Dead or Alive

 Here is an ambiguous title for you, this was just going to be about the recent updates to the PS3 and Vita, but going through a bunch of videos today we found that we have an ad for Tecmo's Lady fighting game Dead or Alive 4.

PS3 and Vita bit

Sony have pushed out another firmware upgrade for the PS3 and more rarely for the Vita, which removes most of the management features on the Playstore and bars new accounts on PSN. Its been nearly 3 years since an update for the Vita but much sooner for the PS3. Makes a change for all those supposed security and stability updates, we're used to seeing on PS3.

DOA 4

This is an odd one, we have some videos from around 2006, found at work of course, which mostly contain, Sky Living (the last season of Charmed with Kaley Cuocco,) and some bits and pieces of sport, mostly boxing and football. 

We're not through the whole tape yet, and its fucking awful in places, jumping around, so this ad break floored me. We have an old bagel ad from McDonalds (probably discontinued.) and this from Dead Or Alive 4, which is based on a beauty contest that becomes a brawl. Will have to upload this to a few places, just in case my old channel bites the dust. 

Dumping carts and that.

Doing a couple of related things today. Looking into dumping out Vita game cards that I own, and cannot find a good guide that will allow me to.

I have it all set up and what I can see from looking at Persona 4 The Golden is that it seems to be an exfat file system and with a few folders. A lot of files in MP4 format and a folder with the file system in it. Can remember there was a thread on RHDN ages ago about hacking the PS2 original, but as I cannot code at all. This is beyond me.

All I really want is a tool that will let me hook up the Vita and dump the contents of the card via USB so I can run it on from my SD2 Vita. (Incidentally will need to set this up as well.)

Also been looking into doing the full Monty and getting the PS3 hacked. Every guide I see for this is either super detailed or written by a chimp. A chimp who's English is remedial at best.

Its either a full range of caveats in a forum post or a few vague instructions of downloading this shady shit from Mega and adding it to a USB drive.

I'm guess I'm spoiled by how the PSP went down and how easy it is to do that. But I'm seriously thinking of looking at shitty video guides on youtube written by gobshites with terrible taste in music and heavily accented English low in the mix.

Oh and anime avatars, not that there's nowt wrong with that, mind. Its just shitty hip hop instrumentals and mumbling.

VIta again

Finally got round to putting custom firmware on my Vita. As per this guide here.

As it went, it was pretty painless to do, once you figured out what went were. Largely written for FTP users in mind you can do this entirely via USB cable. Your vita is being treated as an external drive and will have its own folder put up on your system and you can follow the steps there.

Also another note, When doing the Modoru step, please remember it has its own sub folder in ux0:apps put your pspupdat file there otherwise you will get an error message. This stumped me for absolutely ages and only by random clicking did I discover this and get it downgraded in the end.

Also, final, final note. Vitashell is a really nice file manager, well put together and is worth doing it for this alone. Sad, I know.

Impressions now I've done it.

Not sure what to play now, though. I used to be really into emulation and stuff, but now am not. Will have to see if there is a final burn derivative for the system and have installed Aderanlin for PSP which adds custom firmware to the in built PSP emulator.  Have an SD to vita on  the way and will hope you can transfer across all my home dumped PSP ISO's and save files from the PSP.

Will also need to see if I can add back TXK by Jeff Minter which I lost prepping my system for this.

Short version, forgot my psn login and had to make a new i.d i(ts vital for the hack to work,) had to update from firmware 3.67 to 3.73, and formatted my memory card to make way for new stuff.

Plus point I'm now enjoying Persona 4 all over again. Will have to see if 0syscall and  whatever they call the game dumper, work as I have a few games that require a firmware +3.60, so fingers crossed.

Looking into 3ds hacks, which, if I'm honest, looks like a fucking nightmare.

A Mickey Mouse presidency.

God emperor Trump is now president and everyone is losing their shit and virtue signalling like a bastard.  We get it he's a dunce, a blowhard, a jerkwad and a boor.  He sad bad things about wimmins and immigrants, and wants to make America Grate Again.  To be honest I don't even like the guy and I'm siding with him simply for all the weirdos and anti fascist pillocks that seem to be against him.

The worst thing is that I genuinely hate the racists as well, they aren't my kind of people. Even though the worst thing is that there is no outraged middle ground.  Maybe a Father Ted style down with this sort of thing would do.
The moaning goes on and on about the inauguration, about the crowds, about the policies.  I fully expected a jug band or an old man playing the spoons on the actual day instead we have a clip of him singing my way with Melania.

