I Bought a PlayStation Vita in 2025
I know talking about the Vita is a bit cliche nowadays since it's been covered so much by every nostalgic YouTube video essayist, but I still wanted to talk a bit about my personal experience with it after two weeks of using it. I never owned a Vita before now, and I really fell in love with it!
Buying it
I wasn't actually planning on buying a Vita last month. I was instead looking to buy a cheap handheld for emulating retro games like Anbernic and Miyoo devices, which were around ~50-60 dollars. It turns out that's about the price of better used devices where I live. Specifically, the Vita - which I heard was pretty good for emulating older games.
As a bonus, I'd get to check out the Vita's library of games that I completely missed out on. Not to mention, it would definitely have a better build quality compared to the cheap plastic of most retro handhelds. The Vita also has a very popular emulation scene and even Retroarch is up-to-date and regularly releases builds for the device, which made it a perfect choice.
I ended up buying a used Vita off of someone who barely used it, which was obvious because he only had one game on it and a 4GB memory card. Sadly, it sounds like he gave up on it soon after Sony did.
Hacking it
Literally as soon as I got my hands on it, I started hacking it. It is genuinely insane how far the Vita hacking scene has gone, you can now hack the Vita very easily by opening a browser link and clicking "Unlock my Vita". That uses a browser exploit to run the hacking tool and open up the device. Unfortunately there are a few more steps when hacking the older OLED model, but by following this great tutorial it was a nice, painless experience that didn't even need a computer. I was done in around 45 minutes.
After hacking the device and downloading some homebrew software, it was time to expand the storage. Arguably the biggest reason the Vita failed was the outrageous memory cards they sold. This thing had no internal storage, and memory cards maxed out at 32GB which cost over $100(!) at the time the Vita released. I remember even now when people called it a scam on forums back in ~2012.
Luckily, the community banded together and released something called SD2Vita, a cheap adaptor that allows you to use a MicroSD card to expand the storage. I initially thought this would replace the memory card, but no. It's actually placed in the game card slot, which is brilliant. A few steps later, and the borderline useless 4GB of storage were now 128GB!
Having fun with homebrew
There's quite a bit of great homebrew for the Vita. Custom theme managers, unofficial ports of various games (featuring older classics like Simpsons Hit and Run and a few newer ones like Hollow Knight), and various custom software including very easy ways to get Vita games through... Less legal means.
Probably the most impressive homebrew though is Adrenaline, which turns your Vita into a fully fledged PSP! This gains you access to the more impressive PSP library as well as Playstation 1 games. Cool!
Of course, my main goal was getting Retroarch, which has the files and install instructions on their site. I've only tried SNES emulation so far and it works great - just be sure to avoid the 2010 Snes9x core since it crashes when you try to load your state.
Constantly moving ROMs to the Vita from my computer is a bit cumbersome, but luckily there's an app that lets you transfer files through FTP - so I can connect to my computer at any time to grab files. It's super convenient.
Initial Impressions
Sony's handhelds have unmatched build quality, the hardware here is excellent. Similar to the PSP, the Vita is built like a tank and made to last a long time - which is evident because of just how many copies of them are still being passed around in good condition.
I thought I'd have a hard time with the controls because of how small everything is, the sticks and face buttons are tiny compared to something like the Switch. Not only did I end up liking them, but I think I prefer these controls to the full-sized ones!
I played Super Meat Boy and was very happy with how snappy the analog stick felt. It's low-travel which means you can almost instantly switch directions, but it's responsive and sensitive enough that you still have fine control. The face buttons are also quality, I was impressed with how easy it is to press diagonals on the D-pad.
That said, Sony cooked maybe a little too hard. The Vita is packed with features that were rarely ever used and no doubt made production more expensive than it needed to be. Most of the back panel of the Vita is a glass touchpad, which was only used for a few gimmicks in first-party titles (all ~5 of them).
The Vita also came with a camera which Sony apparently wanted to use for AR games. Both Sony and Microsoft were TOTALLY convinced that AR would be the next big thing in the early 2010s after the Wii craze, but it never ended up happening. I'm probably the only person in the entire world that remembers the Wonderbook. I wonder if Sony ever looked back at that and asked themselves "what on earth were we thinking?"
There's a weird port at the top of the device that was apparently for accessories, but it was NEVER used because Sony gave up before they had a chance to do anything with it. It's a proprietary USB port that was never used again, so Sony spent extra money manufacturing it only for this device.
It even had motion controls and a SIM card slot. On the software side: a bunch of daily-life apps like an E-mail client, a calendar, and music/video apps. They even had surprisingly good third-party app support like Netflix, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, etc... When you bring all these extra features together, it's obvious that Sony really wanted this thing to compete with smartphones. I think part of the reason Sony is so pissed at the Vita failing was because they put a lot of time and effort into this non-gaming side only for very few people to care. They really wanted it to be the next big thing.
