The PS Vita launched this past Saturday in Japan, a few months before the U.S. and European launch date of February 22, 2012 (not counting the early release bundle), moving 321,400 units in only two days. Not a bad launch considering the two day figure, but like most brand new hardware, the PS Vita is not without some obnoxious launch flaws, such as system freezes that come with an unresponsive touch screen and buttons. Yes, the power button counts as a button, which is unresponsive, so users have to remove the battery to unstick the machine. Yikes.
Aside from the system freezes, the touch screen can go unresponsive without the help of the freeze, which would ruin anyone’s play session, PSN accounts not being configurable, positional data being wrong or inaccessible, and even reports of the Vita just plain not turning on. Yikes again.
Sony has already issued an apology, like you do, translated via Google Translate. At least quick on the matter, Sony has already released a software update which is supposed to tackle many of the issues, though yes, it stands to reason that the software update would help a unit that is having trouble powering on.
U.S. and European gamers are probably a little less annoyed that their PSP successor is launching months after the Japanese launch, now that Sony could use this downtime to fix these problems before the Western launch. Most new hardware has issues — whether it be the iPhone 4S battery issues, or the original PSP’s rampant dead pixel issue — which is always the case against being an early adopter. A case for it, though, at least for the PS Vita? The hardware launches with a brand new Uncharted, a prequel no less, and you don’t want to wait too long for that, right?
Check out some videos of the crashes:
- Here’s the PS Vita next to a bunch of other portable systems for a size comparison
- Here’s that early release bundle
- Here are the lessons the PS Vita can learn from the Nintendo 3DS’s launch
Published: Dec 20, 2011 11:45 am