but i still haven’t played the first one!!
I really should though =P I grabbed it on release day but still haven’t gotten to it…
That’s better news than the next new game Cyclet’s announced (I can only pray it has nothing to do with Mushitsukai/Extravaganza)
Corpse Maid 2, huh? I guess I’ll check that out.
It doesn’t. Just a random bug beastie title. I’d actually go with TinkerBell than Cyc if we’re looking for sex with insects…
Looking at the new Cyclet game, it looks like there is some guro content in it…though it’s still very tame in comparison to BCyc’s older stuff.
Random observation…
If the BCyc site isn’t updated by next month, it will be 1 full year since it saw activity. I believe Black is now a dead branch… like White, Rose, and the “vanilla” Cyc.
Seeing how it was rotting from within, that’s not really a bad thing…
So if B-Eye went bankrupt/out of business then could someone else make games using Black Cyc characters since the owner would be "dead’?
If it’s a doujin, sure. Outside of that: not without B-Eye’s permission. Even in a worst case scenario, someone would still hold the copyrights to all the Cyc titles, and that person is the owner… even if they don’t use them. You have to wait 95 years before those expire. 
Besides… I doubt anyone outside of Cyc (and their hardcore fans) would want to make anything using their characters. Matter of fact, BCyc is one of the few dark eroge studio of their popularity (at least in the 'ole days), that never got an OVA for their stuff. Okay, sure, maybe MinDeaD BlooD or Gore Screaming Show have too much story content and characters to make a decent 2 or 3 episode video… but Yami no Koe would fit perfectly… and it happens to be BCyc’s most loved series within the company ranks (given how many times it gets sequels). Even Mushitsukai would fit in a 3 episode OVA.
So if, saaaay, BLACK LILITH was to make an EXTRAVAGANZA-universe game…
You know, hypothetically speaking =P
My list of BCyc series that could make a 3 episode OVA. Generally speaking, your typical ero OVA is about 25 minutes long with at least two sex scenes that last about 5 minutes each. So that’s a minimum 10 minutes of sex, and maximum 15 minutes of plot. Generally speaking of course.
Yami no Koe - Any of them to be honest. They’re pretty much self contained, and short enough on the plot.
Mushitsukai - All things said and done, they could cover the core plot in about 30 minutes. Rest is just all sex.
Extravaganza - Oddly enough, I think this could work. Though it had forking in the plot, the main story in Extravaganza was pretty linear. Would have to focus on the two main girls though, to fit only 3 episodes.
Before Dawn Daybreak - Multiple endings, but the majority sucked. Just pick one and drop the garbage side characters.
Inunaki - Would easily fit 3 episodes without much cut content. Good end.
Gokuin no Sentou - Way too easily. One girl per episode. All bad ends.
These I think, would NEVER fit a mere 3 episodes:
MinDeaD BlooD - Too many characters, intertwining plots, and badass vampire combat. There’s also three credit endings, which BCyc has never admitted which is the “true” end.
Mugen Kairou - Too much plot. I don’t think 45 minutes is enough to tell everything.
Gore Screaming Show - No way. Part of the awesome in GSS, is seeing each girl’s route, then the true girl (which makes it all the more powerful). Can’t do that in 3 episodes alone.
Gun-Katana - Each route basically told the story from another faction’s prospective. There’s more than 3 factions…
Cthulhu - Like MDB, minus the badass vampire combat.
I’d disagree with Cthulhu (ignoring the fact that it sucked) as you could follow the true ending route in 3 episodes with maybe a nod or two at the other routes (of course you would have to pick between the Aozora and Yozora version), which didn’t contribute all that much to the overall story.
Hmm… now that I think about it, you are correct.
And yes… Cthulhu sucked. Although I think the “foundation” was pretty solid. I’ve the mind that BCyc rushed it out the gates before it was finished… like maybe 8 to 12 months too soon. That’s just me though…
I felt the same. Decent enough concept and we know the writer can do better, plus there’s substantial clues that a much meatier scenario was originally planned- although, really, if that was the case why didn’t Great Hunting fix it? It’s not unknown for fandiscs to expand on the original work’s scenarios and restore content that had to be left out because of scheduling or budgeting issues. I guess they just didn’t care that much…
Cthulhu is when everything went completely downhill for BCyc. They’ve never bounced back since then. The happenings in BCyc are really strange. After or during the development of Gun-Katana, there was that sudden exodus of people who worked for BCyc and/or did semi-exclusive work for them. Then we got the crappy YnK Zero and BDD. Then some of the people who left, came back, and we got the outstanding Mugen Kairou 2. Unfortunately that was just a fluke, and more shitty titles were released. Now Cyc has seemingly abandoned the Black branch and created new ones.
