Playstation Vita Pets



  • WTF #1: all the pets are dogs

    WTF #2: making it nothing but a cheap ripoff of Nintendogs

    WTF #3: and the dogs TALK!

    The PS Vita has got to, by now, be the most WTF console ever made. Except the N-Gage.



  • The Vita is an excellent example of how little the hardware specs matter to a gaming experience.

    Also

    <font face="comic sans ms">I don't like this game, therefore this console sucks.</font>



  • @blakeyrat said:

    WTF #1: all the pets are dogs
    Because talking cats would be stupid.

     



  • I've never really understood the appeal of pets games... I mean, if you want a dog, just get a dog. Now, I get that some people can't get a pet for various practical reasons, but I just don't think a simulated one is ever going to provide a satisfactory substitute (until our robot technology seriously advances).


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Buttembly Coder said:

    I don't like this game, therefore this console sucks.
     

    Ponder this:

    @Labored code metaphor said:


    ThisConsole.HasHope = False

    Foreach(game in Games The Overly Controlling Monolith Company Licenses To Represent Its Console)

    IF (game != suck) THEN  {      ThisConsole.HasHope =  True     }

    Next For

    If ! ThisConsole.HasHope

       Blakey.Rant("FUCK THIS CONSOLE!")

    End If

    If you want to prove Blakey false, please try to come up with a single example of a game on the Vita that doesn't completely and embarrassingly suck.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    The PS Vita has got to, by now, be the most WTF console ever made. Except the N-Gage.
     

    Just get a Sega Nomad like the rest of us.



  • @eViLegion said:

    I've never really understood the appeal of pets games... I mean, if you want a dog, just get a dog. Now, I get that some people can't get a pet for various practical reasons, but I just don't think a simulated one is ever going to provide a satisfactory substitute (until our robot technology seriously advances).

    Theoretically, there are a number of "advantages" to a virtual pet - the entire thing is a small fixed cost rather than a relatively large continuous cost, you usually have no risk of the "pet" dying, you don't have to clean up, and you can take it with you.

    While it doesn't provide all the companionship or such, it has far fewer of the hassles or costs.



  • Actually I enjoyed Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward. But it's also on DS, so that's not really an argument for buying a Vita...

    The only other game on it that I'd consider good is Mutant Blobs Attack, which is also on iOS and PC so that's not really an argument for buying a Vita...



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    If you want to prove Blakey false, please try to come up with a single example of a game on the Vita that doesn't completely and embarrassingly suck.

    Trick questions aren't fair. I already know it doesn't have any games.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The PS Vita has got to, by now, be the most WTF console ever made. Except the N-Gage.

    I take it you haven't met.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Dogsworth said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    The PS Vita has got to, by now, be the most WTF console ever made. Except the N-Gage.

    I take it you haven't met.

    I swear I'm the one guy who actually liked that console.



  • Fun fact: the Virtual Boy had 4 times as much RAM as the Nintendo 64.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    The PS Vita has got to, by now, be the most WTF console ever made.
    I'm not convinced; the Ouya exists…


  • Considered Harmful

    @dkf said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    The PS Vita has got to, by now, be the most WTF console ever made.
    I'm not convinced; the Ouya exists…

    It can't be that bad.


  • Considered Harmful

    @lolwtf said:

    Fun fact: the Virtual Boy had 4 times as much RAM as the Nintendo 64.

    Thanks, Internet.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Actually I enjoyed Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward. But it's also on DS, so that's not really an argument for buying a Vita...

