UK, European and Australasian Vita Players! Haven’t got PlayStation Plus yet? No? Well now might be the time to get that sorted as due to cross buy links on titles this month, we haven’t had two new free titles added to the PS Plus instant games collection – we have had FOUR!
Along with Surge Deluxe and Dragon’s Crown, the cross buy offer with products also out on the PS3 and PS4 have resulted in us getting Lone Survivor: The Director’s cut and Pixeljunk Shooter Ultimate, respectively.
With these additions that means if you sign up for PS Plus today you can download SEVEN full games for free on PS Vita as Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Gravity Rush and Sly Cooper Thieves in Time are still available as of right now. Not bad for £40 for 12 months.
Of course PS Plus also allows you to play online on the PS4 and give you further Instant Game Collection offerings on the PS4 and PS3 as you can see on the PlayStation Store.
However all this cross buy goodness (and it *IS* good as it means content actually coming to the Vita) does have a down side. A lot of the products coming to the Vita are cross buy with the PS4 now, and this is because they are easy to port from the PC to both consoles (the Vita actually being a smidge more difficult to support than the PS4 due to it’s homogensied PC internals.) With all this porting going on, though, what is actually taking advantage of the PS Vita properly? This is also exasperating the state of the Vita in most people’s mindsets. The availability of the digital titles is all good, but to the casual gamer on the street who may not have looked at the Vita too closely, the boxed full retail releases are getting extremely thin and far between. With physical sales falling off as a result of this, less and less space is goign to be available to the Vita in the High Street with many retailers now not carrying anything to do with the console at all, and big hitters like HMV only carrying them in their larger city centre stores. The lack of AAA titles, as explored by Ben in his blog, is very concerning.
With E3 about to start, I just hope that Sony have a few surprises on the way – The PS Vita needs to get it’s own Infamous, Last Of Us, Resogun, Shadow Of The Beast and all new IP that actually takes full advantage of the hardware. Plus lets get it doing a load of stuff that an essential hand held device would do – Comixology, PDFs, Ultraviolet, BBC iPlayer, and playing MP3s properly all come to mind.
C’mon Sony, surprise us at E3, and don’t make it all about the PS4 again. Don’t ignore the PS3 either – £99.99 12GB PS3 with some family friendly titles being brought through would be epic.
The offerings for Plus this month are great if you own a Vita. I agree though that the Vita needs NEW games or IP not just ports of games already available on ps4 or 3. Worryingly though I have seen interviews with a couple of developers where they are ecstatic with the fact that their upcoming PS4 game can be played on Vita via remote Play, and that statement tells me that they don’t care for a native Vita game even though to play the game in this manner you need to buy the home console in order to play the game on a handheld that needs a connection to the home console! and in my house that means within about 10 meters! That in my book is not handheld gaming!