1285: Wake Up Club

I hate mornings.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I don’t mind mornings in and of themselves, and in fact if I get my day started early enough I’m always pleasantly surprised how much free time I have left at the end of it. What I actually hate is the combination of waking up and getting up.

Waking up is the first challenge. Or rather, remaining awake after waking up for the first time is the first challenge — the actual act of waking up isn’t, in and of itself, especially difficult.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I tend to have very vivid dreams in the morning after I’ve woken up for the first time and fallen asleep again. Sometimes I have very vivid dreams immediately before I wake up for the first time, too, and the immediate temptation is to fall back asleep again to “finish” them, because waking up almost inevitably interrupts them at an interesting, exciting or otherwise pleasing point. (Sometimes they’re nightmares — err, morningmares? — but even then there’s a sort of morbid curiosity to see how things pan out.)

It’s so easy to just close my eyes and drift back off to sleep again, particularly if Andie has gone out to work and I’ve been left by myself. Without anywhere I “have” to be and with a job that I don’t need to start until late morning, I can quite feasibly fall back asleep again if I want to.

Doing that isn’t really compatible with having a productive day, though, and certainly isn’t compatible with the programme of light exercise (walking 3-4 miles a day at a fairly leisurely pace) I’ve been following for the past couple of weeks. So I’ve been forcing myself out of bed in the morning, even if I don’t really want to. And this morning I really didn’t want to, but I managed it anyway.

One tool I’ve found quite helpful in making myself wake up and get up first time is a freebie download for Vita called Wake Up Club. This is basically little more than an alarm clock app, but it has a few little features built in that engage the brain enough to prevent you from falling asleep again.

There are two main ways it does this. Firstly is the fact that in order to get it to shut up in the first place, you have to actually pick up the Vita, press the “Yes” key when it asks if it’s all right to let the Wake Up Club app bring the Vita out of sleep mode without you having to touch the power button. Once the app is open, you then have to tap on a leisurely bouncing image of your PSN avatar to actually get the thing to be quiet.

Except there’s another step after that, too, which is where the “club” bit of the app’s title comes from. Every morning, Wake Up Club picks a bunch of people who have all set their alarm for the same time and invites them to harass each other if they don’t wake up immediately. You do this by tapping on their avatar, which causes their Vita to yell at them until they, too, inform their device that they have indeed woken up and could they please stop shouting at them?

I’m actually yet to have to do this on other “players” who are using the app, since everyone seems to wake up fairly quickly. The only time I get to tap on other people’s avatars are if there’s no-one else “playing,” or if the Vita has had some sort of PSN-related meltdown in the night and has lost connection. Then you get to tap on the avatars of computer-controlled “club” members until they wake up, which takes a good few seconds. By the time you have finished tapping on things, you’re well and truly awake, those simple motor actions being enough to get your brain moving beyond that point that will allow you to fall asleep again as soon as your head hits the pillow.

Also there are trophies if you are a trophy whore and like receiving arbitrary rewards for “gamifying” your life. So there’s that.

Anyway. Yeah. If you’re having trouble waking up, get some form of alarm clock that requires you to do something more than just hit it to shut it up. If you have a Vita, Wake Up Club is as good as anything, particularly as it’s free.

1084: Darkdeath Evilman

So, I seem to have jumped down something of a rabbit-hole with regard to my current gaming. Specifically, I seem to have jumped down the NIS America rabbit-hole, which means lots of brightly-colored anime-style JRPGs with heavy degrees of ridiculousness. Hyperdimension Neptunia, which I discussed yesterday (and which I’m aware is developed by Idea Factory rather than Nippon Ichi themselves), is a fine example of said ridiculousness being taken to the extreme with its personifications of gaming platforms and companies as cute anime girls with a habit of flashing their panties.

I decided to start something on portable in parallel, though, so I had something to play on the toilet/in bed/in coffee shops. I wanted to pick something that was portable-friendly — i.e. something you could dip into in short sessions rather than feeling like you need to spend hours at a time playing, but which would last a good long while in total. The game I picked for this purpose was the rather gloriously-titled Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman for the PSP/Vita, a game from the Disgaea team and one which wears its influences on its sleeve.

