PS Vita as a Retro Gaming Handheld (Review)

[Music] hey everyone this is russ from retro game core so if you've ever been on any emulation forum or any sort of web page every time you talk about any sort of emulation device the subject of the ps vita comes up every single time and there's a lot of people who really love this device and they say it's the perfect one for emulation and honestly the arguments are so strong that i ended up buying a ps vita for myself just to try this out and to really see what it was all about now i've had my ps vita for about a month now and you know i've hacked it at this point and i've put retroarch on it and i have installed all sorts of games and everything on it and so i'm at this point now where i feel like i can talk about it a little bit authoritatively in the terms of how it plays as a retro handheld device and typically that's what i'm used to playing with you know the amber nick devices retro pocket 2 things like that so i really want to do a comparison for those of you out there who are thinking to themselves i have this other device but do i need a ps vita is that something i want or for example if you don't have any of these devices and you want to see if the ps vita is the right selection for you so without any further delay let's get into it and talk about the ps vita for retro gaming okay so let's start by talking about the features of the ps vita itself so number one it runs an arm cortex a9 cpu which is quad core and runs at 2 gigahertz it has a 5 inch lcd or oled display depending on the model you buy and it has a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and it has a 22 10 milliamp hour battery which can run anywhere from three to six hours depending on the model you have now the ps vita has a ton of neat features for example it has a touch screen on the front a rear touch pad on the back it has wi-fi bluetooth as well as cellular 3g on some models it also has a motion sensor inside of it as well as cameras on the front and the back of the device now ps vitas are no longer being sold by sony you have to buy them used and you can find them anywhere from 150 to 225 on ebay and i paid about two hundred dollars for mine once you hack the device it can run retroarch and retroarch will open up a ton of systems like nintendo super nintendo game boy game boy color game boy advance game gear sega master system sega genesis sega cd sega 32x as well as arcade emulators for example vinyl burn neo works as well as maim does so overall this is the majority of the classic consoles you'll be able to emulate on the device itself now there are some systems that really don't work on this device at all including nintendo 64 sega saturn nintendo ds as well as sega dreamcast there are people working on emulators for this device in particular but they are not running up to speed at this point so if you really prefer these systems this may not be the device for you now that being said it can play ps1 psp and ps vita games natively they run perfectly on this device and if you have a ps3 or ps4 you can actually use remote play to play these games on your device over the internet which is pretty awesome okay so let's start talking with the hardware first things first you're going to see my face reflected a lot in this video unfortunately this whole thing is one big piece of glass and it's impossible to film this without getting all these reflections so i apologize for that in advance also this thing is going to attract a ton of fingerprints so just be prepared for that so let's talk about the analog sticks i really like these analog sticks they're a little bit on the small side but they feel really good they're very responsive they're just that right height for me i really like them the d-pad itself is actually very premium i love it it's very different from a lot of other d-pads that i'm used to it is one single piece it kind of looks like it's four different buttons but it's one single button and it just it has a nice little mushiness to it and it clicks a little bit as well it's just very very premium you can tell that they spent a lot of time testing on this and so i really love this d-pad it's one of my favorites same thing on the right side the right analog stick is exact same as the left one it feels really good i should mention the do not click down if so if you're expecting that there is no l3 or r3 on this now the face buttons themselves same thing they have this kind of clear plastic to them they feel really great overall these buttons just feel very very nice up top on the shoulders you have these two shoulder buttons just r1 and l1 there is no l2 or r2 on this device and they feel just fine i mean i have no issues with them it's a little weird that they're clear to me but overall i have no problems with them they're nice and soft and responsive up top we have the power button as well as the ps vita cartridge slot and then they have this accessory slot that nobody uses for anything and then there's a volume up and down on the bottom here you can see there's a plug-in adapter for data as well as for charging and it's proprietary so you're going to have to get one specifically for this device there's also a headphone jack and then there's a memory card slot now the ps vita 2000 series has internal memory so you wouldn't need a memory card but you're going to need one for this especially for hacking it also has two