Hatsune Miku, a singer from Japan, has over 100,000 songs to her name, has been featured in more than 170,000 YouTube videos and has a whopping 900,000 fans on Facebook. She's appeared in several comic books, concerts and games since her inception in 2009 and sold out the LA Nokia Theater in seconds - but there's something more than a little bit odd about her. You see, she's not actually a real person. The virtual persona of a voice synthesiser application from Cryton Future Media/Yamaha, the sixteen year old green-pigtailed anime diva whose name means 'the first sound from the future' and is essentially a singing robot who, thanks to some serious sampling on the developer's part, can sing as if she were a real (albeit heavily auto-tuned) person. It's a little crazy and oh so Japanese - and thanks to her fans in the west, her latest game will be hitting European PS3's this summer.
The more on-beat you are with each button press, the higher you score.
Essentially a musical rhythm action game, each song is accompanied by a bright and colourful music video with the Playstation button symbols moving down the screen towards markers - when they overlap you need to press the corresponding button, scoring points dependent on how accurate you play. Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F features a selection of 38 songs from the titular 'Vocaloid' in the trademark Japanese pop-y dance style, including her popular hits 'Tell Your World' and 'Black Star Rock Shooter'. The game also promises accessories and outfits galore, letting you customise your popstar with over 90 different costumes and more than 100 accessories - which come into their own in the new 'Edit Mode', which lets you create and share your own custom music videos.
While the game will be available both as a physical disc and as a download for America, it seems Europe will only get it as a download for reasons known only to Sega - and there's still a huge question mark over the game's European release date, except that we should expect the game sometime this August. What we do know though is that a demo is now live on the Playstation Store - the perfect opportunity to test out a rather niche music game. In the meantime, why not check out the game's J-pop infused intro below:
