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Mod game GTA Vice City Shine o' Vice lights up the Vita

Right, I've pretty much avoided talk of hacks and mods on the Vita, but the volume of traffic is definitely skewing to unofficial gaming as Sony-approved PSN releases die down and the last physicals roll off the production line. So, as the hacking scene makes its final moves to break firmware 3.70 (search for them yourself), perhaps its time to open up.

While I won't condone piracy, GTA Vice City Shine o' Vice looks like the sort of thing worth diving in for. If you have a spare Vita or are planning on getting one for hacks and mods, this could be the mod game to make it worth your time. Yes, this could be an April Fool joke, but the game does exist and there's no reason it can't run on the Vita, but in general terms, things are looking lively on the mod/open source game scene.

Update: Definitely not an April's Fool is this San Andreas port running at 11fps but with the coders keen to have a hack at it to improve performance.

There's also a different mod that pushes the PSP GTA games into Vita native resolution. These are all things the original developers could have done to boost sales way back when, like adding tilt controls to LocoRoco or improving the look of PSone games (all have pros and cons, I'm just saying give gamers the choice).

In a few months there will be next-to-no more Vita games, and while we all have back catalogs and games we want to revisit, the lure of something new is strong. The Vita could easily become the go-to-device for open sources games,  and clever efforts like this...


Of course, I'm sure RockStar will have a legal hissy fit of some kind, but there's a huge modding community across the GTA games, so perhaps not. Also, you can't stop progress or free code flying around the net, so expect more of this kind of project to light up the Vita in future. Especially as lots of developers from the PSP era no longer exist.

Currently playing on my Vita/PS4/PS5