Z.H.P. (as it shall be known from hereon) is an isometric-perspective tactical roguelike RPG that plays somewhat like Disgaea (which is normally a strategy game somewhat akin to Final Fantasy Tactics, if you’re unfamiliar) would play if you only controlled one character and could only move them one space at a time per turn. It follows the traditional style of roguelike gameplay, in other words — you move, the enemies move, but between moves you can stand still and contemplate what to do next without fear of getting twatted while you come to your decision. As per usual for the genre, you find yourself exploring a series of increasingly-difficult, increasingly-complex randomly-generated dungeons in an attempt to become as strong as possible and eventually take down the titular bad guy Darkdeath Evilman.

There’s a bit of a twist on the usual formula, though. Rather than featuring a permadeath system that forces you to start over when you bite the big one in a dungeon, Z.H.P. instead features a rather odd levelling system whereby each time you enter a dungeon, you start at level 1, but your total levels gained over your lifetime playing the game determines your base statistics. If you die, you lose all the loot you acquired on that particular dungeon run, but any levels you gained are added on to your total level count, boosting your base statistics by a little and meaning that the next time you start a dungeon run, you’ll be slightly stronger even though you’re still technically level 1. If that makes your head hurt, don’t worry — it starts to make sense after playing for only a short period.

The eventual aim of the game is to work your way through the story and make the nameless, voiceless protagonist (who, rather endearingly, is canonically named simply Main Character) into the hero he was supposed to replace — the Unlosing Ranger, the only one who can defeat Darkdeath Evilman. Every so often in the story, you’ll find yourself returning to Earth from the Bizarro Earth in which you’ve been doing all your dungeon-crawling, and thrust into a traditional JRPG-style battle against Darkdeath Evilman, who is your stereotypical “final boss” sort of character. As the game progresses, these battle sequences become increasingly elaborate — they start with a first-person 8-bit sequence somewhat reminiscent of the end of the original Phantasy Star and gradually progress to… well, I’m not sure yet as I haven’t got that far.

There are some fun additions to the basic roguelike formula, and it’s here that the Disgaea influences are apparent. You can pick up enemies and fling them around, for example, though disappointingly you can’t simply lob them off the edge of a precarious platform into the lava below. You can also throw items from your inventory, many of which have special effects. It also provides a use for items that have degraded to a durability level of 0%, meaning that the bonuses they normally provide are completely ineffective until repaired. If you don’t want to spend your limited funds on repair bills, simply throw them at the enemies.

Then there’s the guest appearances from the Prinnies, the weird explosive penguin-like things from Disgaea. Early in the game, you inexplicably find yourself married to one and gain the once-per-expedition special ability to summon your “wife” and have her bring you a lunchbox to restore your endurance points.

I could go on, but I would like to play the game a bit more before I talk about it too much. Early impressions are very positive, though, and if it’s anything like Disgaea this will be a game designed to keep one occupied for a frighteningly long time. If you’re looking for something endearingly bizarre but which backs up that bizarreness with solid gameplay and good presentation, you could do far worse than check out Z.H.P. — it works on Vita, too, so you can just download it from the PSN store rather than attempting to track down a physical copy.

See you in the dungeon, dood!

1075: Those Trails in the Sky Get Longer

[Author’s note: See, I resisted the temptation to make another “Tits” joke in the headline. You should be proud of me.]

After a bit of a break to play some other stuff, mainly Persona 3: FES, I am back on my Vita and proceeding nicely with Trails in the Sky.

Trails in the Sky, for those who missed the earlier post I made about it, is a role-playing game for the PSP and Vita from Falcom. It also happens to be one of the best role-playing games I’ve played in recent memory, for a diverse array of reasons, some of which I’ve already talked about and others of which I will touch on today.

Plot-wise, Trails in the Sky isn’t your conventional JRPG. I’m over 30 hours in now and there’s been no trace of any villain wanting to take over the world, call down a meteor, kompress time [sic], sit inside a mountain going “MWAHAHAHAHA” or indeed any of the other things that JRPG villains typically want to do. In fact, I’d be hard-pushed to identify a single “villain” as yet — there have been villainous groups and individuals, sure, but not a single character that I’d particularly identify as a specific “antagonist”. No-one with silvery-white hair flowing down their back; no-one with a good line in evil laughs; no “evil empire” to fight back against. The closest we’ve had is a few men clad in black, and they’re clearly working for someone.

While this may cause you to worry about the game being directionless — what’s an epic RPG without an antagonist taunting you throughout making that final boss smackdown all the more satisfying? — in actual fact the opposite is true. The focus may be different, but there’s most definitely a plot with direction and good pace going on here.

