It’s barely a month into Fall here and we’re already well on our way to the six solid months of rain we normally get in Oregon.

This means two things, of course: First, that I can get pumpkin-spice-flavored ANYTHING I WANT, and second that I stop going for walks on my lunch breaks and instead huddle at my desk with a portable game system or two.

So, I’ve been playing Project Diva Extend, the third and final Hatsune Miku game released for the PSP, and it really has almost everything I want in a sequel: Some new songs, some older songs, some refinements to the basic systems (you can switch active characters to the default characters for a song WITHOUT GOING INTO A SUB-MENU OMG), and generally more of Miku & friends.

I started as I normally do, which is to say that I loaded up the game, imported my old save data to carry over all the costumes and such I’d unlocked, and played through the first song on easy.

Then I got to thinking about that, and came to the conclusion that my normal tactic of playing through the entire song list on easy, THEN on normal, THEN on hard was, well, a bit dumb considering this wasn’t exactly my first rodeo with everyone’s favorite twin-tailed virtual idol, and started again and played through the entire song list on normal difficulty.

This was legitimately challenging in bits, but I only actually failed one song so I think it was the right course of action.  Next is, of course, to see how I do on Hard and then maybe even try a few Extreme tracks if I’m feeling bonkers.

It’s going to be a little weird playing the Vita version after this – the PSP games I have are all UMDs, so I’ve been playing them on PSP hardware, so even if the Vita game does allow importing progress from earlier games I won’t have any progress to import.

I’ve also heard rumors of terrible terrible things you have to do with the Vita’s rear touch pad.  Not sure that I’m looking forward to that, but, well… that’s for the future, right?  For now I have my manly lavender PSP and many hours of rhythm gaming to play on it.