I love my Vita. Maybe because I was 16 when I got it, but I use it more than any other handheld I own, Switch included. It feels great to play, has weird stuff, and it's the last handheld Sony will ever make. So I was shocked to find there's no thread here yet! Seriously, it failed, but there's cool video games on it! You probably know the "big" names - Tearaway, Persona 4, Gravity Rush, Dagnabromper - but it also had [Ore no Shikebane wo Koete Yuke 2](https://www.mobygames.com/game/83640/oreshika-tainted-bloodlines/) and [DJMax](https://www.mobygames.com/game/92554/djmax-technika-tune/) and [Soul Sacrifice](https://www.mobygames.com/game/83478/soul-sacrifice-delta/) and [The House in Fata Morgana](https://www.mobygames.com/game/108568/the-house-in-fata-morgana/) and [Stranger of Sword City](https://www.mobygames.com/game/84430/stranger-of-sword-city-revisited/) and [pretty anime boys](https://www.mobygames.com/game/93482/collar-malice/) and [Tales](https://www.mobygames.com/game/74225/tales-of-hearts-r/) and [Ys](https://www.mobygames.com/game/78036/ys-memories-of-celceta/) and PS2 "remasters" and like 30 Atelier games and [more](https://www.mobygames.com/game/88429/gunhouse/) [indie](https://www.mobygames.com/game/86731/olliolli2-welcome-to-olliwood/) [stuff](https://www.mobygames.com/game/89529/txk/) than I can even begin listing. All in your pocket, in English, years before the Switch Lite was pretending it was small enough for that. AND it plays PSX+PSP games! Surely _that's_ worth dusting off.
(Of course, I mostly use it for the bad Wizardry clones. I like them. I don't quite know why.)
PLUS you can [hack it](https://vita.hacks.guide/) to get access to The Scene™, who have blessed it with [dual analog PSP games](https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/RemasteredControls), [Android ports](https://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it/#/info/999), [Grand Theft Auto 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQqAbskT0BA), [Sonic Mania](https://github.com/SonicMastr/Sonic-Mania-Vita), [gyro-controlled Return to Castle Wolfenstein](https://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it/#/info/459) and [even more weird ports](https://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it/#/), alongside all the emulators you'd expect. Oh, and [questionable Dreamcast emulation](https://github.com/Rinnegatamante/flycast-vita). But it's worth it just to use [StorageMgr](https://github.com/CelesteBlue-dev/PSVita-StorageMgr) with an [SD2Vita](https://www.amazon.com/Funturbo-Ultimate-Version-SD2Vita-Adapter/dp/B07F63FPT3) adapter, so you can hoard Backup Copies without paying $5 a gigabyte. Seriously, [hack yours right now if you haven't](https://vita.hacks.guide/).
Do you still use your Vita? Am I just weird? [Have you hacked it yet?](https://vita.hacks.guide/) You really should.
I loved the Vita back on the day. Gravity Rush, Zero Escape 2 and 3, the Danganronpa games, Muramasa Rebirth, Gundam Breaker, PS1 games, PSP games, I played a ton of stuff on it. Even the not great Killzone and Uncharted games were kind of fun from a handheld spectacle perspective. I did put CFW on mine a couple years ago but admittedly haven’t touched it much since.
I plan to get back to House in Fata Morgana at some point and then maybe Suikoden 1 and 2 on it, I think it’s a nice form factor for PS1 stuff that doesn’t require L2/R2 buttons.
I think I mentioned in here somewhere but last year just a few months after I got a 128gb sd card for my jailbroken vita and i was starting to enjoy it a lot I kinda left it outside in the rain by accident and it was then dropped from the roof of a car. The screen and one of the sticks died but somehow the motherboard was still working. A few months later I bought all the replacement parts i needed (plus a new battery) from alliexpress to then find out mid-repair that I ordered a screen without a vessel which is much, much harder to install and requires separating the old screen with a hair dryer (according to a youtube video) and then gluing the new one and because of that (and my lack of energy and/or motivation) my vita has been like this for the past 7ish (?) months. I‘ll have to do a lot of research into what went where exactly cause it’s totally disassembled I sure don't remember anything.
In honor of this thread's title (and also the fact that I've been meaning to do this for a while now) I think I'll try to give new life to my vita asap. maybe tomorrow even.
look at this thing.
this[size=5] near-microscopic [/size]chip contains a whole video game. you don’t need to connect it to the internet, it loads [s]instantly[/s] blazingly fast. this chiclet in your hand is fully formed, stuffed with beautiful gameplay and art and sounds, imbued with spirit. what a delight.
So I‘m planning on modding my Vita. I’ve got the Vita2SD adapter and all that, but I‘m still trying to figure out which SD card I should buy. In terms of size, a lot of Vita resources I’ve read recommend 512 GB cards, but that seems absurdly large to me, especially since cards that large start to get pricy. What size of card do people here recommend? Should I be considering factors other than size?
@rearnakedwindow if you‘re going to be playing vita, psp, or ps1 games then I do think the 512 is worth it because the games tend to be quite large. If you’re mainly using it for more retro emulation then 256 should be more than plenty. A 256 gb one is around $20 and the price scales somewhat linearly so I think it‘s really up to you whether you value the extra $20 to get a 512 vs the extra time you might spend fiddling with file transfers to put the games you want to play on the thing. I wouldn’t recommend going below 256 because a 64 gb card already costs $10 so you might as well spend $20 on the 256, and I wouldn‘t recommend going higher than 512 because I’m not sure if the mods play well with 1 TB cards. I usually try to stick to SanDisk cards as they‘re pretty reliable and especially with emulation you’re going to be reading and writing to those cards a lot if you have autosaving on and that can break less reliable cards.