The focus in this case is the relationship between the two lead characters Estelle and Joshua, foster siblings and a classic case of a “will they, won’t they” relationship that will undoubtedly come to smooches by the end of the game’s 50-hour quest. The main thrust of the game’s story is the pair’s journey around the game world, training their abilities and learning more about themselves, each other and the way they feel about one another. Third and fourth party members come and go, but Estelle and Joshua are permanent fixtures, with the player taking direct control of Estelle for the vast majority of the game.

Estelle is a great lead character, largely because she’s not a traditional female protagonist. She may be pretty cute visually — as a redhead/brunette with twintails, she’s seemingly designed to appeal specifically to me — but personality-wise, she’s certainly far from demure, cute or helpless. She’s spunky, loud, opinionated, brash, sarcastic and quick to anger. At the same time, she doesn’t deny her feminine side to herself — even if she seemingly tries to hide it when others are around. There are a number of scenes, particularly late in the game, where she tries to come to terms with her own feelings towards Joshua that give us some interesting insight into what she’s really thinking behind her slightly-abrasive facade.

The side-effect of Estelle’s somewhat tomboyish nature when she’s around other people is that said other people tend not to treat her in a particularly “girlish” manner, often deriding her for not particularly conforming to gender stereotypes and acting in a “mannish” or “boyish” manner. She takes it in her stride throughout, often swiping such comments aside with a sarcastic rebuttal or two of her own, and you get the impression that she is someone who is thoroughly comfortable in who she is — or at least comfortable with the “public face” she shows to people. Despite her self-assuredness, though, a sure-fire way to make Estelle skittish and nervous is to bring up the possibility of her getting together with Joshua, which in many cases makes her literally want to run away or furiously deny any such accusations, even if it’s blatantly obvious that she’s thought about it more than once in her life.

I’m looking forward to seeing the game through to its conclusion. It’s structured very nicely in that you always feel like you’re doing something, and grinding has been absolutely non-existent so far. Wandering monsters provide relatively trivial amounts of experience points, and are primarily used to acquire the “Sepith” gems used to craft new special ability items called Orbments, and if you’re that way inclined, you can race through most of the game without stopping to have random encounters at all if you don’t want to — though you may find yourself struggling to acquire better spells if you do so.

In short, it’s nice to play a JRPG that focuses on the good things about the genre — exploration, discovery, questing, character development and narrative — and doesn’t force players to live with frustrating and outdated conventions like grinding. If you’re an RPG fan toting a PSP or Vita, you should consider Trails in the Sky an essential purchase, as it is a fine example of how the genre is alive, well and more than happy to not follow the traditional Final Fantasy “OMG WORLD IS ENDING” route. (That’s not to say that doesn’t have a place, of course — I still love saving the world, but I’m well aware many others are sick of it.)

Check out the official website to find out more — and I believe there’s a sequel inbound at some point in the near future, too.

1074: Loving the Vita

It’s fashionable to bash Sony’s latest handheld, the Vita. This is partly justified, because it hasn’t been selling particularly well — especially when compared to Nintendo’s latest powerhouse the 3DS, which seems entirely likely to repeat the success of its predecessor the DS family. The poor sales can be attributed to its relatively high price and the fact that its proprietary memory cards are unnecessarily expensive and can’t be used in anything else, unlike the standard SD cards that the 3DS uses.

But even though I know these criticisms are valid and warranted, it still bugs me a little that this means people are quickly writing off the Vita as a no-hoper, as a stillborn, with some even going so far as to compare it to disastrous past industry efforts such as Nintendo’s dreadful Virtual Boy. That’s just ridiculous.

Fact is, the Vita is a wonderful piece of kit. For your money, you get a gorgeous shiny gadget with a deliciously bright, big, high-resolution LED screen, two not-very-good-but-functional cameras (front and back) and not one but two touch-sensitive surfaces (again, front and back). Games specifically designed for Vita look beautiful on that big shiny screen, and the system runs downloadable PSP titles perfectly — though the lack of UMD drive means that those who have an extensive collection of physical PSP games will either need to keep their old handheld around or re-purchase their games as downloadable versions.

