Sony Pretty Much Rocked The Vita At Gamescom

It’s no secret that I’ve been down on the Vita. And apparently Sony has listened because its Gamescom press conference was pretty much “Yeah, we’re going to make this thing utterly bitchin'”.

  • First up, new games. Killzone Mercenary, Black Ops Declassified, Tearaway… Sony really should have brought this thunder at E3 but screw it, the point is, they brought the thunder.
  • Secondly, the new features. PlayStation Plus is coming to the Vita, and the cloud storage is being bumped up to 1GB. OK, it should still be a lot more, but it’s better than 150MB and it shows Sony is willing to listen and address criticism.
  • Thirdly, the Cross-Buy program. Essentially, if there’s a Sony game coming for the PS3 and the PS Vita, buy the PS3 game and you get the Vita game absolutely free. Damn.

There’s still one big question mark, though, and it’s out of Sony’s control.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified is starting to smell like a disaster. It was just delayed two months. We just now saw a trailer, and, well, it looks like this:

Man, I hope that’s an alpha build.

And most damningly, we have no idea who’s developing the thing. Is it Treyarch? Activision Leeds? Infinity Ward? Somebody else? Nobody seems willing to say. That’s… worrisome.

Sony has a lot of money on this horse: They clearly expect it to push a lot of Vitas this holiday season as they’ve got a little bundle for it with a pouch and a specially branded Vita. If this bombs, it might hurt the platform.

But if the platform is hurt, it’s clearly, from now on, not going to be because of a lack of support.

image courtesy Sony

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