Moving onto my experience.

The Vita itself has a fully sealed enclosure, which is a bit of a shame given the performance record of my PSPs’ batteries. I hope Sony managed to create a battery that doesn’t sometimes kill itself after a month of (heavy) use. However, the sealed enclosure does mean that its surface is entirely smooth, meaning it’s quite nice to hold in your hands. The Vita itself fit quite nicely into my hands, as it has a slightly larger frame compared to the original PSP-1000 series, which was quite nice. Certainly beats trying to use a PSP-3000 if your hands are awkwardly large. Even with my relatively short fingers, I was able to reach most areas of the back touch screen, although I didn’t get a chance to try that touch screen out.

The enclosure was smooth and glossy and seems to be a bit easy to damage (I noticed scratches and chips on the demo model in some places). There are 5 main ports: 1 proprietary port (I think), 1 port for the Vita memory card, 1 port for the Vita game card, 1 port for the SIM card (only on 3G models, I would assume), and 1 final port that looks like a full-sized USB port. The memory card slot is a push-click-lock style one, but the SIM card one seems to be a manual slot (i.e. push to insert, pull to remove). There was no way for me to check the other ports.

The buttons were a bit stiff, not just in a ‘new button’ sense; they simply aren’t as easy to press as they were on the original PSP. But in a way, that’s actually a good thing. As a lot of the UI and games now revolve around touch, it is quite easy to graze or hit a button by accident while moving from traditional hand positions to reaching over and touching the touch screen. There’s also a satisfying ‘click’ sound that they make when you press down certain buttons (start, select and the PS [Home] button on the demo I tried). Yes, I like satisfying click sounds.

Despite my singing praises of the buttons, there are a few minor things I noticed about them. Firstly, they are now a lot smaller than they used to be. Noticeable when playing shooters or games that involve quick button pressing, especially if you are used to the size of the original buttons. They are also now placed higher than originally. This is likely to accommodate for the analogue sticks, as the analogue sticks were in positions that were very comfortable to use (not like the analogue nub that the PSPs have). The Vita has two analogue sticks (which you also should already know), but neither of them are clickable, so no L3/R3 buttons. The sticks themselves are quick to respond, and I had no problems at all with input lag (sasuga Sony, I guess?). Wipeout and Uncharted played perfectly fine in terms of analogue sticks.

The Vita’s shoulder buttons are larger than the original PSP’s. This is good. Very good. Especially since a lot of games are now adopting the Xbox’s ‘trigger’ style control mechanism for games (no more pressing X to accelerate!). Wipeout [somearbitrarynumberhere] now uses R for acceleration, L for brakes, etc., making it quite similar to some of the racing games that were designed on the Xbox. Thanks a lot for that innovative design, Microsoft! I’m glad you can at least do some things right! Anyway, back to the Vita, it still only bears one set of shoulder buttons, so there’s no distinguishment between L1/L2/LB/LT or R1/R2/RB/RT.

Back to touch screens, the front touch screen is quite nice. It’s a capacitive screen (none of that silly resistive nonsense). Ignoring all technical specs, the display was sufficiently bright and the touch was very responsive. As the Vita no longer uses the traditional Xross Media Bar (XMB) that the original PSPs and the PS3 uses, it takes a lot of getting used to, especially since the entire interface is now designed differently. Not only is the entire interface touch-based, it also focuses less on your game/video/music media and more on social aspects. The home screen was littered with shortcuts to apps that I didn’t know about or didn’t care enough to know about (I recognised the Near name though). Anyway, I’m used to touch-interaction from my phone (HTC Desire w/ MIUI if anyone cares), so using the interface itself was rather intuitive for me. Took me about a minute of messing around to find everything though. One thing I was a bit disappointed about was the inability to use traditional controls to navigate most menus. Either that or it wasn’t immediately obvious how to enable/engage traditional control schemes. Uncharted gave the option of using either or both traditional controls or touch/augmented reality controls and allowed you to switch between them as you saw fit. No need to change anything in the options or anything. You could just seamlessly switch from climbing the wall using your analogue stick to swiping across the screen and automating the climb. This obviously depends on the game, because Wipeout didn’t seem to have a touch control scheme. Either that or it had to be changed in the menu or something.

Worthy of note is the fact that the Vita does have an accelerometer too. Dunno if it properly implements SIX-AXIS (shakey shakey!) or not, but it could be used as part of the controls for leaning in Uncharted (tilt to lean, so quite intuitive). Again, usage is game dependant, although I think it may need to be re-calibrated occasionally, as I seemed to have to tilt quite a lot before I got an in-game reaction from Drake (protagonist in Uncharted).

