The console war seems to be dying down. With all three pieces of home hardware landing somewhere in the middle, I don't know if you could say there's still a war going on. Of course, that doesn't mean these companies will stop competing, even for a second.
That's why the latest showdown between Sony and Nintendo is blurring the lines between what constitutes a handheld battleground and a console war-zone. At E3, Nintendo pinned the Wii U's controller as a device that would allow players to continue their game, even if someone else wanted to watch something else on the TV.
Apparently, the Vita will be capable of the same functionality. Speaking with Eurogamer at the Develop Conference, Sony Europe R&D manager Phil Rogers said:
Here's a few boring technical ideas: you could drive a display from a PS3 game, for example. PS3 can send data down to Vita and Vita can display it. You could use the unique features [of Vita] – gyroscope, touch front and back – as a control device for a PS3 game.
You can run software on both devices and use the network to sync the game states. And that's pretty good, because you then have the processing power of the PS3 doing that work, Vita [doing] fancy graphics – however you want to do it. You're not sacrificing the PS3's CPU to be able to have rich experience on Vita.
I have to be honest: As much as I love my PS3, Sony's always been one to ape the best ideas from their competitors. The analog stick, rumble tech, the Move—it's not the first time I've said this. I've also said that Sony typically improves on the technology they "steal". But wait, there's more!
At launch we're going to have some PSN features that work across both platforms. You could access data on each side and access scoreboards, for example. We're building on that.
Obviously we had to bring certain things on and make sure that servers work against all the features and it doesn't break the PS3 experience, because there's a lot of PS3 users. For launch we'll also have Remote Play, which does look good on Vita – I saw an early version of it running recently.
The list goes on, including Continuation Play which was shown off during Sony's E3 press conference, but let's face it. There's no way everything will be packed into the Vita at launch, certainly not if they want to have the handheld on store shelves before Christmas.
