More PS Vita Details From Japan

With the Japanese launch of the PlayStation Vita edging ever closer, more and more details are being revealed. The latest come from an interview with some of the PS Vita’s development team which was posted today on Japan’s Impress Watch and helpfully translated by andriasang.

Custom soundtracks, the ability to play your own music in the background while playing a game, are a much requested PS3 feature that has been only sporadically supported as the developers need to add support to their games rather than it being a ‘baked-in’ feature of the OS. PS Vita users will be able to set their music playing in Vita’s media player, switch back to the game and have their music continue playing with the game’s sound effects overlaid. As a base capability of the PS Vita this will not require developer support and should work in all games.

In some good news for those of us with PSPs and any prospective PS Vita buyers eyeing up PSP games on the PSN Store, the Vita is said to have an “extremely high” level of backwards compatibility with PSP software. It uses a mixture of hardware and software to provide support for PSP games and support can be further improved via subsequent PS Vita firmware updates.

Contrary to some earlier reports the PS Vita will not offer “full” Remote Play compatibility with the PS3. It had been suggested that the PS Vita would essentially be able to act as a remote interface to everything you might do on your PS3 but that is not the case, with Remote Play requiring the developers to add support for it in each game, much as it is with the PSP and Remote Play at the moment.

With Adobe recently revealing that they are to stop providing Flash support for mobile devices the question of what that means for the PS Vita was raised. The somewhat concerning response from Sony’s Division 2 Software Development Head, Muneki Shimada, was that they are continuing negotiations with Adobe and have not given up.

Sony’s decision to use yet another proprietary format for the PS Vita’s memory cards was touched upon. In addition to security concerns Shimada explained that they wanted to ensure that they had something that would provide “an equal condition for everyone”. Presumably by that, he means that they wanted to ensure consistent performance from the cards – something you cannot expect from the many different flavours and makes of SD Card.

Finally, here’s a video you may have seen a couple of weeks back if you read Kotaku. While almost eight minutes long, and in Japanese, the interest is in seeing just how amazingly versatile the PS Vita’s case is.  Seriously, it’s the Swiss army knife of portable console cases:

http://youtu.be/LFEY_OMzDS8

Here’s the YouTube link for those who can’t see the embedded video.