i still DESPISE new blogger but this is too long to tweet

Things I have still shrinkwrapped, some of which are new today:

Yukkuri Panic Escalation - because I heard a spoiler about something that happens late in one of the routes that kind of creeped me out, and it's not really known for being plotty anyway, I just bought it as vague yuri support. I'm bound to at least test it one of these days... right?

Shikkoku no Sharnoth -What a Beautiful Tomorrow- - well, okay, the box isn't english, but there's a patch out, right? Althuogh I don't actually know if the patch patches this version. My hesitance on playing it is because from looking at an LP it looked a little hard to follow. I intend to get to it but only when I have time to focus, not when I'm looking for quick amusement. There may be Research Purposes involved.

Saya no Uta - Just got it, will probably look in Nov/Dec, have reasons for not getting into it now.

OtoBoku - I watched the beginning of the anime and it was boring, the art is not that good, and I don't know if I will ever play it but... well, now I have a box. I have at least some interest in the concept so I'll give it a chance eventually... On the other hand I don't entirely want to touch this while Black Closet is in development because I don't really want Japanese girls-school tropes slipping in among the ones I'm deriving from my own experiences.

If My Heart Had Wings - this is probably going to sit on my shelf forever. I'm not actually interested in any of the main concepts. I was just padding out an order.


Welcome to adulthood. We buy all the games and then we don't play them.


(Dear google - look how precipitously my posting dropped off when you insisted on changing everyone's Posting Experience. How about you stop screwing things up?)

Nonet Concerto Distortion

New action game on DLsite which is at least halfway playable by an English-speaker, although I'm missing an awful lot of the details and settings. Main menu runs on arrowkeys/ZXC and the actual game part is 3d-person 3d with WASD and left/right mouse buttons to shoot. I think you're a magical girl running around a labyrinth blasting stuff. Also has PvP which I haven't tried. More than that I can't really tell you, sorry.

As You Wish

As part of our ongoing campaign to conquer Greenlight (and then, THE WORLD) we have commissioned an awesome new trailer for Long Live The Queen:



(If you can't see that because of blogfeed, link to the trailer here)


The campaign has passed 11,000 yes votes and is still going, slow but steady, so all hope is not lost! We also got a bit of coverage on Rock Paper Shotgun, even if they did (hopefully accidentally!) end up somewhat referencing a hentai game in the title... Don't look it up, spare your innocent eyes!

The House in Fata Morgana

Remember way back when I posted about this gothy Japanese visual novel?



Well! It seems that the circle is actually considering an English version in conjunction with Playism! However, they need support to demonstrate that people are willing to buy something like this.



If you'd like to see this game in English, please go to this Playism blog post, leave a comment, and help spread the word!

when can i buy language chips for my brain?

The frustration of stumbling over cool gothy-looking things on DLsite (usual warning - site is pervy, this link is not) that I cannot play because Japanese...



There's more information, screenshots, and a trailer here.

I don't know, maybe it's good that I can't play all these games, I'd get distracted?

Super Diamond Rumba!

At a glance this reminds me a bit of my now mostly-forgotten skating game, by the combination of sliding tiles to create a playspace that a character moves through. Looks like this is probably EASIER than mine was though. I am always too complicated for casual.



Jump to about 45 seconds in to get past the text explanations if you don't read Japanese. If you can read Japanese or want to play anyway, the game is here.

And DAMMIT google why do you keep trying to make blogger as unusable as possible? I thought you FIXED that wrapping-in-the-middle-of-words nonsense.

Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon

Haven't seen one of these in a while! It's an old-school indie platformer... not the new super arty breed, but a cute Japanese thing. Well, originally Japanese. This version is fully English. Nothing amazingly special in the little bit I played of it, and the controls are kinda slidy, but if you like anime girls and cute things...

You go around whacking people with your magic staff. Some monsters will drop powerups. You can carry two powerups at a time and switch between them, or drop them to get back to your default or carry another.

And as I mentioned, free demo. (As usual, there are adult works elsewhere on DLsite, but this link is safe and leads to the non-adult part of the site.)

signal boost

Reposting from the Let's Play thread:

Dangan Ronpa is now available on iOS. A free download from the Japanese appstore gets you the first chapter of the game, with the rest available as in-app purchase. The whole game costs 2000 yen, which is about $25. Considering it probably costs about three times as much to import the game, I'd say it's a good price to pay.

The app is universal, customised for both the iPhone and the iPad (iPhone 4 or 4S required). It features retina graphics that look better than PSP in the appstore screenshots. An Android version is also supposed to come out, but the news I've read only mentioned iOS for now.

Getting a Japanese account to download the free chapter is easy and guides are readily available elsewhere. Once downloaded, you can switch back to your original iTunes account and still play the game. If you want to buy the game without a Japanese credit card, there are several places online that sell Japanese iTunes gift cards you can use to charge the account with.

Here's the iTunes link. If you like this game and LP, I'd like nothing more than if you give some money back to the creators. Now there's a fairly easy way to do so. Who knows, maybe if they see a bunch of downloads from non-Japanese IP addresses they might think again about an official localisation.

In case you've missed my earlier comments, this is an awesome semi-VN (There are choices, but the plot doesn't actually branch, and there are a lot of minigames) involving murder mysteries and bizarre characters, currently Japanese only and being Let's Played on Something Awful.

As I do not have an iphone or ipad this is still not much use to me, and I have no idea how many people are willing to jump through these hoops for a game they still can't really read, but one can always hope. I'd certainly love to see these games brought over into English. 999 did okay, right?

