Download Gravity Rush, Resistance Vita Demos Plus Niconico

Hello Everyone,

Gravity Rush Vita Wallpaper

The demo for Gravity Rush is available today along side the release of Resistance Burning Skies. Is the Vita's new video application, niconico, the answer to the lack of video sharing?

Gravity Rush

The demo for Gravity Rush has finally made its way stateside to the Playstation Network. Be prepared to read the subtitles as the small amount of dialogue is in Japanese. Unfortunately, the demo is exactly the same demo that has been available in Japan and on demo units in stores. I will not be going too in depth as this demo brings nothing new to the table. If you have yet to play it, you begin learning the basic gravity controls and move onto a few easy challenges. A quick battle against a few enemies and the demo is over. The game is extremely fun and controls wonderfully. I only wish the demo allowed you to have some fun with the mechanics before abruptly ending after about five minutes. Thankfully, Gravity Rush releases in less than a month.

Resistance Burning Skies

Thankfully, the Resistance demo was worthwhile in comparison to Gravity Rush. It comes in at roughly fifteen minutes depending on your difficulty. Overall, the game is very appealing on the eyes. The 3D environments are nicely put together although the buildings can seem very flat at times. The only times the game failed visually was during the red-screen damage indicator. Burning Skies features regenerative health and upon taking damage the screen turns blood red. You would expect the screen to turn blotchy red as if imitating blood splatter but instead Burning Skies ads a full red overlay to the game. It is very distracting from the gameplay and not something I am a fan of.

Resistance Burning Skies Vita Wallpaper

The demo gives access to a handful of the weapons in the final game including the fire axe, bullseye, carbine, and a shotgun-crossbow combo. Sadly, the audio for each gun is poorly done. The bullseye, carbine, and shotgun have almost identical acoustics, only differing in the bullet speeds. Resistance has always been about unique weapons and while having different special abilities, there is not much to differentiate between the bullseye and carbine. The upgrade System is a little different in comparison to Resistance 3. Instead of the use of each weapon determining upgrades, cubes of gray tech are used to upgrade different aspects of each gun. Only two upgrades can be used at a time, so a fully upgraded gun will be no different from a level two if the same upgrades are chosen. I was a big fan of Resistance 3's upgrade system so I was a bit disappointed to see it be replaced by a simple collect-and-spend system.

Another Resistance Burning Skies Vita Wallpaper

The controls, even on the touch screens, felt very solid. The touch screen is only used for environmental interactions, grenade throwing, quick-melee, and the secondary fire for weapons. I enjoyed the grenade throwing and quick melee as it was both accurate and fast. While throwing grenades using the touch screen, time briefly slows down allowing for an accurate throw without having to spend as much time away from the controls. It is a nice system for single-player but I do not see how it can transfer to the multiplayer modes. Some of the touch screen controls for secondary fires such as the shotgun-crossbow and carbine were also very nice. I have very large hands so a quick swipe across the screen with my thumb is almost intuitive. The bullseye is unfortunately hurt by the requirement of touch screen controls in order to tag enemies. It takes too much time to move a hand away from controls in order to tap on an enemy. Sadly, the tagging feature will become barely used due to the annoyance.

Overall, I was impressed with the demo. There were a few hiccups (the annoying damage indicator and the bullseye's touch screen requirements) but overall it really played like Resistance. Resistance Burning Skies, while I can not comment on the full game, seems to be fitting the requirement of the Vita's first true first person shooter.

Niconico

After a rather tedious set up involving bouncing between the application and browser and inserting the same information multiple times, niconico was ready to be explored. Niconico is described as a social video networking service that allows for user comments to overlay the video at specific points. The full service allows for live streaming but, the Vita does not currently support uploads or live streaming. There is an icon for both features on the launch page so support will be coming down the road.

Niconico is very popular in Japan. Most of the content in the application will be targeted at Japan or in japanese. It is a rather interesting application as it is very easy to jump into any live stream. Unless there is a specific broadcast you are interested in viewing, I doubt you will be opening niconico at all after your first time. Perhaps, once support for streaming is made available I will look into creating an All Things Gaming niconico web show for the Playstation Vita. As for now, the application is a pass.

Cheers,

Jon