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    tomman Finished the Oreimo PSP VN, getting all those extra Kirino endings was dogawful.

    Turns out however that this odyssey is not done yet! There is a DISC 2, and it's even translated!
    And you must 100% Disc 1 if you actually care about getting into Disc 2 as intended. And I'm sucker for pointless punishment.
    Ah well, at least it has Kuroneko's lil' sisters~

    First stop: MOAR KIRINO WHY the fujoshit imouto.
    creaothceann Still playing HoloCure (free), trying to finish all 7 stages with all the girls. Down to the last 4 (Anya, Kobo, Kaela, Zeta)...



    Some games that I have installed but not played yet:
    - Hotline Miami
    - Hotline Miami 2
    - Portal: Revolution (free)
    - Sonic Mania

    Steam wishlist:
    - Holo X Break (free): same dev as HoloCure, same fandom, release date 2024-03-29
    - Horizon Forbidden West, release date 2024-03-21
    - Outer Wilds, which is 40% cheaper until 2024-03-21... but by the time I get to it there may already be another sale...
    _ _ _

    Then there's a new book of the Ascendance of a Bookworm series that comes out tomorrow...
    wertigon Recently started a re-run of the Ys Series.

    I've done Ys Origins, I & II, Felghana and Celceta so far. Next up, Ys 6, 7 and 8. Unfortunately 5 is not remade. I am gearing up towards Ys IX... :)

    And no, I'm not gamer enough for Nightmare, only did it on Origins and that was painful enough.
    CaptainJistuce Kuroneko is best girl.



    Meanwhile, I'm basking in reruns.
    Moving from FTL(apparently I just wanted to die embarrassing and miserable deaths repeatedly for a bit I GUESS) to
    Blaster Master Zero(it's Blaster Master, but with more words and a tie-in to the japanese version's unrelated plot) and an EX character run as Gunvolt that I never actually completed before, to...
    ummm... Blaster Master Zero Two: Blast Harder(but not too hard, that's how you broke your gun last time{this is canon}).


    tomman OK, ~87% later, I'm about to clear this "My Little Sister VN Can't Be This Wretched" thing:

    Another VN where if you expect to make good progress, a GOOD walkthrough is a must. But the good ones are in Japanese, and the English one are more unpredictable than Kirino's mood changes (Ended using one from Fuwanovel, where people actually made the effort to debug the flaws). The O.R.E. system and the two-shot dialogs are a mess, but they make more sense the more you get into the routes, although most two-shots are only good for the CG gallery and to be annoying.

    And now, onwards to the heroines!

    - Kirino: ~14 years later, I can finally understand why all the Kirino hate. Uuuuugh, tsunderes. Especially a tsundere with a strong brocon syndrome. Her endings were... meh. But then I understand that they toned waaaaaaay down the incest topic comapred to the original LNs, and yet still there is too many moments of her being a stingy brat every time her beloved big brother sets his eyes on another girl. Sorry, can't love her. NEXT!

    - Kuroneko: "Ooooh, a meek hime-cut flat-chested goth lolita catgirl cutie! She ticks all of my boxes!" Nope, once playing her route all you get is a incredibly awkward girl that can't be sincere with her thoughts. But then, again she got her route intentionally botched for this release to save the actual romantic stuff for the LN. Boo! On the flip side, not every day you get reminded of the importance of backups and system updates by... a goth lolita catgirl that writes shitty doujinshi :P

    - Ayase: Because every VN has to provide a yandere bitch, here is your designated nutcase. OK, she ain't Kotonoha, but gets dangerously close at times. The queen of stupid misunderstandings. But her non-bad endings are actually the best of the bunch, especially the good ending wich is D'AWWWWWW~! Surprisingly she has a latent otaku side, which may or may not be fine. Her route is definitely a good read.

    - Manami: D'AWWWWW~! Plain childhood friend girls are the best, even if poor Manami overdoes herself during half of her route :D Another fun read, with the right amount of drama.

    - Saori: She is weird by definition (and proud of it!), but her route was just sad, not weird. Even her good ending basically is a shotgun wedding. Ugh. She deserved better, folks!

