Review: Sony PlayStation Vita

The most distinguishing feature of the PlayStation Vita, Sony's new portable game machine, may go unnoticed at first glance.

The thing Sony is banking on occupies a tiny little area on the face of the unit, roughly a square centimeter in size.

Do you see it? It's the analog joystick, the one on the right side, sitting just beneath the familiar PlayStation buttons. This may seem a relatively minor distinction, but it's the thing that furthest separates the Vita from the Nintendo 3DS, iPhone, Kindle Fire, or any other self-contained gaming platform. Two analog sticks means hardcore gamers don't have to compromise; they can play Uncharted: Golden Abyss on a Vita the same way they'd play it on a PS3, using one stick to move and another to aim.

Absent some hypothetical and unlikely Nintendogs-style killer app, Sony doesn't have a prayer of selling the $250 Vita ($300 with 3G connectivity) to the sort of erstwhile gamer who is perfectly happy playing on a tablet. So the company's strategy would seem to be to double down on the hard-core crowd by aiming at the sort of person who feels anything without sticks and buttons barely qualifies as a videogame in the first place.

Two analog sticks means hardcore gamers don't have to compromise; they can play Uncharted: Golden Abyss on a Vita the same way they'd play it on a PS3, using one stick to move and another to aim.To that effect, the Vita works very well. The beefy processing power, stunning OLED display and console-like controls can come together to produce experiences like Uncharted that feel like miniaturized home games. The open question is whether software makers will want to invest the time and money into crafting exclusive Vita games that take advantage of all that capability.

The Vita will be released in the United States on Feb. 22. Wired got its hands on a Japanese unit, released in December, for this early review. (I tested the Wi-Fi version, as a Japanese 3G plan wouldn't do me any good here.)

Your PlayStation Vita won't exactly be going into your pocket. Its size is somewhere between a Nintendo 3DS and a smallish tablet. But it's comfortable to play for extended periods of time, in large part because it's so wide and flat. The sticks aren't like the sliding pads of the PSP or 3DS; they're joysticks that tilt. The power adapter can split apart into a USB cable for charging or transferring data, although you have to use the included proprietary cable to plug in the device since there's no mini-USB input.

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The Vita may be chasing after established gamers, but it's hardly a traditional machine. Sony has (finally) bowed to the pressures of the market and added touch sensitivity to the screen. You use your finger to interact, not a stylus as with Nintendo's machines. The menu screens all use touch: You swipe the screen to unlock it, touch to scroll through the icons on the menu, and tap them to open the software. Vita's UI has a lot of cute little touches that make it fun to play around with. If you try to scroll the icons too far, they'll stretch and bounce. Unlocking the screen or closing apps is done by peeling a "sticker" off the screen by swiping from a detached corner.

There's another control option: Most of the rear of the unit is a large touch-sensitive panel, so you can control games by swiping your fingers along the back of the Vita. Sony seems to have added this without any sense of what it would be used for, though, and I haven't played any games yet where it really changes things. The closest anything has come is Uncharted, which allows you to zoom your sniper rifle in and out by moving your finger up and down.

Another way the Vita breaks with tradition is shopping. As with other game consoles, the Vita will have games available on cartridges in stores and as downloads online. The difference is that every cartridge game will also be available on the online store the same date as its retail release, usually a little bit cheaper. So if you don't want to carry around a bag full of game carts, you don't have to. Of course, since games run about $30-50 online, they're hardly impulse purchases. Demos for some, but not all, games are available on the digital store.

There is a catch, of course. Sony's penchant for proprietary accessories has led to one of the Vita's biggest flaws. The device has no internal storage – at least none that can be used for saved game data or downloaded content. If you want to download anything, you have to buy a Vita memory card, which range from $20 for 4GB up to $100 for 32GB. You can't use existing cards. Vita cards are unique to the platform. Even worse, many cartridge-based games (including, yes, Uncharted) won't even boot without a memory stick.

It's easy to back up data to a PC or PS3, though, using a Content Manager application. If you're having bad flashbacks of SonicStage right about now, rest assured it doesn't require a garbage piece of bloatware to function. The PC program is a small application that is used to assign four folders on your PC for the PS Vita to access (music, movies, photos and games), and you do all of the data transfer using simple software on the Vita itself.

There are a lot of other built-in functions – the usual stuff like friend messaging and a "party" function that lets you group a bunch of people together. The most unique one is Near, an app that shows you information about other gamers in your immediate area who also have a Vita. You can see what games they're playing and send them a friend request. This doesn't work as well as it should right now – you're supposed to be able to trade virtual in-game items with each other, but Near is telling me I have to share my online ID to do this. I am sharing my ID, but it doesn't think I am.

Sony says a Vita should get about four or five hours of gaming time out of a battery charge, and this jibes with my experience. I've had mixed results so far when leaving it in sleep mode: at one point I left it for a few days and returned to find it still had some battery, but the next time I abandoned it for a while it totally drained itself and I had to charge it for ten minutes before I could even turn it back on again.

Another limitation: You can only have one user account per system, so you can't share a Vita with other people who have PlayStation accounts, nor can you create, for example, a Japanese account to download games from other regions.

As a PlayStation device, the Vita's success or failure will ultimately be the result of its game library. I don't have enough visibility to determine what its software calendar will look like past launch day, but as of now, it's enough to say the Vita is a capable piece of hardware with a user interface that runs laps around the PSP's, just with a few potentially irritating flaws.

WIRED Big, bright screen. Console-quality graphics. Comfortable to hold and play at length. Dual analog controls. Touch-based user interface is a winner.

TIRED No internal storage. Requires expensive proprietary memory sticks (even for some cartridge games!). Only one account per system allowed. Expensive games with no cheap options (yet).