What are the Best PSP Games to Play on Vita?
We've picked out 10 of them. Load up your shiny new Vita slim with these last-gen greats!
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Interested in picking up the new slim version of PlayStation Vita? It's a pretty slick piece of kit, to be sure... and it has the benefit of an amazing library.
Seriously, the Vita has a vastly better library than its sales would suggest: Big retail titles, tons of PS1 classics, and an amazing (not to mention ever-growing) pile of indie games. But if you really want to get the most out of the system, you need only look backward to the hundreds of games from Vita's predecessor, PlayStation Portable.
While last-gen games don't always make the transition to better hardware cleanly (if, in this age of no backward compatibility, they make the transition at all), PSP games look absolutely fantastic on Vita. Because Vita's screen resolution is exactly twice that of PSP, those older graphics scale up cleanly — and besides, the best PSP games still look pretty great.
But best of all, Vita has twin analog sticks, something the PSP lacked. Sony has thoughtfully included the option for players to remap the controls for PSP games on Vita, meaning you can "trick" the system into treating the right stick like the PSP's face buttons. A lot of excellent PSP shooters simulated the use of a right stick by putting camera controls on the face buttons; by using Vita to swap those commands around, you can actually play limited PSP shooters like proper twin-stick console shooters. It's not so much playing games the way their creators never intended, and more like playing them the way their creators wanted but couldn't due to hardware limitations.
In other words, some PSP games actually play better on Vita than they did on the original hardware. How often does that happen?
Given that the PSP digital library is quite vast, we thought we'd help you cut to the chase by recommending 10 last-gen selections that truly shine on Vita in this handy video feature:
Did we miss any? As usual, amend our oversights in the comments below.