This isn't just true of the Vita, of course, this battery stuff; if anyone actually played their 3DS for any length of time, I suspect they'd come away similarly despondent, pressing buttons which don't do anything and looking at a screen which is connected to nothing.
This is that "portability" thing when we talk about a "portable" gaming system. Portability means more than the ability to carry something or stow it on your person. Obviously, the word doesn't mean that - it's not bound up in the roots. But the implication is that something may be carried and still retain its function. Right? Right. This isn't really a philosophical distinction, it's not hair-splitting for dialectic giggles. A portable without robust power storage is not.
Would you believe that I am still remembering things from PAX? Is that something you would believe? For example, I played Dominion.
The lines were crazy long, and I had no intention of swirling my cape and asserting some kind of King's Right, but I definitely clung to players' shoulders like a parrot to watch the screens and did occasionally caw. Tastefully. I dished up a nice ka-kraww when I determined it would be most appropriate, and thus, the proceedings were elevated. I have, by now, a not insubstantial investment in the game, and the idea that there is another game altogether that I can use that investment in seems like a conceptual model that has no upper bound. My personal favorite video about Dominion is from TotalBiscuit's, from GamesCom. I feel like it captures very well the process of learning it in real time, and also the slow dawning that, hey, this isn't bullshit. This is actually pretty smart.
I stopped by after the Exhibition hall was closed, and was surprised to find the Riot Games booth still in full operation for other exhibitors to get a crack at it - and I leapt at the chance. I was able to kill Jamie several times, which I think provides a brute index of my valor, even though I was playing as a woman draped in almost a ton of sacred armor and Jamie was playing as a half-naked steampunk space-sherrif who thinks that a few belts strapped to her bare legs constitutes a comprehensive defense strategy.
(CW)TB out.
