Back in school I took a course called Software Engineering, taught by an old lady who could not stop singing the praises of the Indian and Japanese software industries. She’d go off on long tangents in the middle of lectures, and you can probably guess the gist: strict adherence to “standards” in the development process, “modularization” with “high cohesion and low coupling,” that sort of thing. Some of it was honestly overblown, borderline bullshit. “India’s software industry is very advanced. Their professional programmers write code so standardized that a hundred people all produce the exact same thing—even the comments look identical.” “The more standardized and regulated things are, the faster you can throw together solutions when requirements come in, like stacking building blocks…” “Once everything is standardized, every person is like a cog in the machine, running efficiently and fast…” She kept escalating into more and more mystical territory, piling on the bullshit, and since I was always late to that class I ended up sitting in the front row. The old lady kept fucking asking me questions, and sometimes I’d push back… “But wouldn’t programming be super boring like that? Everyone turns into a robot.” “That’s called efficiency. The efficiency of a big company delivering solutions fast. You want to be an individual, go work solo…” Back then I only had a vague grasp of this stuff. I figured “standardization” and “assembly line” were indeed probably very efficient… But after starting work and dealing with some small and mid-sized domestic software companies (not internet companies), I found that my contrarian comment actually had some truth to it… The people there really are boring… the stuff they make is boring too… but it does “work.” The assembly line can solve problems, but it always feels like it’s missing passion and fun, like it lacks color… Of course, work doesn’t need color, right… It’s just that games can’t be like that, can they… Yuzusoft’s game from last year, Sanoba Witch, I thought was pretty good—just missing that certain something. The main issue was that Nene’s route wasn’t particularly fleshed out; otherwise there wasn’t much to complain about. So when they announced this year’s new title, Senren * Banka, my first reaction was still disappointment…

Tegokami Nurete no Tenshi (手垢塗れの天使) is probably pretty well known by now. Before release it was marketed as an eroge about a supposedly pure idol who sells her body behind the scenes via casting couch deals, so the “手垢塗れ” in the title is really an abbreviation. The full phrase is “手垢に塗れる” (teaka ni mamireru), which Japanese dictionaries define as: 多くの人に使用されて汚れる. What does that mean… getting dirty because a lot of people have used it. Some people in China translated the game as “The Scarred Angel,” and at first I thought wow, that’s actually got some mood to it, but looking at the actual plot, it really doesn’t fit… Better to call it “The Soiled Angel” or “The Bus Angel”… considering the heroine does have her pitiful moments, let’s skip the latter.

I once came up with a concept. It was about dreams, and there were people with a job kind of like “private detective” who specialized in entering people’s dreams. They’d go on adventures inside someone else’s dream, and ultimately change that person’s view of something. And of course, they get paid for it. Sounds a lot like Inception, I know. But I had a slightly different idea. I figured that since you’re entering “someone else’s dream” as a kind of “detective” or “hunter,” the setting and environment of the dream would all be tied to the dreamer. As the “intruder,” you’d need to adapt to the environment fast and exploit “the dreamer’s own internal logic” to get the advantages you need to finish the job. Say the dreamer is a hopeless MMO addict. You enter his dream and you’ll probably get dropped into some game-like world. You’d have to quickly adapt to the role the dreamer assigned you in that world, and also disguise yourself so you don’t stick out. That means you need to know the dreamer—their tastes, their personality, even their innermost thoughts. Walk blindly into someone else’s turf and you’ll definitely fail, maybe even lose your chance to ever wake up again… I thought this setup was cool as hell, and I even wrote a crappy short story based on it. If you’re willing to dig, you can find it on this blog. Though if I went back and read it now I’d spot a million problems—too embarrassing to even look at. Still, I’m thinking about dusting off that concept and rewriting it into a proper piece. Depends on whether I get the time and inspiration.