    The only other game on it that I'd consider good is Mutant Blobs Attack, which is also on iOS and PC so that's not really an argument for buying a Vita...



    i would recommend buying both (i do have both), since they are not that expensive (i got my vita for 170 and the the 3ds is now about 150) i actually bought it because i have ps+ subscription and get new games for vita for free each month (pure consumerism, i paid for a device because i got free games for it, and then bought some more games). but i dont regret buying it since i enjoyed loads of games (mgs series, ninja gaiden s2+, sine mora, uncharted, gravity rush, virtues last reward, soul sacrifice, thomas was alone).

    what really pissed me off is that they marketed the "remote play" feature (its like streaming games from ps3 to the vita over network, the console does all the heavy lifting, like the nvidia shield is doing for pc games). what they failed to mention (actually i failed to see, since it was probably written in 7px font, light gray text on white background) is that it does not work with all games. in fact i have over 50 games on my ps3, but only one is playable over remote play (i tried every one of them). but what really really really pissed me off is that some guys managed to get more games running on a cracked ps3 with custom fw. so it is technically possible, but someone was lazy to implement it properly.


  • Ok that's it, I gotta counter Nelle. Vita WTF:

    Almost all Vita games are impossible to actually play while on a car, plane, bus, etc. So it's not really a "portable" gaming console, it's more like a "somewhat small gaming console with a built-in screen". This is by far the biggest WTF, because the entire point of me buying a Vita was to use it as a portable gaming console. Even games that get this 95% right usually end up fucking it up at the 11th hour.

    For example, Uncharted: Drake's Whatever offers non-gimmicky controls then, out of nowhere, stops you cold with a screen where you have to (and I am not even kidding) hold the Vita's rear camera against a bright light source. I was playing this in Washington State, in a bus, in November... where the holy fuck was I supposed to find a bright light source?!

    Similarly, Mutant Blobs Attack, which is an otherwise not-shit game, requires you to use the Vita's motion controls on the last level. So while you played 95% of the game as a dignified person, the last 5% you have to start spazzing your arms all over to control your character. In fact, so far the *only* game I've found that didn't use any gimmicky controls is the aforementioned Zero Escape. And that's probably because it was a Nintendo DS port.

    Needless to say, it's impossible to tell which games use gimmicky controls before actually dropping cash on them. The PSN store doesn't mention what features of the console it uses. (Actually, it lists which features it uses, but not which of those are *required* to complete the game), and reviewers inevitably review it while sitting at a desk in a well-lit room, and not while using a portable console as a ... portable console.

    That makes the thing fucking useless.

    Also see previous Vita posts.



  • @eViLegion said:

    I've never really understood the appeal of pets games... I mean, if you want a dog, just get a dog. Now, I get that some people can't get a pet for various practical reasons, but I just don't think a simulated one is ever going to provide a satisfactory substitute (until our robot technology seriously advances).


    Wrong pet. Virtual pets are less like dogs and more like fish or ants. And a simulated fishtank isn't really much different from a real fishtank. Except if you don't clean it, it doesn't stink up the place.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    If you want to prove Blakey false, please try to come up with a single example of a game on the Vita that doesn't completely and embarrassingly suck.

    I hear Dragon's Crown is actually pretty good on the Vita.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Similarly, Mutant Blobs Attack, which is an otherwise not-shit game, requires you to use the Vita's motion controls on the last level. So while you played 95% of the game as a dignified person, the last 5% you have to start spazzing your arms all over to control your character. In fact, so far the *only* game I've found that didn't use any gimmicky controls is the aforementioned Zero Escape. And that's probably because it was a Nintendo DS port.

    I remember an extreme case of that, the DS game "Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time". Every other DS game lets you at least navigate the menus with the touch screen, but this one never even acknowledged its existence. If it didn't use the two screens I'd have assumed it was just a bad GBA port. And then, suddenly, there's a moment near the end where you have to "clean a picture", by rubbing its dirt off with the touch screen. It takes about ten seconds, and that's it, back to buttons only. Is there a rule at Nintendo that all games must use the touch screen or something?


  • @anonymous234 said:

    I remember an extreme case of that, the DS game "Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time".