little clips on the bottom here so if you wanted to attach like a string or something to it so you didn't drop it you could do that if you wanted and then on the front there you can see it has a front facing camera on the bottom you can see there's a select and start button there nothing special about them they are a little bit hard to push because they're flush with the device itself but not a big deal and similarly there is a playstation home button and that's what you're going to use in the same way you would on a playstation 4 to get back to home or anything like that now switching over to the back the first thing you're going to see is this rear touch pad and like i said this thing is a fingerprint magnet i swear i wiped this down five minutes before starting this video it also has these two kind of pads on the side where you can rest your fingers but overall this back touch pad just feels like a piece of glass and often you don't really think that it has a sensor and honestly it doesn't work very well luckily a lot of ps vita games actually don't use this feature but we'll get into that here in the future but in general these back pads don't really fit with where i'm supposed to put my fingers and i can't really figure out where i'm supposed to hold this thing or what sony wants me to do with my hands so in general i end up putting my hands just across the back of it and not using those pads that are there at all because it just doesn't fit very well to me so in terms of ergonomics it's kind of a confusing device it doesn't feel perfect in the hand but overall it does feel very premium i like that it's a little bit rounded in the back it makes a little bit easier to hold and this screen this screen is just amazing it's five inches and to me i think that's that perfect size uh you know the switch light is 5.5 inches and a lot of the retro devices usually are less than four inches this five inches really makes it impressive this thing feels like it's 99 screen which is just kind of a really cool experience when you're playing this it feels very premium and nice so let's talk about the slots for a second on the left here you actually have the cartridge slot and so this is where you would put in your ps vita cartridges but on top of that you can also buy this thing which is called an st2vita and it allows you to use an sd card and put it in there and you can actually use that to store all of your data now you have to have your device hacked in order to use that and i'll have a link down below on how to hack your device it's not an easy process but i wanted to have that available for you now on the bottom here there's a memory card slot and i bought a memory card for this because it's required to hack on a 1000 series ps vita and it was kind of expensive because it's a proprietary card so i think i paid 20 for this 8k card but it was a necessary step and luckily once you do it one time and you hack it you never have to use this thing again so it's really just a 20 price you have to pay in order to hack your device also up top you have an accessory port here sony never really did anything with this so it's just kind of there it doesn't have any function okay so now let's compare two other retro devices so let's start with the retro pocket two now you can tell right off the bat the screen just seems tiny compared to the ps vita but also the buttons just don't have that kind of premium look to it now i'll be the first to admit the retro pocket is half the price of a ps vita right so you get what you pay for but in general i don't think there's any sort of comparison you can make between these two devices in terms of the screen size just how it looks in terms of quality and then the buttons themselves and how they feel i mean one of the things i really do like about the retro pocket 2 that the ps vita doesn't have these two shoulder buttons that are stacked as well but overall this thing feels just kind of like a toy compared to the ps vita but again you could buy two of these for the price of one ps vita so just something to kind of bear in mind they're not really apples and apples it's more like apples and oranges i think a better comparison with the ps vita when it comes to retro handhelds is going to be the amberneck rg351p and that's because it has some of those similar premium features to it that the retro pocket just doesn't have so for example the way the craftsmanship was made it just feels much more sturdy in the hands it has better button placement i like the way that the analog sticks are just kind of perfectly placed everything feels really really good on this device it feels more like a high quality device compared to the retrograde pocket too and it's not up there with the ps vita in terms of that quality but for being about half the price of a ps vita you are getting a very solid product but when it comes to comparing the screens for example it's just no contest you can see that the 351 is a little bit smaller than the vita but really not that much but look at that huge difference in screen size it's like almost a full inch in width not to mention the diagonal size there and obviously the clarity and the ability to play very high resolution games is much better on the vita than is the 351p but nobody buys the rg 351p in order to play triple a titles right so let's keep this focused on the retro handheld game part of it here and let's talk about how the