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The Engineer Behind Vita's First Big Exploit

Known exploiter Yifan Lu explains why this doesn't necessarily mean the floodgates are open for Vita, and whether someone could use it for piracy.

No Caption Provided

Yifan Lu is a Texas-based student, one who resents the term “hacker.” He’d prefer to be called a reverse engineer, and he’s claiming to be responsible for a breakthrough that may open up the Vita. Eventually.

Lu disclosed his progress last Saturday on the Wololo.net message boards. He was seeking developers to help him out, which prompted a news post on the front page of Wololo.net. As more people started paying attention, this quickly lead to apocalyptic speculation that Lu had “cracked” the Vita, and would open the floodgates to piracy.

None of this is true, Lu told me over email this week.

“I did not expect this to be news,” said Lu. “Naive, I know. The announcement was basically ‘hey, we're at the point where we can actually write a loader now, so if anyone wants to jump on board and help, that'll be cool.’”

Lu has previous experience exploiting hardware, a task he takes on for the sheer challenge of it.
Lu has previous experience exploiting hardware, a task he takes on for the sheer challenge of it.

Lu is known for previous exploits, including the first jailbreak for the Kindle Touch and PSXperia, which converts any PlayStation game into something playable on the Xperia Play. In short, he’s legit.

Lu claimed that piracy on a Vita would not be possible with the exploit he’s discovered.

This assumes Sony doesn’t patch Lu’s exploit, the details of which are being kept private. Lu described himself as “very anti-piracy” and said he will not code anything to support the practice.

That said, Lu acknowledged there’s not much preventing someone else from taking the baton, and using his work for nefarious means.

“My work could be used as a stepping stone for others,” he said. “Personally, I am not talented enough to find exploits that could be used for piracy, and I am in contact with those who do have the skills, but they are also against piracy.”

“We can't stop it, but I can promise that I will never help it,” he said. “I made this metaphor before, but it's like the invention of airplanes. They're good for transportation, but somebody decided it can be used to drop bombs. But to prevent bombing cities, would it have been better if airplanes were never invented?”

The subtext of Lu’s comments is that homebrew is a good thing for the Vita community, and encourages more people to purchase a Vita and use it for a variety of reasons, including some that Sony never intended. It’s an argument fans of the rather impressive PSP homebrew community might agree with, but Sony? Yeah, probably not.

"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," said senior VP of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America Peter Dille in a 2009 interview with Gamasutra. "It's been a problem that the industry has to address together; it's one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it's criminal what's going on, quite frankly."

I asked Lu to try and break down what he’s accomplished thus far in laymen terms. Let’s try.

Lu’s first breakthrough was getting a RAM dump. On 3DS, exploiters accomplished this by creating a physical RAM dumper. Since RAM is on the same chip as the CPU on a Vita, that’s not possible. Lu wouldn’t explain how he solved that issue on Vita, “but it wasn't as creative as engineering a hardware dumper.” Once the RAM dump was successful, he was able to analyze the code running in memory, and puzzle over how to get their own code going.

They’ve figured that part out.

In a best case scenario, homebrew is used for emulation. In a worst case, it's games for free.
In a best case scenario, homebrew is used for emulation. In a worst case, it's games for free.

Lu worked with a team to accomplish his feat, but didn’t feel comfortable naming other people.

Now, it’s a matter of recruiting developers to program a loader that can actually run unsigned (read: unauthorized) code. Lu doesn’t expect the loader to be ready for at least a couple of months, and it could take much longer for anything interesting to come out of the homebrew community after that. Those folks work fast, though.

I asked Lu for verifiable proof of his success. Sure, he’s proven his exploitation chops with previous pieces of hardware, but why not more? For now, it’s just his word.

“There is no proof I can offer, and as of right now, it would be wiser to not believe me and go on with life as usual,” he said. “Don't hold off updating, don't go and stockpile on Vitas, etc. Because between now and when it's released, anything could happen.”

Given the speculation created by Lu’s discovery, that wouldn’t be a huge surprise.

Sony has not yet contacted Lu, and Sony has not responded to my request for comment.

“If they tell me to stop, I will,” he said. “I don't have the time or resources to fight them. This is only a hobby.”

Until Sony steps in, he'll keep at it. It's exciting.

