Made this on a whim because I had leftover ingredients to use up.

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More isn’t really a studio that specializes in galge, honestly. It looks more like…

“A bunch of music people who make galge on the side so they have an excuse to put out albums.”

The company name is MME — MORE MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. Which is my whole point: their center of gravity is clearly music. Making galge, a cheap kind of game dev, probably isn’t the day job for them. More like a hobby?

Hobby or not, they’ve put out a decent number of games, and they don’t look like they’re doing a “one and done” bit. If anything they keep branching out, spawning more and more sub-brands…

Sometimes I wonder if registering a new brand in Japan is just free. Why else does every eroge company change its skin every other year…

This time the new More brand is called Niko, and their game is Golden Hour (ゴールデンアワー).

I mean, More already had two brands running fine — More for pure-love stuff, Pure More for nukige — and now there’s a pile of sub-labels: Chelseasoft, which looks like it’s going for moege, DOLCE, which put out the little flower of Casablanca, and now Niko. God knows what style this one is supposed to be.

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I based this on a recipe from Xiachufang. This was only my second time baking bread, so I don’t have much experience. The first loaf I baked wasn’t this one — it turned out badly, more like a flatbread…

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After I upgraded Firefox to version 55, I found that the old option:

gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled workaround

no longer existed. Without that option I can’t display emoji correctly in Firefox.

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Wagamama High Spec (ワガママハイスペック) did pretty well for itself last year. It even got a short-form anime, and a way better one than that princess stray cat got — word is the latter ran out of money entirely. And when a game sells, a sequel is inevitable.

So Madsoft sat on it for nearly a year and put out Wagamama High Spec OC.

At first I assumed it was a sequel, and Madsoft’s own copy sort of implies that. In this “sequel,” the class rep who wasn’t a route before, April 1st Kanade, the protagonist’s editor-in-charge Takatsukasa Chitose, and his homeroom teacher Iwakuma Yukari all get promoted to heroines — while the original cast stays available too.

No trial version. Straight to the full release.

Which made me wonder — is this just a fandisk? Then I saw the price. Nearly 10,000 yen. You can’t be that brazen.

Booted it up. Holy shit. It’s a fandisk.

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I was using a ThinkPad X250 before this, and I upgraded it bit by bit over time, but I had a few complaints about that laptop:

1. Cooling was terrible. Hook it up to a dock and it hits 90°C in no time, and breaking 100°C was routine. I tried modding it, but it was basically useless.
2. Performance was lacking. With the dock running dual 1080p displays, it just couldn’t handle it—open YouTube and performance explodes.
3. Build quality was so-so. The ThinkPad X250 was a step back from the X230 in terms of build. It’s all fiberglass, even though every media outlet hypes it as carbon fiber. It’s not, and there’s no metal either. Fiberglass, plainly put… is plastic.

Overall, the laptop was okay at first, but later it started to annoy me, so I planned to upgrade after two years. This time I looked at the X270, but found nothing new, and it seems the ThinkPad series has given up on the X200 line. So my targets were the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Yoga.

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I used to wear a Xiaomi Mi Band on my right wrist. Honestly there’s nothing really wrong with it, but I bought it at launch, my mom wore it for a year, then I wore it for another year, and then the strap snapped and the charger went missing… I figured I’d just buy a replacement part, only to find the official store had discontinued every accessory for it, and the prices on Taobao were somehow higher than a brand-new one cost back then. Forget it, I got my money’s worth, so I gave up.

But wearing something on my right wrist had become a habit, so I thought I’d get something else to wear. What though? Maybe something that actually looks good? That’s how I came across the Misfit Ray.

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Looking back on some of my old Gal impressions, I always want to laugh bitterly.

The old me thought a game had to have a good story to be good. And what counts as a good story? It has to have a big twist, but not too absurd a twist — explode the plot while staying coherent, plant a pile of foreshadowing and pick every bit of it back up. Best if it also works in a little life wisdom and the truth of the world. That’s a good game.

Now I see that what I was after was just the “good” games within the story-driven category. But like how a cinema shows more than Hollywood blockbusters, visual novels aren’t only the story-driven kind.

I’ve also thought that if a game can make its characters cute enough, that’s fine too — I just always felt that kind of game was a tier below the story-driven ones. Because those are the big titles, and this is just selling moe character writing, tea-party-slice-of-life level. Like holding up Death Note against Yuru Yuri, or a AAA title against Minecraft — most people figure the two aren’t even on the same level.

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I remember the summer of 2003, right after I graduated middle school. Around August 15th, the rain started in Zhengzhou and just wouldn’t let up.

After that, summer left and never came back. My closest friends from middle school scattered too, and we lost touch. The next time we met was Chinese New Year.

That was the first time I felt like I was “abandoning the past and opening up a new world,” but I wasn’t all that keen on opening that new world. I still liked my old friends better.

August is over again this year, which means summer’s over. Maybe there’ll be a late-summer heat wave, but every autumn rain brings a chill with it.

I didn’t do much in August either — just worked. Hard to believe my job actually has busy periods. Probably the whole country’s been fucking around lately.

I originally wanted to stir things up and then keep pushing, but in the end I chose to give up on fixing things. My health isn’t great, so I figured I might as well rest.

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Obviously I’m a handheld nut, and my love for handhelds outweighs any other kind of console gaming. In some ways I even use the Surface Pro 4 as a handheld, even though it’s not remotely “handheld” sized.

A while back I got my hands on the GPD Pocket. It’s great in every way except that gaming on it is a hassle — compared to the GPD Win it has no built-in gamepad buttons, and the default keyboard is just painful.

So pairing it with an 8BitDo portable gamepad does the trick.

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