    I thought you had posted this before and was unconsciously repeating it, but it turns out it was someone else.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    And then, suddenly, there's a moment near the end where you have to "clean a picture", by rubbing its dirt off with the touch screen. It takes about ten seconds, and that's it, back to buttons only. Is there a rule at Nintendo that all games must use the touch screen or something?
    It's not just games.  I've seen several credit card terminals in stores where everything is done on the touchscreen -- you select whether you're using a credit or debit card then you sign your name using a stylus (or your finger if the sylus is missing).  But then after you sign your name you have to press an actual physical button to complete the transaction.  There's probably some obscure credit card regulation somewhere but they still want to use touchscreens because that's the cool thing to do.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @anonymous234 said:
    I remember an extreme case of that, the DS game "Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time".

    I thought you had posted this before and was unconsciously repeating it, but it turns out it was someone else.

    I might have used different accounts in the past.



  •  Someone, Somewhere must have made a robot to care for their virtual pets (probably the manufacturer's testing dept.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    For example, Uncharted: Drake's Whatever offers non-gimmicky controls then, out of nowhere, stops you cold with a screen where you have to (and I am not even kidding) hold the Vita's rear camera against a bright light source. I was playing this in Washington State, in a bus, in November... where the holy fuck was I supposed to find a bright light source?!

    That's not the worst idea. Actually, other than the sluggish-like-Castlevania controls, this was a pretty decent game. If you had access to sunlight most of the time you wanted to play.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    If you want to prove Blakey false, please try to come up with a single example of a game on the Vita that doesn't completely and embarrassingly suck.

    Uncharted

    NFS Most Wanted

    Hot Shots Golf

    The part where one can play MGS 1, 2 3 and Peace Walker all on the same device




    Yes all the haters like to say how the Vita has no games, but the games that it does have are excellent. Contrast to most of Nintendo games which are targeted towards brainless children.

    No wonder the forumers here appear to prefer Nintendo.



  • @gu3st said:

    Yes all the haters like to say how the Vita has no games, but the games that it does have are excellent. Contrast to most of Nintendo games which are targeted towards brainless children.

    No wonder the forumers here appear to prefer Nintendo.

    Sturgeon's law, my friend. Both platforms have mostly crap games with a few gems in between. More games mean more reasonable ones.



    Of course the DS still has a few utterly bizarre ones. My personal favourite is Kira Kira Pop Princess, which I got because hey, with a name like that it has to be either hilariously bad or, well, just bad. As it turns out it's oddly creepy. From the questionable slogan ("Dress up, touch, live" with "live" pronounced as in "live show") to the setting (a lesbian ghetto where apparently every job involves dancing on a small stage in front of a crowd) to the fact that after certain performances you get a present accompanied by a spray of golden particles flying at the camera... Oh, and the intro. The characters in the intro are so utterly weird that I made a drinking game:


    • Every time someone waves their arms and does a weird forward bending motion you take a shot.
    • Every time someone jumps into the shot after a camera angle change despite the fact that they should be standing right there already you take a shot.
    • Every time someone is angry but immediately begins to grin like an idiot again you take a shot.



      Despite trying it with water shots I never made it through the entire half-hour intro, giving up after about eighty. Parts where you have to drink more than one shot per second aren't uncommon. And all that with three rules that should never trigger in an intro that isn't retarded.





      So yeah: A game that teaches little girls to become exotic dancers who touch themselves live on stage so that they can get a golden shower from their sugardaddy. And an intro that makes for an even better drinking game than most Manowar songs. That's some quality entertainment right there.


  • I think Nintendo does have some kind of "games must use the console's new gimmick" rule. When the DS first came out there were a number of games that used the touch screen for everything. Steering? Touch this wheel on the screen. Shooting, jumping? Touch these virtual buttons instead of the perfectly good real buttons right next to them.



    Then there was the DS Action Replay, which displayed menus with potentially thousands of entries, which could only be navigated by the touch screen. Specifically, by tapping up and down buttons on the touch screen. Not the actual physical buttons, not displaying the menus on the touch screen itself and scrolling them, just tapping on these virtual buttons. And if you tapped too fast, it didn't respond.