Whatever caused that first exodus, seriously injured the group. It’s my theory – and this is only a theory – that Cthulhu was supposed to be a major title after Gun-Katana, but then the exodus happened, and the project was put on a backburner. Mugen Kairou 2 was closer to completion, got out the doors first, and then what little of Cthulhu was complete was thrown together and released thereafter. If the exodus didn’t happen, perhaps Cthulhu, and by extension BCyc, would have been epic.
YnK Zero and BDD were just stop gaps to close the wound by those people leaving. It’s also very telling that Fairy Yui… errr… Karen, stopped working with BCyc. A lot of her early fans were drawn from the relationship. It was around Gun-Katana that BEye began to make changes to the sites. Perhaps it was a new management thing? I guess we’ll never know… 
I’m also disappointed with how Gokuin no Sentou turned out. It was another “good setting idea” that BCyc completely fucked up.
And it’s even at the point, where Banya Izumi has written a short EXTRAVAGANZA crossover for a non-Cyc brand.
You know… you mentioning this made me think that maybe the reason why some people returned to BCyc for awhile, was only to finish Mugen Kairou 2 and Cthulhu. Sorta how Keiji Inafune quit CAPCOM, but still offered to finish Megaman Legends 3 off the books, because he did so much work on it (i.e. loyalty to the game, not the company).
Another disappointment about that exodus… JAST once said the main reason why their BCyc deal failed, was because BCyc couldn’t code english text into the games. Really? How can the company that made the game, not be able to reprogram something that simple? Unless… the original programmers weren’t around anymore to do it. Damn whatever changes happened in B-Eye… they fucked everything up. :evil: 
To my knowledge, System-NNN was entirely programmed by Tinyan. Custom coding (mostly in GUN-KATANA) was also presumably all by Tinyan (the engine itself is not flexible enough for that)
If Tinyan left Cyc may not be able to do anything with the engine. They may not even have source code.
Yeah. It’s not a matter of how simple it is, but of how much their programmers know about the engine. If nobody works there who wrote the original engine, then it would be a lot harder to make the modificiations.
Telling is that Tinyan’s website doesn’t even link to Cyc at all. It links to the Monokurometal site, which alone is telling enough, I think. Shame that page isn’t archived by the internet archive- be nice to see what it looked like a few years ago.
I’d say Tinyan left when everyone else did and Cyc stayed with the engine- after all, they are familiar with it and it is free to use. However, while fan translators can do all the executable hacking they like to get halfwidth font support into games where it wasn’t before (I myself have done some of this- it can be easy, it can occasionally be quite hard) for Cyc this would likely be quite illegal =P
This is actually one thing I’d like to try sometime- recreating an eroge engine from scratch in order to localise a game. I’ve done game engine recreations before (Ultima IV) and I’ve created visual novel engines before (small project called INSENSATE that never really got off the ground, but the engine was finished!)
There are already a couple of freeware engines out there. Jast USA has also done this at least twice: Transfer Student was released after the total collapse of JAST (the Japanese JAST), and in order to release it, Peter had to hire people to write a new engine from scratch. (Which honestly was a waste; the game was pretty awful, and definitely not worth the expense and effort spent on it.) And now again with Downhill Night Blaze, because the developers’ offices were totalled by the earthquake, so external programmers had to be brought in to finish fixing it up.
In theory it shouldn’t be THAT hard to recreate most h-games in a different engine. Yeah, the scripts have code interspersed through them, but honestly? Mostly they’re just novels with some stage directions. It’s not a matter of it being difficult, but of it taking a lot of time (and thus being expensive). So when they say it didn’t happen because they couldn’t get English to work in the engine, what it really means is it would cost too much money to do that compared to how much they’d expect to make. If they thought the game was going to sell a million copies, well, that’d be quite different.
There are, but that still leaves you with the significant task of performing a complete conversion of the game’s scripting, assets, interface etc. over to the new engine which may be completely different. I mean, would you want to be the one to convert GUN-KATANA or an AliceSoft or Eushully game over to nscripter/ren’py? =P
I suspect recoding the engine from scratch would actually be easier in some cases, though it would definitely depend on the game.