local Game Station store and spent a short five minutes playing with the Playstation Vita and it definitely gave off a brilliant first impression.

I purchased the original Playstation Portable a year after it's release in September 2005. When the PSP came round it was seen as a direct rival to the Nintendo DS that was released around a similar time. It was clear to see that the PSP was far closer to the Xbox and PS2 video games of the time and as a result was a massive success everywhere it was released. As of March 31st 2007, the Playstation Portable had sold 25.39 million unites worldwide. All together, since it's release date, the PSP has sold 71.4 million units (as of September's 14 2011.) Now these are no figures to scoff at and Sony wanted to bring the Playstation Portable up to date with the latest technology that is available to us today!

The device includes two analog sticks, a 5-inch (130 mm) OLED multi-touch capacitive touch-screen, 3G, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support. Internally, the device features a quad core ARM Cortex-A9 core processor and a quad core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit. All these specifications definitely suggest this was built to handle some really impressive gaming with plenty of power to back this up.

Now, let's get on to my own little personal review of the PSVita When I saw a few videos on the hand-set, I thought the two analog sticks were going to feel loose and plastic, however they were completely different and felt nice and responsive and didn't feel like they would break over time at all. The grips were grippy enough and in general the sticks felt really nice to use.

I played the first half of an exhibition game on the Fifa Football demo and within this time I got a good glimpse at how much of an improvement the graphics had made since the original PSP. The shadows were amazing, the lighting was bright and dark in the right places and there was no lag anywhere at all. I was with a friend at the time and we both commented on how it looked a lot like a portable version of the PS3. I had the idea that these graphics would were in the middle of the PS2 and the PS3, I was genuinely overwhelmed!

The browser was very smooth when I had a short play with that too, however the checker boarding was a serious problem and definitely needs to be sorted out in a firmware update.

The rest of the software wad very nice and definitely felt like a very modern handheld gaming device. The software is so far more modern than Nintendo latest edition of the DS. In addition, I have researched some of the titles that have been announced to be released on the PS vita and there are games such as Call of Duty, Virtua Tennis & Uncharted Drakes Fortune. So the Vita definitely isn't low on support in the gaming department so this is another massive selling point.

There are probably quite a few things I have missed out on about the PS Vita, but this article is based on my short play with the device and a little research that was done. I hope this article will help you in making your decision on whether to purchase the PS Vita or not.

Prices: Wi-Fi only model £209.99

   Wi-Fi + 3G model £259.99