Jet Set Radio PSN/XBLA/Vita/IOS review

[dazza_cole]

What control method changes exist for the Vita? Any use of the touchscreens?

[Dogg Thang]

Not that I have seen. Not by default anyway. Spraying is done with the stick, like on the DC.

[dazza_cole]

Great, thanks. Good to see no unnecessarily forced use of the vita's features!

[Dogg Thang]

Turns out you can use the touch screen for spraying too. You can also set the camera to the rear touch pad too but it's off by default. Absolutely loving this and it's a steal at the price - doesn't feel like a retro game that should be cheaper at all. I had forgotten how frustrating some of the missions are where you have to spray the guys on the back though.

[fuse]

I had a crash on this on the Vita on Sat. Wasn't particularly impressed, but up until that point I was a very happy chap.

[Dogg Thang]

Yeah I had my first nasty crash yesterday. After completing a level, the screen went black, music played and it just stayed like that. Had to close the game to get it to do anything and it hadn't saved that I had completed the level. Not a nice bug.

[PaTaito]

JSR and Sine Mora have really put retail game dev's to shame in one foul swoop this last week. Both native, both gorgeous, both a fraction of the price of the full price tat.

Happy days....for a few weeks.

[wakka]

Turns out you can use the touch screen for spraying too. You can also set the camera to the rear touch pad too but it's off by default. Absolutely loving this and it's a steal at the price - doesn't feel like a retro game that should be cheaper at all. I had forgotten how frustrating some of the missions are where you have to spray the guys on the back though.

I didn't know you could use the touchscreen to do the graffiti! I kind of like using the sticks anyway though. I'm only one or two levels off the end of this now, I've enjoyed playing it through again immensely - I could never finish it when I was younger. And yes, those levels where you have to spray the guys on the back are perhaps the most frustrating part of the game!

The controls and camera can be a bit janky and make things harder than they need to be, but once you get the knack of it back, grinding around the level is seriously satisfying. The graphics look absolutely superb on the Vita screen (are they drawn at native res? They look like they are) and it's still such a fresh, exciting game even ~12 years on. I wish there were more titles made with this amount of imagination - jet roller blading around a cel shaded neo Tokyo and sticking it to the man by doing graffiti everywhere is just an absolutely wicked premise for a game.

It's dated, sure - the maps give you practically no help, and the game forces you to learn the way the levels link together by heart. But that's part of what makes it so much fun. I find the 'autopilot' nature of games like Assassin's Creed and Uncharted so tiresome, even though I still enjoy playing them - basically hold the R trigger and your character will climb over stuff, slide down slopes, jump gaps, all sorts. Where's the skill in that?

I love JSR ;D

EDIT: Oh and in the course of some quite heavy play over the last few days the game has crashed and had to be restarted more times than I count now. **** bug testing by Blib or whatever they're called ?_? not impressed by that at all.

Having said that this game is ?6.50 and better than Declassified by a factor of 8 trillion.

[wakka]

Finished this today. What a superb game I love it and I'd forgotten how great it is. More DC ports plz! Shame the Vita version crashes at least once every couple of hours, really.

Wub the way

->Open Spoiler<-

the character you kill Goji with at the end spraypaints 'Thanks for playing' on the wall at the end of the credits. I just really like that thing of thanking you for playing.

[_SD_]

It's finally out on iOS.... downloading it now.

[Shozuki]

been playing the Vita one, anyone else had a bug where the game keeps pausing itself? you need to close the software and open it again to resolve the issue - really annoying!

[wakka]

I didn't even have that one, although levels frequently started by pausing the game for some reason. I just had to unpause it.

One of the buggiest releases I've ever played.

[Decider-VT]

The audio glitches... constant pausing... ugh. I hope this gets patched soon. At the risk of echoing most Vita owners, it just looks beautiful on that screen. Would love to have some Vita ports of the Dreamcast/Saturn games on PSN.

[ETC]

It's now on IOS for ?2.99

[_SD_]

Absolutely unplayable on iOS. The controls were always a bit iffy on the dreamcast version, but trying to play it on the iPad is about impossible.