REVIEW: Project Diva 2nd

Project Diva 2nd♯

★★★★☆

 
PSP only

I am a 35-year-old North American male, so what the hell am I doing playing a Japanese import PSP game whose target audience is people half my age and whose main attraction is mashing buttons to music sung by (mostly) underage (mostly) girls? For me, I think the hook is obvious. Not only am I fan of Rock Band, I’m also a fan of Japanese quirkiness and also happen to be a fan of the Vocaloids. So what do you do when one of your favorite console games completely bungles its hand-held port and someone else comes along with another spin on mashing buttons to music, including some other stuff you happen to like, on a system whose games are region-free?

If you need to know what a Vocaloid is, Wikipedia is a friend that can get you started. If you want to know what veered me into Vocaloid territory, I would have to tell you to thank Valve and Ellen McLain for GLaDOS. By making a humans sound like a computer, you’re bound to pique the interest of people using computer software that tries to sound human, and you get Miku singing a translated version of Still Alive, which at first listen could be mistaken as an official translation of the song. After that, I stumbled upon Caramelldansen, and as with any meme like this people are going to incorporate their favorite characters into it, including Vocaloids. The nail in the coffin, though, was Love Is War, an actual full-fledged song, reminiscent of Linkin Park, using Vocaloid as it was intended. Being fully subbed in Kanji, Romaji and English helped greatly.

(Lest you think English users are being totally ignored: English is harder to pronunciate, thus harder for a computer to pull off, thus the popularity problem. It’s become much better in recent years.

Enough digressions! Let’s talk game play.

QEMU Vs. VirtualBox, Round 1

Goal

Play Sonic CD in a VM. Sonic CD is a very old 2D game that only runs in Windows 9x clients without the Sonic CD PC Fix patch. It was originally an OEM-only pack-in that was written in Intel’s DirectScreen API. Later, the game went retail and the DirectScreen calls were re-mapped to DirectX.

Things Neither Emulator Can Do Yet:

Neither emulator can play CD audio tracks. No music for you!

Phantasy Star Universe Doomsday August 1st

In light of a slew of foul-ups by Sega, American Phantasy Star Universe players have dwindled near the point of non-existence. The remaining PSU players have deemed the next scheduled update, which has finally been confirmed for August 1st, as Doomsday — the last day Sega has to not screw up or risk losing a another swath of players. (And even then, Sega can very well consider every scheduled update afterwards a Doomsday as well.)

As a participant on the PSO-World forums, I decided to bring this discussion here to widen the audience.

The screw-ups that PSU players have had enough of include:

Game Exploits: Where Do You Draw The Line?

Playing Phantasy Star Universe as much as I do, I’ve come to know exploits. I’ve also come across a wide spectrum of reactions to them. As a user and rejector of these hacks, I had to ask myself, “Why some and not others? What’s the line you’re drawing?” And I came up with this answer:

Using exploits are OK as long as it’s not to the detriment of others.

To help explain my stance, here are three glitches in the game that should be fixed by the time you read this. In order from benign to fuck-you-asshole:

PSU: AotI Slowdown Glitch

Because bs_angel thinks I’m dead or something, here’s something to let you all know I’m still alive.

Not the best video editing in the world, but I sufferred 40 minutes of agonizing game play for that video!

PSU Font Translation

Because it’s freakin’ annoying when the in-game lettering is close enough to be recognizable, but still vague enough to be incomprehensible.

PSU Font Translation Table

Phantasy Star Universe XBox 360 Clothing Glitch

[Update: On February 23rd, Sega released a patch through XBox Live that updated the client to prevent this. Apparently, it wasn't half-naked female characters running about that caused a problem so much as it was the fact that this glitch completely screwed up Cast characters.]

A week ago, Sega released swimsuits for people’s characters. By now you may have seen quite a few people running around in mixed ensembles — female characters wearing pants or shorts with a bikini top or male characters shirtless with regular clothes. How do you do this when the the swimsuit is an all or nothing thing? They exploited a glitch.

From the You-Did-Not-Just-Say-That Dept.

All-Your-Base Reference From Phantasy Star Universe (XB360):

They didn’t investigate what “Wang” meant in the USA. Why should “toilet paper” be any different? From Riviera: The Promised Land (GBA):

Sorry about the lens flare and the camera reflection, but I could not get a good picture with a flash.

Sega and Phantasy Star Universe: What Were They Thinking?

Phantasy Star Universe really has me scratching my head during my offline hours. The game play is excellent, but how you connect with other people baffles me.

Let me get this straight: XBox 360 owners are cut off from PS2 and PC owners, right? That must mean they “XBox Live-ified” the “partner card” system for the XBox 360 version, right? Instead of having to exchange cards, I can look up people in my XBox Live Friends, right? Wrong.

WTF? Now why on Earth would Sega do that? Doesn’t seem logical from a sales standpoint to cut off one gaming console from the rest of the pack. In fact the only logical conclusion is that this was not Sega’s intention.

The only other party involved is Microsoft. Unfortunately, logic fails here too — why would Microsoft want to see the PC and XBox 360 sides divided? If anything, they’d want the PS2 version quarantined. An argument might be made that Microsoft is just trying the separate the XBox 360 as a superior gaming device. That argument fails when you consider the audiences — 6 million XBox 360 owners, 100 million PS2 owners, and up to 750 million PC owners. Suicide!

OK, so XBox 360 PSU isn’t going to play nice with PS2 and PC PSU. Can we at least switch our Guardians Licenses between the the two? I mean, after all, no matter what name you’re using on any one platform, it all boils down to a unique ID number that’s optionally visible while playing, right? Any name can be attached to a number. Well, no. Sega ain’t going to do it. Not even between billing cycles. Not even if you cancel one system’s License and start anew on another.

I think I’m beginning to see where the problem lies.