For some time since I joined the forum (it will be a year ago at the end of next month), I’ve noticed people talking about Yo-Jin-Bo. What a great game it was, lamenting that they couldn’t find it anymore, and so on. Well, I have good news for those of you who don’t get the J-List newsletter: it is back in a download version. Generally, I prefer to get my bishoujo games on disc, but given how much I’ve heard people here praise this game, I may make an exception. You can find the game here.
Excellent news :D. For the record, I think that this is (so far) the best commercial translation/localisation of a VN [far from the best game though] as well as being the best comedy currently available in English translation.
Yes, I only occasionally check the j-list blog, but happened to do so tonight and was browsing through the list of releases and went “Buh? Yay!” and promptly updated many of my websites, forums, etc to point to it.
… I’m still too busy to PLAY it at the moment, but I’m at least promoting it to a bunch of people!
I actually discovered that it was coming out before the announcement. I first saw it the other day when I was browsing through J-List’s game section and pondering about which titles looked good (that I don’t already have). I probably would have mentioned it on here earlier, but I thought it might be better to wait just in case it showing up was a mistake (i.e. not supposed to be available for purchase yet).
Although I don’t have an interest in this title, this does make me curious if they’ll be releasing other titles not under their banner(that we currently know of) for download as well. Such as Ever 17.
One can only hope that is the case. Given how many good things I’ve heard about Ever17 here, I would probably make an exception for it as well. Of course, if it was released, it could lead to me trying to track down the other games in the series…
I’d marry Jin if I was girl. Jin is the kind of guy you don’t need a stable for. 
Wow, that’s surprising considering how bad other Hirameki translations were. They were usually riddled with typos (though the English was usually fine).
You better get Ever17 if it’s available again. I consider it by far the best game translated to English, both officially and unofficially. I have 2 copies of the English PC game (since one copy was only $15) and the Japanese DC, PS2, and soon PSP versions. (Hey, I’m not that crazy. The DC and PS2 versions were dirt cheap and I wanted the extras in the PSP version.)
And I wonder if JAST is doing license rescues of Hirameki’s games. If so, they really should put some effort and port some of the DVD games to PC, where they belong.
I learned about this through the I Whine About Games blog. Since I’m a “shoujo FTW!!” fanboy, I’m glad that it’s no longer necessary to sift through auctions to find Yo-Jin-Bo.
Starting from 2006, Hirameki’s text quality was actually top-notch - better than other galge localization shops (Media Blasters, G-Collections, JAST USA, Himeya Soft, MangaGamer), I’d say.
It’s unfortunate that no one cared about those lost few PC releases. Nevertheless, translation did become their greatest strength, to a degree that other publishers have yet to match.
I’d heard stories that when Peter picked up the remains of hirameki’s stuff something like this might have been a part of it.
Yes, a dl version of Ever17 would be a wonderful addition – I think my on hand of that title is more than 2, plus I made sure quite a few friends got copies as well. Thumbs up as well if the PC versions of Hourglass of Summer or an uncut version of Tea Society could come out too. Tea Society was indeed edited by Hirameki on the release here (loli issues) but most of the other stuff for which the ‘censor’ claim was made was incorrect in that it was the japan all ages versions (many of which were PS2 versions ported elsewhere) that we got.
Plus, there were a handful of the DVD games that just never got a US release and they were supposedly sitting on SOMETHING significant – I remember some threads here that had alluded to aquaplus possibilities although other boards had hinted it might be Never7 or Remember11 (from the same series as Ever17).
Piece of Wonder was a better game than it was given credit for being. It certainly was a better mix of b-game and trpg than Pretty Soldier Wars, especially from the story side of things. Solid VA talent, which was the case of almost all the games Hirameki brought over. Ever17s lineup for example includes both Yu Asakawa and Hisayo Mochizuki. I was more than a little disappointed with Animamundi, but that was another title that suffered from actual edits on Hirameki’s part.
I’ve never finished Animamundi, not to a single ending. I just couldn’t get into any of the characters enough to feel compelled to keep going. The underlying story was interesting, but the specific characters and the way they went about things annoyed me. So it was constantly put at the bottom of a priority list of things I had to do, and delayed and delayed until practically forgotten. Like Snow Sakura, it sits around waiting for me to be bored enough to try again. (Although the reasons for Snow Sakura are very different, and I did at least get one ending there.)