"Like some people do crossword or sudoku, it's mainly the intellectual challenge and the euphoria of success," he said. "I'd be lying if I didn't say there's also a bit of pride involved for being the 'first' to do something."

Patrick Klepek on Google+

107 Comments

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Sourcery

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Edited By Sourcery

"reverse engineer" love that.

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Crackinwise

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Edited By Crackinwise

Maybe this will give some people an actual reason to get a vita.

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yukoasho

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Edited By yukoasho

Unfortunately, his airplane analogy is unsound. The potential for misuse of this or any exploit far outweighs any possible benefit, to the point where any non-piracy use will likely be little more than an excuse to garner sympathy, whereas airplanes serve a very real legitimate purpose.

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GooieGreen

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Edited By GooieGreen

@Ax23000: A company has a right to protect itself within reason just like anyone else. Hacking a device on a closed community like PSN, XBL, or iOS will lead to abuse and greater problems within the community. You begin to impact the experience of other users. These companies are, in effect, operating as a government body would to protect the interests of the many as they outweigh the thievery and curiosity of the few.

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Ax23000

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Edited By Ax23000

Man, most of the comments on this article depress me. Can people really not make a distinction between what this man is doing and piracy? You can poke holes in his analogy all you want, but the fact remains that he has a point. Hacking the console does not make him responsible for what people choose to do with the freedom he has granted them.

Freedom comes with personal responsibility and yes, PEOPLE WILL ABUSE THAT FREEDOM, but does that instantly make the freedom a bad thing? I live in the US where I, and pretty much every other citizen, have the freedom to say more or less whatever they want. People abuse this freedom constantly. They say mean, awful things. They lie and spread half-truths. Is the solution to this problem to do away with freedom of speech?

If you make every choice about granting freedom to people based on the worst people will do with that freedom, you might as well give up on the idea of giving anyone any kind of freedom ever.

What you have to remember about freedom, is that while some will abuse it, there will be others who will do amazing and interesting things with it. THINGS THAT WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT IT.

No company, in my opinion, should have the right to tell you what you can and can not do with something you have purchased. They should not be allowed to tell you what software you can and can not run. They should not be allowed to control what OS you have to use. They should not have that power. To my mind this is a fundamental right.

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GunnyHath

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Edited By GunnyHath

Homebrew ftw

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Blitzer

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Edited By Blitzer

I wouldn't even buy a Vita to pirate games. That's how much I don't care about it.

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Enigma_2099

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Edited By Enigma_2099

GeoHots vers 2.0

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daidryk

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Edited By daidryk

Great journalism as always Patrick. Love the legwork you put in on a very interesting subsection of gaming (considering I am a reverse engineer myself). Keep up the gold standard of amazing writing my man!

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EndlessLotus

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Edited By EndlessLotus

Firmware nuke incoming....

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ltcoljaxson

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Edited By ltcoljaxson

Lu must be reading some Paul Virilio...

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akira_22

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Edited By akira_22

Yeah this guy ain't at Kittyhawk, he's working Los Alamos. If he doesn't realise his work will lead to piracy he's a fool.

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gesi1223

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Edited By gesi1223

@George_Hukas said:

SONY EXPLOITS are news? I get Brad Muir being deep in Microsoft's pockets, but I didn't expect this from the staff. You guys kept pretty hush during those two years of FREE xbl arcade games. There's no way devs didn't lose millions from that as people played Trenched, Bastion etc. via a simple USB hack. But here you are, continuing to perpetuate and glorify this garbage, but for the console of your liking. Could you mention YIFAN LU a few more times while you're at it? His name isn't sticking like Geohot or James Holmes yet.

I think you're blowing this out of proportion. This news article is to break the false rumors floating around, not bring attention to the idea that piracy is still a thing.

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George_Hukas

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Edited By George_Hukas

SONY EXPLOITS are news?

I get Brad Muir being deep in Microsoft's pockets, but I didn't expect this from the staff.

You guys kept pretty hush during those two years of FREE xbl arcade games. There's no way devs didn't lose millions from that as people played Trenched, Bastion etc. via a simple USB hack.

But here you are, continuing to perpetuate and glorify this garbage, but for the console of your liking.

Could you mention YIFAN LU a few more times while you're at it? His name isn't sticking like Geohot or James Holmes yet.