@TracyDMcGrath Thank you so much! I went with the 512, decided to live a little and just go for it. It should come in the next couple of days and then I'll hopefully get my Vita life really going.
So, I know this thread is more intended to celebrate the Vita than to be like a help thread, but this has been a big recurring problem since I got my Vita in 2014 and I trust the good people of this forum more than anyone else on the Internet: my dang charger doesn't charge consistently. I can always eventually get it to charge if I mess around with it enough, get the wire in juuust the right placement, get my solid orange light, and then DON'T EVEN BREATHE ON IT. But it would be nice to have it so I can just plug it in and it works every time. Maybe I need a new charger? Maybe I need to clean that little port? I just don't know. Has anybody dealt with / solved similar problems?
I just want to say that even though I don‘t play my Vita all of the time, I definitely love my Vita!
With the previous handheld generation, I liked the DS more than the PSP. So when the Vita and 3DS rolled out, I thought the 3DS was the obvious choice. I didn’t get a Vita until they were announced as discontinued and I imported a Japanese one. I made the wrong choice because while the 3DS never clicked with me, I very quickly learned to love what the Vita has to offer!
I have the LCD version but I still think the screen is bright, clear, and pleasant to look at. With games on those mini cards, I like that I don't have to deal with bulky, rattly UMDs. I love how it can play PSP games in a way that I prefer to original PSP hardware. I haven't watched any movies on it but doing that would be FAR better than watching them on a UMD. Remote play with PS4 is kind of clunky but it still a pretty cool feature. And that's not even touching on its game library which has loads of interesting titles (especially if you like JRPGs and the like). The biggest downside is that I don't really like taking it places but since I mostly just want to play handheld games at home anyway, that's fine.
IMO the Vita is the hardware that really delivered on the promises of the PSP.
I haven't hacked mine but I'm honestly pretty happy with it as it is.
Also I'm dreading the day when I'll have to change the battery: it looks quite a bit more difficult than the PSP...
@rearnakedwindow not had this problem but the USB part of the charger is very cheap on Amazon so you can take a chance it is that.
All my handhelds charge via USB from a hub plugged into my PC so if your Vita gets intermittent charging from the cable not being Just Right, then you could leave it in your PC or something else so that it charges only when your PC is on. I work from home so all my handhelds charge for 8 hours a day. This works well because I have a GBA SP that either doesn't charge consistently or lies about when it is charging or lies about when it is charged. I think it has a dodgy charging port but I'm not a solderer so it probably isn't getting fixed. Charging it from the PC means that it is getting juiced regularly for when the fancy takes me to play it.
Anyone here have a Slim model and would be willing to give their thoughts on it? I have an old slightly beat up OLED Vita with cfw on it and I kinda want to grab a cheap slim locally for official PSN stuff I’ve bought over the years(I know you can technically do this on cfw but I don’t really want to) and physical games. How does the screen compare?
@sabertoothalex it’s noticeably less good! but the trade off is that, in my opinion, the slim is much more comfortable to hold. also, as long as you don’t directly set them side by each and compare them, the slim’s screen will probably look just fine.
Slim is indeed more comfy and screen is fine if you don't compare to oled. Apparently you can hack slim screen to look more vibrant but you need to jailbreak it heh heh.... I'm all for having variants of consoles so totally go for it. There are some nice colors!
I had slim first and got og oled version later and I was disappointed at the screen at first because it's kind of dim and not too vibrant. I chucked it up to it being old oled tech but found hack that lets you jack the brightness way up. Looking super damn nice. It's not as good as Switch oled but still beautiful.
Sometimes all it takes for me to love a console is when it becomes another way to play older games I already like. Had a nice time loading up Adrenaline on my Vita and playing various PS1 and PSP standbys: Tekken 3, Ridge Racer 4, Outrun 2006, SF Alpha 3, and Samurai Shodown Collection. I dig all those games but I've never played any of them on a handheld and that gives them something fresh.
As far as actual Vita games, I'm really liking Touch My Katamari. It's nice to have an actual good exclusive that didn't get made unexclusive later (which was an annoying trend that I think hurt the Vita's identity, even if it made some of these games more widely available). Fun, fast, poppable levels that fit handheld format quite well.
Anyway, just curious, what games- exclusive, non-exclusive, emulated, whatever- do you all especially enjoy playing on your Vita?
I also like mine for Adrenaline and don't get why people say it's an inferior experience. The resolution is 200% exactly on each axis and there are a bunch of sharp filters you can use besides bilinear blur. I'd really like to know what's missing from the experience compared to an actual PSP.
@connrrr I like psp on adrenaline also but I think lack of real grid lines on screen make it feel a bit off to me.
Vita was pretty much P4G/P4D/Danganronpa machine until I hacked it. I'm not dexterous with controllers so action games were not fun for me with those tiny knobs. Tearaway is really cool. Backtouch poking finger through the screen part is probably one of the most obscene feeling video game experience.
@tomjonjon I played like a whole questline of Horizon Zero Dawn remotely while housesitting once on my Vita and still had fun. It‘s a neat novelty. I think I may have even played a bit of Nioh that way too but I can’t remember if I enjoyed it for real or not lol.
