Nandemonai

The game doesn't suck. I can't say it's a masterpiece or anything, but for what it is, I'm enjoying it. (Haven't beaten it yet because, um, Cold Steel 2 is out next week, and I need to finish replaying Cold Steel 1.) And if FrontWing has someone who hangs around the FuwaNovel forum, they're already doing something right. That's more of a presence than Jast USA has!

That does seem to be the logical conclusion, for now anyway. I believe that was the exact same justification that Kindred Spirits used to get a 100% uncensored release. However, decisions in this area tend to be ... inconsistent. Two data points does not a general policy make. Taken literally, "sex without vaginas is okay" might appear to imply that a version of (say) Imopara that cut out all the sex scenes where you can see the lady parts, would be approved. I am, uh, highly skeptical any such thing would be approved. In other words, it might be okay for characters in your game to enjoy a slice of pizza now and then in a story about something else. But that doesn't mean that pizza delivery simulators are okay now, as long as they don't show the sausage holders. (Granted, Imopara maybe not the best choice; maybe a third of the game would be left. That's not my point

Oh please. You actually believe people when they tell you that? That's like people saying they're only reading the magazine for the articles ...

Interesting. Your list points to Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~ Regular Edition which has a really nice summary. I checked Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~ First Press Limited Edition, which has a one-line summary that gives about as much info as Dark Souls patch notes Thanks!

To actually try to get back on topic for a minute (someone, uh, seem to have derailed it somehow ... ::whistles innocently::) I'm a little confused by all the different versions. Now, in VNDB, I see three separate versions of Dies Irae listed. The original one seems to be Dies Irae Also Sprach Zarathustra, and then it was followed by Acta est Fabula in 2009 and Amantes amentes for PSP in 2012. After doing some gravedigging in the old Jast USA forum archives I see that on original release, Dies Irae was controversial because a lot of stuff that had been announced wasn't actually in the game, and that Light said they'd release updates. Would I be correct in guessing that Acta est Fabula added all that stuff? So then what was added in Amantes amentes? Is there a quick overview online somewhere about all the different versions?

Perhaps. I know when Jast tried, years ago, to get into BL, they released the 2 games they initially announced, then completely dropped the genre. And I know MG's more recent move into BL has already spawned follow-ups. I also note that it's been years since MangaGamer released anything from Score or Liquid. So it's too early to tell about Propeller; we'll know for sure, I guess, if no new Propeller games are ever released. But like Fred the Barber said, MG announced at least 2 chuuni games this year (they might have announcements at Anime Atlanta), so I'm still skeptical that Tokyo Babel was a complete failure. But yes. I seem to have put entirely too much faith in SteamSpy's numbers. Silly me.

I haven't checked regularly enough to see that. Point taken.

Speculation means commenting on something in the absence of real information. No, SteamSpy is not speculation. It might (well, okay, does) provide crappy data, but crappy data is still data And yeah, okay, MangaGamer wishes that Gahkthun had been much more successful. But the game didn't bomb badly enough that they gave up. To me, that's the true measure of failure. Brooktown High was a failure.

SteamSpy is not speculation So yeah, Tokyo Babel hasn't sold anywhere near the handful of items up at the top. But those are abberations; Higurashi is famous, and Go Go Nippon was in the right place at the right time. But 2000-ish copies isn't nothing. And that's just Steam sales; SteamSpy has no visibility at all into MangaGamer's internal sales figures.

Are you guys really sure that Tokyo Babel did poorly? I've seen a few people tossing that around, but I'm not so sure. 2K copies seems to be the 'worth-it' point for longish VNs, at least if Koihime's voice licensing brouhaha is any guide. And not only is SteamSpy telling me Tokyo Babel sold more than 2K copies, it is also telling me it significantly outsold Gahkthun. And we know Gahkthun did well (or well enough) as MangaGamer just licensed another game from the series.