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Sagalla

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Edited By Sagalla

This title is misleading, because homebrew and emulation are possible on the Vita already?? I hacked mine on 1.61 and am awaiting the next VHBL release to be released on 1.80 in a few days... This article doesn't explain this new trick in the context of what's already been acheived at all... This vague WIP is clearly not the 'First Big Exploit'

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Morrow

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Edited By Morrow

I don't know how to think about this.

Sure, it sounds cool and useful, but if I were a company that puts time, money and effort into a console I'd be kinda pissed if someone comes along and rapes it. I mean, aren't there copyright issues if you take a preexisting thing and alter it?

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bio595

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Edited By bio595

@kevingadd said:

@Cybexx said:

@ShinAli said:

Because PSM is pretty terrible. They've done a terrible port of the Mono runtime, so it runs really bad; not to mention omitting and restricting things on the Vita like texture compression, 96mb memory limit that is split between heap and "resource" memory (textures, sounds, etc).

Ah I see, good to know. I had not had a chance to try it for myself yet, it seems geared more towards the android devices. And since its C# your going to run into the standard garbage collection issues, usually the amount of memory you need to de-allocate to trigger it is kind of small which restricts the use of local variables. C#: amazing code hinting, clean language, nasty optimization issues.

People building terrible runtimes isn't really an issue with C#. The language actually has a bunch of features you can use to write apps that don't create garbage; it's just that most libraries aren't designed for that, including the ones that come with XNA and PSM. The garbage collector that comes with MS's runtime is really good, and the one in Mono is getting better also to the point that you don't need to worry about garbage very often.

For example, the content management stuff that comes with XNA creates tons of garbage, which means it's impossible to avoid GC pauses when loading content. This is a pretty stupid oversight that MS could have fixed easily but didn't bother to (and it's part of why Fez had pauses when loading levels).

Unfortunately, in general vendors don't care enough to do a good job with runtimes. The PSM runtime, for example, takes ~50 milliseconds to sort an array of 1024 elements, and crashes if the array is bigger. Yes, that is 1/20th of a second.

lololol, any more than 1024 and it crashes!?! Thats deplorable

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Xeiphyer

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Edited By Xeiphyer

I'd love to see some emulation and all the enhancements that this can bring to the Vita, but as soon as pirating games becomes remotely easy, its going to majorly hurt the Vita.

Sure would love to see someone redesign the main screen into something much nicer though.

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haroon90

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Edited By haroon90

I don't think the main shocker of this is that the vita has been hacked,because i don't think there is a single console ever that has not been hacked at some point in it's life cycle,but the amount of time it has taken to find a exploit in the ps vita system,7 months to be precise (an extra 2 i guess if u count the Jap release),i think it took a good 3 or 4 years before the first ps3 hack came out,so he's doing alot better time wise :P

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Cybexx

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Edited By Cybexx

@kevingadd: Yeah I like the language itself, every IDE I've written C# in has the best code hinting I've ever seen and its nice to not deal with header files. But my experience with C# no matter the IDE is that its really fast to prototype in but hard to finalize. For example I've been working in the Unity engine a lot recently and C# is one of the options for scripting. But it has the telltale memory issues I've seen before, it can't take advantage of hardware threading and has a hidden thread limit. So I've been writing everything in Unityscript (Javascript with C++ style Object Orientation) despite the lack of code-hinting because its more reliable. I guess its just an implementation issue since I wrote hardware threaded C# code in XNA but everybody seems to have implementation issues with the language.

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Baal_Sagoth

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Edited By Baal_Sagoth

Very interesting story. I like the nuance in the writing even though the topic involves a lot of grey area shit. I for one tend to agree with hackers/ exploiters/ reverse engineers, or whatever would be the most apt description, that know their limits and abstain from doing actual damage to companies by direct means. The information these people unearth is crucial and a neccessary balance to exploitative corporate strategies in my opinion. Also it's of course simply fascinating to see what can be done and how technology may progress during the arms race between security and the countermeasures.

Edit: @i8246i said:

...but true white hatters would report the vulnerability of a system to its manufacturer instead of publicly post the exploit for personal (and most likely financial) gain. You're a hacker. And kind of a douche.

I'd say it's more of a philosophical question if that information is in better hands with the public or a corporation. And are you sure that hackers who talk to manufacturers are not hoping to get a security related job out of it, aka doing it for financial gain? Your personal attacks against this guys strategy seem ill-informed and kind of like strawman arguments.

