Nicholas Gatewood
"Nintendo also has a great roster of games, especially when looking at titles that exploit the popularity of its core intellectual properties. Zelda and Super Mario 3D Land are that good I’d buy a 3DS just to play them alone. Mario Kart, Kid Icarus, Pilot Wings Resort and Street Fighter IV: 3D are also great games. Further, Nintendo will develop aggressively for the 3DS and the company has much more in-house development muscle, so we can expect to see some stunning games from the big N to support the third party efforts."
Yeah, no. Ocarina of Time 3D is the most disappointing game on the 3DS and Sony has way more development muscle than Nintendo. It has way more development studios making games exclusively for its systems and they've consistently shown that they can output way more good exclusives than Nintendo's devs. Sure, Sony's studios might not count as "in-house" but they all benefit from having their own internal company cultures. You'd never see a game like God of War as a Nintendo exclusive and I doubt that we'll ever get awesome exclusive shooters like Resistance, Killzone or SOCOM on our Wii U systems. Sony packs so much more developer clout than Nintendo right now it's unreal.
I was a massive Nintendo fanatic until the 3DS. I had read that you'd always remember the first time you flick that 3D slider up and that you'd be blown away by it. I flicked it up, my eyes felt uncomfortable and I didn't feel any real benefit from the effect. Six months later I still hadn't owned a single 3DS game because every single title on the system by that point was a.) crap and b.) a ripoff at $40. When I gave negative feedback to Nintendo pointing out all the things wrong with their system and explaining how they could fix it(revision revision) they offered to refund my system due to the effect it had on my vision and I accepted. Easily the best thing Nintendo did in that scenario.
The 3DS will be obsolete the day the inevitable revision model releases. The lack of a second slide pad and the fact that they pretty much already revealed that they're putting a second slide pad on any future 3DS models shows that the current model is absolutely not worth owning at this point. The Vita, on the other hand, wouldn't really benefit from an extra analog stick and is already covered with 3G support(4G isn't really necessary with the way mobile internet is used on the Vita). It has a 5-inch OLED screen so we won't want a larger Vita(the 3DS' screens are ridiculously small in comparison). The Vita's battery life is much better than the 3DS' from my experience, as well. I get six hours of Vita gaming at half-brightness(any brighter and my eyes get fatigued) and in PSP games I get around 8 hours of play. When I play Vita games I usually have apps like Trophies up as well and I play music while playing games like Unit 13, MotorStorm RC and Modnation Racers. On the 3DS I got around three and a half hours of play when I played with 3DS apps for hour upon unending, brain-numbing hour, and in DS games like Dragon Quest 9 I only got around five hours of battery life; for some reason wifi was a huge drain on the 3DS' battery. It also sucks that you can't multitask on a 3DS anywhere near as well as you can on the Vita. You can play your own music in most Vita games in the background and on the 3DS you can't. The only thing related to multi-tasking that the 3DS has better than the Vita is that you can actually minimize your 3DS games and use the browser on it, on the Vita you have to close your game before you can use its browser. I expect this to change with an eventual OS update but at the moment it's literally the only thing the 3DS has going for it above the Vita in terms of its operating system.
The Vita is way more powerful than a 3DS. Most people cry "graphics aren't everything" when this is mentioned but at the end of the day I'm getting PSone Classics on my Vita and there's a great chance that I'm getting PS2 Classics within the next two years as well. The 3DS on the other hand is just way too weak for Gamecube emulation and I doubt it'll get N64 emulation any time soon because of controller constraints. What's that? I didn't mention how much prettier Vita games are than 3DS games in that last paragraph? Oh yeah, well, here you go: 3DS games look stuck between the DS and the Wii in terms of visual fidelity and the Vita is dangerously close to PS3 territory. I don't think 3DS owners will ever, ever see a game as pretty and smooth as Gravity Rush on their silly little 3D-capable system and I won't ever be depressed that the prettiest games on my Vita look subpar(Resident Evil: Revelations, anyone?). Look at it from this angle: the day the 3DS released, it was weaker than the average smartphone. The day the Vita released(a year or so after the 3DS) it was more powerful than any smartphone on the market. That's a huge deal, especially since the casual gamers that made up 80% of the DS' sales are flocking to their overpriced, underpowered, underfeatured smartphones, leaving hardcore gamers like me who actually care about specs and product features with the choice of Vita vs 3DS.
At the end of the day it feels like Nintendo was like an abusive significant other to me for the past few years of my life and Sony's taking me by the hand and showing me I deserve more. I'm a handheld gamer and Sony has proven that it is the better option for this generation of handhelds. Sony has way more foresight than Nintendo. There is no overlooking that and there's no ignoring the fact that the 3DS released at a crappy price while the Vita's $250 price announcement at E3 was greeted with loud cheers and Nintendo executives sweating profusely and rethinking their business strategy.
