Thursday, February 10, 2011

Frau Ada

The old lady is Frau Ada ("Gina Mingol" in some international versions). She haunts the Michinoku Pass C. C., and is an unlockable player in Hot Shots Golf Open Tee 2 for PSP. Fairly hard to beat, my suggestion is to play within yourself and don't try anything fancy. With a little luck, you'll collect her for your stable of golfers and unlock TWO new golf courses — Michinoku Pass and the Olive Coast course somewhere near the gentle Mediterranean surf. In the next match, you can also unlock Mia Cara, a new caddy, and that marks the halfway point through the game.

Frau Ada is part of a viral trope in Japanese games, mangas and videos; a kind of nostalgia or sympathetic feeling for old Axis allies, German or Italian.  Compatriot conquered countries would be my guess (Studio Ghibli even waxes romantic about the antebellum South, e.g.), but the sentiment is alien in the good old xenophobic U.S. of A. and needs to be hosed down with  a bit of humor, something them Japs are getting good at just in time for 21st Century Chinese economic hegemony.

The Playstation Portable (PSP), soon to be superceded by the underwhelming PSP2, is a money trap worthy of the La Brea Tarpits. It has WiFi. It has a Playstation® Store, where you can buy all 26 season 1 episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex at $1.99 a pop ($51.74 total), plus download time for about 10 GB (about 2 solid months worth of Verizon Wireless connectivity). Even worse, you can download 1.8 GB of movie in a bit more than 4 hours — just in time for a fully-charged battery to expire with four minutes of download left. In Sony's Big Book of Fun, that means your ability to download it all again without paying for it twice is a "feature." Ugh.

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