How Mortal Kombat for the PS Vita Got it Right

   I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm in love with Mortal Kombat for the PS Vita. I know that it might seem a little surprising that one of my favorite games of 2012 so far is a handheld port of the already excellent Mortal Kombat that we saw last year, but this game does what other portable games have been attempting to do since the Gameboy was released in 1989. At last portable technology has finally caught up with the home consoles and we are finally beginning to see ported games that aren't just cast shadows of what appeared on the original systems. This game feels like it was made for the portable device—and I'm not just saying that in the generic way that you'll hear countless other reviewers say it, as if they're speaking of how convenient it is to play Angry Birds on the way to work. No, this game is an actual video game, and one that is worth playing for far more than two minutes at a time.

I feel like Mortal Kombat for the Vita is exactly what I've been waiting for: a console port that retains all of the incentives that make us want to play video games in the first place. From the very moment that I started MK up for the first time, I noticed that this game takes itself seriously. Most portable games that I've come across in the past tend to have this annoying habit of dumbing themselves down to appeal to the people presumed to be "always on the move", a demographic that, if it ever even existed in the way it was marketed, is now irrelevant due to the rise of Smartphones. Because of the unforeseen consequences of everyone carrying around a portable computer that doubles in speed almost every year, to survive and flourish in the new portable market you need to do more than just innovate; you absolutely have to differentiate yourself from the competition. Nintendo is beginning to slowly realize this with it's monumental mistake of keeping its touchscreen-centric device pretty much the same.

Ok, ok, exactly the same.

 These days, all the portable devices have touchscreens, cameras, microphones, and accelerometers already built in. To even exist in the handheld gaming market today you have to give people a reason to choose you even though they already have a device that does most of what yours can do and, what's more, they already have it in their pocket at all times. That's where Mortal Kombat and the PS Vita come in. Of all of the things that Smartphones can do, there's one thing that they really can't and it's called "actual physical controls". A D-Pad and buttons just don't work very well when they're superimposed on a touchscreen and, fortunately for the Big Three, they tend to be very necessary for games that involve more than moving blocks and sling-shotting birds.

So how does Mortal Kombat fare on Sony's handheld? Fantastically well. The game handles magnificently on the device, in fact. It's well known that the Vita is a powerful machine, but when you actually get a chance to play Mortal Kombat or Uncharted, you really can see the system for what it really is: a truly portable console that keeps up with its bigger brothers on almost all fronts. For example, MK translates almost all of the great stuff from the console release with only a minimal visual downgrade. The game even manages to keep its extremely-important-for-fighting-games 60fps. To put it mildly, this game is a glimpse at what we can expect from the Vita in the future. If you are looking for a full-fledged console in your pocket and you also enjoy playing real, fleshed-out games on it, then the forecast for the PS Vita is looking really solid.

And who knows? Maybe gamers will finally have more options than Tetris or Angry Birds.

I absolutely fucking detest this game

Apples Vs. Oranges 2: Electric Booga-fuck-you

   It has been nearly three years since I wrote my prophetic article regarding the inevitable cluster fuck that the next iteration of the PSP would prove to be. Of course, 2009 was a simpler time for the portable gaming market and I was, at the time, confident in my assumptions that the “PSP2” would either follow the Sony tried and true technique of “shiny black— but this time even more so!”, or a more experimental strategy of “plastic that is as BLACK as the void but also so polished that, like, light kinda just slides off of it: like a plastic slip-and-slide. Oh, and we duck-taped an extra screen on there too – with touch controls”. Unfortunately, the future proved to be even more ridiculous than what I had originally envisioned. And I mean, holy shit, my original vision was already pretty fucking ridiculous.

Pictured here: Ridiculous

At the very moment that I’m typing this, the new iteration of the PSP is already barreling towards store shelves faster than an alcoholic trying to desperately find the nearest Total Wine & More. So what can we expect to see in this “highly anticipated” launch from Sony?

Drum roll….

Ta-da!

Wait a second. I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong picture.

No, wait. Here it is:

Drum roll….

TA-Fucking-DA!

No really, that’s the new system. They actually managed to take fewer chances than a designated driver would on an average Monday morning. Just in case you happen to be one of those people that can’t spot differences in two nearly identical pictures, I’m going to go ahead and point out the main difference to you John Madden style.

BOOM.