    - Others: Well, there is fake Meruru Kanako as the designated lolicon route (yay~!), that strange Akagi 8-bit route (complete with yandere Kirino, ugh!), and... for the asswipe that wrote the Forbidden Lily ending: DIE. "Ordered a box of fluffy kittens, got a live bobcat instead".

    And of course there HAD to be a Disc 2, which will actually check your homework before letting move on! But I'll save that nightmare for later, as my VN backlog is still bigger than Kiririn's ego.
    tomman
    Posted by creaothceann
    Posted by tomman
    Time to move on to...

    ...VirtualBox

    Which is 1) embargoed, 2) Orrible®, and 3) not exactly the most charming platform for games, much less VNs.
    Fortunately I still have more than enough native metal here to run those problem titles (had to get that pesky Otome ending on my ol' Inspiron running crusty W7), but come on Wine, there is life beyond This Week AAA+++ games! (Also, I refuse to mess with Proton).

    ...Or I can switch targets to non-PC titles: just started playing the Oreimo PSP VN. Yes, that Oreimo. And as someone that never watched the anime or intend to read the LNs, I can now understand somewhat the Kirino hate. But this VN is... confusing. Those folks decided to throw out the door the traditional decision system you would expect from any VN, and instead replace it with the very unique and irritating "two-shot"/"O.R.E. System" mechanisms which don't give you a clear clue on where are you going.

    So far, I'm stuck at the "two male friends visit the Comiket to get some BL merch for their totally cute lil' sisters, there is nothing weird here no sir!" bad ending. Thaaanks Bamco/Banpresto. Well, at least there are targets other than Kirino... if I don't ragequit this garbo decision system first!
    creaothceann
    Posted by tomman
    Time to move on to...

    ...VirtualBox
    tomman After finishing with School Days HQ, I went and like the good masochist I am, picked its seprequel, Shiny Days. Weeeell... it was a rather interesting way to get that bad aftertaste out, I guess? But Sexy Setsuna's headliner game came with its own bag of misunderstandings too:

    - I hated Otome in SDHQ. I hate her even more after Shiny Days. Seriously, poor Ai Yamagata deserves better than this!

    - Everybody's favorite yandere princess got demoted to... slob lazy princess. At least Kotonoha got far better endings here, even if all of them basically were "from zero to [CENSORED] in one night at the festival". And she is the sanest of the Katsura bunch here!

    - Poor Sekai, cockblocked by mom at the eleventh hour :D

    - Yes, you can do not only the protagonists, but also her mums too. Trio of desperate housewives businesswoman there. Especially Ms. Katsura!

    - Things Setsuna enjoy: Paris, using childish nicknames. Things Setsuna hates: threesomes, being reminded constantly that she has the body of a little girl, videogames, manga, Niki.

    - Shiny Days is actually a remake of Summer Days, whose sole major addition is the Inori route. Well, many people HATED it, but my opinion on it is that while it gets boring at times, Inori is a very quirky and fun character, and her route does reveal quite a lot of the behind curtains scene on the power struggles at the lovely beach town of Haramihama. Getting to know some of the characters up close and personal is always a nice addition to any canon.

    - SDHQ was a mess but you could get to make progress with careful usage of savestates and the (screwy) route map. Shiny Days on the other side it's nigh out impossible without a walkthrough... and most there are trash or unusable (I found a handy one at GameFAQs, of all places!)

    - Did I mention that the reason to get into this hell was in part to contribute to Wine's languishing AppDB? Well... School Days HQ was more or less well behaved despite its 0verflaw Kwality™ reputation. Not so much Shiny Days, where the one thing that shines are the random crash dialogs under Wine. In particular, the one ending involving Otome is UNFINISHABLE under recent Wine versions due to the rampage of random, unpredictable (but highly reproducible) crashes! Looks like Wine hates her even more than me :D But yeah, sadly that means that just for that it's impossible to 100% this game on pure Wine, unless you wanna test your luck with a 2 year old release. Oh, and JAST USA changed the installers a few years ago to incorporate the latest patches, and I had mojibake issues with those when changing the default install dir! (which you should do if you intend to install *ahem* A Certain Content Restoration Patch).

