Everyone knows the “handheld market” is hot right now. On top of the old crop of “open-source handhelds,” we’re drowning in “high-performance handhelds.” Plenty of people are chomping at the bit for these things, but most of them are “playing with the machine, not the games”—buying one after another, testing for a bit, then stopping cold. Some call this “electronic impotence.” I don’t buy it. I just think most of today’s “handhelds” don’t deserve the name. They’re more like a “giant desktop PC you can cradle in both hands.” Whether it’s Aya or GPD, each new machine is bigger than the last, and heavy too. I basically have no desire to take them out anymore—you need a dedicated shoulder bag just to carry one. And that’s not even the main issue. The most awkward part is that battery life on these handhelds tops out at two hours. Good luck getting enough playtime out of one on a trip. Aya even showed off a concept machine called the Next 2 that ditches the battery entirely and has you play plugged in. Which is basically an admission that this thing isn’t a “portable handheld” anymore—it’s just a mini desktop you can hold in your hands. If that’s the case, why not just use the TV at home?

Not gonna lie, my X account and 茉宮祈芹 mutually follow each other. I think I followed her back when she wasn’t that well known, sent her a greeting message, and got a reply. Occasionally she’ll like some lewd art I retweet, and I’ve written a paid piece hyping her up too. I used to think the stuff she draws was too explicit, but then I figured, as a freelance illustrator, drawing it a bit more H for sales is pretty understandable. When I reviewed Ninja Girl and the Mysterious Army of Urban Legend Monsters! Hunt of the Headless Horseman, I said that 茉宮祈芹 is an illustrator who can raise the quality of an entire visual novel single-handedly. One reason is that her drawing and coloring style leans toward flat, digital-game visuals, which means the character art in any visual novel she works on stays consistent — no awkward art shift from a different colorist stepping in. No matter which other artists she’s paired with, her characters always stand out. And even when she isn’t drawing characters with heavy exposure, she still nails the heroine’s cuteness. So here’s a new game: FLIP＊FLOP 〜INNOCENCE OVERCLOCK〜, put out by a DMM Game shadow brand, with 茉宮祈芹 on art, Houmori Kei on planning and scenario, and Kitakoji Yuki voicing the lead heroine. With a lineup like that, there’s no reason not to give it a shot.

Lu Xun once said: Moonstone Cherry is a good company. They put out a famous series called 妹ぱらだいす!, and that series is the reason this blog ever got any traffic at all — go look at “most popular on the site” in the sidebar, the title’s sitting right there in plain sight. Course, Manbara Paradise isn’t loved just because it’s a sister-type nukige. It’s the “usability” upgrade. The character designs had nothing going on, but the HCGs went hard. They were already using Emotion ten years ago, plus a “countdown to launch” feature, so you and the heroine can reach each other across the screen in mutual fashion. I’ll say it: that game wore me out back in 2011. The sequels went two more rounds. Not as striking as the first, but they swapped in the best voice actresses available at the time and kept the old usability tradition. The third one even upped the music quality. Classic, re-pressed. But apparently Moonstone Cherry figured hanging from one tree wasn’t great, so they stopped making 妹ぱらだいす! and started pushing out games under planner “Wu Lao’er” that look weirder the longer you stare at them… “Welcome to the sex open world,” “welcome to the sex underworld” — what the hell is any of that. And now we get Yūnagisō no S-Kyū no Kanojo-tachi (夕凪荘のＳ級の彼女たち).

Generally speaking, the “cross-dressing” games enesemble puts out have painfully contrived premises. Most of them go like this: the male lead has some unavoidable reason to dress as a girl and transfer into a girls’ school, where he proceeds to whip it out and go on a rampage. Even though the protagonist is nominally a cross-dresser, the HCG in these games is genuinely lewd, and he’s the lewdest one of all despite being a guy. And the lewdest guy still fights at full power in the HCG, as if following the principle of “treat every shot like it’s your last, and don’t be afraid of going impotent” — which bumps up the usability a lot. For a while I just mentally filed these games under the nukige subcategory. But enesemble clearly shifted direction after last year’s cross-dressing title. It started caring about plot coherence, even going for crazy twists. Last year’s game felt like a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas, but willingness to change is always good. So this year enesemble brings us a new cross-dressing game: Hana wa Mijikashi, Odore yo Otome (華は短し、踊れよ乙女).

