できない私が、くり返す。 left a decent impression on me, and not because of the art or anything like that — mostly it was a bunch of people saying it’s a “tearjerker” and “the best.” Generally a game that most people approve of can’t be that bad, so I played it during June when there was nothing else out. The title is weird. Going by my Japanese level of a one-year-old infant, I think it’s trying to say that no matter how many times I go back, I can’t change a damn thing. Early on, the protagonist gets a pocket watch from a big-sister type named Ren, who tells him it can travel through time and return to the past. “But there’s no point in going back, because the future can’t be changed.” A time leap that can’t change the future is basically useless, and Ren hammers it in every time she talks about the watch: 未来は変えられない So the story begins five years after big sis Ren dies, at the moment the watch-holding protagonist meets a girl named Shino.

I haven’t played many Alcot games, but most of them follow the same path: fairly lowbrow (no offense) snark and slice-of-life, cute moe character designs, and music that’s better than it has any right to be. I’d say it wasn’t like this back in Clover Heart, but by the time Clover Days rolled around it had quietly become this way, so my feelings about Clover Days carry over: no matter how you look at it, this stuff is “not especially clever,” but it’s also “not bad.” The plot beats are a bit clichéd, but it never force-feeds you shit. When LoveRec. was being promoted I took a look at the character designs… “Oh fuck, isn’t this just Anzu?” Yes, the heroine named Hitomi looks almost identical to Takakura Anzu from Clover Days, just with a different hair color and eye color. You could chalk it up to Jinmura Yuji’s art style, but the feeling that they “literally just took an old character, tweaked her, and put her on sale” is a weird one. Incidentally, the other two heroines weren’t drawn by Jinmura Yuji, but they’re also a bit off, and overall not as cute as Clover Days. Given Alcot’s usual style, I assumed this game was at most a moe showcase, and from the designs and the rough blurb that’s exactly what it looked like. But after finishing it, I came away feeling something different.

Secret Game is a galgame series by FLAT with a battle-royale-ish plot. I played its predecessor’s enhanced version, Killer Queen (杀手皇后), a long time ago, and it left a strong impression on me. I call it deep not because it’s brilliant or anything, just because… it’s so goddamn infuriating. Because the protagonist is a total bleeding heart — the kind who won’t lift a finger no matter how badly people screw him over, and who goes around spreading love and peace to everyone. A pushover like that in real life would’ve been picked clean by now. Unfortunately, he’s a game protagonist, so not only does he survive without spilling a drop of blood, he also gets to bang the girl. This is also the game that made me remember the scenario writer’s name, and now whenever I see him I can already tell roughly where a work is headed. So that Secret Game did get a sequel. The first one was just called Secret Game 2, then got the name Secret Game: Code Revise, and later it was ported to the PSP with the story and visuals fully overhauled and renamed Secret Game: Code Revise 2nd Stage. Then that beefed-up PSP version had 18+ content added and was ported back to PC in reverse, under the full title Secret Game: Code Revise 2nd Stage Boosted Edition. Alright, whatever the hell the full title is, my point is just that despite this being the sequel, the setup is the same as the first game.

The first time I heard of a dating sim was in elementary school, when I found something called Tokimeki Memorial from a pirate-game dealer. Not a CD version, of course — it was in a folder on a disc with a “Cangjinge” label. After installing it, I saw the name written as “Jun’ai Shuzha” (I even misread it as “Jun’ai Shouli”), and somehow, following the GameZ88 install wizard, I put a shortcut for the thing on my Windows 98 desktop. I played it for a while and found it pretty baffling. Bear in mind I was an elementary schooler then — I was dying to grab a gun and blast monsters, not sit down and hit on girls. The whole business of getting entangled with several women every day made no sense to me. “Why isn’t he fighting?” “When does the fighting start?” were the biggest questions in my head.

