As of today, there's a brand new piece of Playstation hardware on shop shelves - the Playstation TV. Not a stand-alone console as such, but more of a non-portable version of Sony's Playstation Vita, it's a little black box that plugs into your TV, giving you all the functionality of your PS Vita, but on the big screen. Setting you back around £84, and coming with a voucher that'll let you download three free Vita games (the turn based comedy mayhem of Worms Revolution Extreme, stylish skater Olli Olli, and shoot 'em up Velocity Ultra) - yet oddly shipping without a controller - the PlayStation TV is attempting to become a must-have obelisk dust magnet for your front room.
Potentially affording the average couch potato an all-in-one media hub of hubris and delight, much like the current crop of consoles, only for a much lower price, we take a peek behind the curtain to see whether the Playstation TV is right for you, with our take on the good, the bad and the indifferent...
The Good
Well, for a start, a metric-ton of games.
And we're not talking low-res conversions of decades old mobile phone-ware, here; this thing's essentially a slightly smaller version of a PS Vita, without the screen - and so it can run all the same games. With a cartridge slot built in, you can whack any PS Vita game you already own into it, and soak up the full screen goodness - or, you can download brand new titles from the Playstation Store. Letting you download games from a gigantic back catalogue of PS Vita, PSP, and PS One titles, everything you can run on a PS Vita, you can run on this - and that gives it an enviable catalogue of games.
Also of interest is that the Playstation TV will be fully compatible with Sony's upcoming Playstation Now service - a streaming service that will stream Playstation 3 games directly to your console over the internet. Of course, the service is still some way off launching, and with games only seemingly being sold as time limited rentals rather than the more traditional pay once, play forever model we've become used to, it remains to be seen just how useful Playstation Now will be.
For those of us without the necessary wedge of cash required to jump aboard the next-gen band-wagon as it rolls through town this Christmas, the Playstation TV provides an affordable and inviting way of keeping the family both happy and out the way.
Beyond the games, the Playstation TV also offers a range of shiny media options. With Sony delivering Sony Video Unlimited and Sony Music Unlimited, letting you stream/rent a range of films and tracks, the prospect of building a healthy mountain of selection box wrappers and nut shells about your chair this Crimbo seems as likely as there not being a good Bond on TV for the post-pudding slump.
Furthermore, should Santa pull his finger out and actually earn that glass of milk and mince pie and stuff a PS4 down your stocking, the PS Vita also has support for Remote Play, a swanky feature that lets you plonk your PS4 in one room, and play it in another through your Playstation TV. So if someone chucks you off the TV when Eastenders comes on, all you have to do is find another TV in the house to continue your game, uninterrupted.
The Bad
In the spirit of 'if it ain't broke, force an alternative onto them', Playstation TV eschews the more standard SD and Micro-SD memory card formats in favour of the Sony proprietary M2 memory card. Just as easy to lose as a standard micro-SD, yet considerably more expensive, you'll be needing a pretty hefty one of these to store your games, films and music on, because the device only comes with 1 GB of storage as standard. The little 'hidden costs' soon add up.
The controller also raises a few issues. Seeing as a lot of Vita games rely on the touch screen, or gyro sensor, those games obviously aren't playable on the Playstation TV, as the controller doesn't have the necessary input. Of course, there's a huge list of games that are supported, but there are several of our favourites that aren't, and a few weird choices. While Tearaway, possibly the game that relied the most heavily on the Vita's input obviously doesn't work, the murder mystery virtual novel Danganronpa 2 does, but the original game doesn't, despite being practically the same in terms of gameplay...And with a second-hand PS3 coming in at just under £100 nowadays, with a minimum of 40GB memory on board and far cheaper to increase the capacity thanks to a swappable hard-drive, it drives a hard bargain against the Playstation TV.
