Tips and Tricks for Your New PS Vita

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Tips and Tricks for Your New PS Vita

Christmas may be over, but the gaming fun has just begun. For those of you who got a PS Vita from Santa, or as a gift to yourself — congrats! I’ve collected some handy tips and tricks for you to get the most out of your new Vita.

Longtime PS Vita owners, feel free to chime in and let us know your favorite tips & tricks in the comments section.

PS Vita

Remote Play with PS4

Remote Play is one of my favorite features of PS Vita. This feature lets you steam your PS4 games from your PS4 system over Wi-Fi to your PS Vita. So if the living room TV is tied up, just use Remote Play to send your PS4 game to your Vita and continue playing. For instructions on how to link your PS4 to your PS Vita for Remote Play, click here.

PlayStation Now

Our game streaming service that uses cloud-based technology, PS Now, launched in open beta on PS Vita just a few months ago. Through PS Now, you can play hit PS3 games like God of War: Ascension and inFAMOUS on a portable system — how cool is that? To get started, download the PlayStation Now Open Beta App from PlayStation Store.

Quick Settings Menu

PS Vita’s Quick Settings menu lets you easily change settings for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, music, brightness, chat audio and microphone, even while you’re in the middle of your gameplay. Just hold the PS home for a few seconds and the quick setting menu will pop up.

Personalize Your PS Vita Background

Customize your PS Vita with themes from PlayStation Store, or upload photos taken from PS Vita’s camera in the Themes & Background menu under Settings. Some cool themes currently available free on PlayStation Store include Uncharted Golden Abyss and PlayStation’s 20th Anniversary theme.

Take a Screenshot

Just like PS4, you can snap a screenshot of your game on PS Vita. To take a screenshot, press the PS button and the START button at the same time. You can view the captured screenshots in (Photos), and attach them to tweets using Vita’s LiveTweet application.

Organize Your Apps with Folders

Got a lot of apps on your home screen? You can quickly create folders to organize your games and apps. Just hold down on the icon, select Create Folder, name it, and start dragging other similar apps/games to the folder you’ve just created.

Calendar App

Use the calendar application to set up gaming events with your friends. You can also sync your Google calendar to have all your events with you on your PS Vita. The app also makes it easy to share your favorite events by using the Messages and Email applications.

PlayStation Plus

Get access to a rotating list of free games from the Instant Game Collection, 1GB of cloud storage for game saves, deep discounts off select content, and more with PS Plus.

For December, Final Horizon and Titan Attacks! are currently free for PS Plus members via the Instant Game Collection. Also, one PS Plus membership works across PS4, PS3 and PS Vita.

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76 Comments

  • Is it possible to stream a blue ray movie to my Vita? or my old but good PSP?

  • My fav tip is definitely screenshots….I love to take screenshots especially of Sony games,but the screenshots on Vita are really lame.So how about upgrading that hu?

    @ 16 BlueBl1zzard – Wow I didn’t know that you could control the menu with the buttons.Nice tip my friend.

  • I can give a tip…it took a while for me to discover this but Vita can record videos…yup most people may already know this but some may don’t and even with the Vita camera having bad quality,its still nice that it can record videos.

  • The best tip & trick I can give you [as somebody who owns a PSV since launch day] is: don’t use remote play and buy only retail titles. Only way for Sony to realize that the PSV is a stand alone system is that people use it as such. Nobody bought it for RP [hopefully] and indies are fine but overdone. We want retail games, folks~.

  • My Vita tip is that you can still take screenshots on your PSTV using a DualShock 4.

  • A few minor notes:

    *When using the web browser, pressing Square brings up a pointer you can move using the left analogue stick. This can help when navigating web pages with drop-down menus. (The same feature works in the Email app, too.)

    *When installing new games (or transferring them back to your Vita via Content Manager), check to see if there is a patch update available. In some cases, such as with Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment, it’s worth installing the update right away, even if the file size can be quite large for certain game titles. (SAO:HF’s update takes up 646mb of space, but adds another 30 hours’ worth of content and tidies up various parts of the game interface.)

    *Note that the cloud-saving tip noted in an earlier post only works if you have PlayStation Plus. With the exception of certain individual game titles that offer their own cloud-save function (such as Retro City Rampage DX), you cannot save a game file indepenently from the game data if you do not have Plus. (For this same reason, I’d recommend backing up your game data to your computer with Content Manager on a regular basis.)

  • On another note, I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but the Maps app seems to have a way to access Street View.

    When you click on an icon showing a certain location (such as Times Square, to give one example), you can click on the “Street View” image in the information box to look around that location. Once in, you can tap on the sides of the screen to turn left and right (or look up and down), and press the “road” arrows to move your position.