Twitter, that big salt mine online is particularly insufferable, with every virtue signalling bastard squeaking their brains about the inauguration.  So much so its almost painful to wade through each and every bastard post on it and that's both sides of the political divide as well.

In brighter news I've came across my first ever videogame Atheist, in Dungeon Traveler 2.  We finally cleared the Piertan tower dungeon and have rocked up at a church out of town.  There is a small girl in the bushes called Lize.  She outright mocks the benevolent god and donation spiel of her older sister Fiora and says out right that there really isn't a god.  Having a look she seems to be a playable character which means she could be an asset to the team.  I'm guessing Spieler class as she carries around a stuffed penguin.

More worryingly she's 12 and as everyone has some semi nude artwork of them here, this has to potential to be super creepy. 

Edit, yup proper bent ref territory, guess this was one of the censored ones Atlus did.

To Love.

We now have Steam, you know the PC discount prog thing that lets you buy PC games.  Was going to get a few things like Vegas again but it seems like its full price now, I'm getting pissed off with Hit Film Expresses limitations so will be looking for a cheap home version of Vegas Movie Studio.  So far picked up Shadowverse on the excellent Kimimi's suggestion.  It's alright I suppose, its like an Anime Magic The Gathering and I don't really care about MTG at all, could have got it for the phone but it has bugger all space left. Android how about you let us install everything to SD card instead of internal storage.

So far we are stuck at El Ciclo in DQ7 due to some timewarp dungeon and Groundhog Day shenaningans wrought through the clock tower and its portal, but apart from that I've been playing Dungeon Travelers 2 for PS Vita. 

If you like fan service and Dungeon crawling then you'll be in seventh heaven here.  Hell its not like there isn't a shortage of Japanese RPGs on the Vita already but this is one of the best.  Based around a sealing team made up of lightweight, do nothing boss Fried (pronounced Freed) and a team of girls that make up your suppression team.  So far we have ginger warrior type Arisia and a black haired mage called Melky.  Completing this line up is the bird from the shop, a maid and a cursed girl with a shed load of problems. 

Part or Leaf's To Heart Visual Novels for PC, you can see fan sevice shots of nearly all the girls and bosses in this as everything in this, monster or player character, is female. Well nearly there are a few Therian's in this that aren't, they are Ramen selling Bears, Quest giving Sheep, and a penguin with an ice cream stall.  My favourite has to be this bear which you can see below, that runs the shop once when the previous owner joins your team.

Shop bear, a camp champ.

The constant crawling is starting to grate at  the moment, but more progression and I've finally opened up class choices for Arissa and Melky so naturally I've gone with berserker and Healer classes.  A solid 8 out of ten and if ever a fan translation pops up of the original, rest assured I'll be on it like a shot.

Edited for fuck knows what reason, this was delisted by  the goolag. Incidentally I've not played this in years we got as far as some mansion and kept getting beat down by a ghost.

A round up of sorts.

Haven't really had the time for one of these in ages, its basically when I'm out of ideas but have had a few things to pick up on for awhile now and they make excellent reading.

Vita stuff.

If you've been living under a rock you'll know that there's a brand new exploit out for the Vita called Henkaku, that allows you to run unsigned code and homebrew programs such as emulation and Doom.  Of course its been out a while and there is of course a firmware update that invalidates this but if you don't update then it should be OK its only some stupid on line functions anyway.  There are also a few things in the works such as rom dumpers and the like which is going to be interesting especially from a preservation perspective or emulation.  Also with a temporary way in it'll be fun to see what anyone comes up with. 

Private Magazine.

Been reading up about the history of Private, the long running Swedish Porno mag / film empire.  They are along with Color Climax some of the oldest porn merchants in Europe and yes I've been reading 70's porn again.

The article in question is actually a good read although there's no nudity possibly not one you'll want to read at work.  Largely it started by Berth Milton taking nude photos of models and then taking them to the justice ministry in the mid 60's and asking if they were permissible or not.  The answer they said is they didn't know, effectively publish and be damned, I won't spoil any more as its a cracking read.

Shit Film X Hess.

Finally found something to edit film for free.  Its a bastard hassle to get including liking on Facebook to get your download and a sign up to register but once you are in and registered its not so bad at all.

Its called Hitfilm 4 Express, and yes it renders out quite nicely with no watermarking or anything other shenanigans free stuff normally adds.  Its adequate for normal stuff and has a compositing strip so you can do ytp stuff and on screen graphics.  Its a bastard to like and register, but the program itself isn't disappointing, true you can't do time stretch stuff like in Vegas or pitch shifting to make YTPMV but you can use an audio editor for that.