Anyway, things that I didn’t really get to try out: cameras, volume adjustment, screen brightness adjustment, rear touch screen, USB port?, other port, SIM card port, game card port, boob physics SIX-AXIS/Dual-Shock?, Remote Play/Transferring/Transfarring, and 3G usage. The in-store guy assures me that (in the UK anyway) the 3G models are not carrier-locked. They come with a Vodafone SIM card, but are not locked. 3G usage is PAYG too apparently. Not too sure about the details on that.

In any case, I doubt I’ll be buying one in the UK any time soon. I’ll probably pick up a 3G model from Hong Kong some time in the future. And maybe get a PS3 too so I can get the full suite.

Questions/requests on what else I should check are welcome. Leave them in the comments below. If I get any, I will consider going back into the store and exploring those features.

IX is finally alive again. And as a result, the Clannad + After Story project is resuming. But not quite the way it was before. IX and I have decided that we’ll be merging our respective groups together into kureshii’s (remember him from Taipu? He helped us out a lot with Eve no Jikan) group, Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku (ZUM). Our only active project now is Clannad. We will focus on this for as long as it takes to get good quality subs out for Clannad. After that, I intend to pursue some other fansub projects, mainly shows that I feel never got good enough BD/DVD releases (ZKC, etc.).

If anyone is willing to help us out (and we could always do with more help!), please join Rizon and message me (Southrop) ASAP! We’re looking for additional TLs and timers mainly at the moment. KFXers/K-Timers are also wanted, but are of lower priority.

Basically, Nyaa redid their tracker completely. Links still all work, but the old torrent files no longer work. And as such, pretty much all the torrents of stuff I’ve released are dead. I have no intentions of bothering to go back and reseed them all, since the need for most of them is probably gone. All releases are still available on IRC via our XDCC bot, Chaos|Hina.

BakaBT: Basquash Music Collection [FLAC]

Torrents: FLAC | MP3

XDCC: See here

edit: I know I tagged the two Eclipse songs wrong. I fixed those for the BakaBT collection, but I can’t be fucked to redo the archives.

Thanks muchlies to kureshii who actually bought the soundtrack and sent me a copy of the ISO. If it weren’t for him, this lossless version would never have been released to the intarwebz! Believe me, I’ve spent days scouring Share and PD for a lossless rip. There were none to be found.

And as always, if you are a translator and enjoyed our work on Eve no Jikan, please consider joining us to help translate the prequel light novels!

Torrents: FLAC | MP3

XDCC: See here

It’s my birthday~

That is all.

Anyway, that aside, I’ve become really rather busy with Uni properly starting and having 21 hours a week of teaching, tutorials, mentoring and labs all put together.

However, I would still like to pursue some fansubbing, though I’d like to take things slowly. Like… very slowly. lol. Anyway, we’re always on the lookout for new talent to join the group. If you watched Eve no Jikan and enjoyed it, and want to help the group, please consider joining. We are very short on translators at the moment, and that is causing the delays on all our projects (I’m the only translator in the group at the moment D:).

If we can assemble a team large enough, we may consider picking up a weekly show that currently only has shitsubs.

I’ve also formed up a joint with Wasurenai to finish subbing Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari. After I finish TLCing their final few episodes, I’ll then go on to do v2s of all the releases myself to fix hardsubbed errors, translation errors, etc. This is one of my slow background projects.

An update on Zettai Karen Children: this project is still happening. It’s stalled on the fact that I just received a pack of questions from UCL for me to do before term starts (27th for anyone who cares) and that II-Subs pulled from the joint so I have to wait before I can get raws. These are my choices for ZKC:

1. Wait for II-Subs to provide raws to me slowly (3 eps at a time) over an FTP.
2. Encode the 7 or so ISO volumes I’ve already downloaded.

The second option involves learning to encode too :/

And as always, we’re still recruiting, especially for our manga/novel translation department! We have loads of projects were interested in doing, but no staff to work on them!

When did it start?

When did people walking in the streets start to have red rings glowing above their heads?

And when did the people not crowned with a ring start becoming fewer and fewer?

If you don’t already know, there’s a prequel short light novel for Eve no Jikan. I’m trying to work on translating it, but it’s rather difficult. Recruiting any and all help I can get in the TL department!

I’m going to be uploading releases slowly one at a time because I’m lazy like that. But for now, here’s some SD goodness to keep you guys waiting!

Update: Scripts have been uploaded~
Update 2: All releases are out! I’ve updated the links below to NyaaTorrents links. These will allow you to download from BakaBT even though it’s still in the swarm protection period! 720p and 1080p are still waiting to upload to my XDCC bot.
Update 3: NyaaTorrents links removed. They decided to delete the torrents :|

Torrents: 576p | 720p | 1080p
XDCC: See here.
Scripts: Here