Okay, time for a status update. Ryechu has today started editing the translation. Programming seems to have stalled, as Mad Pierre doesn't seem to have been around since his last post in early July. Even if Mad Pierre is gone forever, my plan all along was a release on Asenheim regardless of the ultimate fate of any stand-alone version, so the project is still very much on.

Well, Mad Pierre hasn't been around in a few weeks, but he seems to be making good progress on porting the game to his new engine. I am also planning on making this available via Asenheim. But the raw translation needs to be edited first.

Indeed, you are quite right. When I see the borked behavior, and I go into Options I find that "Courier New" is for some reason the default font in my browser. When I change it to <default>, the problem goes away and everything appears to work perfectly. It also works fine with the Comic Sans option.

OK, there's some kind of bug where the game is putting a bunch of extra spaces into the text. It's linebreaking in a weird way, or ... something. Not sure what. The text format is wonky. @Scorp Check your PM, I'm sending you a link to the Google Drive with the TL in it. I added a screenshot. I'm not sure if the bug is in asenheim's emulation, or if it's in the original game.

Ah, yes. I seem to recall this now. I don't remember what it was about though. Let me pull up the site again real quick to check.

I don't believe this is accurate. There was some confusion over the voice acting; I seem to recall Mad Pierre was saying the voices weren't working for him, and I was saying they were working fine for me, so there must be some kind of bug somewhere. But I don't remember anybody saying anything about Japanese not working right in Asenheim.

Just a quick update - I just now noticed that my update to the main post got snarfed in the rollback. This project is not recruiting at this time. I have found everything that I need.

So, uh, how long until the correct backup is restored?

That's great, Scorp! But it needs to be edited first, I think.

It's been awhile since I looked at the original translation, but seems like you grabbed the text from it. My file reads very differently. Other than that it looks great

Seems like the list of nukige disappeared? I know there's games missing from this list now ...

It seems pretty straightforward to me. Their Kickstarters failed miserably, because these clowns have no clue what they're doing. But they don't want to give up, so this is plan B. That's probably why it's so slapdash, the company's running out of time and/or money. This is their Hail Mary plan to try to somehow get the game out without the budget they were counting on.

That jives with what Nargrakhan said in his efforts to get it to work. There were lots of bugs like that, and he had to tweak a lot of stuff. (What, exactly, I don't recall, I'd have to dig up the thread.) Upside down sprites, sprites in the wrong place, the graphics code just was really old and finnicky.

Well, I just tried, and the installer doesn't work on my Windows 7 machine. Years back, Nargrakhan (over at the Jast USA forum) wrote up his experience getting the remake running; it involved a VM, an installation of Japanese Win98, and then installation of some extra add-on crap that was like a quasi-official mod of the OS (because it wasn't until XP that localization became a module in the OS). And it still ran wonky. So given that, it seems to me that if we were to re-insert into the original engine, it would run on Asenheim and very few other places. (I believe you when you say it works for you, Scorp. But it didn't work for anyone else I know who's tried it on modern windows. Based off that track record, it will be very spotty at best.) Aside from that, there'll end up being some recoding anyway. I paid no attention to fitting my translation into text boxes, and I don't intend to. More text boxes will almost certainly have to be added to accomodate some of the lines. Almost every engine I know requires a scripting change when that happens, so insertion is likely to require coding anyway. I'm not opposed to putting it up on Asenheim. I actually think it's a good idea. But Asenheim is a website, and sooner or later the same thing will happen to it that happened to Geocities and the Anipike. Whether for legal reasons or not, I'm skeptical it'll be there 10, 20, 30 years from now (I mean, there's hardly any 20-year-old sites left , and the web itself isn't even 30 yet). A Mikan port should be much more future-proof. TL;DR : My first pick is getting this supported in Mikan. I am definitely also interested in Asenheim. But if Scorp would rather work on some other project that isn't also being released in another form, I will understand (there's only so many hackers to go around, after all) and Mikan is #1. Be warned, Mad Pierre, that this game is ancient and uses a really old engine. I know that the Vile guys found a ripper, but I also know that there were bugs in it that they fixed. I don't know if they ever released those fixes.