Still, there is a difference between someone who has maximized a skill and someone who really works it. If you have a fever, symptoms, and/or been in contact with someone with COVID-19, we ask you DO NOT attend. Oddly enough, despite often being worth more points, star notes are easier to hit and have more forgiving timing than their regular counterparts. At the end of the song, assuming you made it through, you’re given a performance rating and a suitable amount of Diva points, which serve as the game’s currency. The remainder of the Project Diva F is a virtual dollhouse where you visit Miku and the other entirely interchangeable characters in their rooms. This review is based on a PSN download of Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F, provided by Sega. Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F may superficially resemble the pop music shovelware that haunts the bargain bin at your local Walmart, but there’s a degree of artistry here that puts it above the usual Celebrity: The Game slop. Looking only at its core mechanics, Project Diva F is about as basic as a music game can get. As with any music game, your mileage is mostly going to come down to how fond you are of the game’s soundtrack and, unsurprisingly, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F has a very narrow musical focus.

Not so in Project Diva F, which litters prompts all over the screen and has secondary prompts flying in from all angles like it expects you have three eyes. You can buy them extra costumes or accessories which carry into the music videos during the actual game – pro tip: aviators for everyone – but mostly you’ll be spending vast quantities of Diva points on vanity items that do absolutely nothing. For everyone else, there are more innovative and more varied music games out there. You’ll learn to filter out the visual noise, halloween gamer but drop a beat during an intense chorus and your chances of finding it again are slim. Unfortunately, the network system Sega has implemented isn’t doing much to make finding good content easy. You can buy gifts, which unlock short cutscenes of the characters doing sickeningly cute things in sickeningly cute ways, or gadgets, which unlock things that are almost, but not quite, mini-games. I’ve found about three things that require and input code to unlock: two costumes and one item. One of the gadgets is an alarm clock that lets you watch Miku sleep. Spoiler: Miku likes having her head patted and dislikes having a finger driven into her eye socket.

Pat her head enough times and you can play a game of Rock Paper Scissors. You know, I’ve said it a couple times now: microtransactions just aren’t the devil. Like most pop videos, they’re prone to flashing lights, fast-moving objects and quick cuts, which makes picking out individual prompts headache-inducing at times. As you progress, the game mixes things up with notes that need to be held, or pressed in conjunction with a direction on the d-pad, and “star notes,” which require a quick flick of an analogue stick in any direction (standing in for the touchscreen used in the Japan-only Vita version). If you weren’t able to attend the festivities, or you just want a little pick-me-up as you come down from your convention high, here’s a quick look at the weekend in pictures. You can take photos of the characters in various costumes, complete with a hilariously stern message that appears when you try to adjust the camera to look up their skirts (never let it be said that I’m not thorough). This review originally stated that Fable Heroes contains no characters from the Fable universe. You are Master Chief, making the universe safer one plasma grenade at a time.

It isn’t crucial for the game that they do, simply because most players are happy with more of what they’ve been getting the past four years. It’s meant to be challenging, and it’s joyously so, but failing to hit a simple four beat note because the game is deliberately obscuring what you’re supposed to do is infuriating. From playing around, I’ve made about four to five different patterns for different sizes and body types. Good patterns will draw your eye around the screen in a natural way, which feels more engaging than waiting for the prompts to hit a static line. The quickly increasing price tags are a good motivator to move on to the harder difficulties, but putting your hard-earned money to use is an exercise in frustration as you navigate seemingly endless sub menus peppered with loading screens. Each user can only upload a maximum of three tracks, meaning you’ll have to scroll through a lot of “song deleted” prompts to get to the good stuff. The downside is that the difficulty isn’t really determined by how complex the song is, but by how complex the developers made the prompt pattern.