So the Vita is finally out here in the States. It's been sitting on shelves in Japan since December, and I've spent two months trying not to read too many impressions posts so I could go in mostly blind. Tuesday was launch day and I swung by the Best Buy on my lunch break instead of eating, which tells you where my priorities are these days.
First impression: the screen is genuinely gorgeous. OLED, 5 inches, and it makes the original PSP screen look like something out of a calculator. I fired up Uncharted: Golden Abyss right there in the parking lot before I even got back to the office and the character models looked better than some PS3 launch titles did. Sony's been saying "console power in your pocket" for a year now and for once the marketing isn't lying to you.
Now the part that's going to annoy everyone, and I do mean everyone: the memory cards. You cant use a normal SD card. Sony made their own proprietary format and a 4GB card runs you about $20, an 8GB is closer to $30, and if you want the 32GB card (which, lets be honest, you probably do if you're buying digital games) that's $99.99. On top of the $249 for the WiFi model or $299 if you want 3G. I get that every handheld maker loves locking you into their own storage, Nintendo did it too, but this feels especially cynical given how cheap SD cards have gotten. My brother-in-law works in IT and just laughed at me when I told him the price. Not a good look for a launch day.
That gripe aside, I'm having a genuinely good time with it. The touch controls on the back panel are weirder than I expected, ModNation Racers uses them for drifting and it took me a solid twenty minutes to stop accidentally triggering stuff by just holding the thing normally. Once it clicked though it felt kind of clever instead of gimmicky, which is more than I can say for a lot of "innovative" input schemes over the years (looking at you, every third-party Wii peripheral from 2007).
The other big story this week
Completely different topic, but worth mentioning since it's been all over my Twitter feed the last few days: the whole Google/Safari tracking thing has snowballed into something bigger than I think anyone expected. A Stanford researcher found Google was using a workaround to plant tracking cookies in Safari even though Safari blocks third-party cookies by default, and then it came out that the same trick was being used to get around similar protections in Internet Explorer. Google's line is that it wasn't intentional, some kind of side effect of a feature meant to let signed-in Google users share content with +1 buttons. Maybe. I don't think anyone at Google sat down and said "lets deceive Safari users" as a company strategy, but the effect is the same regardless of intent, and it's the kind of story that makes me twitchy about how much of my browsing history is sitting on servers I have no visibility into.
I bring this up not because it has anything to do with the Vita, obviously, but because it's a good reminder that the stuff happening on the small screen in your hand and the stuff happening quietly in the browser tab you're not looking at are both worth paying attention to. One's fun and one's a little unsettling, and I spent my whole lunch break thinking about both of them, which probably says something about how my brain works.
Anyway. If you're on the fence about the Vita: buy a bigger memory card than you think you need, budget for it up front, and don't let the sticker shock kill the fun of the actual hardware, because the hardware really is fun. I'll probably write more once I've put some real hours into Golden Abyss instead of just the first twenty minutes in a parking lot.