I’ve been having a hard time figuring out what I want to play lately, so I thought a good way to combat that would be to play something nostalgic. Perhaps my favorite game from my childhood, while watching the incredibly fun Ratchet & Clank speedrun at this summer’s Olympics, I quickly concluded that this was the game I wanted to revisit. After all, it’s been a while, and although I’ve been close to the final boss, I’ve never actually managed to beat the game, so I wanted to set myself a challenge to beat it.
I still have my PS2 and an original copy of it, but I also don’t want to deal with the hassle of setting it up, let alone without the modern luxury of PS4 and PS5 rest modes. Luckily, I still have an HD collection of the first three PS Vita games – remember that old one? – This feels like the best solution. This means I can lie on the couch or take it to bed, pick it up a little at a time, or even pick it up on the go. It’s been a while since I’ve played a Vita, and buying the console was arguably a mistake, but as I played Ratchet & Clank, I couldn’t help but think…Sony should make another one of these.
Manage cookie settings
Yes, I know it didn’t sell well, with estimated lifetime sales of around 16 million copies, a far cry from the PlayStation Portable’s 80 million copies. But it was certainly ahead of its time, being a console that could play intensive, console-like games, with an OLED screen and even just two analog sticks. It’s the Nintendo Switch before the Switch, just without, you know, the switching element. There are other problems, one of the biggest being that there aren’t that many games, at least not over in the West (there are a lot of Japan-exclusive games that I’m sad I can’t play because of the pesky language barrier).
We all know that Sony uses big first-party games like God of War, Spider-Man, and Horizon as system sellers, or at least as part of the brand under which they sell their systems. It’s a diverse portfolio that makes people go “oh yeah, this is a Sony game” even though it’s not technically a first-party game. The PS Vita doesn’t have many features like this. There’s a LittleBigPlanet spin-off, an Uncharted spin-off, and even one of Japan Studio’s best games, Gravity, but there aren’t enough big hits to make it more widely available. A must-buy game for the audience.
Watch on YouTube
You can only wonder if now is a better time to get a console like this. Sony is clearly considering a return to handheld devices, otherwise why would the PlayStation Portal exist? But the portal is… good! It doesn’t matter. It’s not a dedicated handheld that offers double-A games that are fun and cheaper for developers, it’s a tool that lets you stream PS5 games to what is essentially a smartphone while you’re making them , without the benefit of a smartphone.
But making games is really expensive these days, and a dedicated console with a narrower range of games seems to be something the industry almost needs right now (and it’s available in the Switch, even if not all developers use it that way). I’d love to be able to play some kind of new first-party Sony game on the PS Vita 2, maybe even the upcoming Astro Bot, so I can enjoy some classic 3D platformers from the comfort of my couch without having to worry about some blurry The network ruined my experience on the portal. Isn’t that a dream? To make life simple and comfortable?
I know that even if those rumors of a full-fledged new PlayStation handheld come true, it won’t be the Vita 2, with all its quirks. I’m sure the internal demo was going to talk a lot about “synergies” with the PS5, brand cohesion, and all the annoying crap that capitalism invented at some point. What I really want, though, is to be able to play Ratchet & Clank on a small handheld, whether it’s a 2002 or 2021 game, and relax.