The PSP support is an aspect of the Vita that I can’t help but feel is understated. I know, I know, you could buy a used PSP for a fraction of the price of a new Vita, but how great the games look on that LED screen shouldn’t be underestimated — plus with the latest system firmware, it’s possible to apply bilinear filtering to the games to smooth out edges without making them look overly-blurry, and assign the Vita’s right stick and touchscreen to various functions. You’d be surprised quite how much more comfortable it is using the right stick to move the camera in games that previously used the shoulder buttons for this purpose — the PSP, let’s not forget, didn’t have a right stick and had that peculiar and uncomfortable “nub” instead of an actual stick on the left.

The other aspect of that PSP compatibility is that it makes the old “Vita has no games” argument sort of invalid — because not only do you have a healthy selection of largely good-quality Vita titles to draw on, you also have a huge selection of downloadable PSP titles to work your way through, too. If you’re a JRPG or SRPG fan in particular, the Vita is a fantastic system. The first three Persona games; Trails in the Sky; all the Final Fantasy games up to IX plus spinoffs Final Fantasy Tactics and Dissidia Final Fantasy; Tactics Ogre; the list goes on. (It goes on longer if you’re American, because you also have titles like Growlanser and Gungnir to enjoy, too. Damn you, Atlus, for not having a European arm.)

As for the actual Vita games themselves, there are some real gems there. Everybody’s Golf/Hot Shots Golf is fantastic fun, and packed with content. Gravity Rush is a beautiful, stylish, challenging game that makes good use of the Vita’s accelerometers alongside a more traditional control scheme. The Vita version of Need for Speed Most Wanted is a very good one, ideal for a quick race on the go. Lumines Electronic Symphony is a fantastic puzzle game — though not very toilet-friendly, as sessions tend to go on for quite a while. LittleBigPlanet is an ideal fit for the Vita’s interface and touchscreen. And then there are a bunch of cheaper download-only games that are also fantastic — the strange and abstract world of Sound Shapes; the John Cleese-voiced, Unreal Engine-powered brain training of Smart As…; the freebies like that ecosystem game I’ve forgotten the name of and hilarious pass-and-play party game Frobisher Says.

And then you have PlayStation Minis, which is home to some surprisingly brilliant games — Velocity by FuturLab being one in particular you should really check out. And then there’s the newly-added support for PlayStation Mobile, which offers super-cheap ports of some of the best iOS and Android games out there.

Need I go on? Yes, the cost of entry may be higher than a 3DS or a PSP, but the Vita is packed with a ton of possibilities that people just aren’t talking about enough. “The story” about the Vita always seems to be that it’s “Sony’s big failure” — and while that may end up being true, it’d be nice to see, just once, a feature in the professional press detailing the many things this system does wonderfully well rather than yet another predictable article heralding its apparently-imminent doom. We’ve all seen this article many times over — so how about ditching the negativity for a bit and exploring the many good things the system does offer so those of us who do have one can unearth some of the platform’s hidden gems — because they’re out there.

If you happened to get a Vita (or PS3, for that matter) for Christmas, do feel free to add “Angry_Jedi” to your PSN friends list!

#oneaday Day 942: Trails in the Sky

[Aside: This is the one-thousandth post on this blog. Hooray! Another 58 days until I’ve completed a thousand days of daily blogging, however.]

My current gaming “jam”, as I believe the kids are saying nowadays, is Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, just Trails in the Sky or its immensely entertaining acronym TitS for short. It’s a Vita-compatible PSP game from Falcom, published by Xseed in the States and Ghostlight in the UK, and it was originally available for Windows PCs in Japan, though in the West I believe we’ve only seen the PSP release.

It’s good. Real good. And, like recent RPGs that I’ve had a particular blast with — Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, Pandora’s Tower — it is good due to its willingness to dispense with the conventions of the JRPG genre and to incorporate good ideas from both Western RPGs and the more specialist strategy/tactical RPG subgenre. This exhibits itself in two main ways: its battle system and its game structure.

Battles in Trails in the Sky are a slightly more involved affair than your stereotypical “line up in front of each other and take it in turns to slap one another” JRPG combat system. Instead, battles take place on a grid, and characters have to actually move around as well as use their skills. Certain skills can affect areas, too, meaning that positioning is more than just a gimmick. This system is combined with a mechanic similar to the “Conditional Turn-Based Battle” system seen in Final Fantasy X, whereby the turn order for the next few rounds is displayed at the side of the screen and can be affected by various factors.

The game’s “Craft” special ability system also allows player characters to “jump the queue” in the turn order at times if their “Craft Points” bar is full, allowing the player to manipulate the turn order to their advantage. This is an important aspect to gameplay, as certain turns are marked with symbols that denote various bonuses to the active character — a guaranteed critical hit, increased damage, a small amount of healing.