ps vita handles retro games in general okay like i mentioned before this device can play retro work and it's not a perfect experience you can see here when you navigate through after you've imported your titles it'll show you the thumbnails and stuff which is pretty handy but it's not perfect for example if i try to run the gpsp core on my version of retroarch it doesn't load at all it actually crashes the entire system and i'll show you that here in a second now in order to get retrowork on this device you actually have to go to the retroarch website and get a specific ps vita version and it just doesn't work very well you can't update your cores or any of the other things that you can expect to do in the rg 351p or any other retro device so it's kind of a compromise in terms of the experience of what you're expecting with retroarch now luckily the other available emulator core for game boy advance does work on this is called vba next so you are able to play game boy advanced games on this device you just have to kind of keep that in mind now game boy advance games actually play really well on this device they look really good because they also have a wide screen 3x2 aspect ratio so they look good at 16x9 and because the vita has online networking you can have retro achievements set up and everything like that very seamlessly and it's very fun to use overall game boy advance is probably one of my favorite systems to play on this device and the big screen just looks gorgeous now with other systems you can either decide if you want to stretch it out and have it take up the entire beautiful screen or you want to squeeze it down to a more manageable aspect ratio for example here is the game boy color and you can see it's kind of stretched out and the text looks really kind of fat and everything it's up to you if this is something you like personally i like to squish it down to a more manageable aspect ratio so you can see here i'm using the core provided aspect ratio and this still looks very nice and gorgeous even though i have the black bars on the sides overall it just looks very crisp and clear on the game boy same thing with the regular game boy non-game boy color here you can see you can either stretch it out in some games it looks pretty good actually i think that this version of metroid looks pretty good and here's here it is with some added colorization from the emulator core but overall i think that looks fine it's up to you whether or not you want to adjust the aspect ratio yourself same thing with nintendo you can see here this is with a 4x3 aspect ratio so you have the black bars on the side but really you're still getting a lot of screen here which is still pretty awesome but honestly i'm okay with living with the kind of fatter picture because it just looks so beautiful on the full screen here as you can see now like i mentioned before it's not perfect so for example i'm in the middle of playing an nes game just like this and it just crashed on me and i have no idea why it crashed and it's just something that's kind of frustrating especially if you hadn't saved your game or something like that super nintendo works fine i think this one also looks better in 4x3 aspect ratio there are some super nintendo games some surprisingly that don't run very well on this device so for example mario rpg it kind of chugs a little bit which is a little bit surprising but that's unfortunately just how it goes with this device as far as i could tell sega genesis ran perfectly i had no issues with it same thing with sega cd and sega 32x they all played just fine and honestly it's really neat to see these 16-bit games playing in this widescreen ratio like this i know they're a little squished but it just looks so beautiful on the screen now overall arcade was a disappointment to me a lot of games that play really well and a lot of low-powered systems do not play well on this device you can see me here playing alien versus predator on final bernie oh and it's not doing well it's getting about 45 frames per second when it should be getting close to 60. that's really unfortunate to me because this is not a very high powered game so same thing here with marvel vs capcom it has the same issues it's not running very quickly and it's just really unfortunate because final burn neo is supposed to run fighting games really really well it's just kind of not doing it and you can see here with cps3 games so for example street fighter alpha 3 it's just chugging it's getting about 42 frames per second when it should be getting 60. the rg 351p can cut into this game like a hot knife into butter and this thing just kind of chugs which is really unfortunate because it looks so beautiful on this display now here's mortal kombat and it only plays at about half speed which is really unfortunate because it plays at full speed on the rd 351p i think this is just kind of the way it's going to go with arcade emulation if you want to play an 80s game i think it'll be okay but any 90s games you're probably going to have issues which is kind of unfortunate now there's no sega dreamcast emulation on this device out of retroarch they don't even provide the core but they do provide the core for sega saturn so i booted it up and it had you know about six or seven frames per second completely unplayable which is kind of a bummer but at the same time i understand it you know this this system is made to