    Veredict: Far better experience (crashes and convoluted routemap notwithstanding) than the original game, Shiny Days is a good read/watch/play if you survived the initial School Days experience. Sadly this is the end of the road for me with the Days franchise, as the next game on the road (Cross Days) has a fat chance in hell to ever get localized (it has contents far more polemic than the infamous Kokoro route), no English fan translation group is touching it either because it's radioactive, and while an Spanish translation amazingly exists... it's a dead link locked behind a Meta Platforms firewall :/

    Time to move on to something less... insane.
    tomman The one and only, the infamous murder and cheating simulator, Misunderstanding Bitches HQ School Days HQ.

    Been waiting for 11 years on my backlog, but now that Wine can finally run it out of the box (and I can't make enough emphasis on this, as unlike your ordinary VN, School Days is actually an interactive anime, so perfect video playback is a must if you actually want to play this thing, something that has been a sore point for Wine for almost 2 decades), let's cross this one out off the list.

    OH GOD WHY I SPENT MONEY ON THIS!?!?!?! (found the receipt from October 2012 telling me that I burned $39.95 on this!)

    Anyway, with 5 out of 21+2 endings to clear yet, here are my impressions:

    - Makoto is a horny cheating bastard, we all know that. I don't get why all the girls in this school set their eyesights on this dude... but then at least he is a normal horny boy. Taisuke on the other end is a flat out rapist, and it's a shame there is no route where he dies!

    - The whole plot of this thing is an absolute trainwreck (which is ironic, considering that a good deal of the action on this VN actually happens around actual train stations): "guy gets in love with random girl he met at the train, random classmate offers to help him to hook up with random girl and succeeds, but classmate actually has been in love with guy since forever". Yes, I'm aware that this shit happens all the time in Real Life™, but still it's pure crap :P

    - The bloody (literally!) bad endings!!! Did I mention I _hate_ gore!? This is one of the reasons I don't play FPS games, I have really low tolerance to bloody scenes... and the very first bad end I got had to be THAT ONE. And the game makes sure for you to NOT forget by displaying the very last scene of the last ending you got on the title screen. Classy.

    - Now onto our lead heroines: Sekai is a crybaby that can't grow a pair and tell Makoto that she loves him before ending in this trainwreck. And Kotonoha... OH BOY, what the hell is wrong with this girl!? She literally REFUSES to get dumped, EVER! But once you know her past, you can even feel pity for her... almost. At least there is harem ending where you get both girls... which is nicely tucked between two bloody endings.

    - Initially I hated Hikari (loud screaming tsundere bitch, lovely)... until I got to her endings (she gets TWO!). Ended liking her for no good reason~ On the flip side, I didn't liked Setsuna that much despite being a cutie, because she is willing to backstab her BFF for that cheating MC. Otome and Nanami can rot in hell, thanks.

    - Every single filler character here is absolutely unlikeable human trash, especially Kotonoha's classmates.

    - BUGS! I wasn't aware that 0verflow was better known as 0verflaw... until I actually RAN the game. School Days HQ is more like a 11GB bugfest with traces of a visual novel inside. Broken route chart, broken flags, videos that sometimes will not play, meter bars that go offscreen if you push them too far (ha!), nonsense story branching, blatantly broken lipsync at some scenes, rampant abuse of animation recycling, weird crashes and hangs, and in my particular setup, Furnace Laptop Mode™. Almost all of those bugs are present on ALL editions of the game, no matter the OS or patch level!

    - No yuri ending, despite the cover art hinting at that!

    Veredict: School Days has its moments, but it's mostly unburnable trash. Even the HQ version hasn't aged well...
    Kawaoneechan To nobody's surprise, I've been playing Half Life.
    CaptainJistuce I've been dropping into Star Ocean 2 R.
    I don't really know what to say other than it makes me feel like a teen again. It is raw nostalgia injected straight into my veins.
    eccentricwind I've been playing Crono Cross for the last week like a maniac for no apparent reason
    (this is a cry for help)
    tomman Continuing with my quest for Japanese lulz on 9x, I'm (re)playing the SonoHana series on WinMe.

    "Replaying" because I only played the first 3 routes and a half (who doesn't love Reo/Mai?) due to the availability of translations circa 2015, but now the entirety of the original routes are translated (in Spanish, even!), and now I'm getting this done.

