I'm sure you guys all know that if there's anything I like, it's news about the Vita, something that I grow more and more excited for every day.. So GamesCom has been quite a thing for me, what with all the things confirmed, announced and shown off for it. And even though my allergies are making these words crawl through the haze in my head to get here at the moment, I still want to point out the more noteworthy bits of news that we learned about. (Which are, of course, all of them.)
First up, and arguably the most forgettable of the news, is the fact that there will be downloadable apps for Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Foursquare which is....well, not great news, but pretty good. I know I use my PSP to check my Twitter and update it, which, well, you all know as well, and while I don't have much use for the other three apps, the fact that they'll be available for download for free is nice. Note that "Available for Download" is key, since it likely means they won't come pre-loaded on the Vita so you can just pick what you like rather than have a useless Foursquare app staring at you every time you go onto that app page or however this UI is going to pan out with all these apps and buttons.
Seriously, before today, I had never heard of Foursquare. And this news did prompt me to wiki it which...well, it looks interesting. It's like a sort of meta-game you play with your friends and/or the entire internet, that lets you log where you go and give you points and awards for visiting the same places again and again or something. Like I said, it's fairly interesting, but the wiki article does, of course, point out the inherent, er, issues with such a service, and I don't know if those have been addressed or anything properly yet, but while interesting, I doubt I'll be using it, especially since it sounds like Near far outperforms it in terms of prizes for going out of the house.
Secondly, which is....kinda sorta less necessary to know for those of us who just intend to play on the Vita, is the knowledge that Vita Dev Kits are dirt cheap (comparatively speaking). Where the PS3/PS2 dev kits were/are fairly expensive (The figure shown in the article is "PS2 and PS3 devkits cost €20,000, while PSP ones cost €15,000", but those may be long out-dated numbers.), the Dev Kits for Vita in Europe will start for a paltry 1,900 Euros plus tax. I don't know the exact exchange rate or anything like that, but four figures seems, all in all, pretty nice, especially when that four figures is on the low-end of it all. Hopefully this means that it'll never be 'too expensive' to develop on the Vita and as such, we'll never have such a drastic games drought.
Finally and most importantly, was all the wonderful games news that we got, not only updates to games we knew about but also brand-new reveals shown off just recently. Clearly, we all know that I'm going to show off the trailer for LittleBigPlanet Vita, right? Right. This one focuses a lot on the fact that you'll be able to take pictures and inspiration from anywhere you go and shows it off in, well, a pretty good way.
Of course, the end result isn't exactly what was built and would take at least a little while longer of tweaking, but still it's seeming fairly user-friendly. I imagine the sticks will be what you use for a little more precise work but more methods of input are always good, I say. Also, that music.
Up next is my second most anticipated game for the Vita at this point, Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Finally a trailer that shows off how the game looks in cutscenes and in-game. Which, unsurprisingly, both look exactly the same.
If I had to pick any one thing out of that that I didn't like, it'd just be the girl's hair; something about it looks slightly off. But, eh, such is the issue with video game hair, unfortunately. The rest? The rest is spectacular.
And while I'm going to be looking forward to Resistance: Burning Skies and Gravity Rush (newly named), the announcement of Escape Plan is something that is fairly interesting, so I thought it would bear reason to show it off.
Maybe it's the music playing (really, how many times has that song been used to show off a game? Yet it works every time.) or the Clerks font on the in-betweens, or just because the game really shows off some form of character with just what we've seen, but it looks like it'll be a contender for our attentions.
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