Update time is here again.

A few updates on old stories and things, including a few things to read before you die. First of all a round up.

PS Vita Piracy is a thing now?

Read this on Wololo last week but as I was writing about the Chinese New Year then I plumb forgot about it.  Apparently there is a pirate version of  Uncharted for Vita that has been released now.  There are no flash cards or Emulators available at present to take advantage of this but its a start (). Maybe in 2020 they'll be a working Vita Emulator complete with romhacking scene to take advantage of all the pirates work and that but at present its a nice thing to have. Maybe there will be a game exploit like Locoroco was for PSP that will give an exploit for full access, or a way to back up games that you own to prevent them getting lost and that. 

Super Famicom.

They have in one of those Mobile Phone / game shops a Super Famicom for sale and its not cheap.  They want £220 for it and it comes with a bizarre selection of carts with it.  There is Game of Life, a few horse racing games including Derby Stallion 96 complete with bizarre cart that is Satellaview compatible and Dragon Quest V. They also have D Force a sub par shmup from Asmik Ace which at least requires minimal Japanese knowledge to enjoy unlike the others for sale.

Windows 7.

I finally got something working on the old Sony TVPC. Was going to go with linux but in the end as it came out garbled to fuck, decided to upgrade to windows 7 via an iso. file on an old Hard Drive.  It has a pirate key on it and to be honest its not going on line ever but its coping well so far.  We added tweaking hardware which I've found invaluable for sorting out old drivers to installed hardware, and Service Pack 1 via usb key.  Its at its max of 1GB of ram and still looks like hell though but at least its current now.

Finally you'll have a few things that I've found interesting over the past week or so.

Want to read up on the original version of Star wars and how a group of fans are remastering it from original 35mm prints, then click here.

EPSXE have a new version of their PS1 Emulator out, I spent a good hour dicking about with all the settings trying to get Magical Drop 3 to work before I learned I was trying to run an iso. file as a CD doh.  On better news they fixed the annoying cursor control issue for Pro Pinball the Fantastic Voyage which is a minor miracle, anyway that link is here.

Oh and finally PPSSPP the nice PSP emulator has also been updated as well.  You can bag that here.

Raptors and Roundups.

Been a bit crazy this week, with a few trips out and some Vita news for all you rom botherers out there, 
oh and the Prime Minister allegedly sticking his knob in a dead pigs mouth as part of a university club initiation ceremony we have to grab our Lolz where we can get it.

Unexpected Find.!
First up some odd nature bits and pieces.  We took a trip down the Thames path at Woolwich today, the last time I did so I was sure I saw a Kingfisher in flight and didn't think anything would top this, or so I thought.  That is until halfway through my walk I saw this.

Peregrine Falcon.

Yeah that is a dead Peregrine Falcon, right there on the pathway leading down to Thamesmead, I didn't know that they were actually present in the area only that they are protected and rare in the UK. Looking on line there are reports of nests in Greenwich and Lewisham complete with chicks which is good to see. I initially thought it was a Sparrowhawk though my mind was screaming that this is a Peregrine.  It certainly made my trip out although really wished it had been alive rather than dead.

Vita Breakthrough.
Really enjoying this breakthrough on Wololo.net.  Seems some guys have been poking through some files dumped out via hacking into the Vita's Mail app.  Seems you can dump out files up to a certain size for analysing, you can only dump files lower than 2 Meg at the moment or go 7 Directories in but its a start and what has been found has been actually quite interesting. 

What has been found so far from this is:
* A whitelist of all games that run on Playstation TV.
* Switch PSN account.
* Read, write and delete from memory card (UX0)
* Cartridge dumping and back up installation.

As you can see its a major deal already, you can dump cards from the vita and put roms for back up whether this extends to PSN downloads is anyones guess so far but, like I said this is getting interesting.
Better explanation here, or if you wish to keep, fully up to date, follow Major_tom's twitter here.

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.

TXK

So we finally got this to download and install.  Its an awful lot of work that for once was basically only a download code on a receipt.  We are down my aunts place in the country and decided to take advantage of her Wifi to do bits and pieces and install a few things on my Vita while I can.

I was going to write a massively long post about this being a bastard to do on PSN but once I worked out that my email had to be lower case then it was plain sailing from there.  Code was redeemed and the whole thing downloaded without a hitch.

