So I'm thinking about getting a psp....vita or classic?

[Traveling Bard]

There are some interesting games out there in the psp world that I'd like to check out:

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the sky

Star Ocean: Second Evolution (yes I've played the original on ps2 but it broke so i want this!)

Jeanne'd arc

Wild Arms XF

Half-Minute Hero

Kenka Bancho

Lunar

Ys

Valkyrie Profile 

Crisis Core

Fate/Extra

Brave Story

Adventures to go!

Valkyria Chronicles 2

Breath of Fire 3 (same as star ocean)

I can go on....now, I am not familiar with the ways of the next gen. I just recently got a 2ds lol (3d makes me sick to my stomach) should I purchase a vita? Can it play older psp games? If it can, then I'm on board, if not....should I still get a vita? If so why? Just looking for opinions on the subject. Thanks in advance.

Edit: Did a bit of research and found that the cartridges/cds themselves are not backwards compatible but that "all of the good games for psp are available on the psp vita via the playstation store". How much of that is truth? For those of you out there that have psp vitas, do you see the games in my list above available via the playstation store? Or should I just get a psp classic? 

 

[hian]

I own a vita. If you want to play both PSP titles and ps vita titles, then vita is the way to go.

Unfortunately, vita is very expensive, and if you want to play PSP games you're also going to have to invest in a memory card, because you can only play PSP games by downloading them from the psn store, or by using file transfer.

If you're thinking about jailbreaking and playing pirated games, the vita is pretty much a no-go, so if you want to have fun with it, you'll need enough money for the vita, a memory card, and whatever titles you plan on playing.

Also, crisis core is not available for some reason.

The good thing about the vita, is that it's the future of Sony handheld gaming, which means that you'll steadily be seeing new and interesting titles for it, while the psp is essentially dead now.

If you're just looking to play psp classics, use emulators for ps1 and n64, SNES etc, and you don't want to spend lots of money, the PSP is the answer for you.

The PSP is probably the best handheld ever made for a broad spectrum of gaming to an affordable price.

If you want to play classics, but also have access to newer titles, then you have to go with the vita.

Vita has a small library at the moment in the west, but it has its share of gems, like gravity daze(gravity rush in the west), killzone, ys, the tales of series, persona 4, final fantasy 10 and 10-2, metal gear solid 2-3, muramasa, phantasy star online 2 and a couple more.

There are also a lot of upcoming games that will probably be quite cool -

Freedom wars, a new monster hunter, and gravity daze 2

Square Enix are talking about rereleasing ff12, and kojima has hinted towards a new portable mgs title.

But again, it depends most on how much money you have vs what you want to play.

Edit : I have seen all the games on your list on the Japanese psn store except star ocean and crisis core. I'm guessing the us is largely the same. You can check this out on Wikipedia though.

Also, some titles might be added later, as many titles have been added since launch that weren't originally on psn .

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

Depends on your future plans and budget. Though I'd suggest getting the classic for now and play those games. Then just get the Vita sometime in the future when it gets more games. This is assuming all games that you wanna play for now are the classic PSP games and not the Vita ones.

 

[Athryl]

I didn't check every single one but if having these immediately available on the US store is important I would definitely look them all up before buying a vita, I couldn't find Jeanne'd arc when I searched on my vita (US store) but on the website it does list it for vita.  I am sure some will come down the road, but the biggest vita weakness is the library.  I really like my vita, but it does kind of sound like psp might be better for you (not to mention probably super cheap).  I still have my psp for some of these (like Jeanne'd arc...also PoPoLoCrois).

 

[Seacliff]

I have a PSP, not a vita though.

The vita can only play the digital versions of PSP games, which isn't too much of a bad thing since they tend to be cheaper.

However, Vita is more expensive, I would only recommended getting the Vita if you want Vita exclusive games.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

I really like my vita. Even if just for P4G.

Though BL2 port is also coming! Which I'm excited about, hopefully it plays smoothly (and still wondering how well they are going to make up for having no r2/r3/l2/l3)

(There are also other vita games I am glad I have, but P4G is currently the pinnacle in my opinion.)

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

(and still wondering how well they are going to make up for having no r2/r3/l2/l3)

At least you have the right analog stick on Vita...

 

[hian]

The vita doesn't really need those buttons when you consider that it actually has a touch screen and a touch pad.

If only producers were better at implementing them, nobody would notice most of the time.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

ah yes, the Vita has a touchpad and touchscreen, I almost forgot...

 

[hian]

It also has motion sensors, two cameras and a mike.

It's incredible to me how so many producers fail to see the possibilities of the vita.

It really is one of the best(if not the best) handheld potentially speaking.

It's caught in a vicious cycle though - few games and high price means nobody buys it, and nobody buying it means that producers won't make games for it, which means it won't sell, which means it will remain expensive, rinse and repeat.

If Sony had marketed it better, and secured more projects for it from launch, it could gave done so much better.

