Sony PS Vita TV

                             Sony PS Vita TV

BY WILL GREENWALD
When Sony announced the PS Vita TV, it arguably got more attention than the PlayStation Vita£155.51 at Amazon Marketplace itself. Forget having a $200 handheld gaming system; a $99 (approximately, in yen) micro-console that can play Vita, PlayStation Portable, and PSOne Classic games on an HDTV? Brilliant! While the PlayStation 4$399.99 at Newegg.com competes with the Xbox One and the Vita withers against the Nintendo 3DS, the Vita TV can encroach on the small but growing microconsole space occupied by the Ouya, and with the Vita's media apps it could eat into the Roku and Apple TV markets to boot!

Sony still hasn't announced the PS Vita TV for North America yet. I don't know why. Most of my gamer friends, including Vita owners, have expressed more interest in the Vita TV than the PlayStation 4. It's small, inexpensive, and has a massive retro library thanks to the PSN store and the great ports on the Vita and PlayStation Portable. Add free games with a PlayStation Plus membership and you have a small, gamer-friendly console for a price that undercuts both the Nintendo Wii U$300.99 at Amazon and 3DS. We might see a North American Vita TV announcement at E3 this summer, but that's a big maybe. Until then, your only option is to import it.

                     

Menus and the Language Barrier
Sony pulled out all of the stops in making the PS Vita TV's interface HDTV-friendly and less reliant on the Vita's touch screen. It's the exact same interface as the Vita, complete with cartoonishly large bubbles and that irritating menu music. Fortunately, Sony begrudgingly added physical control support to the interface before the Vita TV came out; originally, you could only navigate the menus with the Vita's touch screen, which would have made the Vita TV impossible to use. There's no option to use an analog stick as an on-screen mouse cursor, which would be the natural way to get around a touch screen interface with no touch input. Instead, you just jump between different items on the screen using the physical controls and, with the Vita's highly icon and art-based interface, that can be awkward. It took me a few minutes to figure out I had to hold X to close a tab or program from the menu.