Which Sony handheld to collect for?

[Betagam7]

I'm a big handheld gamer due to my work making console gaming fairly impractical.

I'd like to add a Sony device to my collection as it would open up a library I'm mostly unfamiliar with to me. I briefly owned a PS2 slim back in the day but never had more than a handful of games for it and I've never owned any of Sony's devices.

Bearing in mind that I'm buying this to discover a new library (not to emulate other systems) I'm wondering what would be the best Sony handheld to invest in. I'm thinking of a few factors:

• price of physical games (cheaper the better)

• Price of device

• quality of library

• quality of unit

Any recommendations as to what would be the best between the Vita and the PSP (and which of it's iterations might be best if it's the latter?)

[dsheinem]

How married are you to having physical games for it? I’d say the Vita is better in pretty much every way except for the price of physical games. With the Vita you basically get access to both libraries since you can play PSP games from the PSN on the system.

How much do you want to spend? What kind of games do you want to play? Maybe we could put together some hypothetical bundles for you...

[Betagam7]

How married are you to having physical games for it? I’d say the Vita is better in pretty much every way except for the price of physical games. With the Vita you basically get access to both libraries since you can play PSP games from the PSN on the system.

Is that a subscription service or a pay per download platform? I do tend to prefer physical media over downloads due to concerns over the long term life of download services.

Are we talking a wide gap between PSP prices and Vita? Also is it cheaper to pick up the original PSP games than it is to download them?

Sorry for all the questions but Sony is a huge gap in my gaming expertise.

[ElkinFencer10]

I'm typically not the biggest fan of handheld systems, but I'm completely enamored with the Vita. I've got probably a dozen PSP games, but it just doesn't excite me; I'm really not a fan of the PSP. I LOVE collecting for the Vita, though (still prefer to get a game for PS4 if it releases on both). The Vita is also the single best system for niche games.

[Reprise]

How married are you to having physical games for it? I’d say the Vita is better in pretty much every way except for the price of physical games.

Of course the only problem with this though and going the digital route, is of course the price of those damn memory cards. They never did go down in price.

Edit: Concerning the price of physical games on PSP and Vita, I was considering getting a PSP earlier this year (didn't in the end, but...) and PSP games here (UK) are really cheap. Much cheaper than Vita games, which have retained their prices in much the same way as Nintendo games seem to.

[Segata]

The Vita. What a magnificent system that Sony screwed over. The only drawback to the thing is the stupid memory cards.

[marurun]

How did Sony screw it over? I'm curious, because I don't know.

[Sarge]

He's not wrong, at least for here in the States. The system was poorly marketed, and it felt like Sony forgot about it not long after they released it. The proprietary memory cards didn't help, either. One could say that the writing was on the wall for the system, and Sony was content to just let the system zombie on; compared to the PSP, the Vita was a failure. (I love the hardware, though, even if it lacks a lot of the games I'd normally want to play. And PSP and PSX games look great on it, even the LCD version.)

[Segata]

Don't forget the price and the fact Sony got booed on stage announcing AT&T for the 3G version during E3. That 3G didn't last long in retail before Sony discontinued it. The marketing what little of it there was. It was not very good. Sony memory cards being proprietary was the last nail esp the price and they are still expensive. Last I looked a 16 GB card is 40 bucks. Sony just treated Vita like a legacy system about a year after release in the US. here in SLC, many retail stores unless they carry retro stuff don't even have a Vita section. I love the Vita and wish it did better but at least Japan kept it alive and it gets many cool weeb games, tho it's obvious that's now starting to shift over to Switch.

[BoneSnapDeez]

I know little about prices and the whole "collecting" component, but I believe the PSP game library is significantly stronger than that of the Vita and I don't expect that to change.