OK, so apparently Namco Bandai have been outed as registering the 3rd VISION trademark. The potential significance of this is likely obvious to at least a few of those reading this – all the iDOLM@STER works span-off from iDOLM@STER2 were tagged as 2nd VISION, so it follows that this is likely to be advance notice of a third core installment to the franchise coming up in the near future.

Its probably make a lot of sense that this is something that’s potentially coming up shortly. Aside from the fact that there are new hardware platforms coming in the near future for them to exploit, and the otaku market are probably easier to sucker into being early adopters than most, there is also the forthcoming iM@S feature film. Bundling the movie’s eventual home release with a new iteration of the game makes an awful lot of sense, particularly considering how well the iM@S2 plus TV anime bundle sold when released on PS3.

Aside from that, though, they’ve pretty much milked iM@S2 as much as they can without bringing in some kind of shake-up at this point – even discounting the mobage, they’ve more-or-less exploited it as much as they managed to with works derived from original iM@S. They’ve had their TV anime (though the A1 Pictures effort was obviously a lot more “core” iM@S than Xenoglossia!) and their three PSP games – this time combined with their rhythm-game-bundled-with-OAV title. DLC for iM@S2 has naturally run it’s course by this point to.

All told, it’s probably about time they did something to revitalize interest in the core franchise, especially now that they are actually facing some degree of competition in the idol game market – I mean, there’s Aikatsu, and there’s an upcoming Love Live Vita game forthcoming, and who even knows what the heck SEGAs Project575 is. Attention is divided.

But, hey, it’s obviously early days right now, so who knows what this actually is, or what they’re going to do with the game. I do have my own suggestions, however…
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From episode 58 of Puchimas, the iDOLM@STER gag anime spin-off which, like the Mini-Goddesses, exists in the handy petite size. Not that this was the only example in the show – I actually had two different examples brought to my attention by Calaggie and Peter over on the Twitter ages back, but since I completely forgot to favourite the tweets like a sensible person at the time, I’ve had to go back on trawl the BDs for them. I figured I’d cap the post with this particular example because PiyoPiyo is my favourite underused Puchidol, and also it’s upside-down, which is kind of interesting!

Well, maybe not so much the latter point there.
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This one was brought to my attention by Peter over the Twitters, because I’m doing an absolutely awful job of keeping up with things I should probably be trying to watch this season. Turns out it was a pretty bad weekend to take off to make a terrible, and terribly broken, game about hugging for Molyjam, as when Monday rolled around I discovered that there were eleventy billion things to be watching and, honestly, I’m hardly even managing to keep track of what is and isn’t actually streaming on Crunchy at the moment. Whoops.

So this is presented without any kind of content relating to context or even the show, because, frankly, all I know about it right now comes from that gag comic edit with the samurai complaining about the apparent heteronormality of it all that was doing the rounds a couple of days back.

Well, not exactly, but this one shot of Oguie’s bookcase in the first episode of the new Genshiken is pretty weird. Those DVDs on the same shelf as the Hi-Fi are pretty specifically UK editions – you can even see the BBFC logos replicated on them. Some of the content looks to be a little esoteric as well – the Aliens Quadrilogy boxset should be obvious, as should the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood. Next to the Torchwood to the right seem to be a volume of Classic Doctor Who (the silver bannered packaging is pretty distinctive), a couple of volumes of New Who and a bunch of stuff I just can’t make out.

To the right of the Aliens box is what looks to be the Gremlins Collection boxset and what is the really odd thing here – Bo Selecta.
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It’s hard to complain about anything in particular in regards to any specific British element presented in the first episode of Kiniro Mosaic, where the shows prologue is set in England. By all reports, it seems that they fairly meticulously location scouted, so whilst I’d like to complain about the practicality of using a Morris Minor for transport (at least as a primary mode of transport), I guess there’s someone out there who continues to be crazy enough to do so. You also can’t really complain too much about how old-looking the furnishings of Alice’s home are given they’re basically a replication of a real-world location, though, despite indoor shoe-wearing being acceptable here (though I don’t tend to do it myself), I’d question wearing boots on the bed.
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