PS Vita

I'm just reading the Engadget review of the PlayStation Vita.

PS Vita appears to be the culmination of Sony's efforts not to understand how the video game industry works at all. Like the Nintendo of old (and the Sony of always) they're trying to push the hardware side of the business with seemingly no actual idea of what people would actually *like* to use.

When it was announced with its quad core CPU, 5" screen and other goodies, promising 'PS3-like graphical quality' I couldn't help but feel like I'd seen this dance played out before with the PSP. Sony are once again offering current-gen console graphics in a handheld that seemed determined to sacrifice battery life and portability for pixels, polygons and vertices.

The reason this amazes me so, is that the precedent for consumers wanting the opposite is well established. Not that I think you should give consumers what they think they want - I'll write an article on that at some point no doubt - but there have been three major victories in portable technology that put life span and potability ahead of all other aspects of the device, and these have been the iPod, the MacBook Air and the Nintendo Game Boy.

Paint me an Apple fanboy if you will, but hear me out at least. With the iPod, Apple had a portable media player that put accessibility and battery ahead of virtually all other aspects of the hardware. Every major revision boasted improved battery life and functionality, whilst things like video playback were relegated to a long-delayed afterthought despite the competition all offering a healthy market of PMP devices which would play music, movies and radio (all with terrible battery life). I recall reading about a PMP with a large LCD that would give only an hour of video playback - that means you couldn't even watch a full movie on it - who was the real market for this device? Most of these PMPs were the size of a 3.5" hard drive, which meant they were hardly pocketable.

The MacBook Air followed a similar philosophy - try and optimise battery life and size/weight. In the original (and oft mocked) model, the hardware was severely compromised: the CPU was extremely slow and tended to overheat easily, the GPU was slow, the price was exorbitant, the supplied hard disk was slow as molasses and contributed to the poor overall system performance. After the first major revision however, the MacBook Air became a kind of gold standard for laptops, something Intel is now aggressively pushing all PC manufacturers to emulate. Intel were also extremely ready to abandon the high clock speeds they were aggressively pursuing when they saw that portable designs were taking off. This is what effectively ended the Pentium 4's architecture as they moved development onto the Centrino platform to develop the 'core' CPUs (Centrino itself was actually a side project to make low power CPUs based on the Pentium 3).

The Game Boy (getting on to actual video games!) was chunky, but followed two main design considerations - battery life and durability. The Game Boy was durable as heck, and compared to every single competing system, it had a battery life to kill for. Game Boy remained stagnant in the hardware department for a decade, before the extremely minor upgrade in the form of Game Boy color was released. Game Boy Advance followed the same principle, and Game Boy Advance SP took it to (arguably) the ultimate level, being perhaps the ultimate in portable console design (regrettably, hardware isn't timeless). Nintendo DS began to eschew the battery life ratio in favour of a radical new design and philosophy, but the course was corrected with DS lite, though the lite was pushing the boundaries of durability that Nintendo usually had.

Nintendo 3DS changed all of that though. Though smaller than the DS lite, it seems chunkier. The battery life is extremely disappointing - I cannot leave mine in sleep mode for longer than a day or two or it will go flat. Sony has once again sacrificed battery - three hours with default settings is simply awful, and consumers shouldn't settle for Sony's 'solution' - an external battery. Nintendo should be celebrating PS Vita though - in comparison the PS Vita makes the 3DS longevity go from 'barely adequate' to amazing!

I feel the biggest issue that will plague the Vita will be its power. We are looking at quad-core smartphones this year, and looking at some iOS and Android titles I'm seeing the gap closing quickly. I'm also still not convinced that extreme graphics are even a compelling reason to buy a handheld. The best handheld titles seem to be the simple 'pick up and play' sorts. I have found Super Mario 3D Land much more playable than Resident Evil: Revelations, for example, though Revelations did try to tackle the short-form style admirably. A great example is probably The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is a little too true to its console roots and lacks a save system that complements portable gaming.

No amount of hardware will make many of the best portable games any better. PS Vita's lacklustre additional 'abilities' make it a poor contender next to the iPod touch or iPhone, which are realistically its most direct competitors. Nintendo should have released 3DS much cheaper, and I still think it should be cheaper than its RRP today, but Nintendo have almost found a sweet spot by remembering their original market - children. Nintendo have never lost their stranglehold on that market, and whilst the adult market is now larger by an order of magnitudes, it gives a steady user base.

PS Vita also continues Sony's long tradition of needless proprietary junk by using a Vita-exclusive memory card, which is many times more expensive than standard micro SD cards. Presumably this is to protect their software, but realistically this will be hacked within days (if it hasn't been already).

If the PS Vita does well I will be genuinely surprised. If the PS Vita does well because of the appearance of third party console emulation and pirated games via hacks, I will not be surprised. I am currently preparing to not be surprised. Go team.