“Vita means life,” said Kaz Hirai yesterday during Sony’s pre-E3 press conference. “And PlayStation Vita will blur those lines between entertainment and your real life.”
Oh Hirai, you so crazy. Still, the newly-retitled successor to the PSP looks pretty astounding.
Besides the immediately obvious improvements to the old design (two analog sticks! A massive 5 inch OLED touchscreen!) it will feature a whole range of nifty gadgets. There is a touchpad in the back of the device, sixaxis motion sensing (everyone groan and think of developers forcing us to wave our systems around) as well as built-in microphone, GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth. Front and rear facing cameras allow for head tracking and face detection.
Games will come on proprietary flash cards called NVG cards, which will come in 2 and 4 GB sizes with some space reserved for saves and patches. Higher capacity cards are in the planning.
Games revealed include Uncharted 3, ModNation Racers, LittleBigPlanet, Ruin and Street Fighter x Tekken, which includes Cole from inFamous (yay?) They’re looking at near-PS3 quality.
$249 will buy you a Wi-Fi only model, and $299 will get you a model with AT&T 3G access. It’s definitely a price point that puts it in direct competition with Nintendo’s 3DS, which hasn’t taken off the way they hoped it would. It’ll be interesting to see what Nintendo has up its sleeves today to combat this.
Expect the Playstation Vita to hit this holiday season and by the way- that’s not “Vita” like “vitameatavegamin“, it’s “Vee-tah”.