Pretty much every Vita owner collectively spouted “WTF?” when Sony only spent a few moments at E3 talking about their new handheld, and Sony’s reluctance to talk about the future of the system during E3 caused a lot of overly emotional nerds to begin proclaiming “The Vita is doomed!” Well, Sony isn’t rolling over to die yet, and the Vita still has a ways to go before all your doom and gloom proclamations come true.
Today at Germany’s Gamescomm convention, Sony finally made the Vita related announcements they should have made at E3. Gamers who own both a PS3 and a Vita will be glad to learn about Sony’s new “Cross Buy” program — If you buy a PS3 copy of Playstation All-Stars, Ratchet and Clank: Full Frontal Assault (known as Q-Force in European territories,) or Sly Cooper 4: Thieves in Time, you’ll get a free copy of the Vita ports of that same game.
In terms of original titles for the system, Media Molecule (the developers behind Sony’s popular LittleBig Planet series,) announced Tearaway, a new 3D platformer where players can use the Vita’s front and rear touch panels to “tear away” parts of the level and change its layout. Sony also teased that a new entry in the Killzone franchise would be making its way to their handheld, though they didn’t have much in the way of actual gameplay to show of the new title. Here’s hoping Killzone makes the transition to handhelds better than its compatriot Resistance did.
The announcement that will probably make the most people happy was the formal unveiling of Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified for the Vita. The new CoD game takes place between the stories of Black Ops 1 and the upcoming Black Ops 2 (does anyone play CoD for the story?) and Activision is promising that this handheld CoD will have gameplay on par with its console brothers. The game will also be released in a special, limited edition bundle with the Vita hardware and a CoD branded carrying case.
Finally, Sony announced that PS1 classics will begin rolling out for the Vita on August 28th. Just a reminder for those of you looking to load up your Vita with all the PS1 games stored on your PSN account: the update doesn’t make all PS1 games compatible with the new hardware just yet, and Sony will “roll out” updates that add more games to the compatibility list. For now, all we know is that the original Tomb Raider and FF7 will be playable on Vita with the next patch.