play sony hardware games and so it's not meant to play sega games and unfortunately that means you can't play things like sega dreamcast or even sega saturn and like i mentioned before nintendo 64 nintendo ds they don't even have retroarch cores for these systems on this device you have to actually use a standalone emulator and those emulators are far from ideal i've read about them i've watched it on youtube and i've decided to myself that it's not time for me to even try to attempt to play those games on this device so that in a nutshell is basically what you can expect when it comes to emulation on this device you can expect to play 8-bit and 16-bit games okay and there are other cores that work okay so for example dosbox and things like that you can run those on this device but it is fairly limited but i wanted to give you an idea if you're thinking this is an emulation beast it really isn't so let's talk about the user experience itself so this is a touch screen display and a lot of the user interface actually is modified for a touch screen and it feels a lot like a smartphone or an ipad honestly now in general these are the different buttons you can use and this will give you a landing page which then you can then start from there and that's how things work and then when you want to actually end an application you just hit the playstation home button and then you swipe down from the corner to get back to the home screen and in general that's how you load a game or any sort of application these applications here are all the apps that you're going to need in order to hack and use the device so for example here is your psp emulator and over here you have an app that allows you to download games and whatnot and then retroarch is there obviously and then this one up here allows you to actually connect to your pc and access your memory card but you can see here here's a bunch of different ps vita games that play just perfectly on this device i mean obviously they run natively on this because that's what they're meant to be playing and these are not retro games these are modern games for the ps vita you know came out around 2012 2013 but there are a lot of collections which are really interesting for example here's the jack and daxter collection which allows you to play the first three jack and daxter games from the ps2 which is really kind of awesome and honestly the ps2 is not really a retro device but it does let you play some of those games which is pretty awesome and some of these native vita games are pretty incredible like i showed you in the beginning of the video that uncharted game just looks incredible and has a really fun controls it uses a lot of unique touch screen features which i think is really kind of cool to power off the device all you do is you hold down on the power button for a few seconds and then you just hit the power off it also has a sleep mode that works really well all you have to do is tap the power button so let's talk about the adrenaline app which is what you use to run psp and ps1 games now the device needs to be hacked in order to play this app and i have that instructions down below but in general it's just kind of a joy for me to turn this on and see the psp original interface you know i owned a psp back in the day when it first came out i was there waiting at midnight for this release and it's just so incredible to be able to have that experience all over again something i haven't really played in about 15 years which is kind of crazy so everything's stored in the memory card here so you can see i just go into the navigation and you can pull up all the different ps1 games and you can just load them right up and through this adrenaline app these ps1 games run perfectly there's actually a retroarch core for ps1 i haven't even tried it because this runs just brilliantly i love it and so you can see here it has the original splash screen here for playstation one there's a lot of different configurations you can do if you hold down the ps home button you can get into the official settings and that'll allow you to adjust the screen and all sorts of other things here so you can see me here going into the controller settings you can adjust your controller settings assign your buttons however you'd like but they're perfectly mapped already you can go in and adjust your memory card so for example if you have too many save files or whatever you can adjust it there and then most importantly you can adjust the screen now each of these different screen modes aren't perfect so i prefer to use the custom one which allows you to basically just drag the screen to whatever size you want it to be and you can keep your proportions to have it four by three or you can stretch it out a little bit so you can see here i'm making it so that it goes top and bottom across the entire screen but not all the way left and right so it's just kind of a middle ground between stretched and uh perfectly native resolution and it looks great i love it it brings me a lot of joy to be able to play a ps1 game so brilliantly on this device like this to quit out of the game you just quit it like you would any other psp game so you just hit the home button and then you just say yes quit the game and there you are back in your psp interface now let's go through again and kind of look through some of the psp games so for example you can see here tomb raider legend comes