To date, it’s been a struggle to turn the Vita into a success for Sony. Sales have been weaker than expected for a variety of reasons, among them the lack of quality games that justify spending $250-plus on a piece of portable hardware which in turn expects you to spend $40-plus on games in an age when quality mobile games can be had for a few bucks a pop. Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida even admitted recently that it’s been a struggle to attract third-party publishers to the platform. And while Sony remains stubborn about certain things that could be holding the system back — its price, the cost of its proprietary memory cards, and so on — there were a lot of new reasons to be excited about Vita following today’s Gamescom showing.
A variety of original Vita games were shown during today’s conference, including a brand-new title from LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule. Entitled Tearaway, the game is a sort of puzzle-platformer with a cutesy, papercraft art style. It makes use of several of the Vita’s non-traditional control inputs, like the rear touch pad (allowing you to virtually insert your fingertips into the game world) and the microphone (blowing creates wind).