    (The Action Replay is not made or licensed by Nintendo though, so you can't blame them for that one... it's made by Datel, and everything they make is absolute shit, but I'll save that rant for later.)

    @joe.edwards said:

    @lolwtf said:
    Fun fact: the Virtual Boy had 4 times as much RAM as the Nintendo 64.

    Thanks, Internet.

    It's 16MB. N64 (which came out later) had 4MB, but this could be doubled with an expansion pak (sic). And that would have been plenty, if some genius hadn't decided to give the 3D processor a meagre 12K.



  • @gu3st said:

    Uncharted

    Mediocre. But triggers my anger reaction because of that stupid "hold against a lightbulb" thing.

    @gu3st said:

    NFS Most Wanted

    Wasn't released until after I gave up on the piece of shit.

    @gu3st said:

    Hot Shots Golf

    Wasn't released until after I gave up on the piece of shit.

    @gu3st said:

    The part where one can play MGS 1, 2 3 and Peace Walker all on the same device

    Wasn't released until after I gave up on the piece of shit.

    @gu3st said:

    Yes all the haters like to say how the Vita has no games, but the games that it does have are excellent.

    No they aren't; they're mostly shit. And yes, yes, I know 90% of everything is shit, Sturgeon's Law, etc etc. But the Vita's problem was that for the first 18 MONTHS of its release, the only good games were: Rayman Origins (available on every other platform) and Zero Escape (available on DS and iOS) and a couple of their $8 indies (most of which are also on iOS or DS). And Zero Escape didn't come out for close to a full year after console release.

    It had some other games which may or may not have been good (like Gravity Rush), but I couldn't play the because the controls were not compatible with being... you know... portable while playing a portable console.


  • Considered Harmful

    @lolwtf said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    @lolwtf said:
    Fun fact: the Virtual Boy had 4 times as much RAM as the Nintendo 64.

    Thanks, Internet.

    It's 16MB. N64 (which came out later) had 4MB, but this could be doubled with an expansion pak (sic). And that would have been plenty, if some genius hadn't decided to give the 3D processor a meagre 12K.

    Despite its limitations, N64 had some truly revolutionary games for its time. I find these games even more impressive in the light of the technical adversity within which they were created.

    I think blakey mentioned that the Atari VCS (aka 2600) had 128 bytes of RAM, which prompted me to read Racing the Beam (a good read if you're into that sort of thing). Games like Pitfall are amazing when you consider the limitations of the hardware. The console was basically built to compete with Pong but because its lifecycle was so long developers had to come up with increasingly innovative ways to do more with less.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @lolwtf said:
    Fun fact: the Virtual Boy had 4 times as much RAM as the Nintendo 64.
    Thanks, Internet.

    How can you not respect a site which isn't afraid to ask the tough questions like [url=http://game-consoles.findthebest.com/app-question/538/What-game-console-has-the-most-bits]What game console has the most bits?[/url] and knows that [url=http://game-consoles.findthebest.com/l/77/Sony-Playstation-4]the Play Station 4 GPU runs at 6 GHz[/url].



  • Considered Harmful

    @DCRoss said:

    @joe.edwards said:

    @lolwtf said:
    Fun fact: the Virtual Boy had 4 times as much RAM as the Nintendo 64.

    Thanks, Internet.

    How can you not respect a site which isn't afraid to ask the tough questions like What game console has the most bits? and knows that the Play Station 4 GPU runs at 6 GHz.



    I have to wonder what kind of WTFery could actually lead to such useless answers as "the Virtual Boy has 0GB of RAM," the only thing I can come up with is that the answers are somehow dynamically bound to some kind of query.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @joe.edwards said:

    Despite its limitations, N64 had some truly revolutionary games for its time.
     

    I could never forgive them for their betrayal.