right up and it plays just like a regular psp game so let's try some of the harder ones out because we know that in general you know some of the emulation devices can play 2d psp games but let's try some of these 3d ones and i have to say it's super cool to see the psp boot screen on your device like this so here we are with grand theft auto liberty city stories this is a game that's just impossible to play on any of the rg devices or anything else like that maybe we'll see that in the next year or two we'll have better emulation but for now this is probably the best place to play these games and same thing here with god of war goes to sparta it just plays perfectly right out of the box and so if you're really into ps1 games and psp games this may be the ideal solution for you knowing the fact that you can't really play dreamcast or nintendo 64 and things like that if it's still really important for you to play psp games this is your best solution hands down okay so let's close out of adrenaline here and we'll go back to the main interface and i want to talk about ps vita games now some of my favorite things about these ps vita games is that they have a bunch of hd collections of ps2 games that are some of my favorites so for example the metal gear solid collection allows you to play metal gear solid two and three so if you're keeping count here that means that you can play metal gear solid one on the ps1 and then you can play metal gear solids two and three via the ps vita and so to me that's super cool to be able to play through almost the entirety of the series here uh through this device is pretty awesome and honestly if you had a ps3 and you had a remote play enabled you could play metal gear solid 4 through that and then if you had a ps4 you could remote play and play metal gear solid 5 out of that so really there's a ton of games you can play here and i'm not even talking about the two metal gear solid games you can play on the psp overall if you're a sony fanboy you've got a lot of options here so for example you can play the first god of war games on the ps vita through a collection same thing with the first three jack and daxter as well as the first three rat and clank games and i have to say it's a lot of fun to replay the original jak and daxter games on a handheld device like that they're just perfectly suited for this device and i think it's just really a cool feature now moving on to actual original ips here so killzone mercenary is in a first person shooter game that's on the ps vita and it runs really well and it was well reviewed you know there's a lot of games that are like this they have like you know call of duty versions and things like that as well but in general if you want to play triple a titles on the ps vita you can do that as well we're getting pretty far away from the idea of retro gaming at this point but if this is something you wanted to include with your retro gaming this is another factor to consider when thinking about buying a ps vita i mean these graphics are just gorgeous it's pretty awesome to have this on the screen like that okay so let's talk about remote play now unfortunately i no longer own a ps3 so i can't test the remote play on that but i do own a ps4 so i'm able to just go and log into my ps4 and play it natively on this ps vita and it's basically just streaming the image and the controls over across the device but you know to be honest i've played entire games using this remote play function on an ipad and they never looked or felt as good as they do on this ps vita they're really kind of amazing and so just something to think about if you have a ps4 and you want to like lay in bed and play ps4 games this is absolutely an option and it's pretty cool now there's one huge drawback to having ps4 remote play and that's the l2 and r2 buttons aren't available you don't have physical buttons for it you're supposed to actually use the pad on the back the touch pad to use that for l2 and r2 you can see me here tapping it it's not a perfect system it doesn't work very well and unfortunately this really stops me from enjoying a lot of games especially first person shooters like bioshock infinite here because it's not a lot of fun to play with this touch screen on the back i want that tactile feedback and unfortunately it's not there you can see here this is how it's spread out so your l2 r2 r3 and l3 are all on the back touch pad it just doesn't work very well unfortunately that being said it's incredible looking to be able to pull up god of war the you know ps4 version of god of war and see just these beautiful environments with no pixelation or any sort of issues within my home internet network here it's just incredible to be able to play that unfortunately i can't use my l2 or r2 buttons with any sort of consistency and that takes away from the gameplay experience okay so i spent a lot of time talking about the ps feed at this point let's start wrapping up let me tell you about the things i like about this device and what i don't like to start i love the screen it's five inches and it has just that perfect size it's a sweet spot for me i like that it's a touch screen i have the ps vita 1000 which means it has an oled display but even the ps vita 2000 lcd display i've heard is really good as well i think the craftsmanship of this device is very very nice you can just tell that it's made by a first party manufacturer it