8 Best PS Vita Homebrew Games

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is Rockstar North's 2002 follow-up to Grand Theft Auto III. It is set in 1986 in a fictional take on Miami, and you play Tommy Vercetti, a gangster fresh out of prison who gets caught in an ambushed drug deal. While he hunts the people behind it, he builds a criminal empire of his own. The story borrows from Scarface and Miami Vice, and it was the best-selling game of 2002.

The original never came to the Vita. Rockstar put Vice City out for iOS and Android in December 2012, and fans got it running on a hacked Vita. Players who hack the console list it right next to San Andreas when they name the ports to get.

Diablo is Blizzard North's 1997 action role-playing game. You play a lone hero in the town of Tristram and fight down through sixteen randomly generated dungeon levels until you reach Hell and face Diablo, the Lord of Terror. It is considered one of the greatest games of all time, partly because the quests and enemies change on every playthrough.

The Vita version is DevilutionX, a fan port, and it needs a hacked Vita. Blizzard never brought Diablo to the handheld, although the 1998 PlayStation version had already swapped the mouse for direct control with a controller. Players who mention the port agree it is the way to play Diablo on a Vita.

Bully is Rockstar Vancouver's 2006 action-adventure game, sold in PAL countries as Canis Canem Edit. You play Jimmy Hopkins, a troublemaker enrolled against his will at Bullworth Academy, a boarding school in a fictional New England town. Over one school year he tries to end bullying by rising through the school's cliques. You get around the open world on foot or by skateboard, bicycle, scooter or go-kart, and the game sold over 1.5 million copies.

Rockstar brought the Anniversary Edition to Android and iOS on 8 December 2016, but never to the Vita, so fans ported it themselves. Players name Bully among the first ports to put on a hacked Vita. It is the one Rockstar game on this list without a car to steal around every corner.

Hollow Knight is a 2017 Metroidvania from Team Cherry, a small studio in Adelaide. You play a nameless insect warrior exploring Hallownest, a fallen underground kingdom plagued by a supernatural disease, and you unlock new abilities as you go. The idea started at the Ludum Dare game jam in 2013, and Metroid and Zelda II are among its inspirations.

It came out for PC in early 2017 and for home consoles in 2018. Team Cherry first planned a Wii U version, and the Vita never got one at all. A game about a tiny knight with a huge map was always going to suit a handheld. A fan port fixed that for hacked consoles, and players put it on their lists of Vita games worth playing.

Half-Life is Valve's first game, a 1998 first-person shooter published by Sierra Studios. You play Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist trying to escape the Black Mesa Research Facility after a scientific experiment goes wrong and aliens overrun it. The story plays out through scripted sequences while you keep control, and it won more than 50 PC Game of the Year awards.

Its only PlayStation release was the 2001 port for the PlayStation 2. It runs on GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, and on the Vita it is a fan port. Players count it among the big reasons to hack a Vita, usually in the same breath as Doom and Quake.

Quake is id Software's 1996 first-person shooter, published by GT Interactive. Teleportation experiments called slipgates let a hostile force codenamed Quake invade Earth with an army of monsters, and you play a soldier sent through the slipgates to destroy the source. The levels swing between futuristic military bases and gothic places full of ogres and armor-clad knights, with a heavy dose of H. P. Lovecraft.

id released the source code on December 22, 1999. Unofficial ports followed on PDAs and mobile phones, and later on the Vita. Players rarely stop at the first game, and they recommend the whole trilogy on a hacked Vita. Is there a better way to spend a train ride than shooting ogres?

Doom is id Software's 1993 first-person shooter. You play a space marine, later nicknamed Doomguy, fighting through hordes of undead humans and invading demons, starting on the moons of Mars and finishing in Hell. The enemies are 2D images in a 3D world, a trick sometimes called 2.5D, and id sold it as shareware by giving the first episode away free.

The source code came out in 1997 under a non-commercial license, then under the GNU General Public License in 1999. Since then Doom has been unofficially ported to numerous platforms, and the Vita is one more. Players name it in nearly every rundown of what a hacked Vita can play.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is Rockstar North's 2004 action-adventure game. You play Carl Johnson, CJ to his friends, a former gangster who returns home in 1992 after his mother's murder and works to rebuild his old street gang. The open world covers three cities based on Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, and it is the best-selling PlayStation 2 game.

Sony's handheld never got it officially, and Vita owners spent years asking Rockstar for it. Fans finally did the job, and players recommend the San Andreas port more than any other Vita homebrew. As one player put it, "someone ported the actual GTA San Andreas to Vita and it's really good."