I sold my Google Nexus 9 after a year of service and imported the latest Google Pixel C as its replacement. The real reason is that I wasn’t all that satisfied with the Nexus 9 — screen too small… build quality so-so… maybe that’s it.

More than that, though, I think the Pixel C just appealed to me more.

The import went smoothly, but Google still shipped the keyboard and the tablet separately, which meant I had to deal with two forwarding orders. The keyboard ended up getting taxed too — though I don’t think it should have been, the forwarder probably declared it proactively. Since they had an actual tax receipt, I let it slide.

I’ve used the Google Pixel C for a fair amount of time now — not short, but not that long either. I’ve honestly written a lot of stuff on it: reports, plus every blog post from the last one of last year up to now. I figure that gives me the right to have an opinion on this thing.

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I’ve got way too many spare laptop drives lying around. Up to now I’d been buying every random enclosure under the sun, so I got to wondering: do they make external enclosures with two drive bays?

Turns out they do. One option costs way more and supports Thunderbolt and USB Type-C — clearly built for Mac people. The other is the one I bought: cheap, plain USB 3.0. The Taobao reviews looked decent enough, so I figured I’d take a chance and see for myself.

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My ThinkPad X230, in service for at least two years now, has been acting up lately. First the screen bezel took a hit and a chunk of it cracked clean off. Then the left button under the TrackPoint started failing intermittently. On top of that the stock SSHD already has bad sectors — file searches hang for ages. Nothing fatal, just a pile of small problems that need fixing.

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When I got the X250, there was one letdown: supposedly the thing maxed out at 8 GB of RAM.

But then things turned around. In April a BIOS update landed that added support for a single 16 GB stick. The only problem was that RAM was expensive as hell.

Prices have come down now, but Taobao is out of stock everywhere. There are some cheap ~600 RMB single 16 GB DDR4 sticks floating around, but the X250 can’t use them — it’s DDR3 only.

Good thing overseas shopping exists. US Amazon had a decent deal, so I grabbed a single 16 GB Micron DDR3 stick. Global shipping isn’t actually that fast, for the record.

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Never thought I’d have anything worth bragging about, though honestly this probably just proves the guy is beyond saving.

So at the end of the year I figured I’d count how many visual novels I’d played over the past twelve months. Big mistake — 80 titles.

Sure, if you merge the split-release games the number drops a bit.

Frankly, I don’t like visual novels. I feel like I’ve said this more than once. The reason I play them is that I hate half-finished anime adaptations, hate the brain-dead plots of light novels, hate the endless circular serialization of light novel and manga stories. The only place I can find something that satisfies my love of the Japanese aesthetic while also cleanly and quickly showing me a story’s ending is the visual novel. I’ve rarely seen a visual novel end with “wait for the next volume.” Put bluntly: in a game, the protagonist is going to bang a girl, rather than wobble indecisively among an ever-growing harem of heroines.

I hate being called a “landmine reviewer,” and I hate it when people respond to my impressions by telling me they like big dicks and big tits and that if I’m playing an adult game anyway I should stop acting all high and mighty. But somehow I still ended up playing this many. Someone said, you’ve played so many games, you could at least recommend a few, right?

Thinking back on my gaming history, genuinely excellent games — ones you could call 面白い — are really few and far between. Most suffer from slapdash art and nonsensical stories. Recommending a few better ones serves a dual purpose: spreading the gospel, and saving people from wasted detours. There’s meaning in that, I think. I’ve already eaten shit. Sure, I’d enjoy watching others fall into the cesspit and laugh at their misfortune, but what I’d enjoy even more is watching the ugly bastards who know I called it shit still charge in and eat it anyway.

So let’s begin. No particular order, just whatever comes to mind.

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I’ve dabbled in a fair number of Chinese-made visual novels, and most of them honestly aren’t great—heavy on the imitation, with that forced Japanese flavor. I can’t read Japanese, but I still play the originals in my head every day. To me, a Chinese-made visual novel ought to have more of its own local elements; it’s not like it can’t survive without copying the Japanese formula. After all, Chinese RPGs proved that much ages ago. With most of those chuuni-as-hell, Japan-aping Chinese visual novels, I usually just read the blurb and hit Pass.

Setting quality aside for a second—if you’re going to imitate the Japanese stuff that hard, why would I even bother playing yours? I’d just play the actual Japanese version. Right?

