A milestone of such.

Didn't realise this until I checked in but this will be my 333rd post up here, not that you get anything for this, just noted and that.

Its a bit of a round up special this time with some weird RPGs on Android / PC, a brief bit more on the Vita SDK and finally Mitchum.

Odd RPG's
Been going through an old copy of Famitsu at bedtime, its the issue where they talk to Prof Layton developer Level 5 about stuff, but that's not why I'm here, they have a strange Japan only RPG selection for PC and Mobile.

So far I've seen one where your avatars are cars in female form, there's a Toyota, a Nissan and what I think is a Mitsubishi all represented by anime girls.  There are a few more weird ones

Weird tower making sim with girls wielding tools.

WW2 war sim with girls taking the place of tanks and planes and that.

Oh and Animal X Monster for Android.  Some weird Pachinko rpg free 2 play thing for mobiles.
Stream here.  Skip ahead to 10 min mark for action, looks much more fun than regular Pachinko.

Incidentally there are no translations or anything so if you want to test these out and are fluent or have access to the Japanese google Play store see what they're like as I doubt they'd run in blue stacks.

Mitchum!

Finally saw an ad for this on TV (though still no actual product in the shop).  For those following for a while I did a post on how I did a bit of market research/ focus testing for them awhile back.  I got £5 for my troubles and never saw anything of it. Looks like nothings changed.

Vita SDK.

There's a bit more on this at Yifan Lu's site and a write up on some technical hacking bits and bobs.  Its quite involved the hack and required you to be part of the Sony Publisher license (now defunct).   If you went through all these hoops and such, you could run homebrew stuff on Vita (not piracy) so get coding those emulators.

Why Piracy could be the best thing for the Vita.

I've been mulling this post for quite a while now, not in a where do you get teh romz as there isn't any, but more like a simple how would it work.  If you're out of the loop then you will know that Sony has all but disowned the Vita as a dead medium and as such there's not much of a first party support at all now.  Sure there are a number of Japanese only games but seeing as Japan has all but moved lock stock and barrel to Smartphone usage then even this won't be able to save it.  

We were going to say some stuff about Steins Gate last week in our round up of woe, but ran out of room.  I thought it would be a rare game but I've seen it in a number of towns now which is more than can be said for Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 or Disgaea 3, which I'm currently looking for.  I know you can buy online but with piracy you could download it and put it on vita without hassle.  I know Sony would lose money that way but its not as if they aren't already, you actively have to hunt out the Vita section as its literally shoe box sized area (and nearly all the games will be either football or Minecraft) often hidden away in the guts of the PS3 or PS4 area. Anyway here is a few ideas about how "piracy" may help.

Data Install

Or as I like to call it ISO. support.  One of the biggest bugbears with Vita now is that apart from Txk everything requires a card present in the actual slot to load, sometimes it doesn't register and you have to take it out and re insert it.  I know its the pinnacle of first world problems but taking my PSP as an example, I can keep my discs safe, knowing that it will load up from the memory card and play all my games without losing them or switching games all the time.

Unofficial Support.

Yifan Lu is currently working on a Vita SDK which could open it up to much more fun such as homebrew support and bring emulators to the system.  Currently this works only on specific firmware with an exploit game from the PSN.  Even then it uses the PSP emulator mode to run custom firmware, in other words it works but its not ideal.  If this SDK comes through we could see the first true native CFW for Vita allowing more use of the hardware to run stuff we couldn't on PSP.

Flash cards and the like.

This is the main thing that got me thinking about piracy and that.  The memory card used in the PS Vita is a custom chip not much bigger than a SD card but much fatter.  Its not unprecedented the PSP used Memory card Duo and we had an adapter from  Amazon that allowed us to use SD cards in it, its what all my ISO.s run from.  With the Vita though they're almost the same size and its not going to work, I've thought about this and you could put a flash card of sorts in the game slot and run stuff from there.

One its bigger and you could easily get an SD card in it.

