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.
Previously, in the last instalment of Beta-Waffle…
I’ll get around to it one day (probably when they do a 3DS redesign, that being a convenient way to justify to myself buying a Japanese 3DS)
Then, the very next day, Nintendo goes and announces a new 3DS variant with a significantly larger screen. This is leaving me feeling a little like a politer but considerably less attractive Suzumiya Haruhi. Still, I suppose I’m going to have to be true to my word and actually get around to playing Dearly Stars sometime soon.
In other related news, the first details of the new set of PSP games Shiny Festa came out a few days ago. I’m not going to write about it to any length at this specific point, as the first of the iM@S 7th Anniversary live shows is going on as I type this. Those events are going to mark the first showings of the promotional videos for the games (which probably goes someway to explaining why they’ve been so aggressive with the whole “live viewing” thing – they’re live-streaming the event to a number of cinemas all over Japan), so both those videos and the website for the game will likely go live over the next couple of days, providing additional details as to what it actually entails.
Still, I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to be doing about the games, in a similar fashion to the whole DS/Dearly Stars situation. My PSP is old – first generation PSP old. So old that I had to mod the D-Pad as many of the original model PSPs shipped with pretty much broken, unresponsive D-Pads. I should probably replace it. I mean, I’ve got a Vita, but that’s rigged to my European PSN account, and I use it to play the PSP stuff I never got around to buying on UMD (it’s full of Falcom, Atlus and NIS games). The problem with wanting to play Shiny Festa on Vita, even if it would be the optimal experience, is that, aside from probably having to buy another Vita, it’d mean I’d have to buy the games twice as well – I’d going to be picking up the physical releases regardless, and having to rebuy three games again in digital form gets into the ‘ludicrously expensive’ category (as would, you know, buying another Vita just to play Shiny Festa).
I suppose I should really just replace my PSP, though I’m a little loathe to do that in a sense. I suppose I’ve got enough UMD software that having the console redundancy would be somewhat useful. They’ve stopped selling the PSP-3000 in favour of the way-cheaper-but-less-nice E1000 over here, though. Probably still better than my old 1000, though.
Some one week ago, over the Twitters, Omo posted the following statement:
@digikerot one of these days you should do a post on all your im@s merch. could be neat.
My response to that is, well, it probably wouldn’t be, because it’s mostly just a whole bunch of CDs. You see, there’s several things about iM@S when it comes to me and merchandise. For one, iM@S as a thing that I was a fan of came along at a really awkward time for me – namely, the point that I’d run out of room for bulky, space-consuming merchandise. Like, you know, toys and figures and all the cool stuff like that. Yes, the point at which I was getting into iM@S was also the point where my merchandising purchases started to be filtered by a ratio of size to functionality which figures wouldn’t pass through. Which meant I missed all the cool stuff, by which I mean the characters I’d actually want to buy figures of in costumes I’d want them to be wearing, by which I mean Brilliant Stage Ritsuko (and I’m not really much one for switsuit figures, if I’m entirely honest).
Secondly, most the best iM@S merch, or at least the stuff it’d be interesting to own, tends to be rather more of a pain to get for those outside Japan – we’re talking store exclusive pre-order items or Lawson-exclusive items sold around major iM@S releases or live events. I’ve no patience for auction sites or using weird online stores or proxy services these days, even though I’d have loved to eat a tub of iM@S crisps.
Then there’s the year or so that I spent completely out of the purchasing, release-tracking part of iM@S fandom. This came around about the release of Dearly Stars, which, to this day, I’ve still not got around to actually playing. The thing about that particular game is that it came at that point where I’d already bought myself a European DSi, and therefore was finding it difficult to go back to playing a regular DS with the slightly smaller, less vibrant screen. Of course, with Dearly Stars being DSi enhanced, I couldn’t play it on my EU DSi due to the region-locking. I can’t play it on my 3DS either. I’ll get around to it one day (probably when they do a 3DS redesign, that being a convenient way to justify to myself buying a Japanese 3DS), but until then, I’ve been avoiding, to this day, anything with significant Dearly Stars related content that may spoil the game. This means I’ve got absolutely no attachment to the games characters, though, and therefore have no related product.