Structurally, the game is somewhere between a traditional JRPG and a more freeform Western title. The game’s main plot is rigidly linear and leads the party through various locales which then become their “base” for a while. But while they are there, they have the opportunity to take on a bunch of optional quests which range from defeating tough monsters to delivering packages or locating ingredients. They’re generally pretty simple stuff, but each is bookended by a short story sequence for context, giving the player a greater feeling of immersion in the game world by allowing them to get to know some of the incidental characters a bit better. It also makes the game feel less linear, as these optional quests can be tackled in any order — though some will expire if too much progress is made on the main plot before completing them.

There’s another reason to do these quests: they’re one of the few ways to make money. Rather than monsters inexplicably dropping fountains of gold when they expire, they instead drop crystals that can be used to synthesise new special abilities at a special location in towns, or sold for a profit. Questing is a much more reliable source of income, however, as it’s better to save up the crystals for upgrading characters.

Mechanically, then, Trails in the Sky is interesting if not quite “revolutionary” — it’s certainly enjoyable to play. But the highlight for me so far has been the excellent localisation. Characters are well-defined and have a strong sense of personality even though there’s no speech or any real animation. Through a simple combination of well-written text and mood portraits, you get a real feel for who these people are and how they relate to one another. Particular praise should be given to the interplay between the two main protagonists Estelle and Joshua, who have clearly been set up to have a ridiculous amount of sexual tension between them for the duration of the game despite being polar opposites in terms of personality. It’s also surprising to see an openly bisexual character making an appearance, though he is treated somewhat less than respectfully by Estelle, as she refers to him as a “pervert” within minutes of finding out about his preferences. (To be fair to her, though, he kind of is a bit of a pervert, though not because of his sexuality. His stalkerish lusting after Joshua seconds after meeting him for the first time is a bit creepy.)

I’m only about 10 hours in to the game so far but it claims to be about 50 hours in total. That’s a decent size for a handheld RPG — hell, it’s a decent size for an RPG generally. Any more than that and it can become a bit of a slog. I hope the excellent characterisation and fun battles continue throughout, as it’s been a blast so far — so if you have a PSP or Vita and are looking for some top-quality questing, give it a shot.

#oneaday Day 896: Gravity Rush

I’ve been playing a fair ol’ bit of Gravity Rush on the Vita recently. My feelings about it are somewhat mixed, but on the whole it’s a very good game, and certainly one of the most impressive handheld games I’ve ever played.

Of all things, my least favourite thing about it is the name. “Gravity Rush” is not the name of an epic, sprawling, visually sumptuous adventure. “Gravity Rush” is, to me, the name of an iPhone game — perhaps an Angry Birds Space ripoff — or an obscure downloadable console title at best, perhaps. (Or perhaps I’m just associating it too much with Gravity Crash on PSN, which is nothing to do with Gravity Rush.)

That aside, though, there’s a lot to like.

For the uninitiated, Gravity Rush is ostensibly an open world… platform game, I guess you’d call it if you had to pin it down to an established genre, but to pigeonhole it thus is to do it a gross disservice. It’s a platform game. A racing game. A mindbending puzzle game. An air combat game. And plenty of other things besides. It actually has a surprising amount in common with underrated open-world gem Crackdown, of all things. Oh, and it was designed by Keiichiro Toyama, who true game geeks will know is the creator of the Silent Hill series. According to Wikipedia, Gravity Rush was the first game he ever wanted to create, but was only able to bring his vision to fruition recently.

In Gravity Rush, you play Kat, a young amnesiac girl with red eyes, blonde hair and surprisingly dark skin for an anime-style character. Kat is also clad in an outfit best described as “bizarre”, and is accompanied by a black cat. Oh, and she can shift gravity at will with the assistance of said black cat, allowing her to “fall” in any direction she pleases, stick to walls, skid along the ground and do gravity-defying flying kicks.

Kat is far and away the highlight of the game. Despite her hackneyed amnesiac introduction, she quickly proves herself to be a fun character to play with. She’s a bit dizzy, she’s confused, she’s obsessed with her own appearance and appeal to the opposite sex, and she’s easily distracted. But despite these flaws, she has a noble streak — she wants to do the right thing and use her powers to help people, despite not really understanding where they came from or what they’re for. As the game progresses, the residents of the city where the majority of the game is set go from fearing her strange powers to respecting and appreciating her talents.

