Playing PS4 games with PS Vita TV is a lagless, slightly compressed experience

Sony continued to shine a spotlight on PS Vita TV during its Tokyo Game Show keynote, talking up the little device's ability to stream Vita, PS3, and PS4 games. But how they would look, and--more importantly--how they would play, was yet to be known. As soon as the show floor opened we made a beeline to Sony's booth, and after getting hands-on with the hardware we left with mixed opinions.

There's definitely a visual hit when you're using the PS Vita TV to play PS4 games. We played Knack, one of the console's flagship launch titles, and though it looked good, there was definitely something a bit off. In a way, it almost looked like we were watching a YouTube video running at 1080p--it was serviceable, and looked good, but had minor tinges of compression.

That's the (relatively minor) bad news. The good news is that it played flawlessly. During our 10-minute demo we experienced no lag whatsoever. It felt as though we were playing a game running on the hardware, not a game being streamed wirelessly to it. So while you're not getting the full-fledged next-gen experience (especially if you're playing using a PS3 controller, as we were), you're definitely getting an extremely solid experience.

Well, so long as you live in Japan--Sony still hasn't announced plans to release PS Vita TV in the US/UK, despite using almost exclusively Americans in the promotional images and ad campaigns. Hopefully that is alleviated soon, since we're definitely excited for this interesting piece of tech.