This weekend I went out into the world with a list of things to do.  You know what wasn’t on my list?  Purchase a Vita, but as you’ve no doubt gathered from this post’s title, that is precisely what happened.  It all started with my genius plan to take advantage of Best Buy’s trade-in promotion they have going on now, in which you get double credit for any video game trade-ins.  They normally give a pathetic amount of credit, but double a pathetic amount is an acceptable amount in my book.

I sifted through my games and used their online trade-in site to determine what I could get for a number of titles before settling on six games.  I’m not sure if GameStop also has this feature on their site, but being able to check my games at home made the experience much more straightforward and spurred me to actually follow through.

Here are the games I traded in along with my justification and how much credit I received:

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – Credit: $5.00 $10.00
Justification: AKA Assassin’s Creed 2.33333333 with some pretty cool multiplayer

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Credit $14.00 $28.00
Justification: As far as Zeldas go, this one will be remembered more for its shoddy motion controls than anything else.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 – Credit $12.00 $24.00
Justification: If I forget that this game ever existed tomorrow it wouldn’t be soon enough.

Tekken 6 – Credit $5.00 $10.00
Justification: With Tekken Tag 2 coming out soon, why do I need Tekken 6?

Shiren The Wanderer (Wii) – Credit $4.00 $8.00
Justification: Sorry, Shiren.  I need the money.

LittleBigPlanet – Credit $6.00 $12.00
Justification: I have LittleBigPlanet2.

Total Credit – $46.00 $92.00

At this point I was content to sit on my credit until the next must-own title.  I’d managed to convince Sarah that if she wanted a Vita for Persona 4: The Golden, now was the time to strike due to the free $50 gift card when purchasing a Vita (this offer has since expired by the way).  Sarah’s new job has her taking public transportation pretty regularly so it seemed like an obvious fit.  She was completing her transaction (which included a copy of Gravity Rush — I’m so proud) when my own logic for purchasing a Vita started to sink in.  But did I really want one?  The 3DS is vastly less expensive, more portable, and it actually has some Monster Hunter support — oh, and Pokémon.

Yet my PSP Go has been good to me, touting a ton of ports, hi-tech features and interaction with my PS3, which is essentially the central nervous system of my gaming world.  In the end I think I just realized the Vita has a lot more potential, so I took the leap.  Here’s a breakdown of what it all came to:

Costs:

Playstation Vita Wi-fi $249.99 + $15.87 in tax
16 GB Memory Card $59.99 + $3.81 in tax
Gravity Rush $35.99 (purchased on the PSN — no tax)

Total: $365.65

Savings:

$92 from game trade-ins
$50 gift card applied to memory card
$3.99 free Gravity Rush DLC for purchasing the game on the Playstation Network

Total savings: $145.99

Gross: $219.66

I spent the remainder of the day familiarizing myself with the system’s interface.  This took longer than you’d think — not necessarily because it’s cumbersome, but simply because I did a lot of exploring and customizing.  Here’s what my desktop looks like at the moment:

I’ve yet to actually spend a substantial amount of time gaming with the device — it’s just so easy to get distracted with all the apps and features I still don’t quite understand (looking at you, Near).  I banked a few hours unto Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention, playing until I could unlock Raspberyl mode.  My fingers quickly adapted to the controls which are identical to the PS3′s.  I turned off the rear touchpad controls as they were just a nightmare, causing me to rotate the map and change characters unintentionally.  Props to NIS for making this feature optional, despite it being poorly implemented.

Right now I am happy with my purchase.  I look for any excuse to turn the machine on and I’ve already got a slew of great games at my disposal.  Now, I’ll just sit back and hope that my confidence in what Sony will do with the Vita wasn’t misguided.