Not that I’ve been able to play it, since BaNam haven’t seen fit to grace these good shores with it’s availability – some joke referencing “The World Is All One” and telling them to stuff their “Unity Mind” would likely be appropriate here, were I feeling up to the necessary level of witticism. I’d be curious to know if there’s any specific reason for it’s lack of local availability, but I wouldn’t like to speculate on that specific point.

Anyway, the Internet exploded with a whole load of annoyed shouting and a whole boatload of misinformation when the games surfaced in the US AppStore yesterday. This, mostly, comes down to the fact that it’s three games priced at $55 a piece, which even I admit is a little on the steep side.
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Because obviously, the thing to do when faced with new competition in the cartoon idol space is to stay one-step ahead of the game by renewing your efforts at a higher scale!

Anyway, pretty exciting news to wake up to, if rather immediately tempered by the realisation that, with the way these things usually work out, it’ll probably be two or three years by the time it’s released and filters down to a BD release and I’m able to actually see the thing. Maybe I should track down the SLA program director at the GFT this afternoon and start bugging him about it already…
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Or at least it seems that the first half is in the wild now – shipping notices received and all that. I assume that those few in the US to whom this is of any interest will have probably gotten it already, though obviously being outside of the territory it takes somewhat longer for me to receive such things.

Anyway, this was mainly just a public service announcement more than anything, given I’ve written far too much on the subject of Xenoglossia in the past – probably more than I’ve written about the rather spectacular “proper” iM@S adaptation of recent times, whose staff were showered with awards at the Newtype Awards this weekend gone. This Xenoglossia release is pretty interesting because it’s likely to be the best English translation of the show that has been available, and perhaps more importantly, looks to be the only time that certain supplementary material is going to be available in English.

Of course, I’m not sure when I’m actually going to get to watch my copy – Scotland Loves Anime looms this weekend, and even if it turns up before I head off to Glasgow, I’m not lugging a device with a DVD player up to Scotland with me ^^;

Apparently. I mean, I’m not yet convinced that the whole internet isn’t playing a really elaborate joke on me, even though it isn’t April.

Anyway, I’ve written way too much about the show in the past, so I’ll just say that I hope they include the omake and extended ending from the Japanese DVDs.

There was, alas, no iM@S Anime Season 2 announcement out of todays iDOLM@STER 7th Anniversary live event, but they did show the first promotional video for the upcoming Shiny Festa game for PSP – and promptly uploaded it to the interwebs.

For anyone curious as to how they’re pulling those graphics out of the PSP in comparison to similar genre games like Project Diva or the K-On game, well, they’re doing it by cheating – they’re using pre-rendered videos for the “music video” part of the proceedings, with the gameplay interface layered on top of that. It seems like a weird way for them to go in a sense – by using pre-rendered video, it prevents them from nickel-and-diming the more rabid parts of the fanbase with costume DLC (which is, you know, iM@S tradition at this point), as you can’t really expect them to render every costume combination in advance. Suppose they’ll just have to milk it via DLC songs instead.

Otherwise, yeah, it’s a pretty simple looking rhythm game. There’s only actually two inputs to it – there’s left and right (and I gather that the d-Pad, shoulder buttons or certain face buttons are acceptable for each), either as single presses or as having to be held for short periods of time. I gather the complication is going to be on the “track” side of things, where they’ll be distorting it into fashions other than the straight lines seen for most of the PV. Those who’ve played iM@S2 will probably know how much of a headache those looping tracks in the vocal lessons can be when you’re trying to rush through them, so I suppose it may end up slightly more interesting than it looks.

Anyway, ’tis out the 25th October.

Also, I still can’t accept Yayoi as being a drummer. Just saying.