iM@S Shiny Festa PV1

Posted by DiGiKerot in Gaming, idolmaster at June 23, 2012 on 3:48 pm

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.


I Need To Watch What I Write About…

Posted by DiGiKerot in Free Talk, Gaming, idolmaster at June 23, 2012 on 8:49 am

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.


iM@S – Live in Slot!

Posted by DiGiKerot in Gaming, idolmaster at May 7, 2012 on 2:53 pm

After being rumoured for at least the last couple of weeks, iDOLM@STER: Live in SLOT! was announced yesterday (PV here for the curious complete with new song, We Have A Dream).

Live in SLOT, aside from being a pretty stupid sounding title, is a pachislot game. Basically (as is my understanding, at least), it’s a slot machine on which a game also runs on a video screen at the top of the cabinet. The reels on the cabinet are essentially the randomisation element of the game – an event plays on the game screen, and the result is determined by what comes up on the reels. Whilst I gather at least some of these machines have some limited player control over the stopping of the reels, in generally, like all slot machines, they’re designed so that the establishment ultimately takes as much of your money away from you as possible.
(more…)


Move Over iM@S – There’s A New Game In Town…

Posted by DiGiKerot in Gaming, idolmaster at May 1, 2012 on 6:31 pm


Well, that is presuming your town is a city called Tokyo, or at least in Japan. And that you have an account with the mobile gaming service Gree. Should you pass these hurdles, however, you can now enjoy the recently released social game iDOLMAKER (which I shall affectionately shorten to iMac). You can tell that this game means business as well, as it’s lower-case “i” has a lightening bolt coming from it, almost as if it’s some kind of taser-esque wand or microphone.

I’m not really about to call iMac a blatant clone of iM@S Cinderella Girls, and not just because eg-Gree-gious would be more painful of a pun to inflict you with – but some of the press material does make rather familiar reading. The part where it promises over 100 girls to produce in particular invokes a certain sense of deja-vu, though that they would have needed someone to devise and draw so many different character designs alone makes it somewhat less creatively bankrupt than certain games recently published by large, US iOS developers.

To treat it fairly, though, there’s just so little information about the Japanese mobile space written in English (or even in Japanese, to be quite honest) that it’s kind of hard to justifiably criticize it, because I frankly have absolutely no idea what the game entails in comparison to Cinderella Girls. Despite the obvious, presumably intentional, invocations the title makes, for all I know it could play completely differently.

To be doubly fair, it’s not as if Cinderella Girls is the only, or even the first, game to enter this space in the Japanese mobile market – I’m pretty sure that the Gree-powered Taito game i-Log (アイログ) pipped the release of the iM@S mobile game by a month or two when it comes to idol-based social gaming (and, on the basis of character designs alone, looks to be rather more interesting an endeavour than iMac). Again, though, it’s annoyingly difficult to find good sources of information on Japanese mobile games.

The more interesting, larger question is probably exactly why it’s taken so long for other developers to start infringing into iDOLM@STERs bailiwick – Namco has pretty much had the space to themselves for the last six years. Dream Club borrowed at least the games business model (and some would argue more than a few of the character designs and presentation elements, though the games themselves are pretty different), but there hasn’t really been a direct competitor in the idol game space. I can imagine there’s probably a few good reasons for this. It’s likely a very difficult business model to pitch at this point – iM@S, as a game at least, makes an awful lot of it’s money selling horse armour. That is, the business model for the game is that it revolves around selling near 100% of it’s DLC content to perhaps 1% of the overall market (then smaller amounts of content to increasing percentages of it’s fanbase) – the die-hards into the games PV culture very much subsidise the rest of the franchises audience. Of course, it’s not always been that way – the game started as a coin-op, after all, and where DLC wasn’t so much of a thing at the time (although there’s plenty of trading-card-fuelled coin-ops these days, and Love and Berry was a thing around about the same time), and built it’s popularity from there. In a lot of senses, it was simply very lucky in terms of it’s timing.

I mean, it wouldn’t be that difficult to design an iM@S-beating idol game that played on the same compulsions (both gameplay and content-wise) as iM@S, but it’d likely be, if not incredibly difficult, certainly extraordinarily expensive to line up all the necessary non-gameplay elements. Beyond accusations of mimicry, the biggest one is the voice-talent, which is where iM@S really struck it lucky. Most of the voice actresses for the games main characters – even the ones brought on recently – were hardly prolific at the time they signed onto the series, and many of them continue to be otherwise relatively small names. In the case of Rie Kugimiya, they were clearly extremely fortunate to sign her just before her popularity absolutely exploded. Yet they all worked out. To try and take mindshare from iM@S at this point, you’d probably have to build yourself a pretty stellar voice-cast to build your marketing around, and, frankly, I bet those iM@S contracts have all sorts of interesting restrictions and stipulations that’d be very difficult or expensive to get passed with the kind of people you’d be looking to get (or even Kugimiya at this point), but are likely very necessary to ensure profitability.

Which is why we’re seeing the competition in the mobile space rather than the console one – those games are lower risk, cheaper and easier to develop and, most importantly, much lighter on the assets than console games. Assets like voice-work, which for a gaming environment where people are often off listening to their own music media simultaneously, is rarely that significant a requirement (or at least less of an expectation).

Honestly, it’ll be kind of interesting to see if any of these games pick up any real kind of audience – whilst I gather there’s been events for it, it’s not like there’s a vast amount of i-log artwork clogging up Pixiv, which suggests even beyond it’s anonymity in the western world it doesn’t have any kind of massive secret popularity, and based on the artwork, I’m not counting on iMac fairing any better. The thing is, though, having five top-ten singles simultaneously (as Cinderella Girls managed last week, and I really must get around to writing about) sends out a very loud message, and one which suggests we’ve yet to see the last of the imitators.

Surely one of them has to stick eventually, right?

Probably not.


Mikan Watch #58: Disgaea 4

Posted by DiGiKerot in Gaming, Mikan Watch at November 27, 2011 on 2:26 pm


I guess this shouldn’t be much of a shock given that there was one in Disgaea 3, but they seem to be a bit more common on the field this time around.

Hey, has it really been almost a month since I last updated? Whoops, must try harder, though I’m sure many of you are caught in the middle of the end-of-year Gameagedeon right now as well – personally, I jumped straight from the main story of Disgaea 4 (well, I got as far as Etna post-game, but don’t really have time to devote to power levelling right now) into Zelda Skyward Sword, have the new Assassins Creed queued up already, and I want to crack through another couple of cycles of PS3 iDOLM@STER at some point as well…

So, I’m kind of behind on my anime watching at the moment, aside from my weekly Sunday double-bill of Fate/Zero and WorkNaria’!!?@£%&@!, and the later of those has really just been carried along by it’s airing proximity to former. I kind of feel the second series of W! is really uneven – at times it’s a lot better than the first season, and at times it’s a lot worse.

As for Disgaea 4, it was alright. I love the new higher definition sprite art, but the characters are a little too one-note. Not that Disgaea has ever exactly been the pinnacle of quality character writing, but this one seems way more aggressive in it’s repeated pushing of the same jokes over and over again.

I’m also rather missing the PS2 days, where the mainline N1 SRPGs always brought something new to the table in terms of the way they played – La Pucelle, Disgaea, Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom (not to mention Soul Nomad), whilst all being SRPGs, had mechanics which gave them all a very different flavour to each other. I know that the Disgaea team made ZHP between Disgaea 3 and 4 (and I’ve played a fair deal of that game), but there really isn’t enough difference between D3 and D4 for my liking. Just as well I’ve only bought this the once this time, then.