 

[Uzuki]

Yeah I think that's the only real problem with the vita. It has everything to give the ultimate edge in the hand held gaming market, but due to lack of games that should expand to a large group of people it just falls flat with nothing in it's library. Plus most of these developers that Sony hires are too lazy to come up with ways to use the touch screen/pad or the camera and mic. That's why if anyone asks me about handhelds I refer them to the 3DS.

To the OP, for know I would recommand a classic PSP. It has a wider range of games (PSP & PSN Exclusives, PS1 Games, and if you're going down the emulator path - GBA and SNES). And if I can recommend some games: Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep (Don't worry you don't have to play the others to understand this one), Tactic Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, FFTactics: War of The Lions, and Disgea 2.

EDIT: And for Crisis Core & Kingdom Hearts those are physical only, but you can find them super cheap on Amazon. I think they're about 15 bucks New.

 

[Traveling Bard]

Edit: Duplicate post? sorry. See below.

 

[Traveling Bard]

I'll probably grab a classic psp for now and grab a vita once they have more vita exclusives that I would be interested in. Don't get me wrong, P4G is tantalizing; however, at the moment it's the only one that catches my eye. I'm sure this will change over time. Thank you for the responses can't wait to tackle some titles! 

 

[Touchfuzzy]

The vita doesn't really need those buttons when you consider that it actually has a touch screen and a touch pad.

If only producers were better at implementing them, nobody would notice most of the time.

For the kind of quick clicking you need for a lot of those buttons in BL2, you need tactile response: IE: Buttons. You also don't want to ACCIDENTALLY activate some of them because they are on timers or are limited use items, and trust me it is SO easy to accidentally touch the backscreen when playing games.

For instance, the clickies for the sticks: Sprint and Melee attack. You kind of need to be able to access melee attack reliably! Especially playing say... Krieg.

I'm 100% sure that the ironsight/zoom and fire buttons are going to be tied to the L and R (they are L2/R2 on the PS3), which leaves activating your action skill (which you don't want to be easy to accidentally do, but want to be able to do on very short notice on PURPOSE), and throwing grenades (limited inventory, same deal).

Touch screen just DOESN'T work as well as dedicated, tactile buttons for things you need to press a lot and be able to click QUICKLY and accurately.

 

[Traveling Bard]

Only thing I can think of to utilize the back touch screen is manipulating attack arcs or something. Like have the mage cast the spell and touch the back. Think like a giant Z. And you're able to make this happen while most likely being able to have the mage run around in case monsters are still chasing him. It would have to be arcs because I can't see utilizing a back touch screen for anything that's supposed to be pin point. You would need a big splash radius with anything attack wise coming from input back there simply because you can't see it. You have to gauge "about" the right point. That would be my attempt to utilize it. Might be cool because then you're hands/fingers aren't in the way of all the action. Surely they've already made a game like that right? 

edit: just thought of how cool it would be to be like an underground bug/alien creature or maybe earth elemental that stabs up from below. So when you use the back touchscreen, you'd have spikes pop up, if you swipe across maybe a tentacle streaks across. Idk, just a thought. Anything like that out there? 

 

[hian]

@touch:

That's your perspective. Personally, I can faster and more reliably use a touchscreen for clicks than I can ordinary buttons just fine.

This is the reason why most well optimized vita games tie quick inventory and skills to on-screen icons. Ys is one example.

On the other hand, long presses, slides etc are actually much more demanding.

Case in point, long presses and slides require longer input, and therefore has a larger margin of error.

when "clicking", ergo doing fast touches, you shouldn't really have more of a problem than typing quickly on your smartphone, which if you've owned one for a while, should be second nature by now.

Besides your example is problematic because you're trying to force an already existing game to fit the Vita's scheme as is, to demonstrate a lack.

That's silly, because no producer would, or should, ever do that.

A producer would and should fit his game to system, and optimize accordingly.

You haven't demonstrated that the game you're talking about absolutely has to be the way it is right now, therefore there is no reason to make the assumption that the control scheme must remain static.

The reason the control scheme seems necessary to you is because the game has been designed and balanced with those buttons in mind - not because those buttons were inherently needed for that game to be made.

And that's a good thing - it's relevant to the complaint I made earlier - namely that hardly any vita games are actually optimized to the vita system, which makes the system itself seem redundant.

I did enjoy MGS on vita though. MGS has always used the entire PS controller. Vita replaced inventory management(l2 r2) with on-screen touches.

Wall interaction, using the same buttons with the rear touch screen, and a couple of more creative uses to replace sensitive button pushes, etc.

All in all, it worked really well for me.

Simply put - either you optimize the gameplay for the system, or if you're porting, you port a game that can fit the system, or alter the gameplay in such a way that a change in the controls won't handicap the players.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

Which the PSP port of Armored Core did so badly. They implemented a manual control mode for it but then it needs so many buttons that they tried to fit to the PSP, making it so hard to use.


