Playing games, the most important thing is to have fun. You can’t force every new game to be a masterpiece, and when a game leaves you feeling like you ate shit, well, that’s the dev team flexing, and nobody wants that to happen. Hey, I’ve got a title here that’s guaranteed to put you in a good mood after you finish it. Wanna take a look?

Puramai Wars (プラマイウォーズ) is Asa Project’s new release. The studio’s signature… I’ve covered it over here: messing around plus wild facial expressions. It looks chaotic on the surface, but it gives you a genuinely happy atmosphere. Plenty of you have probably played Renai 0 Kilometer and know the drill by now. It looks like nonsense on the surface, but the story’s actually got a bit of meat to it, and amid all the noise you can still feel each girl’s full-on feminine charm.

So the dev team probably figured that formula was popular and just went full copy-paste, putting out a brand-new game with roughly the same setup: this here Puramai Wars. As for what the name means, I honestly don’t know. “Puramai” should be Japanese, “wars” is war, and the main premise is a showdown between two families sharing one house. One side is the protagonist’s “good-conduct” family, the other is the “bad-conduct” family.

The official site’s blurb is literally “the story begins in the war between the good-conduct and bad-conduct families.”

I need to clarify something here: this so-called “war”… basically doesn’t exist in the game. It’s mostly pretty harmonious.

By essay-grading standards, this is off-topic.

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A while back, apt-get update started throwing something weird at me:

“The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: XXXXXXX”

My first thought was whether I’d gotten myself MITM’d or DNS-poisoned — the public key just up and vanished?

So I flushed the DNS cache and ran the update again. Same problem.

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This is a stupid problem. A genuinely stupid one.

It’s so stupid I’m saying it twice.

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As of right now, Ubuntu Linux still ships Empathy as its default IM client.

I won’t go into how bad that thing is, but at the very least it doesn’t even support proxies, so Pidgin is the only way to get things working properly.

Pidgin on Unity already supports integration with the indicator-message in the top-right corner, but there’s one important feature it hasn’t integrated: showing the unread message count on the dock icon, the way Empathy does.

In fact, someone made support for this a long time ago, it’s just that it’s only recently gotten on track. If you’re on Ubuntu 14.10 or later, you’ll find this plugin in your Pidgin install.

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KeySmart is a crowdfunding project from the evil empire of America. What it does is let you neatly organize your keyring using two steel plates as a module.

When I bought it, the official site had a 30% OFF discount, but there are a few things I need to tell anyone who comes after me:

1. It ships from the US by regular mail, which means it’ll probably take 20–30 days to arrive here. 2, When filling in the address for this thing, you absolutely must use pinyin rather than Chinese characters. If you write it in Chinese it won’t arrive—at least, there’s no precedent of anyone receiving it that way yet. 3, If too many of your keys have plastic heads, this thing probably isn’t for you. 4, For official accessories, I’d suggest buying just one clip; the rest are a scam. That USB drive—Kingston has a cheaper one on JD.

So what arrived was this envelope:

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Being into niche stuff makes you feel superior. Same goes for visual novels.

Which is why I’ve always figured that compared to TV anime—that cramped, length-constrained assembly line—visual novels have way more freedom in how they present a story, and they just do it better. Original anime has never been a big share of the pie anyway; most of it’s adapted from light novels, manga, or visual novels. So at least on originality of writing, visual novels ought to have a small edge over TV anime…

But there’s always an exception…

Never thought I’d see a visual novel pick the light-novel route…

And a knockoff light-novel route at that…

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The keyboard critics on Quora once debated a question:

Is visual novel literature?

Honestly, the question itself is a problem. Asking whether a game is literature is like asking whether “humans” are “perverts.” Sure, some humans are the type who can’t go a day without licking something, but there are also normal people like me who have zero interest in that stuff.

A visual novel is still a game. And since it’s a game, it has a story—most non-nukige visual novels just happen to emphasize story more. There might be some “literary” elements in there, but those elements alone don’t make it equal to literature.

So as a game genre with “literary elements,” plenty of visual novel titles try to break new ground in their plots. These days, if you don’t have foreshadowing and mind-blowing twists, people will call you boring. That’s why so many think only “torture,” “death,” “flying” and whatnot can be called a god-tier scenario, while they turn their noses up at slice-of-life.

On this point, I really like the 2007 Chinese college entrance exam essay prompt: “Unexpected yet reasonable.”

What it means is: no matter how your plot unfolds, no matter how wild it gets, no matter how huge the brain hole, as long as you can justify it and give people that “unexpected yet reasonable” feeling, your story is a success. Even everyday life, if written vividly and each character’s personality can achieve that “unexpected yet reasonable” quality, that’s also a success—at least the story itself keeps people in suspense, is easy to follow, and doesn’t feel too far-fetched.

To put it bluntly: no matter how you write it, at least have logic. That’s the basics.

Without logic, the whole story looks baffling—just like Haru no Chi Sotto Kitto Nanohana-biyori.

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I’d never heard of Blue Ever Blue (BEB for short) before. I just got curious and, well, itchy, saw they were running a demo listening program on Hi-PDA, and grabbed one to check out.

The model I got was the BEB X1001. The packaging feels cheap—inside there’s just a carrying case and the earbuds themselves, with spare silicone tips in the case.

Honestly, packaging doesn’t tell you much with earphones. I’ve seen far worse. What matters is the sound, so I plugged the BEB into a Sony D100 and started listening.

Two minutes later I put them down and shook my head.

How to put it—muddy, stuffy, boomy. Those are the three words I’d use for these. I’ve never bought into the whole earbud burn-in thing, but since these were demo units they probably wouldn’t be this bad out of the box, so I did what people say and plugged them into the D100 to burn in…

After nearly 48 hours, I listened again…

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I got curious about Hana no Aru Utsukushiki Uta for two reasons: the scenario writer, Kirituki, and the coloring.

Kirituki wrote Tasogare no Sinsemilla (you can call it The Cure for the Dusk or Dusk’s Weed, whatever you like), and the game’s coloring reminded me of [Clover Day’s] 1. Same artist as Tasogare no Sinsemilla, sure, but the coloring is way better than that older title—the girls come off cuter and fresher.

Honestly, I didn’t want to play this at first, and I haven’t played Tasogare no Sinsemilla either. Plenty of people hype it to the skies, and I figured a writer who’d produced something watchable at least wouldn’t sink to garbage, plus one glance at the art and I liked it a lot, so I played it.

If I had to sum the game up in one line: it’s more like a cup of gongfu tea carefully brewed by a soft-spoken girl. Mild on the tongue, it won’t hit you fast the way coffee or hard liquor does, but it won’t leave you feeling bad either. Sip it slowly and you’ll find something unique.

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The Fruit of Grisaia has sequels—two of them, actually: The Labyrinth of Grisaia and the finale, The Eden of Grisaia.

The Fruit of Grisaia already got a TV anime adaptation, and since the Labyrinth and Eden anime both premiere on the 12th of this month, skip this if you’re worried about spoilers.

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