For years now, SMEE’s main scenario writer Yu Hayase has been getting cozy with Azarashi Soft. After a few “collab mini-games,” they’ve stopped pretending and just merged, with Hayase even spearheading Azarashi’s new title Amanatsu. The game looks weird no matter how you slice it. The title and art style are pure Azarashi, but the side characters and dialogue style scream SMEE. Probably to boost sales, they brought in a bunch of VAs old players know by heart. And goddammit, they dragged out my most hated one, Yukary Aoyama, to voice the main heroine. Every role she’s done except Kazuki Kazami gives me PTSD. The second heroine is Akinohana, who’s currently on permanent vacation, and the third is Mai Gotou. That’s a stacked cast spanning three generations of eroge VAs. If this game had a press conference, the fat otaku in the audience would’ve been screaming. I was actually hyped for this one, but less than five minutes in, I felt this weird sense of disappointment.

Hey! Friend, have you had COVID? Are you worried about long COVID? Are you scared of getting quarantined? By now it’s been confirmed over and over that COVID is a “self-limiting disease” — which basically means there’s no silver bullet against the virus, and all you can do is boost your immune system and tough it out. But nobody ever tells you how to boost your immune system, or what counts as a way to significantly boost it. But one eroge recently gave a clear answer.

Years ago, when I first started playing eroge, I had plenty of reasons for it. I was sick of light novels, anime, and manga dragging their “serials” on for years without end, and sick of their bloated, convoluted stories. So I went with galge. One of the reasons that satisfied me most back then was this: “Visual novels are different from other ACG works — in a single game, you always get to see the story’s ending.” But times change, and that line has drifted further and further from reality. My view of visual novels has swung to the opposite end too — from weariness to outright hatred. Never mind that visual novels have all learned the light-novel “split-volume” sales model. What wears on me most is the “advance or regress” market development of the genre over the years. Visual novel players always call themselves “subculture enthusiasts” and take pride in their supposedly niche hobby. They’re always finding ways to recommend visual novels to others, or personally jumping into making them, or introducing their favorites in ACG discussion forums. Most of these so-called “enthusiasts” will admit it’s a niche market, in a gray zone, not something you can show in broad daylight — but they keep praying that one day the market will evolve and become accepted by more people. And as a niche game category, visual novels have far too many flaws that most people clearly reject, yet the so-called enthusiasts ignore and tolerate them, year after year for over a decade. That’s what I never expected.

As someone who loves portable devices, I was actually pretty interested in the Steam Deck. But earlier this year, the Steam Deck was terrifyingly expensive and basically impossible to buy. The few Chinese handheld makers that bothered to show up were all just drawing pies in the sky. Then Maxzhou, Brother Zhou, released a Windows handheld: the Anbernic Win600. Not only was it in stock, it was the cheapest thing from a legitimate manufacturer on the market… Most importantly, before launch they advertised it as: made in cooperation with Valve, supports Steam OS, and they even showed some demo videos. So I got carried away. Couldn’t afford the expensive one, bought the cheap one.

Buying this thing was really a follow-up thought after buying that Venture Electronics DAC earlier — the over-ear looked like it had decent specs, and it was pretty cheap too. This purchase didn’t seem to require joining the Discord group, even though I’d already joined it. Shipping was as slow as ever, and the packaging was as bare-bones as ever when it arrived, but the headphones themselves were fine. I plugged them straight into the stock DAC they came with and ran through a few songs of different styles, and the tuning direction became pretty clear right away: Wide soundstage Mids pulled way up — the legendary “vocal” sound Very weak bass Put simply, they suit classical and symphonic music, and the more acoustic the instruments the better. For modern electronic styles they’re a poor fit — all those effect units turn harsh through these.

My brain short-circuited again and I want to spend money. I thought I was over this hobby, but no, I still want an external sound card for my laptop. My requirements were pretty clear: Built-in battery USB Type-C power Support for 4.4 balanced and 3.5 Sound that’s passable Portable As cheap as possible So, bored, I got a recommendation and found this brand called “Weiyi,” created by the guy they call “Brother Dao.” There I saw a portable DAC selling for just 299, the “Megatron,” officially nicknamed “Dawei.”