Ever wonder what the future of portable gaming media would look like? Well, you must have been a little curious. It is not some new sort of micro disk that can store terabytes of data. Sony is going retro with the PS Vita, back to cartridges, which should last you a little long than those pesky UMDs.
So, even though all currently announced games for the console will be downloadable on day one of release, it’s nice to know Sony is still supporting those gamers with bandwidth limitations, slow Internet, or no Internet at all. I can’t say how much one of these little carts holds, but I’m sure it’s close to 8GB or more, depending on how big the game is. The game pictured if of course Uncharted, though the Japanese version.
The cartridge also has the advantage of being able to store saves and DLC, depending on the space needed.
What do you think, like the idea of using cartridges rather than disks, or should Sony stuck with the PSP Go model of download only?
John Draisey
The decision to go with cartridges (i.e. modified SD cards) is smart. Developers can make their games cater to the available sizes, and the fact that each cartridge has free space for DLC and game saves is just brilliant. There’s no need for much internal storage on PS Vita, if any. Yeah, some people will want to save pictures, videos and music. But the majority of players will want to either play games or stream entertainment off of Wi-Fi or 3G.
Rian Quenlin
Carts have a massive upside above CDs that CDs will never beat, and that is the loading times. The loading time of a cartridge game is lightning fast and sometimes even zero.