Although I enjoyed Saga Planets’ game from last year, HanaSaki Work Spring! (man, the katakana part of that title is a pain to remember), and considered it a well-rounded game with “no real flaws in the story,” “very entertaining daily conversations,” “cute heroines,” “some standout music,” and “art definitely worth checking out,” I had a bad feeling about the company’s new release this year, Floral Flowlove, from the very start. So, at first it was described as a “ojou-sama-related” game, which already sounded boring to me. After all, when you hear “ojou-sama,” you think of the kind of thing from Note company—gorgeous style, cultured ladies, and the protagonist either infiltrates or lives a luxurious high-society life as a young master. I had no interest in that kind of setup. Then the full title, character designs, and setting were revealed, and I was completely let down… “あの日、俺は天使を見た” “That day… I saw an angel.” And then the story was the usual cliché setup: the protagonist at an elite school surrounded by all kinds of ojou-samas, especially the main heroine who reeked of desperate affection. I saw the scenario was by Tōta, a regular for Yuzusoft, and I even thought about ignoring this game entirely… Later the OP movie was released. Honestly, it was several orders of magnitude worse than HanaSaki Work Spring!’s. Many of the girls didn’t do anything for me; it was pure moege vibes, the simplest and most粗暴 kind of moege. But then I thought, I didn’t want to give up on Saga Planets just yet, so I tried the trial version. It turned out there was some substance there, including quite a bit of religious content. And I suddenly realized that the one who shone in the trial wasn’t the heroine who looked laughably desperate, but the foreign princess, Aa-chan. As for the other characters, they seemed just as dumb as expected. “If the full game digs into this religion and princess theme, maybe it’ll be salvageable.” With that thought, I played the full version, intending to “just do the princess route and stop.” I had zero interest in the other characters, and they didn’t seem to have much screen time anyway. But man, once I started, I couldn’t stop. I did the princess route, then went through all the other routes, and finally stayed up all night to finish the True End. And my opinion of the game during that playthrough was like a roller coaster—low to high, high to low, then low to high again… This is the first game that gave me such a wild ride and made me slap my own face repeatedly. ISLAND was similar, but that was the writer deliberately showing off, so it’s a different type.

Earlier this month I helped a coworker buy a discounted BlackBerry Priv — the one recommended on Smzdm. Based on my coworker’s case, it took a bit over two weeks to reach him via a forwarding service. The price was pretty cheap, or at least not expensive. After it arrived, I got to play with it for a while since I’d helped with the purchase — maybe half an hour or so. Here are my impressions.

A while back I saw someone on the HiPDA Discovery board recommending bootleg LEGO, saying this 78-yuan WALL-E was actually pretty good quality. So I went and bought it on impulse, thinking I’d never played with LEGO before, might as well start with a cheap knockoff and see how it feels. It arrived and I burst out laughing — theirs is LEGO, yours is Lepin. Though this “Lepin” is actually pretty famous in bootleg circles.

前一阵玩nukige太多了，然后nukige玩多了又玩了一票废萌キャラゲー，觉得自己还是应该回到“故事导向”的基本路线上来，搜了下看到了我个人非常喜欢的《紙の上の魔法使い》的脚本师的一个早期作品，叫做《運命予報をお知らせします》,简单看了下日本人在中二空间对它的评价，觉得应该没问题，也就开始玩了。 The game is supposed to be only a dozen hours or so, but it felt longer than I expected. I came away pleasantly surprised, maybe because it’d been a while since I’d played something with writing this good. It got to the point that after finishing it, I booted up the newly released Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ) and just couldn’t take the gap in prose quality between the two. The former reads like something a college student would write; next to it, the latter is straight-up middle-schooler level…… Anyway, probably because my Japanese has gotten better, I’ve started finding a lot of really dumb phrasing genuinely stupid — it’s not just about clawing my way to understanding the meaning anymore.

I got into HookSoft games pretty early — back when I was still a virgin. I remember the one I played was called HoneyComing. I actually found it on the school FTP out of boredom, and it was one of those green install versions with no translation. I couldn’t understand the text back then, but the game did have a manga scanlated by Sumisora! I flipped through it out of boredom. Fortunately the setup was simple enough that after reading the manga, I could roughly follow the dialogue from the tone, the character sprites, and the occasional kanji. Something about an idiot protagonist taking a class on how to pick up girls at school… all that nonsense. I do remember there was this one girl with a chopstick stuck in her hair who was pretty cute. I liked her. Can’t remember her name now — something-gaya, I think. Anyway, I thought the game was pretty good at first. Mostly because the art was nice and the girls were cute. I wasn’t watching much anime back then, but this game really sparked something in me — activated my inner moe pig genes, I guess. Kind of nostalgic to think about. Oh, and it was definitely the 18+ version. First time I saw a girl gobbling down mosaic censorship, it scared the shit out of me so hard my dick got hard. Took me a while to calm down. But time flies. Nearly ten years later, that virgin who first touched a Hook game has grown up into an old virgin. Really makes you sigh — Time flies, huh. Though I don’t know why my eyes are watering as I sigh…

So I switched to a 4K monitor a while back, and the old Ice Dragon 770 4G just couldn’t keep up with Doto 2 or Overwatch at native 4K. Overwatch was still playable, but from what I could tell it was rendering at 2K and upscaling to 4K — not exactly the pure experience I wanted! So I figured it was time to sell it and get a new card.

So here’s what happened. A few days ago I went for a run, it started raining out of nowhere, and the next day I got home and found the bass gone from the right unit of my IE80… Thank god I bought the domestic version! Sent it in for repair. After that I started seriously thinking about whether I should get a waterproof pair of sports earbuds. I mean, you’re not really chasing sound quality when you work out. After looking around, the best recent option seemed to be the Meizu EP51, so I grabbed one on Taobao for 150.