I promised to look at the HK PSN nearly a year ago. I even took the photos. Then, not only did I stop visiting the HK PSN, but I also failed to make the post. Here it is - very late! Mainly for the benefit of the chap who asked about the Kojima video on the HK store, and to clear my blog folder of "TO DO" stuff before the year's end (might as well brush this stuff away while everyone's drunk on brandy infused mince pies). Much like Kojima and the guy in the photo, I dangled something just out of reach. To make up for it, there's photos idol models, as featured on the HK PSN.
The Hong Kong PSN used to be awesome, since they accepted UK credit cards back in 2008. For whatever reason they didn’t check that your fake PSN address matched your credit card address. But then someone changed the rules and it was no longer valid.
Since then I lost interest in the HK store, since it was no longer an easy access point for imports. It does however still have a few interesting things, none of which I can even be sure still exists.
* The 400mb Hideo Kojima video was pretty cool. Here's a Youtube video.
* Street Fighter IV tournament videos. How awesome is this? Apparently they had like a pan-Asian tournament, on SFIV, and the HK store hosted videos of it. This alone is worth starting a HK account for. Why didn’t the US or UK stores have videos of this event? Because they’re run by idiots, that’s why. I don’t care if the show doesn’t have direct relevance to my locality, I want to watch top tier players slug it out.
* Japanese PS1 games with English names a descriptions, which is handy if the Kanji on the Japanese PSN store proves too difficult.
* A few Japanese games, with ENGLISH options. This was my main reason for using the HK store. Before that garbage themed Tetris game came out in the US/UK, it was available first on the Hong Kong store, IN ENGLISH.
* Demos for games not available elsewhere. I don’t know if Pixel Junk Shooter now has a demo on the US/UK store, but for months and months, the only PSN demo for it was on the HK store. Well done Hong Kong!
* Special discounts: they often have special offers, and cool stuff around Chinese New Year.
* Lots of music videos by local singers – some of them really cool, in a weird 1980s kind of way (the Miriam Yeung 2008 AGS song is very 1980s).
* A whole series of idol shows, which I can’t even begin to pretend to understand what’s going on – but it has plenty of video footage of attractive young women, wearing bikinis, in hot tubs and outdoor showers. This appears to be some kind of major phenomenon, with quiz shows and other stuff... which I don’t even know how to describe.
Enjoy the photos, make a HK account, then complain in the comments section that none of this information is relevant any more. When I first got my PS3 in 2008 though, the HK store was seriously awesome stuff - especially since none of my PS3 owning friends/colleagues had anything near this kind of stuff on their HDDs.
Merry Christmas!
I recently interviewed Jeremy Blaustein, along with David Hayter and other Metal Gear folks for a print magazine, and while these interviews and snippets of them will appear on HG101 in the near future, this snippet of speculation is too cool to wait for.
It is an excellent property, and admittedly this is speculation, because no one wants to speak too much on the record, but Kojima's popularity continues to soar, his MGS series is on everyone's mind, plus the Radio Drama is being unofficially translated by fans, surely if there was a time for Snatcher to be ported to iOS it would be soon? (if you've not checked out the fan-translation of the radio drama, do it now, it is a phenomenal achievement)