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Back in school I liked to show off when writing essays, always trying to pull off some big twist — start off plain and then suddenly swerve at the end to surprise the reader.

But the teacher never gave me the chance in regular assignments. Every topic was something like “A Meaningful Day,” “A Meaningful Event,” “The Wall Clock at Home” — all required to be positive and wholesome. I couldn’t write about helping an old lady cross the street and then having her suddenly leer, drop her pants, and reveal she was actually an old man with a huge dick all along. Nor could I end an essay about the clock at home by turning it into a vibrator. Then one day, an exam gave us a topic essay that let me go wild: how to express the hypocrisy between people.

Just as I was excitedly plotting out a story about a righteous-seeming hypocrite with a big twist at the end revealing he’s actually a vile, cunning bastard, I ran into a problem:

I ran out of grid paper!

With less than half a page left, my plot was only just getting started…

The exam paper didn’t exactly have extra space to write either. After weighing it for a while, I started compressing the ending — compress, compress, compress — until it was crammed into a few sentences and just ended. The final piece read as utterly baffling: a guy who’d been proper and serious the whole time suddenly turned into a piece of shit, with exactly one line of explanation in between…

The teacher looked at me with a mocking eye and consoled me, telling me not to be so presumptuous writing this kind of boring stuff next time, and to stick with argumentative essays which are more reliable.

Sure, her words were very tactful and encouraging, but that look was clearly the look you give someone who just failed spectacularly at showing off.

Anyway, years later I don’t have to worry about length limits anymore. But I never imagined I’d get to experience that same look and attitude from the teacher again.

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Play enough visual novels and you end up talking about plot, and when it comes to scenario structure there are basically two directions.

One is the suspenseful gamble-until-you-die route: cook up a big news event, a big twist, build a seriously killer mystery up front, then line up some killer developments and a grand reveal. The other is plain old school-life romance, maybe with a little friction over life, studies, and club activities, resolved on the way to the ending.

Personally I like the first one, but not everyone can pull off big news, and running faster than everyone else doesn’t mean you can pull it off either. Mystery and grand-reveal stories demand serious scenario chops: pacing, laying the groundwork for the mystery, arranging the different routes—all of it is interlinked, and one wrong step leads to every step after it being wrong. Plenty of people have wiped out on the first type, drawing a tiger and ending up with a dog, or the story is passable but the writing can’t carry it, so the mystery lands with no effect and you can’t even follow it. Good settings and good stories, wasted.

The second type is way easier—at least you won’t cause a disaster just by writing it. It can produce great stories too, provided you’re a gag writer who can dig the fun out of everyday life; Yukikoi Melt and The Shepherd of the Great Library are among the better examples of the latter. And it’s actually hard to completely ruin the second type. Compared to walking the tightrope of a mystery, slice-of-life is safer. Daily-life games don’t even ask much of the plot anymore—a lot of people are really in it for the character designs and the CV performances.

It’s not just games; anime mostly runs on the same rhythm. Some live on plot, some live on slice-of-life, and you can see how hard the former is to get right. Kantai Collection went for a grand reveal and got called “feeding you shit”; Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? went slice-of-life moe and got called “healing.” The difference in their settings isn’t even that big—they just picked different scenario routes.

Of course, for some studios, botching a grand-reveal scenario naturally leads to learning from the burn and retreating to slice-of-life for safety. Like Parasol’s QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH!.

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Onii-chan Teacher Himitsu no Jugyou o Kibou Shimasu! is the latest entry in the Onii-chan Migite no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu! lineage, so it’s still one brother and a pile of sisters. As another siscon title, though, the cast is completely different — at best you could call it a spiritual sequel…

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Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o is PullTop’s year-end release. I haven’t really touched this company’s games before—well, that’s not quite true, I’ve played stuff from their sub-brands, like Natsuiro Recipe, or Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort… They did have that one pretty famous game, If My Heart Had Wings (この大空に、翼を広げて), but I never got around to playing it.

The selling point from the start was that it’s made by the same team behind If My Heart Had Wings, themed around looking up at the night sky and stargazing. Unlike the earlier plane-building thing, this one’s set in winter around Christmas, which lines up nicely with a December release.

Ah—actually I wrote a long intro but realized I’d accidentally turned it into erotica again, so let’s just get to the impressions. Keep going like this and I’ll never find my way back from the path of filth.

Put simply: as a visual novel, this game is pretty good. But as a game about “stargazing,” it falls a bit short.

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