    Yes, this series is a mess - sequels, sidestories, and of course, Maidens of Michael (which is infamous for being delisted from Steam thanks to the action of rabid SJWs, but surprisingly it's in GOG... not that you should give money to them until they apologize over kowtowing to the CCP!). You won't be running the licensed Western localizations on 9x - they were ported to Ren'Py, which requires XP at least.

    As for the rest of the original Japanese ones, they're tricky to run on non-JP systems:

    - On XP and later, Applocale (or your favorite locale emulator) is mandatory, even when using the unofficial translation patches (which often ship with hacked executables).

    - On Wine, the equivalent for Applocale is "LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF8 wine ./yourJapaneseGame.exe", and if you're using a Wine version prior to 7.10, you also need to use this tool to patch the messages file for your translation because of a dumb bug that Wine devs stubbornly refused to fix for 15 years.

    - On 9x there is no Applocale to save the day. Even worse, the hacked translated EXEs will crash with a internal engine error as soon as any character tries to speak (first screenshot). The solution is simple: use the original JP .EXEs! You will get mojibake on the titlebars and some rendering artifacts on texts (second screenshot), but the VNs are fully playable nonetheless.

    Yuri has never been that suffering :D
    tomman
    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    Oh! Very nice!
    What sort of frame rate you getting with that Radeon Mobility?

    I have only started a new game (haven't even left the store yet!), but it oscillates around 45~60FPS, and in general it feels very smooth.

    The game configuration applet (custom.exe) allows to set a FPS cap, down to a 6FPS target, aimed at particularly weak machines. But not ones made with parts from dubious Taiwanese component suppliers - for those you need a miracle!
    (Yep, that's Win98SE)
    CaptainJistuce Oh! Very nice!
    What sort of frame rate you getting with that Radeon Mobility?
    tomman Pointless stuff we do for lulz:



    Yes, that's good ol' Recettear running smoothly under Windows Me on my T40... with a 2004 CPU (2.1GHz Dothan) and a GPU from year 2001 (Radeon Mobility 7500).

    To be fair, this 2007-vintage game requirements were Netburst toasters running "XP and later" and a "DX8.1-class 64MB GPU" (spoilers: this Radeon only has half that). For lulz, I even tried running it on my PCShits and its lovely SiS 630 Graphics Decelerator on a PIII-750 and W98SE... and while it ALSO runs on that thing (!!!), the game is almost unplayable at 5FPS.

    I guess I'll be reviewing my ol' game purchases from the last decade on this thing, but so far the initial results are not encouraging: anything past 2010 is definitely "XP or later", while games from 2007-2009 are leaning towards "no 9x, sorry". Kirikiri-based VNs are riiiiight out of the question - those will often crash with script errors due to the lack of proper Japanese codepage support, and unlike NT, there is no AppLocale we can use on a strictly ANSI OS :/
    creaothceann
    Posted by tomman
    https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout
    https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout-rewrite

    I tried the browser version, but IMO the ship/car clips a bit too much into the track when you drive up ramps in order to jump over an abyss, with the result that discount Lakitu heaves you back onto the track.
    CaptainJistuce Imagine if they'd found the Saturn code instead!
    tomman Today's unofficial game decompilation port: wipEout
    https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout
    https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout-rewrite

    Now available on Linux and Mac, but don't worry, fans are also getting their ships warm and their hands dirty with the upcoming flood of ports. I'm myself waiting for the Win9x port, in the meanwhile this one works fine on the last two stable releases of Debian, although performance on a lowly Radeon X1400 is kinda janky. And yes, I suck at this PSX game, but the soundtrack is pretty cool~

    Make sure to read the blogpost: this port is based on leaked sourcecode from the original Windows 95 port made for some ATi cards, and oh boy, the guy found quite the nightmare on that codebase. Plus you may or may not find a specific file that Sony doesn't want you to have in order to run this "rewrite".

    In a rare twist, this port even got the unobtanium JWZ Seal Of Approval™, and it's rare from him to hear praise over any piece of code not written by himself.
    creaothceann Played the new update of HoloCure that came out today. 9 new characters (the Indonesian girls), new maps, a new game mode.

    Also available on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2420510/HoloCure__Save_the_Fans/

    Completely free, of course.
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