Gameplay in Gravity Rush is mission-based, but it’s up to the player when they want to trigger each subsequent mission. Between missions, it’s possible to tool around any of the unlocked city areas collecting gems (which can be used to level up Kat’s abilities), talking to residents to gain a greater understanding of the strange world the game is set in and taking part in “challenge missions.” The latter are very difficult timed tasks of various kinds — some might see Kat having to defeat as many enemies as possible in a time limit, others see her racing through a series of checkpoints, perhaps with some limitations on her abilities in place. Each challenge has three tiers of rewards, with increasing numbers of gems available for completing these tricky tasks by more impressive margins.

This may all sound relatively unremarkable so far, but it’s the excellent way that Gravity Rush makes use of the Vita’s distinctive capabilities that make it interesting. The “gravity shifting” mechanic is a prime example. By tapping the R button, Kat floats up into the air; tapping it again causes her to “fall” forwards according to where the screen is pointing, regardless of which way is “up”. The specific direction she falls can be controlled using the Vita’s right analogue stick, but a surprising degree of precision can be attained by combining the stick controls with the tilt sensors in the Vita. If you’re feeling completely un-self conscious, you can completely control the direction of the camera in these floaty bits by tilting and rotating the Vita, but that would be both impractical and undesirable for most people, so the combination of stick and tilt works very well.

Similarly, when Kat uses her “slide” move (accomplished by pressing and holding on the bottom two corners of the touchscreen), it’s possible to steer her by tilting the Vita side to side and jump by “flicking” the device. You can also “drift” in a Wipeout style by releasing one corner of the touchscreen as Kat goes around a corner.

A more subtle use of the Vita’s capabilities comes in the comic-style cutscenes that punctuate each mission. Tilting the device causes the perspective on the comic panels to shift slightly — unnecessary, but cool — while swiping with a finger advances to the next panel, just like in an iOS/Android comic reader app. These little touches arguably don’t add much to the experience, but they certainly don’t hurt it, either.

The game is a joy to navigate — gravity shifting and “falling” through the skies towards your destination is thrilling every time, and the world is an interesting, beautifully-designed environment to explore — but things do fall apart a little when it comes to combat. On the ground, Kat is limited to a not-particularly-effective kick attack as well as a useful “dodge” move achieved by swiping on the touchscreen. In the air, Kat can do a “gravity kick” manoeuvre where she “locks on” to an enemy then flies through the sky with high heel outstretched, with more damage being done if she “falls” on the enemy from a greater distance.

This is all very well and good and would be absolutely fine were it not for the fact that every enemy is only vulnerable in specific weak spots. Crash into an enemy anywhere other than their obvious glowing weak spots and you’ll do no damage. Early in the game this isn’t an issue, because the weak spots are in easily-accessible locations, but later enemies have multiple weak points all over their body and often thrash about, making it difficult to hit them. One boss in particular will have you flinging your Vita in frustration as it seemingly always dodges aside just as you get lined up perfectly. None of these challenges are insurmountable, but it does sometimes give the game some rather artificial-feeling difficulty spikes, which is a bit of a shame.

The game’s considerable charms (mostly in the form of Kat and the interesting, mysterious story she becomes embroiled in) outshine its flaws, however — at least to me. I’ve been playing it quite a bit today and I’ve found it an engrossing, immersive experience. I think quite a bit of that is due to the fact it’s a handheld game, which surprised me — traditionally, I’ve regarded handheld experiences to be less immersive, not more — but Gravity Rush draws you in like few other games I’ve played recently, and then doesn’t let go.

If you have a Vita, be sure to grab a copy. If you don’t have a Vita, it’s certainly a great example of what the system can do. Is it a “killer app” for the system? Perhaps — it’s certainly not perfect, but I can’t imagine it working quite the same on, say, a console. The touch and tilt controls are excellently integrated into the more traditional button-based commands, and the whole thing feels like it was designed specifically for the Vita rather than envisaged as a console title with Vita features shoehorned in later. The gorgeous cel-shaded graphics, heavily influenced by a combination of French comics and anime, also make it one of the most distinctive-looking games I’ve seen for a long time.

If nothing else, it’s a game I’d certainly like to see a sequel to in the future, so let’s hope it enjoys some success.

