Vita

GameCritics is proud to offer one of two impression pieces covering the PS Vita. The first is the one you are reading and it's by Matt Kaplan (commonly known as one of the biggest PlayStation Portable fans on the planet). Matt has been putting his Vita through its paces and evaluating every element and gives his thoughts on the shiny new black hardware.

In this episode, Mr. Jaffe shares with us his thoughts on God of War 4, the troubles of tumultuous development (including two cancelled games, Darkons and Heartland), the failures of Calling All Cars, and the reasons why he left God of War. Finally, we wrap up with thoughts on the process of creating the brand-new Twisted Metal.

Most probably due to her upcoming role as a playable fighter in Street Fighter X Tekken, pink-haired, handcuff-sporting Poison has been popping up all over articles, online and on Twitter lately. If you don't know who she is, Poison (to my knowledge, anyway) is one of the only transgender characters in gaming who's gained a solid level of visibility and a decent fanbase considering that her exposure over the years has been far less frequent than some of the other well-known faces that one would usually associate with Capcom, or fighting games.

It's interesting to read a prediction from Strategy Analytics that more than 12 million Vita units are expected to sell worldwide in 2012. That's a pretty lofty number for one year, especially considering weak sales in Japan and that we're still in the launch window in other territories this week. The prediction comes with one caveat, however: There needs to be a price cut for the Vita this year.

We will be having some in-depth impressions about the PlayStation Vita hardware and such later, so I'll skip the tech specs and all that stuff for now. I did have a few things to say about some of the games, though...

The PlayStation Vita is officially upon us, and I've only one major complaint about it so far: I ain't got one. Luckily, I was made doubly fortunate last week by Toronto's own DrinkBox Studios, who not only managed to stave off my hunger for said portable console by putting one in my hands for an extended period, but also showed me their fine new platformer, Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack!

Nintendo will be looking to the 3DS remain strong in January. Expected residual interest in Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land can be cited as factors, and there's a certainly a chance that the 3DS can stay close to Xbox 360 numbers.

How will this week's releases fare? Kingdoms of Amalur headlines this week's slate of new releases, which is solid for a second consecutive week after a mostly dormant month of January. Early reviews have been quite positive for the game, which would be a boon to Electronic Arts. The Darkness II hits this week as well, although it seems to be flying under the radar a bit.

It's been quite a while since I spent any time with the Soul Calibur series... I think the last one that I really got into was probably the original SoulCal on Dreamcast. The series kind of dropped in terms of quality (for my taste, anyway) and it fell off of my radar until today when GameFly sent me Soul Calibur V.

So, used versus new... It's a huge topic to begin with, and it's only gotten more complicated due to the various tricks made possible by online connections. Thanks to these "innovations", something that has never been black-and-white to start with is now more grey than it's ever been. That said, let me try to pick apart the various strands of the problem as I see them, one by one.