Two it leaves the memory card slot free to add stuff as well maybe have CFW run from there and have everything else run from the flash card.

Backwards compatibility.

There are a few PSP games for downloading at a price from PSN, making use of the PSP emulator to run them on Vita.  Much better would be allowing you to add your own ISO.s via card and have them play. Its not as if that old PSP is going to be used much now.

Finally Fan Translations.

We have Criminal Girls Invite Only as part of a lucky trawl through one of the Game's up town.  Its originally a PSP game, I don't know what changed between iterations but I do know that its in English now where the original is JP only.  Its not the first time this has happened,  Makai Kingdom got a fan translation using the PS2 translation as a base, of course you would need a Vita emulator for this to work and at the moment its largely uncharted territory.  When that happens expect to see this being more of a reality.

Pimlico Junk Tour

This is going to be a disappointing trip out for a number of reasons but safe to say its largely due to massive amounts of Jehovas Witnesses being around with their little stalls and that.  The main reason for popping down to Pimlico is for the RHS halls or rather the Linley Library in which the club has scheduled a trip out some time toward the end of July, so I thought I would at least be prepared with knowing the whereabouts of it (in Vincent Square to the right of the Train station).  Getting there wasn't much of a hassle, after I got my bearings and a disastrous side trip to Buck House, found where I wanted to go.

As there seemed to be some sort of party going on in the school grounds opposite I decided to walk down to Pimlico and see what it had to offer charity shop wise.  There were a few hospice shops and a Fara, as well as an Oxfam too.   Oxfam for me is mixed bag, they normally have some good stuff but they are massive scalpers, I ended up paying retail price for a half missing Kuba Sojka album (I paid £11.40 thanks to the guy in store having no change, Discogs has it at around £10 complete) and yeah didn't realize it was half missing till I looked it up.   I did pick up some good stuff on CD including Blackalicious Nia, Curtis Mayfield double compilation and a DJ Muro / Dmitiri From Paris double pack which had no CD's in it at all.

Fans of Weird books may wish to know about Evangelism in Tahiti 1850- 1950 (I think it also had a Polynesian subtitle and may not be about Tahiti), there was also a book about hacking and a biography for that well known war criminal and con man Tony Blair.

The most galling thing is not the half missing or just plain missing albums but this little trove from the Trinity Hospice off of Warwick Way.  They had a few CDs including the Avalanches album (I bloody love Frontier Psychiatrist) only to be told at the Check out, that someone had stolen the CD (notice the pattern here), no the worst thing here is that they had Xbox 360 and PS3 games for sale.  These weren't your usual annual updates of Fifa Soccer from 3 years ago, but some scarce RPGS,  they had an Xbox 360 version of  FF13 part 2 as well as a few Tri Ace gems Lost Odyssey and Star Ocean 4 and pride of place a Tales of Vesperia (they also had Ni No Kuni for PS3 as well). My love of consoles died sometime when the PS2 died out so I don't have a modern console and I didn't dare ask the price so don't know if they were there or even if they were going for a bargain price.

It wasn't all down hill from here on but near enough, we did however pick up some tapes from the Salvation's Barmy charity shop.  4 for a quid nearly all  Thomsun Original bootlegs and an unknown Arabic tape and a Lebanese version of Cross of Changes by Enigma.

In the background this blog.

The Thomsun tapes are cut down albums missing a few tracks here and there but the others are just odd in fact the only English on the end one says Proudly made in Saudi Arabia, I would have asked my neighbour who she is (He's Moroccan) but will have to rely on Google Images to see if it'll give me a hit .
Edit its Diana Haddad and the album is called Saken, she's Lebanese according to wikipaedia.

There were a few of these suggesting the whole lot were middle eastern in origin.

Finally Oxfam off of Goodge street gave us the over priced and half missing Kuba Sojka album and also had
a Chinese VCD of  Crucifer of Blood, with Charlton Heston playing Sherlock Holmes and yes that sounds absolutely awful.