There’s a saying floating around the internet: “You can’t wake someone who’s only pretending to sleep.” It gets quoted a lot by people I can’t stand, but the saying itself isn’t wrong. Sleep is just how a person rests. Strictly speaking, nobody can pinpoint the exact hour, minute, second they drifted off, because it isn’t something you control. Wake someone out of that uncontrolled sleep and of course their eyes open. But a person pretending to sleep doesn’t actually want to sleep—they just want everyone else to think they’re asleep. Why would someone who’s awake want people to believe they’re asleep? Simple: to look the other way, to dodge whatever they’ll have to face once they’re up. Easy example. Someone you hate comes looking for you. You don’t want to deal with them, don’t know how to deal with them, don’t want to turn them down, definitely don’t want to talk to them… So you flop onto the desk and fake a deep sleep. A friend tries to wake you, but you were awake the whole time, so naturally you keep yourself from looking awake. That’s exactly what “you can’t wake someone who’s pretending to sleep” means. The pretender chose to pretend because they never wanted to wake up in the first place. You can’t wake them. NekoNeko Soft’s 15th anniversary title Sumire (Violet) picks precisely this “pretend sleep” theme. Just like its OP, “Sleeping Pretend,” it’s the story of three girls who each pretend to sleep to get away from the various things in their lives.

I have a bad habit: I charge everything at night, take it out the next day, and only plug it in again when I get home the following evening. Day after day, over and over. Thanks to this stupid habit, my battery-life requirement when buying anything is “lasts a day.” The Nexus 6 has a decent-sized battery, but its endurance isn’t great — probably the price of that 2K screen. It used to be that the Nexus 6 lasted exactly one day for me, including the evening run on the way home. But lately, the Moto 360 and a string of Android Wear updates have been eating into my phone battery more and more. Staring at the Bluetooth power draw in Batterystatus, I felt a bit helpless. At that point you’d get home with 20% left, barely enough for the run afterward. Which meant I had to find something to charge the phone with at work — and for someone with a “one charge a day” compulsion, that’s a real itch. So I wondered: does everyone else just leave their phone plugged in whenever there’s a charger around? I asked on G+ and found that most people do. Since the Nexus 6 has always been on wireless charging at home, with a Lumia Qi pad, I figured I’d just get another wireless charging pad.

Idol Mahou Shoujo Chiruchiru Michiru (アイドル魔法少女ちるちるみちる) is a spin-off of The Fruit of Grisaia and The Labyrinth / Eden of Grisaia. The name says it all — it’s just a magical girl moe-fest set in the same world with the same characters. If you still don’t get it, think of it like the relationship between Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya and the main Fate stuff. Online reception for this one isn’t great. The complaints mostly fall into a few camps: The plot is too cliché, the sense of déjà vu is overwhelming, and you can’t fuck anyone. The game is too short, it’s split into two parts, and you can’t fuck anyone. There are too many repeated OP and ED sequences — obvious cost-cutting — and you can’t fuck anyone. It’s sold in two parts, it’s too expensive, and you can’t fuck anyone. You can’t fuck anyone. So let me clarify: this game is good. It’s fun. If you want to fuck, please turn right to Professor Dave’s fap channel.

Renai Relation (恋想リレーション) is the latest release from Lump of Sugar. I already roasted their previous game, Unmei-sen jou no φ, on account of the plot being flat-out retarded. So does Renai Relation do any better on the story front? Naturally not. Still retarded. Only this time, they’ve gone and built the premise itself as an excuse for it.

Honestly, Natsuiro Recipe (なついろレシピ) wasn’t the game I was most looking forward to this month. I’d originally planned to play Pure X Connect and Sumire first, but Natsuiro Recipe leaked early, so I had no choice but to play it first—and what a surprise it turned out to be.

At work I use a laptop plus an external monitor. Before this there were two monitors lying around: a Lenovo LCD, 22 inches, big white TN panel, completely unbearable. Then the radiology department retired a CRT, a Philips, and it looked surprisingly good — until a few days ago, when that Philips died too. I thought about it for a long time, whether to buy a screen with my own money for the office. Considering that my idiot director has me writing stuff every day and I spend long hours staring at a computer, at the very least I shouldn’t be blinding myself on a big white panel, so I gritted my teeth and picked up an ASUS VS239HR — 23 inches, IPS, VGA/HDMI/DVI. It arrived fast. To my surprise it was a perfect panel with no dead pixels, and the backlight bleed wasn’t too bad either — way better than I expected. Some quick impressions below.