Got my Vita last night. Here are some first impressions from someone who never had a PSP, and has a PS3 but uses it mostly as a Blu-Ray player (the last game I played on it was FFXIII and I quit that after about 30 hours).
So out of the box, this thing arrives with a charge! Yay! I remember the days when you'd get a new toy and your first 3-5 hours with it were plugging it in and waiting for it to charge.
I put my memory card in and fire it up. Screen is pretty. Do I want to connect this with my PSN profile? Okay. Oh, you can't do that until you have a system update. Why not run the system update thingy first, then ask? I can't log onto PSN, but whatever, I guess I'll do that later.
The female computer voice welcomes me and starts running me through some lame games to demo the touchscreens, cameras, and tilt controls. It's all very whiz bang. I'm excited, but the idea that I'd ever want to play these more than once makes me roll my eyes.
The screen is really awesome. And big. Actually, this whole unit feels really big. The picture is crystal clear, but we're in Sony land and it's a little scary too.
Here's the thing in general about the Sony interface-- it feel soulless. From the female computer voice to the intro games, I'm impressed by the whiz bang future tech, but I feel like I'm in Minority Report world where everything about it has been focus grouped and psych studied to deliver the corporation's message and brand. I am being hosted in Sony corporate world, and I will like this because they have detailed metrics of exactly what the demographics of Vita buyers will like.
I realize that Nintendo and Microsoft are also large corporations, but the Nintendo interface seems to be a fun cartoon world, and they've made that choice because their designers love cartoons and want to get everyone to play in their cartoon world. The Microsoft interface is put together by computer geeks who are geniuses with no social skills, so half the time it overreaches and doesn't work (either in tech or as an interface), but they'll try something different in the next rev and maybe that'll work better.
That's a derail there, but just wanted to lay my cards on the table as to how I feel about the Sony interface.
So I get through the welcome stuff and head straight to Settings to do a system update. While that's downloading and installing I actually turn on the PS3 and try to log on to PSN from there. Oh that needs a system update too. Now I'm surrounded by everything updating, so I get out my 3DS and play some Pushmo.
I have Rayman Origins, but I don't know where to put the card yet, so let's head to the Playstation Store. Oh hey,Rayman Origins is on sale on the store, as well as Uncharted. My copy of Uncharted hasn't arrived yet, it'll probably be here on Monday. I paid $50 on Amazon for Uncharted but here on the store it's $35. Is it the same game? Looks like it. Same for Rayman Origins. So I'm paying $15 to not have the game loaded on the overpriced memory stick? Really? I can understand there's a value in having your bigger games on their own cards. I wonder if I can put more blank cards in the other slot (the one for the game cards) and increase my storage capacity. I don't know. At this point, it seems kind of dumb to buy games at retail instead of directly from Sony (provided you have the room on your memory stick.)
So I grab Vita Fireworks, Vita Cliff Diving, the Uncharted demo, Netflix, and the Vita Twitter app, all free. Download speeds are pretty abysmal, just like every time you've ever downloaded a system update for your PS3. 10 minutes for Fireworks, another 10-15 for Cliff Diving, and Uncharted says it's going to be a half an hour. I wait for Fireworks, and start it up. While I'm watching the intro movie, the Vita goes into sleep mode, which defaults to 1 minute of inactivity. I wake it back up, set the sleep mode timer to 5 minutes (the highest you can set it) and watch the rest of the intro movie. It turns out Fireworks is an augmented reality app, and I left the cards in the box in the other room. I'm too lazy to go get them, so I quit and wait for Cliff Diving.
Oh hey, my PS3 system update is done. I turn off the Vita screen and go over to my PS3 to kill time while the rest of my stuff downloads. I see they're doing a third season of The Tester, so I download the first episode to see if they changed the format, or are trying anything different in the third season. They aren't. The Tester is still just as brain dead the third time around as it was the first time. We're introduced to the contestants, who are all excited to compete for a QA job (instead of just filling out an application, like any other high school graduate), and their first challenge is to go to a job interview while their head is in a clear box full of giant cockroaches. I like the torture aspect of the show, because the contestants are all brain dead twenty-somethings, but it's really a waste of my time.
I head back to the Vita about 30 minutes later, and it has turned itself off (instead of just the screen). Okay, maybe everything downloaded and it turned off. Nope. Nothing has downloaded at all, in fact, the second I turned the screen off, all the downloads stopped. Whee! Good defaults! I restart the downloads and make sure I keep pushing stuff to keep the Vita awake so the downloads will download. I grab Rayman and figure out where to put the card and it installs, but now I'm scared that if I start a game all my downloads will stop, so I just let the icon bounce at me asking to be pushed. My battery indicator is now at half and I really haven't played a game yet.
I go back to my 3DS and play Pushmo while things are downloading.
I finally get everything installed, and I'm ready to play something when my wife comes home, we make dinner, and have a night together (we watched There's No Business Like Show Business, a 50's musical with Ethel Merman and Marylin Monroe). That was the end of the Vita for the evening.
No games were played, except Pushmo.