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Enigma777

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Edited By Enigma777
@Enigma777 Stupid phone...

People were complaining about the lack of games, and when a good one came out they would pirate it to "test it out" and never buy it. It was a vicious cycle and AAA developers eventually just gave up on the PSP because there was no way to turn a profit unless you catered to some niche market of hardcore fans like Atlus.

It's a textbook example of just how damaging piracy can be.
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Enigma777

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Edited By Enigma777
@MONOLITHIC_ERECTION

@Enigma777: Piracy didn't kill the PSP, lack of support did. I bought the thing day one and except for ports of old PS1 games there were literally NO games for it. Until GTA Stories came out, it was literally a portable movie player with movies in a shitty format for a tiny ass screen. I mean the Video iPod was around at this time too, so it wasn't like they had cornered a market; the Video iPod had a bigger screen too - by the time they realized "Shit, we need to release some games on this thing that people haven't already played" the thing had already been broken apart and they were working on getting better at how to break it apart, there was no way to stop people using it for emulators and shit at that point. It did come around eventually, maybe 2 or 3 years after release, they put out revised versions and some games, but by then I had already put mine in a drawer somewhere and gotten a DS so I didn't really care.

Maybe in not paying attention to the PSP after a year of its release means I missed a part where people where pirating PSP games in which case piracy killed the PSP, but I don't know if that happened since I didn't really get involved with that.

Yup, that's pretty much what happened. In the later years if it's life, the hardware was moving huge numbers but the top software couldn't even crack 100K. People com
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katelyngadd

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Edited By katelyngadd

@Cybexx said:

@ShinAli said:

Because PSM is pretty terrible. They've done a terrible port of the Mono runtime, so it runs really bad; not to mention omitting and restricting things on the Vita like texture compression, 96mb memory limit that is split between heap and "resource" memory (textures, sounds, etc).

Ah I see, good to know. I had not had a chance to try it for myself yet, it seems geared more towards the android devices. And since its C# your going to run into the standard garbage collection issues, usually the amount of memory you need to de-allocate to trigger it is kind of small which restricts the use of local variables. C#: amazing code hinting, clean language, nasty optimization issues.

People building terrible runtimes isn't really an issue with C#. The language actually has a bunch of features you can use to write apps that don't create garbage; it's just that most libraries aren't designed for that, including the ones that come with XNA and PSM. The garbage collector that comes with MS's runtime is really good, and the one in Mono is getting better also to the point that you don't need to worry about garbage very often.

For example, the content management stuff that comes with XNA creates tons of garbage, which means it's impossible to avoid GC pauses when loading content. This is a pretty stupid oversight that MS could have fixed easily but didn't bother to (and it's part of why Fez had pauses when loading levels).

Unfortunately, in general vendors don't care enough to do a good job with runtimes. The PSM runtime, for example, takes ~50 milliseconds to sort an array of 1024 elements, and crashes if the array is bigger. Yes, that is 1/20th of a second.

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Peanut

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Edited By Peanut
@algertman said:

@galloughs said:

"Known exploiter" is about as ridiculous a term as "game journalist". Also, I literally had forgotten that the Vita existed until I saw this article.

Ice cold.

Also, is it OK to talk about pirating games on here? I understand is the GB crew isn't around to mod the forums on their long 5 day weekends they take every week.

Woof! That's ice cold, dawg.
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i8246i

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Edited By i8246i

"Yifan Lu is a Texas-based student, one who resents the term “hacker.” He’d prefer to be called a reverse engineer"

Dude, you're a hacker. What you are doing is the goddamn DEFINITION of hacking.


Furthermore:

"Lu is known for previous exploits, including the first jailbreak for the Kindle Touch and PSXperia"

Yeah...shut up.

You are, at best (if we can actually trust that your hack doesn't allow or pave the way to piracy *coughcoughBULLSHITcough*) a "white hat"...but true white hatters would report the vulnerability of a system to its manufacturer instead of publicly post the exploit for personal (and most likely financial) gain.

You're a hacker. And kind of a douche.

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Cybexx

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Edited By Cybexx

@ShinAli said:

Because PSM is pretty terrible. They've done a terrible port of the Mono runtime, so it runs really bad; not to mention omitting and restricting things on the Vita like texture compression, 96mb memory limit that is split between heap and "resource" memory (textures, sounds, etc).

