This is a bit awkward, and I hesitated for a long time over whether to bring it up.

But since I was going to write a Galgame impressions post today and don’t have the time, I’ll just use this story to fill the slot.

As a Sendai-obasan anti-fan, I spent a while grumbling about how “basically every heroine in every game has the same voice,” but she does have the talent, and I’d jerked off to her before, so when I heard she was crowdfunding a music album I figured I’d support it. After all, I wasn’t spending money on her—I just wanted to hear the songs.

The crowdfunding album thing was around 2019, ages ago. I backed it the moment it went live. Then COVID hit, and what was supposed to ship in 2020 got delayed, delayed, delayed all the way to the second half of 2021. And for at least half a year in there, Sendai-obasan said absolutely nothing about the crowdfunding. It felt like a straight-up scam.

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I decided to switch to the Pixel 6 Pro a long time ago, because the Pixel 4 XL was just too slow.

But this phone somehow sold way better than expected. Normally you’d get a Nexus/Pixel within the first week, but this one was out of stock forever. In the end, a guy who runs a proxy-buying service, “Watermelon Daigou,” generously helped me out, barely charging me any fee, and I got the Pixel 6 Pro 256GB white version at retail price.

It’s been a while since I got it, so let me talk about how it feels. I’ll skip the generic stuff and get straight to the real points.

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Early 2022 was a mess, so I never found the time to write anything. The biggest problem I have now is that there’s a ton of stuff in my head but no time to get it out — and we’re already almost a third of the way through 2022 and I still haven’t written up last year’s games. I originally felt kind of guilty about it, but then I realized it doesn’t really matter whether I write it or not. Most people don’t play these games anyway; they just like watching the drama. Still, I figure I owe myself some kind of accounting, so here it is. If it turns out useful to anyone, even better.

I played 31 games in 2021, a full 10 fewer than in 2020. Honestly, I don’t think it’s because I had less time — it’s that 2021’s games were just that bad, and quite a few were bad in a “very unique” way. With that in mind, after I cover the ones worth recommending, I’ll also roast some of the year’s hotter titles, so people stop asking me “why isn’t XXX on the list?”

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Houkago Cinderella seems to have a decent reputation, and as the game Hook put out after letting things simmer for over a year, I personally found it pretty fun. The systems are retro in a good way — you get after-school route choices, plus a pair of NPCs (the two stooges) doing fortune-telling for you, hinting at where you might run into which heroine.

The meat of the game is the small talk with heroines after school, and that’s done well too. Not really my thing, personally — after school I’d rather hit the net cafe with the guys, and dates with girls are a pure waste of time — but hey, some people love it. Which is why the game picked up a fair number of fans.

Going by the Hook playbook, once a title sells decently, a fan disc has to follow. These fan discs are usually pretty cynical efforts: no core gameplay from the original, just a few cheap CG sets and some lukewarm dialogue. At best it’s an “after story,” the quality of a free booklet bundled with the game. But Hook still puts it up for sale, harvesting the faithful, whoever it can catch, and it works every time — leaves me with nowhere to file a complaint.

Anyway, back to the game itself: Houkago Cinderella Mini Fan Disc Anata to Kaeru Saigo no Gekou Michi (放課後シンデレラ ミニファンディスク ～あなたと帰る最後の下校道～).

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I know who Matsuyama Takeshi is, because I read his novel Kimi Shinitamou Ryuuseigun. I’m still not sure whether that series is actually finished—it stopped at volume five, and I got stuck on volume three. The official line is that it’s complete.

The plot of that novel is pretty simple: the protagonist’s childhood friend dies, and he spends the entire book getting over it. One idea from that novel stood out to me as genuinely novel: the heroine isn’t actually a “Earthling” in the usual sense—she’s a “space-born,” born in space to a mother who gave birth to her up there. That’s the bit that stuck with me the most.

Honestly, I think that novel should have ended after volume one. The whole first volume is already overflowing with inspirational chicken soup, and the protagonist does manage to move past the heroine’s death. But then—surprise—the story pulls a sudden twist and reveals there might be a way to save her.

And that’s where I checked out. If I had to guess, the rest of the story involves the protagonist using some supernatural ability (time travel, space hopping, whatever) to bring the heroine back…

Lame. So lame.

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When Sonora first launched, I remember they were trying to do something closer to mainstream young-people vibes—the first game’s gacha whale theme, the second’s anime idol theme, that sort of thing. Those are the topics young people love and that are trendy right now. As a visual novel company, creating a new brand to pull in new users with that kind of move is completely normal.