Anyway, for me, if I get enough spare money, I might still get a Vita for Ragnarok Ace. Or maybe Square would port KH:3D to Vita

 

[Touchfuzzy]

Except I was explicitly stating I was curious how they were going to implement a port of an existing game with an existing control scheme to the vita. Its what you responded to.

There are certain things they could definitely do in BL2 to try and move buttons around, but the game is designed around two shoulder buttons and two clicky sticks. My suggestion mostly would be changing the gun quickchange stuff to the back pad somehow (possibly using swiping directions, so that its hard to accidentally tap when you don't mean to), which frees up the directional keys. It also frees the triangle button because HONESTLY it was never needed for gun swaps anyway when the directional pad was better for it. Interaction could be moved to clicking on the screen, but it shares a button with reload, which would be awkward to have a screen press for, but not impossible I suppose (click on your weapon in the lower right I guess of the screen I guess for reload).

You still have 4 buttons to tie in somewhere though, action skill could be up on the directional pad, grenade could be triangle, crouch can be moved to the down directional pad to put the sprint button on the square/x/triangle/o section (you need to be able to activate sprint with your left thumb on the left analog, so putting it on the directional pad would be a bad move. Melee would also need to go on the square/x/triangle/o section. To make the controls really work would basically require rejiggering the entire control scheme... and what I fear will happen instead is we will have the l and r used for l2/r2, and l1/3/r1/3 will be back pad taps which I'll accidentally hit consistently because my hands are huge and the back pad of the vita is RIGHT WHERE MY FINGERS SHOULD REST TO HOLD IT COMFORTABLY. Its why I'm glad that most game DON'T try to use the back pad.

The thing is, the biggest thing about moving things to the touch screen has more to do with REMOVING YOUR THUMBS FROM THE STICKS. Because its a FPS game, and its fastpaced. And this is an issue with every fastpaced game. Using the touchscreen generally means removing your thumbs from other controls. The back pad is better about this, but at the same time, you don't have the accuracy you have with pressing things you can either feel (buttons) or see (the front touch screen).

The touchscreen and backpad are useful, but they aren't good for high speed fast paced games.

 

[hian]

The point here is that the vita already has a large amount of fast paced action games, and one of them(killzone) in particular, is optimized for the control scheme you're referring to in its console variants, and they've made it work.

Again, it's about optimization. You're locked down in the mindset that the game has to work the way it does on consoles, and that it therefore won't work. I don't see why you don't see the issue with that.

As I stated, you either optimize the controls, or you optimize gameplay to fit a different control scheme.

You're making the assumption that the gameplay will remain exactly the same for the sake of a control scheme that doesn't work.

Even if that becomes the case, that isn't a weakness of the vita, that's a weakness of the game developers.

By that logic, all gaming systems are potentially flawed, because if a dev makes a game that requires a scheme a certain console doesn't support, that's somehow the consoles problem.

In either case here's a scheme that should satisfy most gamers :

Sprint is tied to tapping the underhand touchpanel, or doubletapping forward.

Melee attacks are linked to a face, or context specific activated by a swift touch to the screen.

Similarly, action skills will provably be linked to icons on the screen.

The worry that this is somehow going to take too long, or take away control from the analog sticks long enough to matter is just, I don't know - nitpicking?

Unless you're a Korean pro gamer, about to embark on the world championship of borderlands I'm pretty sure it's going to be non-essential.

As a longtime player of killzone that has several functions such as grenades linked to the touchscreen, I can tell you that it makes very little difference in anything at all.

The only place it might conceivably make a difference, is if multiplayer existed between console and vita, but it doesn't.

Still you're right that there is a large chance for Frick up here.

I was under impression that they were optimizing, not just straight up porting.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

Not being able to Melee while still either turning and moving is a huge deal, due to enemy movement and knockback. It makes any melee oriented character (krieg) nearly impossible to play. And you can't screw around with the gameplay like you seem to think they should because the game is intentionally THE SAME GAME, because it has cross-save compatibility with the PS3. It would be silly for it to not be the same game.

And yes, because of a few action skills, it taking a split second longer and requiring you to remove your hands from a stick to use IS a downside. With Maya's phaselock, it is the same as firing a weapon, having to remove your hands from the controls to use it lowers accuracy. With Krieg's action skill, you would think it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but once you start doing Release the Beast cycling, the timing of entering rage is VERY tight, as you need to do it between 33% life and dead, and that can be an INCREDIBLY small amount of time in the more difficult modes.

You seem oddly mystified by the fact that I want to actually play THE SAME GAME that I played on the PS3. I don't want a game with the gameplay changed up, and I sincerely doubt any of the fans of the game do. Its a very unique challenge because you ARE taking a game that has an existing control scheme and trying to fit it into a system with a lack of some of those buttons.

I'm not sure why in the world you are disagreeing with me on the concept that in fast paced games, the more commands I can issue quicker, AND AT THE SAME TIME, the better the control scheme.

And I still think that if you love touchscreens that much, you must have much smaller hands, or at the least, thinner fingers than me. I'm not sure how you avoid tapping the backpanel in games that use it. That thing is a nightmare.