And that, my friends, is that. I can count the changes of this system’s design on one hand – even if I amputated all of my fingers. Hell, I could probably still make it work even if I amputated my whole hand and tied a string around my stump so I wouldn’t forget that they added an analog stick.

This should be the point where you’re wondering whether they did anything new to the system at all and honestly, the answer is that they did add a few new features. Well, that was before the PlayStation design team got drunk and decided to add even fucking more. So if you like gimmicks then there are enough of those to make the Wii look more conventional than an Atari 2600.

But c’mon, you have to see Sony’s point of view. The people like gimmicky bizarro controls, you say? Fuck it. Let’s just give ‘em a touch screen. What’s that? Not enough? Well how about a completely arbitrary second touchpad without a screen on the back! Now we’re cooking with propane!

Happy now, fuckers?

And then there’s the godamn name.

When I hear “Vita” my brain doesn’t automatically correlate it with an amazing mobile gaming device. In fact, my brain tends to shoot me images that look like this:

But then again, that could just be because I’m American.

What about the competition? Let’s look at the Nintendo 3DS and compare how laughable Sony’s “design change” really is:

GODAMMIT

The Beginning and Some Thoughts on the PSP2

Since this is my first blog here and I want to hit the ground running, I decided that I should give some background information about myself and the new blog that I’ve started today to my incredibly large readership of two or three people (all of whom most likely stumbled upon my dark little corner of the internet by pure accident). First off, I would like to say, welcome to the future most popular video game blog in the world. Yes, it will be that awesome. How do I know this? Well, besides my overwhelming urge to mumble in a cool menacing voice that “I have foreseen it”, I’m just generally talking out of my ass.

My ass has foreseen it

However, I can honestly say that I do have passion for video games and also the ability to string together fandabulously-complex-sounding sentences (now with 50% more words that I actually didn’t make up). These skills tell my highly-developed ape brain that I will be an incredibly successful video game blogger/journalist. What is a video game blogger/journalist, you ask? Well, I’m pretty sure that they’re awesomely successful people who write about things that tend to make you somewhat fat and amazingly charismatic (in my case, anyway).

The topics that I cover will mostly, as I have said about four times now, revolve around current news stories in video games. I might sometimes rant about a topic that’s annoying me, but generally I will keep to my regular format.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, welcome to the future of awesome – and don’t forget to mark this day down on your calendars.

The PSP 2: Why Sony Is On the Right Track

Recently there’s been a shitstorm of rumors that a new PSP is in the works. Now, when most people hear the word “rumors” they also hear a little whisper in the back of their head that says something like: “unreliable” or, if your inner voice is a little slower than most: “OMG SO FAKE”. In this case, however, we have not just a couple of rumors coming from the big-black-stupid-place-filled-with-idiots, but also an assortment of video game publishers that have gotten tired of having jobs and thus feel the intense urge to break company policy – an urge that I have felt many times. So what’s the result? Deliciously rumor filled articles like this, apparently.

For those of you who have an aversion to reading more than one article a day, the article above basically pointed to the release date of the PSP 2 to be around Q4 (around March of next year). The changes we can expect to see, if Sony isn’t comprised of pants-on-head-retards, will be a better form factor, another analog stick for FPS shooters, the removal of the UMD (though the Kotaku article said that they may keep it in), and hopefully a few others.

Normally, I think that releasing new hardware this early in a race is fucking retarded, especially if your competitor is outselling you like mad. Why would you give up what sales you have accumulated and the fan base that you’ve kicked your ass to make? It usually isn’t worth it. But this is by no means a usual case.

Sony has proved over and over again that it isn’t afraid of selling the same system with a few minor changes. And I do mean minor. What were the results? People bought them. A lot of people in fact. What does that mean? It means that people apparently have lost all concepts of the value of money. Oh yeah, it also means that Sony’s fan base isn’t afraid of spending large amounts of Republic Credits on a system that has a couple more pixels on its six-inch screen. For Sony, this means that selling a brand new system is a win/win situation. The current owners of the original PSP will have no issues with buying a new shinier PSP, and the people who have graduated from the “DS School of Baby-Gamers” will want to buy the newer, sparkling, black, more mature-looking system in droves.

Sony cannot possibly lose. As long as they position themselves as the more adult system they will always have a place in the industry. That is, unless they sell it for 599 US dollars.

A small price to pay for awesome

Since this is the end of the blog post, I feel that I should leave you with some, presumably/hopefully, fan made PSP 2 designs. Enjoy.