    The interface at this level doesn’t seem to work that smoothly (and nor is it scaled to work well on the Vita screen), leading me to believe that it’s not an intentional feature. Still, it shows that a proper Street View mode could perhaps be properly accounted for in a future update, if Sony and/or Google were so inlined to support it…

  • The Vita is hands down the best handheld I have ever owned. Some of the awesome games for it include Killzone Mercenary and Uncharted GA. There are some major key franchises that are missing from the Vita: NHL, NBA, WWE, GTA, Infamous, Syphon Filter, Pac Man, Sonic (not racing), Dragon Age, Fallout, more Madden and many others. It needs support from Capcom and 2K (Rockstar). Also needs EA to start making games for it again. Remote Play is nice, but does not work when you are too far away from the PS4 or have no wifi. I would like to see more HD games for it like the Devil May Cry games , Hitman Trilogy, Okami, and Syphon Filter Collection. It would be neat to replay Fallout 1 and 2 in updated graphics. It still blows my mind that we have not seen an NBA game or a GTA game on the Vita. Vita is awesome. If Sony got the other publishers to release some of these games on Vita, it would be even better.

  • LOL. for 58, I meant to say that I wanted a Splinter Cell Trilogy for the Vita.

  • 1. You can use any picture off the internet as a backdrop.
    2. Buy Persona 4 Golden.
    3. Use Content Manager to circumvent memory card prices.
    4. Profit.

  • i need to know how to play non pixels games, you know?

  • 1. import 64 GB memory card
    2. Power Save Setting – Use Wi-Fi in Power save mode, Have this uncheck for better Wi-Fi speed especially if you are trying to use remote play over internet.

  • A great tip would be if sony released a first party game for it, Seriously I would love to buy a AAA game from sony on the vita, but it seems as if you guys gave up on it!

  • Tip! don’t sell a broken game (Resogun) and a week later still not have a fix for it. I bought it on the 23rd and as of today still not working! I even re-downloaded it a couple of days ago. I was just so happy to get this on the Vita! Way to kill enthusiasm.

  • Oh wow, I had no idea the Vita could take screenshots. This is super good to know! There are a lot of times when I’m playing a game and I wish I had the option. Now I feel silly for owning a Vita for so long and being completely clueless about the feature…

  • I really love my ps vita but is so sad that the console doesnt have many AAA game, i want to know what AAA games are coming to the ps vita …..i also like the indie games but i wantfirst pasrty games for this year

  • Lower game prices would realy help the vita, as well as lower memory card prices.

    Overall, the vita is a great system.

  • Useful Arigatou For The Guide. :P

  • I need friends to play with on my vita for minecraft! Add me please my psn is famgame1.

  • Get rid of the bubble interface and copy the ps4 interface or allow me to use the Xmb again.

  • i brqd ard cod bod two is coming out for vita

  • i hearrd

  • The PlayStation®Vita is just about the best portable console system in the market today. But Sony has completely failed on the promise of backing up their product and now the Vita is just a dying product. There’s a threshold of interest that a product has to push consumers across in order for them to buy-in, and the Vita hasn’t hit that stride yet. It seems that Sony favors other regions in releasing physical format while North America is enforced to just be satisfied with the digital versions of those same games though Sony should offer distribution options that include digital and retail, that way revenue comes from both demographics for the same game title.

  • Sony screwed North Americans by concentrating more on releasing digital-only content and making flash storage cartridge games impossible to find or buy at local retailers. They need to offer the option of releasing more physical media for games such as LittleBigPlanet PS Vita – Marvel Super Hero Edition, Soul Sacrifice Delta, and many more instead of just releasing them as download only through the PlayStation®Store which I don’t invest on digital media because it takes away the true sense of ownership. If Sony were to approve physical retail release of many of the digital-only game titles especially those games with bigger gigabytes for the PlayStation®Vita, I would definitely buy them in order to show my support but it is always better late than never.

  • It’s very disappointing and it really sucks though that Sony barely supports the PS Vita themselves and now they’ve produced a device called PlayStation®TV that’s does half the job of the Vita for your TV. For what it does, it should be $50 at most so that consumers buy into the games and proprietary memory cards. I’ll wait for the bargain bin, because with Sony’s track record of abandoning and not supporting their products, this thing isn’t going to get better anytime soon because there are too many incompatible games and lack of apps to support it. I’ll most likely purchase one until retailers start clearance these all out, due to lack of interest. Most consumers that wanted the PlayStation®Vita system already bought the Vita. Of course, Sony planned it that way from the beginning…

  • Wished the Nintendo 3DS can link up with the Wii U, then there will be two screen controllers that can be in play. Heard Nintendo is coming out with an updated version of the 3DS with double the spec from the original 3DS that can read the new amiibo toy figures that just came out, and have updated cameras… Vista is a great system that can take out the 3DS if Sony can figure out how to. Because of very expensive Sony exclusive memory cards and a lot of digital game only content, Sony seems to be digging the Vista’s grave ever since the Vista came out.

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