... however, if anyone knows where I can lay hands on a monobear hoodie, DO WANT.

terrible design choices

What were the developers of this program thinking???

Up until now it's worked fairly well. A little too much focus on romaji which I'm not sure is terribly useful. Kana introduced slowly with big displays and lots of practice screens for you to draw them, simple little games that are just about tracing the symbol over and over until you can do it without the prompting.

Their choice of fonts leaves a bit to be desired as any time they're not on the Big Friendly Demo Screen the diacritics are absolutely unreadable (to the point that you can't even tell whether or not they're present on some kana) but context in vocabulary is usually good enough to guess.

So we get to the first kanji lesson, and what do they do? Show you the symbol ONCE, with absolutely no options to practice it or trace it or even get them to repeat the strokes on the page, and then expect you to be able to draw it perfectly from memory, with 'correct' stroke order, on a blank screen. WTF???

Arcanum Knights

This looks like it might be fun to play, if not for the small problem of, y'know, being in Japanese.

(I am finally taking a little bit of my time to push through some simple Japanese learning materials, but only a little of my time, and it's going to be a long while before I'm up to reading in the wild.)

Also, "False English Gentlemen Fellowship" is an awesome name for a circle. Really. :)

super high-school level thread posting

This game is pretty awesome. It vaguely tempts me to work on a slightly vicious VN where the party is getting picked off one at a time (although for different reasons and in a much LESS nasty way than happens here.)

The game is Japanese-only, so most of us can only sit here reading the Let's Play. Which is still awesome!

Never 7

As part of a promotion for the release of the newest game in the "Infinity" series, Never 7 is available for free download until October 10th.

There is a translation project involved with this game and they've made good progress, so while an English version of this game isn't *currently* available, it seems safe to say that if you grab the download and hang onto it, you'll get a patch for it next year.

cross channel

Got totally stuck in what the walkthrough calls "week 3" - despite getting what should be the ending for that week, the game completely refused to continue to the next week's options. Had to start over from the beginning following a walkthrough slavishly with skip buttons to make any progress.

And some people think *Date Warp* is too hard / too much replay? Hrmph. :)

cross channel

The problem with a lot of H-games is that the protagonist is such a jerk that I really don't want him to get together with any of the girls.

I expect this guy has his reasons, but as it is, I'm inclined to dodge sex as much as the game will let me... Can't I just get Kiri and Miki together instead? (Note - I'm obviously fairly early in the game still, spoilers not wanted.)

genrefun

Otome power rangers style game?

That... sounds kinda fun, actually :)

marketing fail

So I spotted a potentially interesting new game on DLsite (not H).

The description says it's a physics-based puzzle sim. Sounds fun! But... what is it? There's no demo version. Of the three posted screenshots, one is just a title screen image, nothing to do with the gameplay. One is a picture of the back of the BOX (many doujin games sell at least a handful of box copies) with screenshots too small to make out gameplay details. Only the third lets you see anything about what the game looks like to play... and with so little information it would be a huge gamble to assume that it even RUNS on English windows, much less is comprehensible to people who can't read Japanese.

And for all that, it's got a highish price for a doujin title. Certainly not unreasonable, there are plenty of games on DLsite for $20, but it's not the STANDARD price. Most things are cheaper.

Unsurprisingly it's not selling any copies on the English side. (Okay, the majority of stuff doesn't sell on the English side, because, well, it's not in English. But still.)

... Of course, the next thing I click on is a downloadable set of speech bubbles. For $50. Good luck, you'll need it.

cute adorable evil

Spotted on DLsite - an entry in the "#@*$&!" genre of platformers (I'm sure there's a better name, but you know what I mean... The ones where everything is a trap and you die constantly.)

It has cute adorable graphics. You have infinite (negative) lives. You die a lot.



There's a free trial, and once you manage to launch it (.net required) you can probably manage even without any Japanese knowledge. Arrow keys and Z/X/C will get you through most Japanese platformers... You won't be able to read the instructions, but they're probably lies anyway!

Magical Drop

There's a franchise I haven't thought about in ages! Apparently they're making a new one. And if someone told GZ about it, it will hopefully be in English?

(If there was an iphone version, I guess some people have seen this game far more recnetly than I have...)

Collte's Spoon Devil

An oddity found at DLsite - this is not adult at all, but as usual, if you wander to that site, you will find some naughty content elsewhere.



It is, um... well, you have two characters and you control one with the mouse and one with the keyboard, while they attempt to constantly attack an enormous horde of tiny pixel characters wandering in and attacking you, and if you defeat them they turn into candy, and your screen is quickly littered with incomprehensible pixels and I was absolutely terrible at this and died quickly on easy.

If "weird bullet hell pixel game with devils and cake" sounds interesting, there is a free demo. And the game is actually in English... of the level of the screenshot above.

Preview the madness!

games for couples

I'm dubious about the idea of an arcade game making your girlfriend/boyfriend jump into your lap, but the concept of games designed for couples to go in and have a shared experience together sounds like fun for more options beyond just a Tunnel Of Love.

One of the game types that's endured better at arcades (that I've seen) is racing games, and I assume that's for two reasons. One, you get the cool seat and steering wheel which is sort of more fun than your home setup. Two, you can race a friend and both of you can have a full display, again working better than the home version.

Any sort of adventure experience you could go into with a friend would help provide 'specialness' for an arcade to offer...