Reposted from nerdmobile.wordpress.com (here)

I talk a lot about Xbox, and I’ve spoken briefly about the Wii, and there’s some chatter about the DS, but I haven’t put hands on a Sony instrument for gaming since the PS2. This was a thing that apparently needed to be corrected, as a supporter and now-sponsor of this nerdyblog has seen fit to gift me with a PS Vita.

So fancy!

Let me just preface this by saying that I’ve never been particularly antiVita, unlike my feelings toward the PS3. Vita just never really jumped out to grab me. It didn’t start out with games I was interested in, and then nobody I knew had one, so it kind of fell to the wayside of my brain, and lay there dying in the gutter for a really long time. Significantly, when taking stock of the handheld machines currently in use in the Handheld Lounges of PAX, the ratio of 3DS to Anything At All Remotely Sony was wildly skewed in the favor of 3DS. It’s hard to seriously look at anything with intent to purchase when you literally see four of them in a whole convention time span. Literally. Four. And they were all together, obviously friends. So I’m not sure if that counts as separate sightings.

And it’s not just the Vita. The PSP also had low showings.

Don’t think it’s just because people don’t bring their handheld gaming systems with them to conventions. A friend of mine started the weekend with 44 street passes on his 3DS. By the end of our run, he had over 2,000. Look at those numbers again. Do it one more time, just so you can be sure.

It was a sea of Nintendo everywhere you looked, if you were looking for portable gaming devices. They even outranked the people who were playing games on their phones. Previous to this, I had wondered if we were going to see more phone games laying around in our beanbags. Nope. 3DS. A healthy mix of the 3DS and the 3DSXL, too. It’s fair to say that I left the convention once again sure that there wasn’t really anything interesting going on with the Vita. I mean, at least in previous years we’d seen the PSP show up. Enough to have tourneys with them, in fact. I saw one PSP this year. One sad, lonely PSP.

BUT! This is a review for a reason, isn’t it?

A few weeks ago, I had somebody put a Vita in my hands and tell me to just screw around with it. I played a little bit of a game called Dragon’s Crown, and actually had to stop before I even finished the tutorial. Not because I had to go, or because the game was shitty. But because I knew that if I didn’t stop then, he would never get his Vita back. The game was beautiful to look at, and so much fun to play. Even just the little bit of the tutorial that I went through was entertaining as hell. Most of my time with the machine was looking at the UI and seeing everything that the thing could do.

It’s comfortable to hold, and easy to manage. It doesn’t look like it should be either of those, so I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that it wasn’t going to kill my hands or make me hate my life after an hour. The display is bright, and the colors are glorious. The clarity of the images is completely astounding.

Cut to yesterday.

My supporter wanted to see something in my hands that wasn’t what I normally game on. It was sent for my perusal and review. I thought that it would take a bit of time for me to be comfortable enough to talk about even owning a Vita, since it was a rather quick turnabout. But you know what? I don’t need time. What happened when I got it home speaks volumes.

Yes, there’s always the aspect of “Ooh, shiny new toy” that goes along with anything. Even things that you’re not particularly excited about, like the crappy laptop your school lets you borrow for a week, or that shitty rental car you have to use because yours is in for major service. I was already pretty excited about the Vita, so it didn’t take much for me to put aside everything else and fool around with it.

Of course, fooling around with it for a couple of minutes and then getting back to the tasks I’d been aiming myself toward turned into fooling around with it for hours and hours and not getting much of anything else accomplished.

There was the normal handful of starter minutes, where I just familiarized myself with the UI and explored a few things. Then played with the brilliant Welcome Park, which doesn’t just walk you through what the Vita can do, but actually lets you play games with each feature. Fun games, too. There’s a different setup for each feature, a different game you play to familiarize yourself with it, and it’s fun enough that I managed to forget that they were teaching me to use the Vita. I replayed them, even.

I looked around the PlayStation Store after that, and found a few games that were free. I added friends who are already on the Network, just to see how that works, and stopped myself before I discovered anything about the Wallet, because I knew that would be bad. With the free games and the game that the system came with, I honestly have enough to occupy myself with for a good while. I don’t need to buy more games. Even though I really want to. Really, I’d love to. I may or may not have a list of games that I may or may not intend to buy at some future point that may or may not be in a closer future than what I could possibly be suggesting here.

The games I got from the PSStore for free are Fireworks (which involved the AR cards, and I honestly gave up on as soon as it said “Get out your AR cards), BreakQuest, Treasure of Montezuma Blitz, Ecolibrium, and Jetpack Joyride. I felt like that was a good start.

I didn’t play very much of BreakQuest, I just did one level, it was amusing and fun, I just think that I started it a little late in the day to really engage. Same for Treasure of Montezuma. Also, that one has some weird timing rules that don’t seem to fit with real world laws of nature, and I’ll have to play it again to really make up my mind. Ecolibrium was fun, in that obsessive compulsive sort of way, where you want to sit and play it for hours. Thankfully, it won’t let you. It’s a VERY beautiful game, though, and I could happily just sit and stare at the screen.

My true downfall was Jetpack Joyride. I cannot even tell you how many hours I played it, because I lost track. I can tell you that I’ve collected enough coin to have unlocked a couple tiers of gadgets, and that I’ve done a ton of missions and gained a lot of trophies. I can tell you that my last run was 1,174m, which is not my best score, but it was about 8am at that point and I had to put the Vita down, or it was going to become a part of my flesh. This game is so addictive and completely entertaining that I didn’t at any time care that I was essentially doing the same thing over and over again. There’s a lot of stuff that’s randomized in there so you can’t get used to an area and just fly through it, which is good. The vehicles that you get are very creative, though my favorite is – and this will come as a surprise (sarcasm) – Mr Cuddles.

I have not even touched The Walking Dead yet to do anything more than install it. And I’m already completely enamored of the Vita. I’m excited to play the game, obviously. I want to play the game. I will play the game. (this is me convincing myself to put Jetpack Joyride the hell down and do something else)

More than when I was playing Dragon’s Crown, I cannot fathom why more people don’t own the Vita. It’s a brilliant little machine, and a pleasure to game on. It’s got options galore. The abilities it has to cross platforms with the games between it and the PS3 are pretty amazing. It’s got PS2 and PSP games available for download. If you have a PS3 and are already paying for the PlayStation Plus part of the Network, you can also use it on the Vita. So… what is it? Was it the fact that the games were few and far between at launch? Is the rest of the world firmly situated in the same mindset that I was, that there’s nothing interesting going on there?

Why weren’t more of them wandering around PAX?

Why don’t people own or want to own this device?

I see the benefits and fun in both the Vita and the 3DS. Is it just because Nintendo has a history and a set fanbase due to Pokemon? I can see that hardcore Pokemon fans would jump to whatever Nintendo puts out so that they can have that, seeing as the Pokemons are not on PlayStation at all. But the Pokemon crowd VS Everybody Else is still relatively small. They can’t be the sole deciding factor on which way the market swings. And it’s certainly not the 3D aspect of it, considering that Nintendo is now also doing the 2DS.

So. What? Rabid fanboyism? Brand loyalty? I need answers.