The ODROID-GO Advance is the follow-up to that ODROID-GO handheld. Better performance, plus a stick and shoulder buttons. From what I gathered reading various foreign reviews, the performance is supposedly monstrous and it has a huge future ahead of it… So I bought one. It actually arrived a while ago; I just never had time to put it together, and only recently dug it out and got to work. Recording it here.

Long, long ago, seven people committed a grave sin and were struck by divine punishment. They came to a small island said to be a place where one could speak with the gods, and there they prayed devoutly to the heavens, begging for forgiveness, begging for their own salvation. Because their hearts were so devout, the gods above were moved by them, and using their divine power they pardoned the sins of these seven, erasing the crimes they had committed, and the people who had died because of them came back to life. And because the history of their past crimes had been altered, the seven forgot that they had ever begged the heavens for anything, and went on living happily. But someone nearby had been watching what these seven did, and that peeping observer wrote down the ritual by which the seven had pleaded with the gods. This ritual later came to be called “Toki no Shirabe.” Gather seven people, and the ritual could be performed—and you would receive the grace of the gods above, have any wish you desired granted, even change history itself. In time the ritual was abused by wicked people, causing consequences beyond repair and giving rise to tragedy. To keep such tragedy from ever happening again, the shrine maidens of the island’s shrine hid away the items needed to perform the ritual, and did everything they could to let the “legend of the seven” fade, wanting this so-called ritual to vanish from the world. Many years later, people carrying “seven sins” of their own came to this place. By sheer chance, they were asked to activate a mysterious ritual called “Karumaruka.” Word had it that performing this ritual would erase one’s own sins. But at the moment the ritual began, they did not choose to erase their sins for their own sake, or even to change history—they chose to stop the ritual forever, and that wish too was accepted by the gods. For they had realized that no matter the past or the future, blindly using the power of the gods to change things was wrong, and that what matters should be held in your own hands. After that, there was no more “Karumaruka,” and no more “Toki no Shirabe.” The island closest to the gods returned to its quiet. And so the story of Karumaruka * Circle came to an end.

The place was getting too dusty — the bed and the sofa both had a layer of it — so my wife said we should buy a “mite remover”. I looked into it and, well, a “mite remover” is just a vacuum cleaner with a UV lamp bolted on… So we might as well buy an actual vacuum. A vacuum isn’t only good for handheld work; you can swap the head and use it on the floor too. That’s how I ended up with a Xiaomi vacuum. It happened to be on sale — 12 interest-free installments, a 50-yuan coupon, and a free Xiaomi desk lamp thrown in. So I bought it.

The 9-nine- series, delayed for God knows how long, has finally reached its fourth volume, bringing us the last routeable heroine, Yuuki Noa, and finally prying open the various secrets buried in the game’s setting. The title is Yukiiro Yukihana Yukinoato.

I vaguely recall that the last time I played a game with Kantoku art was years ago, and I ragged on it pretty hard. Honestly, looking back now… Still deserves a good ragging. Why? Because Kantoku always works with CUBE, and the heroines in CUBE games inexplicably turn into Easy Girls—like, they confess to the protagonist and before you know it they’re spreading their legs. Yeah yeah, I know it’s an eroge, but even for an eroge you can’t keep doing it so bluntly. Nobody watches porn for the plot anymore? Well, a little story goes a long way—it makes it tastier. So after all these years, a new game with Kantoku art drops, and the title alone is high-tier: Kamisama no You na Kimi e I honestly don’t know how to translate it. I feel like in Japanese this kind of sentence could mean “to you, who is like a god,” but a direct translation would be “to you like a god.” The English subtitle is To you like goddess, so I guess it’s the first meaning. But none of that matters. What matters is the scenario lineup—they brought in three guys who specialize in writing toilet paper… oh wait, I mean light novels. Looks like they decided to go all-in on the story. But how did it actually turn out?

This isn’t my first 8BitDo controller, actually, but the one I bought before somehow went missing, so all I’ve got left is one with a bad feel. This time, in order to play some “poorly optimized garbage Unity game,” I had to buy a new 8BitDo controller. Times have changed, though—this thing has evolved. It’s got built-in rumble now, and supposedly a gyroscope too. I’ve used it for about two weeks, so let me share my impressions.

