Sony PlayStation Vita preview

Sadly, when the games try and take advantage of the Vita's more unique capabilities the results (for now, at least) feel more gimmicky than anything else. For example, the touchscreen menu interface in Uncharted felt like an obligatory hurdle thrown in to remind you that you aren't playing this game on your PlayStation 3. This is a real shame, especially since the actual game at times does feel like playing Uncharted on the PS3, which is pretty amazing. Unfortunately, the hardware demos for the Vita's camera and location-aware capabilities just feel like a reminder that the Vita has a camera and a GPS unit.

Of course, many of the same criticisms were made of the Nintendo DS touchscreen at launch as developers struggled to figure out how exactly to take advantage of the possibilities of the hardware. We'll have to wait and see if the PlayStation Vita can build a robust games library that takes advantage of it's camera, GPS, and touch screen capabilities.