… I got further in Animamundi than I did in Hourglass of Summer, though. I completely gave up on that one because of the format struggles, I don’t think I’ll ever get anywhere with that.
Ever17 is my favorite VN (just after YMK) so I give it a “Le nuage’s gold quality label”.
The game takes 4 CD, so i hope you’ll have a lot of free space if it’s possible to download it someday.
I had wanted to go after the animamundi story where you went around decapitating young girls in order to find a body to match with your loli-goth little sis’ head which somehow was still alive. That story was shown in ads for the game but I never found the proper course to open it. All I was heading down was one of several BL-lite paths before I too finally gave up.
Given that current plans for the next desktop I’m building (which has been put on hold because of buying a laptop) include four 1.5TB hard drives in a RAID 6 configuration for data storage, it shouldn’t be a problem. (For those of you who know what I’m talking about, yes, I know what I’m doing is overkill for a home PC. What can I say, I’m paranoid about losing data.) Besides, I’d most assuredly back it up to a hard copy on DVD.
Do you really have 3 TB of personal data you need backed up? Just use an external online backup for the most important things. Most media can be easily replaced. Upload photos to Flickr or something. Also, some of the custom parity software is better for data protection. There are some programs that don’t stripe the data, so a loss of a hard drive greater than the amount of parity won’t result in the loss of the whole array. For example, if you have 4 hard drives and 1 of those is a parity drive, a loss of 2 drives would only lose the data on the drives that failed, not all 4 as in RAID 5 or 6 (well, RAID 6 requires the loss of 3 drives).
Also, if you REALLY need that much storage, it’d probably be better to build a server to store them on since the server would be less susceptible to viruses or other stupid things from daily usage. And if you buy hard drives, you should stagger your purchases or buy different brands. Hard drives have a higher chance of failing together if they’re from the same batch (or if there’s a freak firmware bug that disables the drives, like those Seagates).
But then again, we’ve never agreed on what’s required computer-wise. I tend to shoot for a cheap solution that’s suitable for the task while everything you do seems overkill to me. 
Actually, when you factor in all the data I have now (in fact, I’ve had to do something I rarely do, that being delete things to make room), plus the data I’ll accumulate over the estimated life of the machine (factoring in the ever increasing size of programs, especially computer games), 3TB is a small amount of space.
In my opinion, in terms of your philosophy over how much space is needed for data, you don’t seem to plan ahead for the ever increasing size of programs as time progresses. Then again, I don’t know how much of a PC gamer you are (that is, PC games other than eroge), which makes a big difference in terms of how much space you need. Another factor that greatly influences differences between space requirements is that I like to dabble in modifications of the games I have, both by other people and ones I make myself. For the ones I make myself, I sometimes need to install more software than people who just play the game. I think you’re starting to get the idea. Out of the 193,220,243,456 bytes used on my main data hard drive right now, 147,201,638,400 bytes of it is used for games and utilities for modding (and that is just the stuff that is sorted in to folders, it doesn’t include the loose archives of game stuff in the main directory). I’m not even going to go in to the huge amount of stuff I have that I wish I had room to have installed right now.
As for the idea of a server, I’ll probably eventually make one, especially for backup purposes. However a vast majority of the data I have on my computer needs to be on the hard drives.
Now I’ll grant you that I probably go over board when it come to graphics hardware and CPUs. In terms of data storage (aside from my slight paranoia over losing data), I think I’m well within reason.
I am an avid PC gamer, and my gaming computer’s hard drive is only 400 GB. I have over 100 GB left on it even though I have many games (and mods) installed. Even if you consider the average PC game to be 6 GB (which is high even for newer ones, older ones are usually <2 GB), you can install 500 games on 3 TB. Do you really need to have 500 games installed at once? I’d hate to see your start menu.
For personal use, I don’t see someone filling 3 TB of space (legally) in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. before the system is way obsolete) unless you want to make a backup image of all your physical media. For games, the installed files aren’t really worth much anyways. You can easily install them again from disks. All you need to do is use something to selectively backup your saves (which is why I wish all games saved in My Documents\My Games, so one copy would handle everything).
I’m with Reikon on this, If i wanted to go that hardcore I’d dip into Linux server clusters, not only would you have a hell of a lot more than 12 terrabytes, but you would have insane processing power to spare:p