If you have not guessed (or Googled this) already then I'll say one thing, this is a Jeff Minter game, if you aren't a big retro fan step away its not for you.  Loading this up and hearing some storming acid blaring out of a vector style title screen, you know this is going to be great.  Looking at the credits and seeing basically an old school ascii art of some sheep along with credits to Eugene Jarvis and Benoit Mandelbrot, I get the feeling this is what a rework of Llamatron or Ancipital would look like instead of another revision of Dave Theurers Tempest.

Music is another thing that they get right, whether its a full scale acid or hardcore or even some less frenetic house and trance tracks, there is a full credit listing for all music and a bandcamp page if you wish to buy it.

Of course this means nothing if the gameplay isn't that great and I can happily say that it is.  It gets hard, fast but that is part of the appeal, it will not hold your hand or make it easy its old school and fun.  You have to shoot everything that moves while moving round the grid, please make full use of the analogue nubs as it makes it easier (not much but it does) and collect the little plus signs for power ups.  You'll get a smart bomb, a better laser and an A.I droid that looks a lot like a pollen grain
under intense magnification. Worth the wait of me keeping hold of this,  a deserved 9 yaks out of 10.

Finally here is a few late round up articles,  EA are going to add women players to their popular yearly football cash cow, something I've wanted for ages.  I can only hope they'll be a lesbian equivalent of this previously homoerotic glitch. 
Also a bit of confirmation bias here but here is a bit on Liz Jones about teh Pr0n in the Fail on Sunday, if you've read here long enough then you'll know my stance on porno.

Bank Holiday Junk Tour

Haven't written about this in a while and have been understandably preoccupied with my Vita.  So here goes.

We took a trip out to Croydon, a place that has always been a bit hit and miss for me, over the weekend.  There are a few routes in from where I live and I decided to take the one via Beckenham as its been ages since I've been there too.  Was a good idea too as I picked up a few good CD's from the charity shop not limited to, Sign Nobukazu Takemura, and a live set from Cut Chemist which was awesome.

As the bus was going to be ages I decided to get  the tram for the first time in my life.  For the uninitiated its a weird mix of bus and train, able to run on rails in the road or on dedicated tracks.  Its quite comfortable actually and costs the same as a regular bus trip. One annoying thing is the constant automated messages of buying a ticket, there are card readers on the station but not actual physical barrier like in the Tube or most rail or DLR stations, I suspect you could blag your way into Croydon without paying depending of the frequency of the ticket officers doing their rounds.

Croydon itself is just the same as it ever was, stuffed full of  Christian weirdos and the odd band (sadly no UKIP even though its election year) and a glance around the independent game shops picked up a few things that I didn't want or already had.  We got an excellent picture of a Cormorant from the charity shop which has a nonsense rhyme on it from Christopher Isherwood.  Finally we were still looking for a link cable for our PS Vita to no bloody success at all. I suspect I may have to transfer stuff via Memory card if at all.  We got a download for TXK so will have to work out how to redeem and rework.  God I hate the modern era.

Criminal Girls review.

Been delving into the Vita for a while now and its pretty obvious that this is going to end up a JRPG machine for me complete with Square Enix token localisation of its biggest hits and the like.  I already have Disgaea 4 and Persona 4 the Golden ( basically an Extended Directors Cut, think of what they did with Persona 3 Portable on the PSP but with even moar content) and Criminal Girls Invite Only.

Criminal Girls.

Two of those games are stone cold classics the other one not so much, and I'll tell you why.
Criminal Girls was originally a PSP game that didn't come to the west during the consoles lifespan.  There's a bloody good reason for it, as its a massively pervy dungeon crawler letting you chastise juvenile delinquents in order for them to learn new skills.  There is a Kotaku review that isn't fit for purpose written by Mike Fahy (sounds like a two bit Evangelist) here or rather where the link is and I'll be riffing off of that while doing a review of it myself.

I remember this being trailed a bit over at Andriasang before it shut up shop (ironically I later moved to Kotaku and found it totally boring, this was ages before GamerGate and accusations of corruption and nepotism so my axe to grind with Kotaku started way back) and though it looked cool.   I did go looking for it on download sites a while back, but when I finally found it had been updated and released for the Vita, I just had to snap it up being a big Nippon Ichi fanboy that I am.

First impressions is that this is totally what I would call a Grindhouse game.  You know a totally insane concept with a healthy dose of good old exploitation and or ultra violence.  If you want to know what makes a grindhouse game, think Hotline Miami Video nasty schlock style or  or Bayonetta 1 and 2, an insane witchcraft kung fu hairstyle / outfit combat style action game.

