This is going to be a bit of a departure from my normal articles, because it’s been about a year, and I wanted to remind folks about the utter godsend that is the Vita.

So I assume your initial reaction might be “but isn’t that thing a commercial failure with disturbing amounts of JRPGs?”

Why yes. You know what else it is? It’s currently the cheapest and easiest way to create a portable mass-emulator that can handle just about anything, not to mention the fact that it actually has a ton of…shall we say…questionable original titles that were vastly improved by mods. Plus it can make a lot of PSP games look utterly amazing, including the glorious One Vision mod.

“Now why is it a dad device, and can’t my phone do that?” You might be asking.

The thing is, if you’re a parent, (I don’t mean to exclude moms, but I haven’t seen any mom Vita fans for some reason) you need to move around constantly. You need to be able to pick up and go, handling things left and right, and honestly, I don’t have time to wait for an emulator or whatnot to boot on my phone. I don’t want to lose progress because the thing restarted while the screen was off.

The Vita can just shut down, like the PSP, and come back on wherever you were. It doesn’t matter if this is an emulated title, something beefier like XCOM or Borderlands, or a modded PSP game, it will still function just fine (only one weird exception to that, we’ll cover it in a sec.). The fact that it can just turn on and off in half a second with no loss is far more useful that it may sound.

Coupled with this, the battery live is astounding. Despite constant use, mine will generally see a charge every couple of days or so. This is mostly because I will just forget to plug it in while on my way to throw out a diaper. This includes two marathon sessions of XCOM while overclocked, and that’s about the drainiest this thing gets.

To give you an example: Recently we’ve been potty training one of our kids. This involves taking a break every 15 minutes to sit down, and try to make the magic happen. Thing is, sometimes she doesn’t want me to read her a book or try to learn colors, she just wants to pretend to read, but I also have to be nearby to make sure she isn’t jogging off without pants. So, I’ll plop down on the ground, play half a map of March of the Black Queen, stow it away, and get back to work. Other times a kiddo won’t sleep, or maybe I’ll be making breakfast, or maybe there’s just a quiet moment, and it’s just right there.

You can get just about anything from the PSP and before on there, a ton of things were ported from PC and other modernish systems, and if you have a fancier graphics card in your PC, you can even stream Steam games on the thing! I mean come, on, that’s AMAZING!

I mean I’ve seen folks getting good framerates streaming a heavily modded New Vegas from several rooms away, it’s nuts. This is on top of already streaming several PS4 games even without being hacked.

Some of my personal favorites:

I should stop the list there, I could go on for ages. There’s just so much that runs on this.

Oh, and since it emulates a PSP when hacked (while keeping the Vita visual upgrades), CWCheat will work. Why is that a feature? Well, PSP games came with a lot of means to be modifed via Hex codes. In short, these can add all sorts of features to games, as well as allowing modifiers for more interesting playthroughs (such as a TO run with only Faeries to fight with).

I think I’ve made my point. This device is gold.

I should mention a couple small drawbacks.

The first is technically also possibly a plus. If you’re buying second hand, people often think their sticks broke on the Slim versions. They’re super easy to take apart, and usually all you need to do is take some rubbing alcohol and a Q tip to the stick’s moving bits and it’ll work right. In the meantime, just rotate it clockwise 3 times and it’ll reset. For some reason the slim sticks just get dirty easily. However, if you want to just replace them, those are cheap as hell.

Secondly, if using the overclock mod, there is a weird crash that can happen. In short, say you overclock XCOM, but then close out of it and launch One Vision or another PSP game. It would freeze up and reset. Simply turn off the overclock when doing that. It’s oddly specific, but just so you know.

Other than that, speaking of XCOM, it was near unplayable originally, but yeah, it’ll feel like the PS3 version when the OC is set to the “Holy Shit!” setting. Yes, that’s the actual name. Yes, it delivers.

OK, that’s all I wanted to say on that, have a good one everyfolks!