Most people interested in the Vita won’t be concerned with the touch controls, though: they want an in-depth gaming experience and they want to play games the classic way, with real buttons. All the familiar gestures are there – swipe, tap, and pinch-zoom. Once we were used to controlling the device with touch, however, it became a seamless and familiar experience. When in the Vita’s menus you can’t use the tactile buttons at all, which we found a little strange at first. Touch-based controls are also used to navigate the system’s user-interface, which is built on Android architecture. The WarioWare-like game Frobisher Says actually gets you to use both the front and rear touchpad simultaneously to ‘squash’ characters on-screen. Launch title Little Deviants, for example, requires you to use the rear touchpad to roll a ball around an environment by pushing up the ground beneath it. The Vita has both a front and rear touchpad and a gyroscope, and many of the more casual games are either primarily touch- or movement-based. That said, Sony have also incorporated a number of modern features designed for mainstream, casual gamers. The tactile buttons are also easy to use for those who are accustomed to gaming on a PS3. The thumbsticks feel solid to use – more solid than Nintendo’s 3DS thumbstick – and make camera control and movement as easy as it is on a classic dual-shock controller. The Vita is the first handheld to have dual thumbsticks, which are almost essential for a really enjoyable first-person shooter experience. It’s clear that Sony have really listened to what hardcore gamers want in a device. The Vita is for hardcore gamers – the ones who use their PlayStation 3 at home to play games like Call of Duty, Heavy Rain, or Uncharted. The folks marketing the device have been saying it’s like having a PlayStation 3 in your pocket – that’s not quite true, but not that far off base either. The Vita is designed to give you experiences beyond Angry Birds. It provides an entirely different experience. Add a 5-inch, 960 x 544-pixel display and a mixture of both touch and button controls, and the Vita is not really comparable to a smartphone at all. It has a quad-core, 2GHz CPU and a quad-core dedicated graphics processor. The Vita, priced in New Zealand at $450 for Wi-Fi and $550 for Wi-Fi and 3G, is probably the most powerful handheld device on the market. This is where the PlayStation Vita comes in. Smartphones are now more powerful and more portable than the original PSP, and mobile gaming has in recent years been dominated by games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, which provide bite-sized chunks of entertainment without a real, immersive experience. Perhaps more importantly, portable gaming now has to confront a new class of enemy – the smartphone. Needless to say, it’s gotten rather dated, even with the release of upgraded versions and the PSP Go. The PSP had a 333MHz processor and a 3.8-inch, standard definition display. Handheld gaming has come a long way in the seven years since the release of the original PlayStation Portable.
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