Sure, I'm gonna miss the occasional Mario game, Kirby and Metroid but it's not like Nintendo's done many good things with those series the past few years. Sony on the other hand is throwing new IPs my way by the truckload, plus it snagged some wonderful third-party exclusives from Western devs that matter(like Bioshock, Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed). In the end Sony's system is infinitely better but Nintendo's cultish fanbase(that I was a part of for over a decade) will likely see that the 3DS remains fairly popular as long as it exists. Very depressing to me, I miss the Nintendo of the Super Nintendo and Gameboy/Color/Advance eras.
DrPepper59
True gaming fanatics will just get both of them.
Dawar Saify
The HTC One X Nvidia tegra quad core can beat them both. Funny, smartphones are replacing your gaming console and your point and shoot cameras.
Jon A.
Very nice article!
The Vita seems like far better hardware than the 3DS, but ultimately, what matters is the games. I'm currently waiting for price breaks and must-have games. That and maybe I should finish off Dragon Quest IX and Valkyria Chronicles 2.
Facebook User
Regarding the CPU of the Vita, you need to specify between iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, which you meant to state.
B-Sen.Dawg101
I'd like to point something out to Nicholas Gatewood, Bioshock, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed are not Playstation third-party exclusives, those games also appear in the Xbox 360 and the PCs, and by the way, a couple of CoDs were also released on the Wii. When you said prettiest game on your Vita, did you mean that it was Resident Evil: Revelations? 'Cuz if you did, revelations is actually a 3DS exclusive.
Guy Ben-Ami
3DS games look prettier than Vita games actually. Resident Evil Revelations looks better than Resident Evil 5 on the PS3. This is especially because of the great lighting effects and the amazing 3D effect. The 3DS is an incredible machine with amazing games. The Vita is a stupid misguided boring attempt by Sony.
Shawn Steinhauer
Do not be fooled by those polygon and RAM numbers on the Vita. The 15 Million on the 3DS is with textures and effects enabled. The RAW figure for 3DS is about 40 million per second with no texture and effects The 133 Million qouted on the Vita on the other hand is just the RAW number with no textures and effects. With texture and effects turned on the Vita final Polygon count is much lower at aroun 33 million per second and half of it's RAM and reserved for operating system and cross chat rather than the games themselves Sony was stupid to go with a multitasking system that eats up resources.
Nicholas Gatewood
Sen.Dawg, I literally said that those three titles are third-party exclusives to the Vita and I'm correct. It's getting exclusive titles from each of those franchises. Of COURSE Revelations is a 3DS exclusive, I was using it as an example of 3DS titles that are disappointing in terms of visuals.
Guy, you're absolutely incorrect. Revelations looks vastly inferior to RE5 and even RE4. It literally cannot look even remotely as good as RE5 or any Vita game with the 3DS' specs being as low as they are, it's just a bump above the PSP with 3D draining the resources. The 3DS is the most disappointing game console of the past decade and the Vita was developed with the most foresight of any console in history.
Shawn, you're wrong about Vita multitasking. The Vita has 384mb reserved for gaming, 512mb total; one of its processor cores is dedicated to multitasking, as well, leaving three 1 GHz cores for gaming. Not only that but the multitasking is absolutely worth it, it's really awesome.
The 3DS has a dual-core 266 MHz processor, they had to underclock its CPU just to get the battery life at the crappy level it's currently at. It has 4mb of VRAM and 128mb of RAM. The Vita has a quad-core 1 GHz processor, it's overclockable to 1.4 GHz per core comfortably but then it'd get 3DS-level battery life. It has 128mb of VRAM and 512mb of RAM.
The Vita's screen is 960x544 resolution. The 3DS' top screen is 400x240 and the lower one is 320x240. The 3DS was built off old technology, old even when it was announced. The Vita is using bleeding-edge tech. The Vita has two analog sticks, the 3DS has one slide pad- even the new 3DS XL has only one slide pad, a huge mistake on Nintendo's part. They had a chance to fix their mistake and they effed up.
In every way the Vita is superior to the 3DS, even in terms of its game library. Developers hate working for the 3DS(the hardware's weak, the 3D is a huge resource drain and you're limited in terms of control), on the other hand the Vita is easier to develop for than ANY other game platform in existence right now.
Even as a Nintendo fanatic I'm not going to ignore the FACTS and act as a Nintendo denier. The 3DS is Nintendo's worst game system since the Virtual Boy. The Vita is easily Sony's best gaming hardware to date. 'Nuff said.
I definitely can't wait for that next-gen handheld they're apparently working on, Miyamoto said it'll compete with the Vita in terms of specs. I just hope they get everything ELSE about it right, the 3DS is an abomination. I personally expect their next handheld by 2014 or 2015. If they release it any later they're screwed, they've lost their casual market to Apple and they've treated their hardcore market very poorly the past half-decade. I guess they're gonna see why you don't treat your hardcore gamers the way they did and bomb, hopefully they'll learn their freaking lesson.
MichaelFrom
This is a hard one lol. I couldn't even choose between the vita and the 3ds until just recently. I've been arguing with myself for about 4 months! lol. At the end, I went with the vita just because I'm a bit tired of the mario games myself :/ and zelda, etc.