Hato, the writer who got famous off the Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart series, went quiet for a while and then came back — this time on Steam. A game called Marco & the Galaxy Dragon (マルコと銀河竜) showed up, and it had that “we’re not hurting for cash” look about it, plus the standard day-one Simplified Chinese, so it read like a cash grab from every angle. By that point my opinion of Hato had already soured pretty badly, because with Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 2 he’d started going way too sappy and way too self-indulgent. You couldn’t even tell what the main plot was about anymore, and the jokes were getting harder and harder to follow. My personal take is that he’d gone full “mentally ill genius” like certain other famous scenario writers — call it “too artsy to understand” if you’re being polite, “can’t write a straight sentence” if you’re not. I still wasn’t happy with the game, but Mayuge flat-out refused to gift it to me, so I had to go get it and play it myself. Pretty simple reason: “How am I supposed to dunk on it if I don’t play it?” Anyway, after playing this “scam game,” I feel like I underestimated Hato. Sure, I think he’s a bit unhinged now, but I forgot that he’s got a real gift for doing big things on a shoestring — something he’d already made obvious with the ultra-low-budget galge-to-anime adaptation he spearheaded. Put simply, Marco & the Galaxy Dragon is exactly that kind of “big things on a shoestring” game.

The first time I heard that SMEE — the “matchmaking game maker” — was doing a harem game, I was shocked. SMEE has always emphasized “pure love,” and not just that, but a kind of “realistic romance.” I’ve praised them for doing that well more than once. And then, before they’d even done it well a few times, they got cocky. What’s weirder is that they basically swapped identities with their parent company HOOKSOFT. In other words, HOOKSOFT, which usually pulls settings out of its ass, started doing pure love. And SMEE, which usually does pure love, started doing settings. Sure, both SMEE and HOOKSOFT have done settings plenty of times, with all sorts of gimmicky elements — “gradual conquest,” “a friend of a friend,” “corporate drone matchmaking,” “conquering and being conquered” — but none of that shit ever mattered. What sticks with you is always the bickering between the protagonist and the heroines. So I think the core competitive strength of SMEE, and of the now-SMEE-fied HOOKSOFT, has become “couple bickering skits.” Nobody cares what story you’re telling, nobody expects any wild developments, nobody even thinks you’ll throw in a “memory flashback.” The core is always that “lovers’ quarrel,” and that’s exactly what everyone wants to see. Actually, don’t underestimate “lovers’ quarrels” — not many people can do them well, which is one of the reasons I keep praising SMEE. If I were the president of SMEE, I’d lock in the protagonist and heroine names. Copy-pasting the same template of “unpopular protagonist suddenly hits his popular phase” every time is exhausting. Just use one name, like Wu Laoji or whatever, and put the protagonist’s name in every game title: Wu Laoji’s Country Adventure, Wu Laoji’s Matchmaking Odyssey, Wu Laoji and Miss Wang’s Space Adventure, Wu Laoji and the King of Another World… Keep that up and forget sales — SMEE could become famous overnight, get a theatrical film, and build a national IP. But that pattern feels familiar… Oh right, speaking of “another world,” this time SMEE actually did go with an “isekai” setting. The title is pretty blunt too: Harem Kingdom. The protagonist suddenly gets transported to another world, becomes its king, and gets a harem. To this day I still want to complain that this setting is just so not-SMEE!

A week ago, that well-known Linux kernel developer Mawei-kun gifted me this game. Oshi no Love yori Koi no Love (推しのラブより恋のラブ). Honestly I wanted Tryment, that reheated cash-grab, but Mawei-kun sent me this instead and hoped I’d walk through the gates of yuri. The game isn’t long, and after finishing it I fell into deep thought. Because this game made me think back on a lot of things… A lot of memories I’d almost forgotten…

Once again, my hands got itchy. This one was for use at the office, so obviously I couldn’t buy anything too nice, and the budget couldn’t be too high either. So I found this on Taobao. It claims to be an RHA CL750, some kind of “factory surplus stock,” but the price is obviously suspicious — only 150 yuan.