I’ve been having a tough time figuring out what I want to play recently, so I thought a good cure for that would be to play something a bit nostalgic. A favourite from my childhood, maybe, and while watching a very fun Ratchet and Clank speedrun from this year’s Summer Games Done Quick, I quickly came to the conclusion that this was the one I wanted to revisit. It had been a while, after all, and despite getting right to the final boss, I never actually managed to beat the game, so I wanted to set myself the challenge of beating it.
I still own my PS2 and my original copy of it, but I also didn’t really want to have to deal with the hassle of setting it up, let alone not have the modern luxury of the PS4 and PS5’s rest mode. Luckily, I also owned the HD collection of the first three games for my PS Vita – remember that old thing? – and that felt like the best way to go about it. It meant I could just lie down on the sofa, or take it with me to bed, and pick it up a little bit at a time, or even on the go. I hadn’t played on my Vita in a while, a console purchase that was arguably a mistake in the grand scheme of things, but over the course of my playthrough of Ratchet and Clank I couldn’t help but think… Sony should make another one of these things.
Yes, I know it didn’t sell all that well, with estimates of around 16 million lifetime units sold, a far cry from the PlayStation Portable’s 80 million. But it really was ahead of its time, a console that could play intensive, home console-like titles, an OLED screen, hell even just having two analogue sticks. It was the Nintendo Switch before the Switch, just without the, you know, switching element. There were other problems too, with easily one of the biggest being that there just weren’t all that many games for it, at least not over in the West (there are a number of Japan-exclusives I’m sad I can’t play due to pesky language barriers).
We all know that Sony uses its big first-party titles like God of War, Spider-Man, and Horizon as system sellers, or at least as part of the branding of selling systems. It’s a diverse(ish) portfolio, and it makes people go “oh yeah, that’s a Sony game” even if it’s not technically a first-party title. The PS Vita didn’t have much of that. There was a LittleBigPlanet spin-off, an Uncharted spin-off, and even one of Japan Studio’s best games, Gravity Rush, but there just wasn’t enough of the bigger hitters to make it a must-buy for a wider audience.
You can only wonder if now is a better time for such a console. Sony has clearly flirted with the idea of getting back into handhelds, why else would the PlayStation Portal exist? But the Portal is just… fine! It’s fine. What it isn’t is a dedicated handheld, with interesting, cheaper to developer double-a games, and what it is is a tool to let you stream your PS5 games to what is essentially a smartphone without the benefits of a smartphone while you make on the toilet.
But games are really expensive to make now, and a dedicated console where the scope of titles is reduced seems like something the industry almost needs right now (and kind of has in the Switch, even if not all developers use it that way). I would love to be able to play some kind of new first-party Sony title, maybe even the upcoming Astro Bot, on a PS Vita 2, so that I can enjoy some classic 3D platforming from the comfort of my sofa, without the fear of the some fuzzy internet ruining my experience on the Portal. Is that not the dream? For life to be easy and comfortable?
I know that even if those whispers of a fully-fledged new PlayStation handheld come to fruition, it won’t be a Vita 2, complete with all its oddities. I’m sure the internal presentations will have shite about “synergy” with the PS5, for brand cohesion and all that annoying bollocks capitalism invented at some point. What I really want, though, is to be able to play Ratchet and Clank, whether it’s the one from 2002, or 2021, on a little handheld, and zone out for a bit.