I was planning on working on drawing today but I was busy with various things so I when I arrived home I didn’t have much free time. I would have tried to get a little bit done but like the title says, my long-awaited Japanese Xbox 360 finally arrived. I bought the holiday Value Pack which comes with an Xbox 360 (Pro), wireless controller, 60GB hard drive and media center remote, Ace Combat 6 and Beautiful Katamari Damacy. I decided against getting an Elite because the only differences are the larger hard drive (120GB), headset in place of the remote, HDMI cable and a black paint scheme. Other than the HDMI cable, I didn’t think these differences were worth the extra money I would have to pay to get it and the games that are already packed into the Value Pack.
Now that I have both Ace Combat 6 and Beautiful Katamari along with my copy of The iDOLM@STER: Live For You, I now own all the games related to the iM@S franchise other than strangely enough the original iDOLM@STER. Even though I got my 360 mainly for iDOLM@STER, I played Katamari first followed by Ace Combat. When I was setting up my system, I was happy to be able to set the language to English making the navigation so much easier than I thought it would be. A nice consequence of this was that when I started up Katamari for the first time, it was automatically in English since apparently Namco Bandai decided to include the English script. Ace Combat was even more surprising since I could in-game switch between any combination of Japanese and English audio and subtitles. Katamari is pure fun and the soundtrack is fantastic. I haven’t played Ace Combat too much yet but I’ll probably end up enjoying it.
As for L4U, I’m amazed by the amount of control the player has in arranging performances. There are a ton of costumes and accessories and remixes to unlock and a good number of stages. In addition you can actually control which idol(s) sing each and every line of a song plus camera positions and transitions. I haven’t really played with this particular feature yet but I imagine it adds a new depth to the game. As for the gameplay, I still need to get used to it because the notes scroll sideways unlike what I am used to I still need to memorize where each button on the controller is. Unfortunately there is no story mode so I need to get the original iM@S sometime.
I’m extremely happy I decided to get my 360 and I may be distracted for a while. I still need to setup my Xbox live account but unfortunately it will be a pain since I will need to use an ethernet cable since I don’t want to buy the vastly overpriced wireless adapter. I’ll post my gamer tag information on my About page when ever I finish but until them, time for more Katamari.
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Whoa, nice. For IDOLM@STER eh? 😀 Good thing it’s coming for the PSP. At least I have a chance to play with the girls. 😀
Andrei-kun´s last blog post..Supercell gets a 1st Album by Sony!
I envy you. ;_;
Kairu Ishimaru´s last blog post..Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009!
Great choice. I own one and I’m not disappointed by it !
That was pretty much the entire point of L4U, really – the rhythm-action game was pretty much an afterthought (as evidenced by the fact you can quite easily claim all 1000 achievement points for it in a couple of hours). It’s pretty much because that ended up being the most popular part of the 360 version of regular iM@S (the song arrangement and camera options are all there, too, but you have to play the game multiple times to unlock them), since they basically broken any sense of competition or difficulty when porting the game from the arcade. People interested in iM@S as a game still play the arcade version instead.
See, while people envy you, I downright hate you now ;_;
Zeroblade´s last blog post..Auguri, Buon Anno!
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@Andrei-kun: I’ll probably snag a copy of the PSP version as well.
@Zeroblade & Kairu Ishimaru: Sorry guys.
@ctk: I’m loving my 360 so far. I wonder what other games I should get for it.
@DiGiKerot: I knew that there was a good deal of control in terms of arrangement but I didn’t know how much thus my surprise. Playing the arcade version is a moot point since I don’t live anywhere that could actually make money off of iM@S.
The funny part is that Honya’s Xbox 360 is staying in my dorm room since I have a TV here and Honya doesn’t. Looks like I’m gonna be the one playing iM@S the most!