#oneaday Day 880: Not Going To Make a “Livin’ La Vita Loca” Joke

I bought a PlayStation Vita today. I’d had my eye on one for a little while, but having successfully paid off my credit card for the purchase of my new Mac, I decided a little treat was in order, so I did a bit of research as to what the fine folks of the Internet thought was good games-wise, and grabbed one today. I was fortunate enough to be able to snare a preowned but unused model from Game in Southampton today, which cut down the price considerably, allowing me to also grab an (overpriced) 32GB memory card along with a copy of Everybody’s Golf to enjoy for about £270 in total.

I’ve only spent one round with the latter so far (but it’s bringing back pleasing memories of Tee Off on the Dreamcast) so I won’t comment on that too much, but I did want to talk a little bit about the system itself, as I believe it’s worthy of note.

The Vita distinguishes itself from its predecessor the PSP immediately with its touchscreen-friendly interface. Featuring an icon-based homescreen somewhat akin to modern smartphones, the Vita invites you to touch, swipe, flick, peel and all manner of other things. You can reorganise your homescreen icons as you see fit, and even set backgrounds for different pages. You can’t organise things into folders, though, which is a bit of a shame, but I can cope with that. PlayStation Network (sorry… Sony Entertainment Network, which still amuses me because its abbreviation is the same as Special Educational Needs) provides plenty of downloadable goodness, ranging from complete games that you could also buy as physical products at retail to smaller, cheaper, download-only titles and even free apps for access to Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Flickr.

The downloadable side of things has, for me, always been a big strength of Sony’s systems from the PSP onwards. The PlayStation Store is a veritable treasure trove of underappreciated and overlooked gems as well as some of the most memorable “art games” (for want of a better term) in the business — games like Flower and Journey, for example. PlayStation Minis, too, provide portable-friendly experiences akin to what you might play on a smartphone, only with dedicated controls to enjoy them with, which is a big boon to anyone sick of poorly-implemented touch controls.

Besides the games themselves, though, Vita has a number of interesting and intriguingly noteworthy features. For starters, the system actually does multitasking considerably better than both iOS and Android. A tap of the PlayStation button freezes whatever you’re doing and takes you immediately back to the “OS”. From here, you can “peel” the app off the screen to close it completely, switch to something else (like, say, the settings app, or Twitter) and then be back into your game without any messing around. This is particularly beneficial when you want to browse the PlayStation Store for addon content, for example — even the PS3 requires a quit out of a running game to access the Store, whereas Vita manages to seamlessly switch to it, let you browse as you see fit, then switch back. This functionality also allows you to effectively do what the Steam Overlay does for PC gamers — while running a game, you can pop open a browser window and, let’s face it, look at GameFAQs.

Vita’s interface is gorgeous, too. The big, high-resolution LED screen makes things look great anyway, but the design of the OS just begs to be played with, too. On the homescreen, flicking between screens causes the icons to wobble like they’re hanging on pegs. Rather than “slide to unlock” if the machine goes into standby, you use the same “peel” motion that is used for closing apps. And the soft keyboard is pretty good, too, with a decent predictive text dictionary built in — though the size of the screen and its position means that “thumb typing” as on a smartphone is next to impossible. Fortunately, as the Vita is primarily a gaming platform, you won’t be doing that much typing on it, so it’s a design flaw I can forgive.

The built-in apps are interesting, too. Near allows you to see other Vita owners in your nearby vicinity, see what they’ve been playing and their responses to them. (I was surprised to see quite a few Vita owners living near me — I was expecting it to be a virtual ghost town around here.) Welcome Park introduces the system’s little quirks — the multitouch screen, the rear touchpanel, the two cameras and the built-in microphone — through a series of simple but surprisingly engaging minigames, all of which have Trophy support for those who care that much. There’s also a pleasing number of free downloads from the PlayStation Store, including a selection of social apps, a simple finger-painting app and even some games, including the hilarious and WarioWare-esque Frobisher Says.

All in all, I’m very pleased with my purchase so far. I’ve become somewhat disillusioned with iOS gaming recently — perhaps due to the fact I get to see some of the very best and worst titles as part of my day job — so I’ve been surprised how good it feels to have a dedicated handheld system again, particularly one that doesn’t possess an app ecosystem that encourages developers to include “Get More Coins!!” options even where they’re not wanted/needed. I shall look forward to many Everybody’s Golf sessions on the toilet in the near future as well as a thorough exploration of the myriad joys the PlayStation Store has to offer me.