PS Vita Roundup's 8th Birthday, and the Vita's 7th

In a random world doing random things, I started my blog 8 years ago this month, coincidentally a year before Sony launched the Vita console in Japan, which celebrates its 7th birthday this week - not that you'd notice, Sony Japan didn't bother! Way back then, it was only hinted at as the "PSP2", then it became "NGP", before the whole "Vita" thing happened.

Based on the success of the original PSP, I had high hopes and big dreams of playing top-brand games wherever I wanted to play them. As we all know, reality bit a few years in, despite many impressive efforts at Sony and beyond.

Still the Vita has still been a great ride in gaming and writing for me. The focus on smaller games mean I got to know individual developers and publishers, who were more accessible than the first-party teams. Even today, awesome titles and ports appear, and 2019 will see my Vita party on alongside my Switch and new PS4, with many of those devs and pubs already moved on.

And a smaller user base has built a tight community of Vita lovers, gathered round the light of their OLED (or LCD) screens, championing a device that Sony long-since abandoned. Even seven years after the hardware first hit, it remains a fun little platform for coders to work on, and I hope Sony keeps farming those dev kits out to attract new coders for the PS4 and PlayStation 5. 

So, happy birthday to this blog and the Vita, and thanks to everyone who's been along for the ride and enjoyed the splurts of news and opinion that I've rattled off (over 7,100 posts, 300 games, 180 reviews, 2,600 trophies and 4,250 Twitter friends).

Plans for 2019 include publishing reviews of the games I never got round to writing, interviews with developers from what we can now call "back in the day" and a James Bond mission into the heart of Sony to find out what the "Vita 2" 2015/16 prototype was like! I guess I also need to start collecting Vita hardware before it starts hitting silly prices.

And the Vita's seventh anniversary, launched in Japan on the 17th December 2012

Thanks again, and have a great Christmas/New Year on VitaIsland!