This is in the same style for those who do not know, you apply for a prison warden job at a prison that is at the depths of hell, overseeing juvenile delinquent girls and helping them atone for future crimes they will go on to commit.  So far so Prisoner Cell block H, especially with the Vinegar tits style warden slapping you around with every misstep, but just who are your charges you may ask.  I don't remember the names of all of them, there is the mad one with massive jugs who tries to lay you out with one punch everytime (She's called Ran), there is Kisaragi who is blonde and the most reasonable of the bunch,  Sato is a loli style character looking for Yuko, though at the moment I don't have a clue who that is (friend / sister / small puppy?) finally there is the dark haired one with the biggest rack of all (she's called Alice and appears to be Psychic).  She doesn't say much and what she does say is accompanied with a weird bleeping sound.   Its also implied that there are 4 more girls to come but at the moment we don't know who they are.

As you may have noted a long while back, this is a top down style Dungeon Crawler reminiscent of those you got on the old PS1, not a rogue like as I previously thought.  Its a pretty much a perfunctory one at that as well.  Its got some generic enemies to fight (yay slugs) and a good dose of H action courtesy of the infirmary scenes.

In fact to do anything in this game you are going to need to spank the living daylights out of any of the girls you own, they won't be able to attack until you do.  Administering strict discipline to your charges will of course open them up for learning various attacks and even let them open up to you as a person.  This is done by defeating the aforementioned slugs in battle and dealing out 'CP' points to your girls in a bizarre touch screen minigame.

There is quite a bit of censorship here which is understandable as they have to sell it to Murica, so you get a pink fog obscuring your view of your jail bait charges, (you don't see anything TBH, its panties and obscured nudity only) and if you do it well you will level them up and unlock some abilities.  Combat is a 4 way affair, you pick the girl that has the most to say (normally, lets go old lady, attack x2 and I wish I was kidding here) and whale on what ever enemy has triggered your random encounter (normally a slug but it could either be a weird looking hog or a raven).  When the creature dies you'll get the traditional cash, XP and boost to your CP points or whatever they were called.  There is an infirmary where you can heal up, save your game and administer discipline and that is about it.

The bottom line here is that despite the whole spanking fetish angle the game isn't that great, I can't think why this was ever a physical title as it would have worked a lot better as a cheap download from the Playstation Store.  Price it at £10 or £15 and you would have something that while not great would be ideal as a cheap curiosity. As it stands as a full price title its not worth your time, but if you can pick it up cheap then its worth delving into it.

PSN and You.

Further adventures in stupidity would be the better question here, not only have I got a brand new charger out of this thanks to the one bundled with it being broken as hell, but have against my better judgement signed up for a PSN account.  I don't have a regular subscription as yet, as there is no way in hell I'm going to register my bank card with them due to Sony's past track record of being hacked.   I'm a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to gaming, being a resolute offline gamer, don't like MMO's or Call Of Duty bullshit (played the Facebook incarnation of Maple Story ages ago shock horror it was terrible) so forgive me if I'm behind the times.

The point of this awkward rambling is this, we did a search for some Disgaea 2 DLC on the Playstation plus store with no luck. I had it downloaded from a number of places that had 'archived' some DLC outside of the PSN but couldn't get my legitimate backed up Disgaea 2 to recognise it, so I decided to do it legit for once and use the PSN to download it to PC and transfer it across to memory card, but apart from a load of stuff that is of fuck all use (extra costumes you pay for that can GTFF) its not up there (or not that I can see, I am noticeably bad about looking for stuff like this).  

Thing is I wouldn't have to pirate if it wasn't deleted and when I do all I get is the U.S version that never works here, I haven't found an EU version that works sadly. I don't know if the Vita can be done the same way and by that I mean transfer stuff from PC to a card or via a cable, not rampant piracy, though god dammit it does need a kick up the arse somehow.  

I don't have Wi-fi as my connection is wired, I know its kinda old fashioned and that but I don't play on line, like I said and get some pretty good speeds as I don't have a myriad devices leaching off it to support (also on fibre optic which is fast). Have to look into this to see what is required of me to get stuff onto and off of my Vita, maybe some of my old PSP games from the Hard Drive / memory card though I doubt that would work.

I'll leave you with this on the impermanence of things from the eminently readable EFF.ORG about how making a proxy server to preserve MMO's was recently shot down by the DMCA.

EDIT: You can buy PSN cards from Wilkinsons though they tend to be high value cards, Game may have them too as well as stuff on card to download.  Non UK residents can erm talk amongst yourselves for a bit.