Ah I see, good to know. I had not had a chance to try it for myself yet, it seems geared more towards the android devices. And since its C# your going to run into the standard garbage collection issues, usually the amount of memory you need to de-allocate to trigger it is kind of small which restricts the use of local variables. C#: amazing code hinting, clean language, nasty optimization issues.

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algertman

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Edited By algertman

@galloughs said:

"Known exploiter" is about as ridiculous a term as "game journalist". Also, I literally had forgotten that the Vita existed until I saw this article.

Ice cold.

Also, is it OK to talk about pirating games on here? I understand is the GB crew isn't around to mod the forums on their long 5 day weekends they take every week.

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Rattle618

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Edited By Rattle618

Sony is fighting piracy on the Vita with the most effective strategy: Almost no games on it.

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ezdude

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Edited By ezdude

His airplane analogy is bad for a number of reasons. Maybe he should take a theory class.

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avidwriter

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Edited By avidwriter

Everything is crackable given time. It really depends how fast you fix it.

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galloughs

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Edited By galloughs

"Known exploiter" is about as ridiculous a term as "game journalist". Also, I literally had forgotten that the Vita existed until I saw this article.

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MONOLITHIC_ERECTION

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@Enigma777: Piracy didn't kill the PSP, lack of support did. I bought the thing day one and except for ports of old PS1 games there were literally NO games for it. Until GTA Stories came out, it was literally a portable movie player with movies in a shitty format for a tiny ass screen. I mean the Video iPod was around at this time too, so it wasn't like they had cornered a market; the Video iPod had a bigger screen too - by the time they realized "Shit, we need to release some games on this thing that people haven't already played" the thing had already been broken apart and they were working on getting better at how to break it apart, there was no way to stop people using it for emulators and shit at that point. It did come around eventually, maybe 2 or 3 years after release, they put out revised versions and some games, but by then I had already put mine in a drawer somewhere and gotten a DS so I didn't really care.

Maybe in not paying attention to the PSP after a year of its release means I missed a part where people where pirating PSP games in which case piracy killed the PSP, but I don't know if that happened since I didn't really get involved with that.

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michaelfossbakk

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Edited By michaelfossbakk

Never knew jailbreaking so was so lucrative.

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Edited By Kaigan

I don't know why I thought the Vita wouldn't get fucked in the ass by piracy like the PSP did.

Kind of doesn't matter though, since it's not like there are/will be any games to pirate. The already few developers that want to make games for the Vita will probably jump ship after a full-scale piracy exploit gets released.

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SortedeVaras

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Edited By SortedeVaras

I think Vita has the best piracy protection on earth: by having no games anyone wants to play no one will steal from them. Genius!

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deactivated-5d7bd9e4bef30

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@Dan_CiTi said:

@Boopie said:

sounds good if I don't have to pay for games on the Vita it's more interesting

so people nowadays freely and wantonly admit to being pirates?

It's ninjas that do not like being known who they are. Pirates not so much.

Yeah, they even have their own flag!

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Dan_CiTi

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Edited By Dan_CiTi

@algertman: Sony fanboys buy JRPGs? this isn't the PS1/2. Sony fanboys are Killzone, Uncharted, God of War lovers now.

Anyway, hate to say it, but hacking and all that made the PSP a very awesome portable system, and it had plenty of great games through the years, especially if you dug through the Japanese stuff like Gundam vs. Gundam, Sunday vs. Magazine, etc. as well as the great emulation it provided.

If the Vita can do all of this, as well as be much more powerful, better UI, and blah blah blah, sign me up.

Buuuut I still gotta cop a Purple 3DS sooner or later.

@ripelivejam said:

@Boopie said:

sounds good if I don't have to pay for games on the Vita it's more interesting

so people nowadays freely and wantonly admit to being pirates?

It's ninjas that do not like being known who they are. Pirates not so much.

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algertman

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Edited By algertman

@Nettacki said:

@algertman: Don't say it's dead until after the holiday season. THEN we'll see.

Then after that we'll get the "wait till E3" excuses.

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Cinnastar

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Edited By Cinnastar

Nice article, Patrick. Still cant see this saving the Vita though. I've still yet to see one in the wild.

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Levio

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Edited By Levio

@Shady said:

So, the best case scenario is still piracy?

It's good piracy though! Like the kind of pirates that sing and dance your troubles away.

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Shady

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