feels like a sony product and i like a lot of the quality life features it has you know it has just the seamless online uh wi-fi and bluetooth connectivity you know the sleep function works really well on it overall it just has a lot of those great quality of life features and in general the ps vita and the psp and the ps1 software libraries are very comprehensive and they run flawlessly on this device and i think that cannot be overstated if you are a sony fan you're gonna love the fact that you can play all of these games natively and additionally if you have a ps3 or a ps4 you can remote play and play those games as well with the caveat that you don't have an l2 or an r2 button so you may have to want to try to configure your buttons or figure out a better way of playing it just something to think about and overall there's a huge community around the ps vita in terms of emulation and hacking and stuff and so i figure if there's a solution out there people are going to find it eventually because there's so many people tackling these issues now for all the things that this device does well there are several things it does not do very well and i think some of those things are a little bit understated but i want to bring them up number one this thing is a fingerprint magnet you basically need to walk around with a cloth to be able to wipe it down at all times because it's just crazy how dirty it gets after just a few minutes of use it doesn't have l2 or r2 buttons which for me is kind of a deal breaker because i really hate using that touch pad and the device is not super ergonomic unfortunately i really don't know where to put my hands when i'm holding it part of that is just because it's curved around the edges and it just is a little bit awkward but something to think about is it doesn't feel very natural in my hands at least and honestly the experience of hacking this device it was not fun i'm pretty good with computers and i still was nervous when i was going through it i thought i was going to brick my device and emulation surprisingly is pretty poor on this unfortunately some of its best features have nothing to do with retro gaming in general this is a modern device that can also play some retro games so going back to that topic of playing retro games let's go back and compare the ps vita which is an incredible device and the rg 351p which is my favorite emulation device at this moment now the vita the things that it has in its pocket are the fact that it is a premium experience you know it feels really incredible in the hands you know you're playing a very expensive device it has the entire sony library so if you love sony games this is the place to play them the emulation is okay you know you can play nintendo games you can play super nintendo games just be aware that it might crash you know retroarch isn't going to work perfectly on this and some games are even going to have slow down which is crazy and this has a premium price tag this is a 200 device and so just keep that in mind is that your may be able to find a device for 150 but i don't know if it's going to be worth buying you where you're probably going to have to shout out the money for 200 to make sure you have one that doesn't have a bunch of scratches and isn't beat up now the things that the rg 351 does very well is the fact that it is very classic feeling you know it feels like an old-school 90s device you know it has that plastic kind of feel to it but still feels really really well made and when it comes to retro gaming you know it's 16-bit games 8-bit games arcade games there's nothing better out there i really love playing all those games on this device even if they look better on the ps vita now it does require a lot of work to kind of get all the settings put into place but that's what my website's for and it costs about 100 so it's about half the price of the ps vita so something to keep in mind is that that's just how it is this rg 351p is a cheaper device you can tell it's made out of plastic you know it's not a perfect screen you know there's all sorts of issues with it in in very little ways but at the same time it's a hundred dollars and the ps vita which is 200 has a beautiful display but it has all these other issues that come with it for example it doesn't emulate everything perfectly you can't play a single nintendo 64 game on it even though the 351 can play about half of them so something to bear in mind is when it comes to a retro handheld device i don't think the ps vita is the end-all be-all i think that we still haven't found that perfect device yet the ps vita is really really great for playing sony games and for playing psp ps1 ps4 things like that right everyone that's it for this video i hope you enjoyed it let me know if you have any questions in the comments below you know did i get this right do you think that the ps vita is the perfect emulation and retro handheld console or is the rg 351 or some other device a better choice for you i understand they have different price points but at the end of the day i think i would still rather have the rg 351p over the ps vita when it comes to retro handheld gaming but until next time we'll see you later and happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 278,774

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Id: WH3TUHwNTKk

Length: 29min 20sec (1760 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020