天下制覇

Remember when Touhou was all the rage instead of VTubers?

Well, on the upside, Hero is Dead didn't go through with the pee joke. On the downside, they tried for it a second time (and also didn't go through with it) before just crying and officially joining the harem already. Really though, it was the godawful budget that was the final straw for me, though the continued screaming as humor didn't help. This was all wrapped up halfway through the episode, and then they took a bath and ended up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, because storyboarding is really hard, apparently.

Anyway, as some may have noticed, there were some issues on the frontend last week related to a PHP update. I'm going to have to dig into that, and I'll try to do so on probably Wednesday/Thursday of the next couple weeks, so expect possibly some more weirdness here as I try to figure that out and fix it. Updating and modernizing a ten year old site? Pfft. This is a blog. Ancient history. 

The other elephant in the room to deal with is the long-abandoned translation forum. I'm planning to mothball it since it's probably more of a security risk than anything else at this point. It'll be replaced with a static page linking to the translation patches currently there, and the dev workspaces that I uploaded for each of them a couple years back. I want to try to preserve the patch notes and possibly a couple other threads as well, but we'll see how difficult that is. I don't plan on taking anything there offline until June though, so if there's anything you want to grab, you've got a month.

Speaking of translation stuff, I do get the urge now and then, but there haven't really been any games that tickle my fantasy. It is a little depressing that the VN industry has been cannibalized by the gacha industry, which really puts a damper on… everything. Well, technology also advancing enough to open up development and distrubution to far more people has to also have been a wakeup call that people were willing to pay less money for a whooooole lot of crap, rather than $100+ for Generic VN #1483. Turns out your art and hackneyed writing wasn't actually worth the cost, and instead of adapting… Well, it's basically the same thing the LN industry is going through now too, and we're paying for it by being buried under a mountain of the same goddamned reincarnation cheat power trash. 

A lesson that the industry still hasn't seemed to learn, as Eushully's first and only announcement in around a year is that they're re-releasing an extraordinarily unpopular game from a decade ago for an extra physical edition and selling it at a whopping 20% off. Who is this for? What are you thinking? 20% off for a godawful 10 year old porn submarine sim!? Why are you not making a move to places like Steam where all the customers are and even your 10 year old games will look incredible against the deluge of godawful RPGMaker and Koitkatsu porn? Business acumen like this dominating the field makes me unsurprised by Softhouse Chara and Giga folding, though maybe it's preferable to all the stuff like To Heart and Grisaia living on as zombie gacha garbage.

Point I'm veering around is that even if I had the technical means and other support needed to translate things, there's very little that has come out the last four or five years, or is on the horizon. There are certainly games that I think deserve to have been translated. Nega0, Quantum Girlfriend, Twinkle Crusaders, Corona, Amatsukaze, Magic a Ride, Galaxy Angel 2, Bunny Black 3 I suppose just to finish the trilogy but god it is such a pointless filler of a game even for SHChara… hell, even Material Brave I feel is overly maligned. Maybe there's some amazing trove of indy games I've overlooked in recent times, in which case I'd love to hear about it. Time marches on, but it's depressing and demotivating more than anything.

That's all for this week. The translation side of the site will be iceboxed in probably about a month. Expect some downtime or blog weirdness likely on Wednesdays for a week or two while I figure out why PHP and WordPress are being pissy at each other.