I figured I'd blog about this, since I've just rediscovered my love for a certain game series. My XBOX 360 just recently got a swift death by playing Fallout 3, no RRoD yet but crashes when I play games. So what's a guy to do? Dish out his PS2 with a HDD in it and play Tales of the Abyss through finally, since the anime is getting close to where I left it off last? Nah, not yet. What I picked up was the latest hacked firmware for the PSP in order to play a certain game.

DJ MAX Portable: Clazziquai Edition.

I'm a huge rhythm/coordination/whatever music game fan, ranging from jumping/stepping like a madman on DDR/ITG, ruining my DS's screen with Ouendan, tapping madly on buttons or ruining my screen more with Taiko no Tatsujin, or - smashing 2-9 buttons in sync with the music on a PSP, like on DJ MAX. For some reason, DJ MAX isn't well known over in the west - partially since the game hasn't been released over here ever. At least I don't think it has? It's Korean, and the latest versions are translated in the Korean releases. I found out about it thanks to my local gang here, where everyone's some level of a music game tard. Not all of us have a PSP (lol DS fanwankers all over) - so it was my previous housemate that gave me the original DJ MAX Portable. I have since bested that, and spent my time on the bus to work playing DJ MAX Portable 2, and gotten tired of that too.

But then I notice Clazziquai edition, which is a DJ MAX Portable game themed to the Korean pop music/whatever band, you guessed it - Clazziquai. This game is a kind of prelude to the coming DJ MAX Black Square, introducing a game using PSP software 5.0 to go beyond with what we could do previous on DJ MAX. I really like it so far, and that is 50% because of the really coal, and very budget-heavy new background videos. I mean shit, this is YEARS beyond what the first and second games had. The animation is smooth and actually flows, and the stuff isn't just a bunch of textures being moved around randomly. The game has always had great designs though, so there's nothing but improvements to the already coal designs by making them more smooth and pretty.

Currently I'm not very far in the game, but I can tell that you're supposed to be re-introduced to the game concept through the Clazziquai Edition, playing in Club Mode has so far been so easy that you could expect me to get bored - but I'm not! I can focus on the background video when the music is simple and just have half focus on the moving arrows and still 95% accuracy the songs. I've stuck YouTube videos in this post with some of the better videos from the game, although the people playing the songs are kinda meh.