Star Wars has been huge lately, so I got bored and bought this thing to throw in the car. It came from Amazon Japan as order-padding, alongside that pixel Mario…

Here’s what it looks like.

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Why’d I buy this thing?

Simple — the G602 just wasn’t doing it for me…

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Normally I couldn’t care less about made-up shopping holidays like Double Twelve or Double Eleven. Most of what I follow is electronics, and electronics prices are already transparent as hell, so these so-called shopping festivals rarely throw out anything tempting. Nothing worth buying, in other words.

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As a proud LASS hater, I’ve played basically every LASS (拉屎社, “Poop-sha”) game except the early Nanako series — 3Days, 11eyes, Shoujo Shin’iki, Mayoeru Futari, plus their fandiscs and all the different versions and so on and so forth.

Honestly, ever since Shoujo Shin’iki where LASS pulled a massive blunder and took a setting with real potential and turned it into a self-indulgent landmine of epic proportions, I’ve been thinking: when the hell is this studio going to go under?

So I waited, and waited, and then Mayoeru Futari got announced, delayed, delayed again, delayed some more. And in the end, after finishing it, it wasn’t the landmine I expected — just dumb and flavorless. The art was weak too: every girl’s tits bigger than the last, every gaze more seductive, every H-scene moaning louder than the last. Man, was I happy… I was practically quivering with joy, overflowing with arousal.

Ah, not because I have a thing for big tits — but because I finally saw it. This studio is done for.

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Boku wa Kimi dake o Mitsumeru I gaze at only you isn’t exactly a new game — strictly speaking, it’s a remake.

What’s a remake, you ask? Think of it like a TV drama or movie reboot. There’s actually a pretty solid reason for Innre to remake this one: the original came out in 2006, and both the art style and the production were pretty rough. Go look it up if you don’t believe me. This 2015 remake, on the other hand, is a completely different beast in terms of artwork, coloring, and music.

Same artist, sure, but you can really see how far they’ve come. The coloring even gives me a SAGA PLANETS vibe. They got Elements Garden for the music, Ayane for the OP, and the ED is sung by the heroine herself, Mishiro Mako — if you don’t know who that is, go look up Yonezawa Madoka. Most importantly, the original had no voice acting at all, while the remake naturally has full voicing.

At first I figured remakes were just a quick cash grab, but this one felt like too big a leap to be that. The devs said outright that this went well beyond a simple “visual upgrade” and that the story got a major overhaul too — no way it’s just milking the fanbase.

So I dived in. The setup was what pulled me: the protagonist gets hired to protect a heroine targeted by an assassination syndicate. That’s it. I was sick of boring school romance plots.

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The stock keycaps had gone shiny and were collecting grime, to the point where they were about to fall apart, so I picked up a cheaper set of PBT keycaps on Taobao for 140 yuan. Bonus: the PBT caps are translucent on their own.

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Japanese doujin games are, generally speaking, a dime a dozen. Huge variety, sure. But aside from the ones with no story that you just play for the gameplay, the plot-driven ones tend to be short, the art is mediocre, the music is whatever, the voice acting is amateur. The one thing they can usually win on is the story, because stories are cheap to make. Good artists, good voice actors, good composers? Those don’t come easy.

Put simply, most doujin game circles don’t have money. They can only afford small-scale stuff. If they actually had cash, they’d just found a proper company and sell real games instead of hovering in doujin limbo.

But there are exceptions. I’ve played some genuinely impressive doujin games. Even doujin visual novels can be loaded. Take Untō’s Hakoniwa no Gakuen, for instance.

First off, the character art for Hakoniwa no Gakuen is by Kuwabara Riko. That alone is enough to sell it. And on top of that, the voice cast is absurd: Hidaka Rina, Tokui Sora, Kakihara Tetsuya, Numakura Manami…

Everything’s in place. All it needs is a halfway decent script and this game could stand shoulder to shoulder with proper company releases. And yet… reality is cruel. The story ruins everything.

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Honestly, this is probably the dumbest mouse I’ve ever used.

Sure, Microsoft had good intentions when they designed it. It just doesn’t quite stick the landing.

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When I was on a blind date with a music teacher, she asked me one question:

“What was your youth like?”

I have to admit, there aren’t many questions in this world that leave me completely speechless, but this one definitely does.

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I tried enabling full hardware acceleration for YouTube on Linux a while back in this post. If you unfortunately did the same, upgrading to Firefox 43 today probably broke YouTube video loading for you.

First it’s this…

Then it’s this…

After digging around for a while I finally found the fix…

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