the wombatcave

Finished the BBL ("Bad Boy's Love", which is how it was teased from the demo version) true ending or at least some version thereof; I gather there's an epilogue section which I can't see until I finish clearing the remaining preliminary routes.

"Hatoful Boyfriend" is seriously some of the best entertainment I've had since playing 999. It doesn't have the puzzle-solving aspects, but it's easily just as good of a visual novel. The translator did a great job, overall-- I wish the text spacing was more graceful, and there are som stray proofreading errors here and there, but the prose flows smoothly and naturally in conveying the desired moods.

Yes, the initial premise of a pigeon dating sim sounds joyously ridiculous, and it does have multiple ROFL moments esp. in the preliminary character-introduction/dating routes. But once you've cleared enough of those to open up the BBL option-- and even during some of those intro routes-- the plot starts diving into apocalyptic conspiracies and interwoven tragic backstories. Over the weekend, when I hit one point in the game, I just sat there staring at the screen for several minutes, saying slowly to myself, "Oh. Oh. That means-- oh, no. Oh, crap." And not just out of concern for the human girl PC-- this game somehow makes you *care* about almost every one of the major bird characters by the time it gets through with you.

And now I still have to scoop up two more intro routes, including one for which I've already read a partial playthrough description which ends up in a double-suicide-by-cop scenario. ("Bad birds, bad birds, whacha gonna do-- whacha gonna do when they come for you...")

After reading some hilarious playthroughs, I decided to buy the English-patched version of the game, and I am getting very frustrated with the setup.

Hurdle #1: defusing my brower's flashblockers to allow download.

Hurdle #2: making sure I had all the auxiliary programs needed to play it.

Hurdle #3: looking up the proper file-permissions tweakage necessary for Mac OSX.

So now I've been able to get the game started, but the text display looks weird. There may be some option within the game to adjust the fonts and sizes, but it doesn't look like there's any kerning... and all of the command menus within the game are still in Japanese.

There are definitely options for tweaking the text speed and setting the text to auto-advance. (O--TO proves to be "auto-(advance)", not "sound"). At least I think I found the options for adjusting the music volume. There's also one to temporarily zap the text box and admire the artwork.

So far, I've quit and restarted about three times because I buggered the text speed and started fast-forwarding through the game, which is probably useful for the opening sections on replay but not on initial playthrough. Also, the save menu options are also in Japanese.

Why haven't I ever finished memorizing katakana why oh why D: