The one we don't talk about

[Alc]

So, the PSP game... it's a catastrophe, obviously. I tried a couple of times in the past extracting assets from it, as I think they'd be interesting to compare to the real games, the music especially (on that note, someone more capable than me managed a proper MINI2SF rip of the DS game, which is neat to compare to the originals - thanks to whoever sorted that, if you're around). Anyone dug into the abomination that is UKS PSP for the music, or for any other reason? Played it at all, just for the novelty? I hated it so much I couldn't play more than a few levels. I guess PSP emulators must be getting close to where it's possible to mess around with it (I sold my PSP ages ago).

[texh]

I forced myself to play it because there are actually 3 new levels hidden in there. Not really worth it since they are as atrocious as the physics.

[nathan]

I don't own a PSP, but I did play it on PPSSPP to try out after seeing this post. All I can say is, if the physics are as bad as they are in that emulator, it's a travesty. For some reason your horizontal velocity is limited but your vertical velocity isn't, meaning that it feels extremely awkward to control. It's hard to aim your backswings due to the difficulty of moving left and right combined with the extreme speed gain from pressing up and down. This means that it's impossible to beat Field 36 the "fast way". You also tend to randomly gain speed in the middle of the air, which feels strange. While the music seems to be the best part (it's a remix of the Shun soundtrack), it sounds more like "Silent Hill Umihara Kawase" due to emulation problems.

On the "ripping music from the game" front, I found a file on the ISO called "music.bin" that ended up being MIDI files of the game music crammed into one file. I split them out for easy playing, but I'm assuming the soundfont is somewhere in that music.bin file. There's also a SE.bin file with all the sound effects in uncompressed PCM format, although I don't know the bitrate to play them properly. Finally, the ending video is actually fullscreen for once, although it's a 112x84 VHS rip, so not the best quality. Maybe a bit better than the copy of the fullscreen ending on the UK bonus DVD (note that the audio wasn't originally as high quality as it is, the original audio was lost when I converted the video from PMF format so I used the audio from the UK soundtrack).
Here's all the files I've been talking about. If someone smarter than me could figure out the whole "soundfont" thing for the midi files that would be cool I guess.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_F1gyHiB4fdaEtzSS1ZTHk0Z0E

Edit: you can extract a ton of samples from the music.bin file with PSound, but there's 319 of them so it may be a bit tough to determine what goes where.

[KawaseFan]

I played through to the F30 ending just to see the ending video and that was enough for me.

Here's a page documenting the bugs: https://www32.atwiki.jp/kawasepsp/pages/12.html
What an absolute mess UKP was.

[Canvas]

Dealing with MIDI files is ez. If you just want to play MIDI files, google "your media player midi plugin". Finally download a soundfont and point the midi plugin to it. A soundfont is just a collection of sounds so there are many different ones to choose from, but the MIDI files wont sound the same as ingame without the correct instruments and sounds the actual game uses. There are a bunch of lists detailing some good soundfonts I recommend you check out. I just tried listening to 4.midi in foobar2000 with it's midi plugin. After installing the plugin (you just double click for foobar2000) I went to preferences, then playback>input>midi player. Finally in the output section I changed the plugin to bassmidi, then to the right selected my soundfont which is FluidR3_GM.sf2. You can now just open the MIDI file in the player. I think with this soundfont it sounds alright and I especially like 4, but I bet there would be a better choice as this is clearly missing a few instruments the midi files require. I also recommend you snag the Descent soundtrack

Edit;
Less relevant to Umihara Kawase, Windows actually has it's own soundfont available to use. I don't know how you could for example use foobar2000 to play these files I am not going into that. However if you wanted to change your system soundfont to fluidr3 or whatever (which would be usable in other games like System Shock or Descent as mentioned) , for Windows I recommend VirtualMIDISynth, and Linux users should learn to use Timidity++. You just point these suckers to your soundfont and default VirtualMIDISynth as your MIDI Player in the MIDI mapper section. Even more irrelevant to Umihara but foobar2000 also has plugins for stuff like DUMB module decoder so you can listen to stuff like Jazz Jackrabbit .s3m files its cool as shite, which also doesnt require anything like soundfonts and sounds exactly hiw it does ingame. I think Audacious has plugins for both of these if you want a foss solution, thats available on Windows as well

[Princess Rescuer]

I've had one of at least every Umihara Kawase physical copy, so I've had this one too. Good thing I got it for a good price and don't have it anymore. It really does get wrong the main thing it shouldn't get wrong- the physics. Honestly, one of the most bothersome things about it to me was the perspective- it changes the perfectly good one from the First and Second Editions to a vastly less appealing and more nonsensical fake 3D perspective like in NES games. I guess I'm not too upset because Shun is my least favorite in the series (and it will probably remain that way) and has enough good remakes already. They made up for it pretty fast with the DS one a year later. I'd actually say the First Edition is probably my favorite version of that game. At least its flaws and quirks (such as the cutscenes and the music suspension before loading) are sort of endearing. Plus it's missing some irritatingly designed fields from later versions.

I still maintain my position that Shun Portable isn't the only bad game to blight the otherwise perceptively spotless series- I contend that Sayonara 3DS is arguably an equally obsolete and flawed version of that game, somewhat made up for by the fact that it's just exciting to have a new Umihara game in the modern age and it was the first version of it that came out, quickly superceded by its vastly superior remake, rather than the third that makes you wonder what happened over the past eight years. The framerate was choppy, the game looked drab and ugly almost to the point of creepiness, levels felt incomplete and devoid of enemies, and then there was that awful puffer fish boss made much better in the remake. Sayonara 3DS deserves to be buried just like Shun Portable. And there's just little flaws too like when you restart a level, the music also restarts and doesn't seamlessly flow like every other game in the series does all the time.

And if there's any "bad" version of Original, it's the DS one, made up for by the fact that it was included as an extra of Shun DS (the definitive version of that game at the time) and didn't have many problems other than minor nitpicks like the music being worse, the screen being smaller (what could they do about that?) bosses not picking up speed and being extra long and boring (already a problem with the game in general that presents a huge roadblock for beginners) and the fact that there was still no stage select like in the 2015 version. Still, it's passable for someone who wanted to play Original Umihara on a handheld prior to 2015 (I'm in that group). It even had arguable improvements over the original like better loading times and a more precise timer. There are also preferences like wanting the Taki and Keiryu songs to be where they were in the Super Famicom version, but over all, it's no big deal to most people.

[KawaseFan]

I still maintain my position that Shun Portable isn't the only bad game to blight the otherwise perceptively spotless series- I contend that Sayonara 3DS is arguably an equally obsolete and flawed version of that game, somewhat made up for by the fact that it's just exciting to have a new Umihara game in the modern age and it was the first version of it that came out, quickly superceded by its vastly superior remake, rather than the third that makes you wonder what happened over the past eight years. The framerate was choppy, the game looked drab and ugly almost to the point of creepiness, levels felt incomplete and devoid of enemies, and then there was that awful puffer fish boss made much better in the remake. Sayonara 3DS deserves to be buried just like Shun Portable. And there's just little flaws too like when you restart a level, the music also restarts and doesn't seamlessly flow like every other game in the series does all the time.

I think, at the time, Sayonara 3DS was great, I definitely enjoyed all the time I put into that version, and I still think it's worth playing if you don't have a Vita or you're not into PC gaming.  Now, though, it's pretty clearly the inferior version, and certainly if you've got the option of playing it on Vita or PC, there's probably no reason to play the 3DS version, other than curiosity.