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E3 2011: Carmack - PS Vita will feel 'pretty pokey' in a year or two's time

Smart to poke?

E3 2011: Carmack - PS Vita will feel 'pretty pokey' in a year or two's time
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Chatting with GameSpot at this year's E3, id Software's co-founder John Carmack revealed his scepticism of Sony's upcoming PlayStation Vita.

Although Carmack thinks the Vita is twice as powerful as current smartphones (due to some smart Sony tweaking), he also believes that it won't be able to keep up with smartphone advances.

Questioned whether he'd been hands-on with the Sony's Vita, Carmack responded, "No, but I think that Sony learned a lot from the PS3, and they've gone out of their way to make sure that the development is as easy as possible on there."

"I think that they've picked as eminently a suitable hardware spec as they could for that. They're going to have you program for it like a console, so it's going to seem twice as powerful as a smartphone with the exact same chips in there."

"But of course, by the time they actually ship, there may be smartphones or these tablets with twice as much power as what they're shipping with on there. And a year or two after that, it's going to look pretty pokey."

In Carmack's eyes, for Sony to have success, it should focus its efforts on quicker and cheaper games by "allowing people to more or less directly move over the console development engine to technologies on there."

Anthony Usher
Anthony Usher
Anthony is a Liverpool, UK-based writer who fell in love with gaming while playing Super Mario World on his SNES back in the early '90s. When he isn't busy grooming his beard, you can find him replaying Resident Evil or Final Fantasy VII for the umpteenth time. Aside from gaming, Anthony likes hiking, MMA, and pretending he’s a Viking.