🛈 January 26 Addendum Shuhei Yoshida (former Sony Entertainment CEO) was recently on the Kinda Funny podcast and confirmed a lot of what I was saying! According to him, the OLED was costly, the back panel touchpad was unnecessary, and the proprietary memory cards were "a mistake". The cost of hardware along with not having enough game studios to support the Vita and the PS4 led to the device failing and Sony quickly casting it aside.Shuhei also added that the Vita's devkit included a way to show the device on an external monitor, similar to the Nintendo Switch - but they trashed the idea to save money. Could this be what the mysterious USB port on the top of the device was used for?
Games on the Vita
Taking a look at the Vita library, you can see why people weren't very impressed with it. There are some well-liked spinoffs like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Killzone: Mercenary, but they're still spinoffs. The good smaller titles they had like Sound Shapes and Tearaway were ported to PS4 not long after release, and I already played those.
One thing I was really looking forward to were ports of older titles. This thing had all the Sly Cooper games, a few Ratchet and Clank games, the Jak and Daxter games, among other stuff. It even has some quality stuff like Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed, and hey, Borderlands 2!
I was in for a real disappointment... It turns out that the Vita was a magnet for low-effort ports. Pretty much every port I just mentioned ran poorly. Sly Cooper 1 runs at sub-30 FPS, the Sonic racing game feels like it's in the ~25FPS range, Borderlands 2 is apparently nigh unplayable, and God of War 1 dips to what feels like 15FPS in bigger fights. This doesn't make sense to me because the PSP had God of War games at comparable quality, and those ran much better on worse hardware. What gives?
That's not all, remember how most people only had 4 gigabytes of storage? Games had to be squashed down so people can actually download it. It seems that literally every game on the Vita had a hard limit of being around 3.25GB in size, and developers had to cut corners to make that happen.
Ports regularly suffer from bad audio due to this. Sly Cooper had most music tracks heavily compressed, and God of War destroyed the quality of its sound effects and dialogue. One of the reviews I looked up before picking it up said something along the lines of "It sounds like Kratos is shouting over a walkie-talkie". It's really disappointing, because the Vita would have been PERFECT for playing those classic games! But unfortunately, Sony has a weird streak of hating their older titles. Reminder that Jak and Daxter had amazing HD remasters on the PS3, but have decided to emulate the low-resolution PS2 version on modern consoles instead.
Anyway, on the topic of God of War for the Vita, the R2/L2 controls seem to be replaced with pressing the back touch panel. This is an abysmal idea, because I interact with things like save points multiple times on accident just because I'm holding the Vita a different way. Having to remove and place my hand at the back panel every time I wanted to open a chest is also blegh.
On the bright side, indie games actually put in the effort to make great ports. Games like Super Meat Boy and Spelunky run like a dream at a stable 60FPS - and they look great on the OLED screen! Indie devs supported the device surprisingly late into the Vita's life-cycle, with games like Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment and Steamworld Dig 2 releasing in 2017, long after companies stopped supporting the Vita. How nice.
🛈 January 26 Addendum I'm currently playing LittleBigPlanet PS Vita - which is an awful title that makes it sound like a port of the original LittleBigPlanet. It's actually a great little game made by a different development studio with a brand new campaign that makes full use of the device. There are levels where you use the touch panel to move things around the level, or push them in the environment which can then be pushed out with the back touch pad. There are levels where you tilt your device to control a vehicle, and quite a bit of minigames that use the Vita in super creative ways, such as mobile-esque games that are played in portrait mode (by holding the Vita sideways).LittleBigPlanet is a great showcase for what Sony wanted the Vita to be, an all-around device with a slew of ways to play games. Mind you, it's very gimmicky and I did groan a bit when it kept asking me to tilt the device to move, but it's a fantastic demonstration of the tech involved. Be sure to pick it up if you ever get your hands on the console!
Outro
In the end, I'm having a lot of fun with the Vita. The hardware is excellent, the homebrew community is amazing, and there's quite a few great Vita/PSP games to enjoy. That said, I am a bit miffed at how bad many of the ports are. I was looking forward to playing the Sly Cooper franchise, but the ports are just not good. Many AAA titles that weren't directly made for the Vita suffered frame drops and compressed audio, which makes the Vita's library even worse than it looks from the outside.
Some people say the Vita deserved better and should've been a smash hit, but I disagree honestly. The Vita is fantastic now because of how the community took things into their own hands and fixed basically all its issues, adding tools, emulators, unofficial ports, and native PSP/PS1 support. On release, the Vita was really just a pricy handheld that played spinoffs and bad ports of your favorite PlayStation titles.
Right now though, if you can find a used Vita around for cheap, I'd fully recommend it - especially if you never got around to playing the excellent PSP/PS1 library of games! If the rumors that Sony is thinking of re-joining the hardware market are actually true, hopefully they learned their lesson. I would absolutely love a "Vita done right".