Ever since Key got acquired by Tencent, their direction changed completely—they shifted to a weird… but also very modern approach. On one hand they ride the heat of old IPs to squeeze out the remaining value; on the other they push a series of small, quick, cheap titles, using fast iteration to boost overall sales. Take the new “Kinetic Novel” line, for example: no-choice visual novels focused on story and presentation for a more three-dimensional experience. Honestly, you can see the logic. Games—visual novels especially—are a one-time development cost with essentially zero cost to copy afterward. As long as you have enough titles and keep throwing sales, you’ll move some units, and you can even count on passive income later. For a traditional galgame company, that’s not a bad thing. So from last year to now we’ve seen Key pump out new title after new title, and this one is Rainbow City.

I bought a 9-yuan VR headset.

I bought a Cardboard a while back, but that was the first generation. And the first gen had plenty of rough edges—it didn’t fit big phones (even though my phone at the time was still a Sony Z1), and there were hardly any apps (aside from a few demos there was basically nothing to play). Then recently I stumbled on the fact that YouTube now has a proper 360° VR video channel, and that’s when it hit me: the second-gen version of that box from Google I/O was already dirt cheap on Taobao.

Cardboard is a little freebie Google handed out at its developer conference. With a handful of demo apps it gives you a fairly basic virtual reality experience — basic, but supposedly mind-blowing. Supposedly. I saw people’s reactions on various forums, and the crowd was unanimous: it blew their faces off, it was the shit, it was unbelievably awesome. So of course I got curious… no, really, curious. So I picked one up. Mine was 20 yuan on Taobao. You can also download the PDF template and DIY one out of cardboard yourself — the box is cheap, the convex lenses are the annoying part to find. When it arrived, the knockoff level turned out to be pretty high. Apart from the missing NFC, everything it should have is there.