PSVita megathread

Anoop Gantayat wrote:

Namco Bandai held a Japanese media briefing for its PlayStation Vita launch titles yesterday. Impress Watch and Famitsu.com delivered impressions and screens for Ridge Racer.

As we previously detailed, Ridge Racer (which appears to be the game's final Japanese name) carries a lower price compared to most Vita launch titles. The game's package version is priced ¥3,980. The download version is regularly priced ¥3,580, but through March 31 you can pick it up for the special price of ¥2,980. Regardless of the version, the game requires a Memory Card.

One of the tradeoffs for the low price appears to be content. The sites report that the demo build had just five cars and three courses, and this will be true for the final version as well.

The course list includes Harborline 765, Highland Cliffs and Southbay Docks, all form past entries in the series. They can be played in normal and reverse.

Namco Bandai will, of course, be offering download content to add to the game. Details on DLC will be shared in December. The game's main menu has an option for directly accessing PlayStation Store.

The official Namco Bandai reason for the low price is that it hopes to get as many players as possible in order to make the Planetary League mode more active. In the Planetary League, players throughout the world split into circle, x, triangle and square teams. Every 24 hours, the game sends out new team battle missions. At the end of the month, the game's servers will determine the rank of each of the four teams based off points earned during the missions.

These team battles can be played as real time races via Wi-Fi and Ad-Hoc. Or, you can play against rival ghost data. The game supports Vita's Near functionality for transferring ghost data.

For those hoping to use Ridge Racer to show off your pricey new portable, Famitsu.com reports that the game has detailed visuals and fresh colors thanks to the OLED screen, with the night courses looking particularly pretty. Due to the focus on detail, the game runs at 30 frames per second rather than the 60 some Ridge Racer fans may have hoped for.

Otacon wrote: »

- developers of PS3 games will need to opt-in to allow streaming to the PSV
- and the games will be sent in PSP resolution, [480 x 272] and the PSV will then upscale the content in real-time to match the resolution of its screen.

richymcdermott wrote: »

Ridge racer only has 5 cars and 3 tracks , if thats the future of gaming , im quitting :pac:

There's no more confusion about whether or not the PS Vita will run PSOne Classics and other "Game Archives" games (that's the umbrella term used in Japan for Sony's retro games -- PSOne and PC Engine/Turbografx-16, along with, presumably, PS2) at launch. Unfortunately, the answer to that lingering question is a firm, and bewildering, no.

The Japanese Vita FAQ, which initially noted that the Vita will play all downloadable PSP games except for Archives releases, cemented that in an answer to the direct question of whether or not the device will support old downloaded games. According to the FAQ, Game Archives games will not be compatible with the device at launch. "Plans for future measures will be announced shortly," the (Google-translated) FAQ notes.

There's no reason to suspect that there's a technical issue with running old PlayStation, PC Engine, and PS2 games on the powerful Vita. It's more likely that Sony's figuring out how to square the existing PlayStation Store for consoles with the PlayStation Suite version of the store, which offers a different and smaller selection of PSOne games. That hasn't been a problem so far ... because there hasn't been a device that could theoretically use both stores yet.