    Back in the Days of A Long Fuck Ago, my arcade got a special demo machine for Killer Instinct.  It was a "holy fucking shit" thing-- fully rendered cut scenes. Rendered 3D highly detailed characters. In game music!  Massive combos! Fatalities!

    And framing it all was the shout out right before the game's intro.. [url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=994BRZGKrOM&t=22"]AVAILABLE FOR YOUR HOME IN 1995-- ONLY ON THE NINTENDO ULTRA 64!  [b]KILLER MUTHERFUCKING INSTNCT[/b]"[/url] (slight paraphrase).

    Holy combobreaking Christ! 64!  That's big!  And graphics like this, like it's promising-- on a home console. I can play the everloving shit out this game all day! In 1995!  In my home!  And what a name ULTRA 64!  [url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=aEpPWUyj46Y&t=10"]ULTRAAAAAA CONSOOOOOOOOOOOLE![/url]

    And then, reality. It isn't going to be called the Ultra 64. It'll be the Nintendo 64. Wimpy. But okay, at least I'll still be able to have lots of Killer Instinct brawls right out of the box, right?

    Nope. One controller only. And it'll be more expensive than originally projected. And it isn't coming out "IN NINETEEN NINTY FIVE!".

    And Killer Instincts isn't a launch title.

    And when it finally was released-- it was Killer Instinct 2: Too Late And Missing The Point.

    The wounds still itch when it rains.



  • @video said:

    "PlayStation and " "are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.


    Sony are trademarking a space?


    @FrostCat said:

    That's not the worst idea. Actually, other than the sluggish-like-Castlevania controls, this was a pretty decent game. If you had access to sunlight most of the time you wanted to play.

     

     I loved that game. Though living in England I could only play it for one month out of the year, and that's only if my sleep schedule was behaving itself.
    The westernied DS sequel's RNG-based sunlight system made it easier, but less interesting.

     

    On the subject of DS touch controls, what I hate is when you have the option of navigating a menu with either the touch screen or the buttons, but the cursor isn't present at first. So for example you want to select the third option in the menu. On a sane system you'd press down twice. On most first-party DS games, you press down twice and the cursor is on the second option because the first press just made the cursor appear.

     



  • @joe.edwards said:

    I think blakey mentioned that the Atari VCS (aka 2600) had 128 bytes of RAM, which prompted me to read Racing the Beam (a good read if you're into that sort of thing).

    Good book, although it's inexplicably written in textbook format.

    I liked how it compared early 2600 games like Combat with the late games like Empire Strikes Back, and how amazing the amount of power they squeezed out of that shitty hardware.



  •  Someone should make a pets game where the pets are connected to cleverbot. Hilarity ensues as owners everywhere try to convince their virtual dogs that they are not in fact cats.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    For example, Uncharted: Drake's Whatever offers non-gimmicky controls then, out of nowhere, stops you cold with a screen where you have to (and I am not even kidding) hold the Vita's rear camera against a bright light source. I was playing this in Washington State, in a bus, in November... where the holy fuck was I supposed to find a bright light source?!



    if i remember correctly that particular part was somewhere in the chapter 12. so either you are a masochist or you really had fun with your vita :)




  • Or I paid $50 and wanted to get all my value out of it.



  • Sony announced the price of the Wi-Fi PlayStation Vita would be dropping to $199 in the US and €199 in Europe.

     Along with a new advertising campaign:  It still sucks but at least it's cheaper.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @El_Heffe said:

    Sony announced the price of the Wi-Fi PlayStation Vita would be dropping to $199 in the US and €199 in Europe.
    And, I suppose, as usual with such things, it'll also be £199. I'd check the article myself, but the URL seems a tad broken....



  • @PJH said:

    I'd check the article myself, but the URL seems a tad broken....
    My fault.  Community Server mangles links and I didn't catch it.

    No mention of the price in pounds in that particular article.


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