Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

If you couldn't guess, the above is my current Page One of my Vita that I bought today, actually held and played with and finally experienced exactly what this machine had to offer.  If you're surprised that my background, rather, that the first place I went to was Drakengard, you clearly don't know me too well but that's okay, I forgive you.  While I haven't gotten to really look around for proper-sized Vita backgrounds just yet, as I assume it'll still be something of a task to do so, I have that and a few others that I'm toying about with the prospect of using so I am not left wanting.  All that aside, I did, obviously, spend the bulk of the night with my Vita after  I finally got home from purchasing it and having it charge and then download and install the update that had been pushed out last week for maps.  Which wasn't painful at all and I wasn't pacing around the house the entire time or anything crazy like that no sir.

My first experience was, clearly, a fantastic one, and I come away, having finally turned it off prior to working on this post, feeling a satisfaction that I didn't quite expect, despite barely dipping into the device whatsoever.  My journey to GameStop didn't yield the results I'd hoped for, unfortunately; while I got my Vita and Uncharted with no hassle (in fact, I forgot to tell the guy I had Uncharted pre-ordered and only by virtue of the magical computer did he grab it), the prospect of owning a 16 gig stick on this way was snatched from me for a brief moment when the clerk, 'Leo' (who was a fantastic guy) told me in no uncertain terms "We're out."  This was directly after he informed me that they did not get nor have any copies of Dynasty Warriors Next for sale, so my response and in fact the only response one could have at that moment was to say, "Aww, man you are killing me here".  A quick assurance that they did, in fact, have more 16 Gig sticks from the other clerk working the store made it alright however and $335.17 later ($35.17 after my gift cards) I exited the store with a big bag of the three mentioned items and a sense of unbridled excitement.

The obvious kink in my aforementioned plan is present now as, with no Dynasty Warriors Next, I cannot play Dynasty Warriors Next before Uncharted:  Golden Abyss which I -actually- have and that presents a rather real and annoying problem.  Namely, after waiting so very very long for this thing, I'm not quite ready to play it since, while I assure you that I am chomping at the proverbial bit here to play Uncharted, I know that when I begin playing it, I will not stop and at the launch of a system, you want to have options or at least the illusion of them.  If I play Uncharted for the simple reason that I can't afford to not play Uncharted, then I will not, then, be playing Uncharted specifically because I want to.  It's insanity in pure text, I realize, but this is what's going on in my head and it's for this reason that I spent the majority of the day playing with Welcome Park, rather than the Gilded Chasm, as it were.

Welcome Park is....well, it's not 'satisfying', but at the same time, it's far more surprising than I had anticipated.  The five mini-games are there simply to do as you have been told - to teach you how to use the functions of the system that are, in fact, so intuitive that you don't really need to be taught them.  Regardless, they're mostly all fun in their own right besides the one that revolves around the camera, since it involves you taking a picture with it and then solving that picture as a sliding tile puzzle of 7, 8, 14 or 15 tiles.  I'm sure it's stated somewhere in the big book of Collected Video Game Knowledge, but in the off-chance it is not:  Fuck sliding tile games.  They are never fun.  They are not fun now, they were not fun when I was a wee young'n playing The Simpsons:  Bart vs. the World, they will not be fun when I'm forty and playing Final Fantasy 16.  It's just never going to happen and their mere existence annoys me beyond words.

However, the other four games (well, three, I don't explicitly count the Sound one as a game) are fun in their own right; the touch screen-based game has the right level of "27 seconds?  Psh, I can get 26" replayability, Face Finder is interesting enough that I actually remembered the name of it and will likely be looking for faces in the real world because of it now, and the Sixaxis game is just....just fun, actually.  I was surprised too, and maybe it's just the twenty minutes of collected time I spent playing with it talking, but I got the trophy for it with no trouble on my first go and have played it three times since, content to just try and hop all those bouncey orbs as a little distraction.  It's not going to sate my gaming desires for long periods of time, but it'll do in a pinch.  I only hope that my quest to Target tomorrow yields positive results as I believe my time with Welcome Park drew to a close earlier and I won't be able to sustain another day on it exclusively.  I guess we'll see, though!