Then the third game came along and the direction was already off—suddenly we’re talking about running an eroge shop, which is a super hardcore topic. And by this fourth game, they’ve completely let loose, heading straight into a field that eroge players know all too well but young people couldn’t care less about: eroge development.

Uchi wa Mou, Enki Dekinai (We Can’t Delay Any Longer)

The title itself reflects part of the current state of eroge development companies—thanks to COVID, staffing shortages, funding shortages, the declining industry taking another hit, development content getting delayed over and over, constant pushbacks. It’s basically the norm.

I could already imagine the game’s theme before it came out. Going by Sonora’s previous eroge shop game, it’d be all jokes about the daily work of an eroge production company, with cameos from the previous game’s shop and maybe some idol characters. There might be some tense work descriptions, but problems get resolved quickly, and it all ends in a happy ending…

And so this game… is pretty much exactly what I imagined.

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Back at the start of 2021, while I was playing visual novels, I couldn’t help but sigh:

“Everything coming out early this year is so mid. Guess only the big second-half releases can save this year’s reputation.”

So I waited for the second half, and at last the legendary “big release” showed up:

Sakuhin Kanojo no Ren’ai Koushiki (創作彼女の恋愛公式)

When this one was announced it was stacked with buffs: the artist behind “G-Senjou,” Nii Shuu’s go-to producer, a Campus scenario writer who supposedly understands love better than anyone and who’d kept Light alive for a whole year off a pile of small titles, plus the best support resources Akabesoft2 had to offer. Everything about it made this game the closer that had to finish the year off.

Then the trial version dropped. Honestly, the trial had its affected and janky bits, but overall I thought it had real merit. The big one: the secondary heroine, Kiriha, genuinely stood out. Earlier in the year I’d been snarking that she was a painter who’d also done debug work on the game, and then in the second half she turns around and becomes a heroine who spends the whole route PUA-ing the protagonist, and she’s the one who brings the story’s highlight moments.

So I was looking forward to release. End of the year came, the full version arrived. When I saw the walkthrough mention a story lock, something felt off. Add the OP title they revealed later, “Kiseki nante, iranai” (“I don’t need miracles”), and I had a bad feeling.

“Don’t tell me this game is about to pull some shit again.”

Unfortunately, my hunch was right. Again.

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Another exam came up in the first half of the year, so I’ve been in study mode again lately.

I’ve been wanting to try the “all-digital” paperless study thing — reading PDFs, books, and magazines on a tablet. I’d been using a Lenovo Chromebook Duet, but the stylus on that thing is godawful, and the screen aspect ratio isn’t 4:3 either, which feels like a waste.

Then I remembered the very chicken-rib Surface Pro 4 I had lying around. It’s got a 3:2 screen and a 12-inch size — just right for reading books and magazines.

Let’s look at the basic specs first:

CPU: Skylake i5-6300u

RAM: 4GB

Storage: 128GB NVMe SSD

As you can see, here in 2022 a Windows machine with 4GB of RAM is basically unusable. The CPU feels salvageable — ancient, sure, but it’s battle-tested 14nm at this point. The drive is too small and probably needs fixing too. And this thing has been used for who knows how many years, so the battery’s down to about 60% capacity and needs replacing.

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Zhou Ge (Maxzhou) is one of those figures in the “open-source handheld” scene who gets both love and hate.

The love is because he keeps cranking out new products, and the new products generally look pretty good.

The hate is because they’re all expensive, the performance gains are minimal, and people roast him for “harvesting the leeks.”

Honestly, though, while there’s profit in Zhou Ge’s machines, calling it leek-harvesting is a stretch. His machines just take open-source designs and pile on a lot of his own tweaks and optimizations—higher-quality metal shells, better-feeling conductive rubber pads and metal dome switches, and so on. You can argue this kind of handheld isn’t worth that much, but if you bought one and modded it yourself, the cost wouldn’t be much lower than buying straight from Zhou Ge. Think of it as buying a fully modded open-source handheld out of the box, saving you the hassle later.

From that angle, it’s really not that expensive.

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The reason for buying this is simple: to replace the old Surface Pro 4. That Surface Pro 4 would overheat badly the moment I opened DingTalk to teach a class, and on top of that the screen would start shaking. Turns out that screen shake is a known defect — “Zhang-chan” actually had to swap machines because of it, while I probably never hit it since I’d never thrown anything “heavy” at the tablet.

Anyway, the Surface Pro 4 just couldn’t keep up anymore, so I bought a Surface Pro 8.

Spec is i5 + 256GB + 16GB RAM, with the standard keyboard/pen/cover bundle. Double 12 sale, 9998 RMB for the lot. Not a bad price, eh.

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