Left 4 Dead on the Vita is cool, but not what you think

Many people have contacted me over the weekend to blog about a recent Buzz in the Vita hacking scene, regarding the following video

In this video, we can see a developer playing the famous game Left 4 Dead on the vita, controlling the player’s movements with the console. The buzz started when famous website kotaku played on words by explicitly saying  the game is running on the vita.

This is not true.

Or at least, not really. The game is not running on the vita, it is running on the dev’s PC, and the result is streamed to the console, while the console’s buttons are mapped to some specific keys on the PC. If you’ve ever used VNC, that’s basically the idea.

Some people are amazed at how good it looks, and at how there is no ping, but that would be expected on a local network. Now don’t get me wrong, this *is* an impressive technical achievement, but the author of these videos never claimed he was running the game on the vita. He actually explains in other videos on his youtube profile that he is running this on his PC, with comments such as this one:

As a matter of fact, such a thing already exists on the 7-years-old PSP, and you can basically achieve similar results using Portable VNC or PSPDisp, as shown in the video below:

Actually, if you dig on youtube, you’ll also find the PSP running Left 4 dead through PSP Disp. Does this make this video of Left 4 Dead streamed to the Vita any less interesting? No, it’s still very cool, in particular the motion sensor integration (although probably not really playable “for real”). But is it a breakthrough? Nope. I don’t remember Kotaku having a “breaking news” type of article when PSPDisp was first released Then again, the interesting point here is that to get PSP Disp to run on your PSP, you need a CFW. That is not the case here, as everything is coded using the official playstation suite.

As far as this remote desktop application ever making it to the official playstation store… only time will tell. In the meantime, the author said he would be releasing it “soon”, which probably implies he will be releasing the source code for those of you who have the pss sdk and want to compile it. But will it ever make it to the official PSN, what do you guys think? Will Sony accept that kind of entry?
Note: I contacted the author of this app for comments but didn’t get a reply.