From episode eight of the original series, somewhat hidden on the far left hand side there.

As if proof of the force being strong in this one was required, I pretty much just clicked on this episode randomly on Crunchyroll whilst pondering how far through the show I’d actually watched, and *BAM*, within thirty seconds this revealed itself.

As for the show itself, it’s one of those things I didn’t feel particularly strongly about either way – it didn’t present itself as a particularly offensive way to waste some time, but I didn’t particularly love it either. I suppose that’s why I only managed to make it up to episode six or so – I probably just forgot to watch it one week and didn’t care enough to catch back up on it. Suppose I might check out at least the OP of the second season just to see what the OP is like, though it is another one of those shows utilising unpronounceable sequel identifiers.

Another submission from King Author (has that joke died yet?), which I suppose means that I’ve rather been slacking in my own efforts recently. To quote the relevant matters from his e-mail…

Yep, that one. I tend to omit ~full colors~, because it’s dumb and the title is unambiguous. It is from ep.13. I do not remember this character appearing before or after, and have no idea who she is.

Except, the title seems to be even dumber than he suggests, given it’s punctuated with a “‘S” at the end.

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.