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Merry Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve! As always, it's time to add Santa hats to our avatars—by which I mean I add Santa hats to your avatars, because apparently you people are too lazy to do it yourselves. In case you don't remember how this works: you select one of the numbered Santa hats below and I'll put it on your avatar. Optionally, you can also ask for one of the flourishes at the bottom. If you don't select a number, I'll choose one for you, which you may regret. Rules (I'm copying and pasting these rules from last year, because I can rewrite the same thing with new prosaic flourish only so many times): Make sure your current avatar hasn't already been Santified last year or a year before that. You can make a special request or ask for a Santa hat you found somewhere on the Interwebs, but it might be difficult to implement on your avatar. (Translation: I might be too lazy to accommodate your request.) Some avatars won't look very good with a Santa hat, either because the Santa hat is cut off from view or for other reasons. I probably won't be able to do animated avatars. If you get a Santa hat from me, I'll save your original avatar somewhere and @ you after Christmas to remind you that it's time to de-Santify your avatar. For every day beyond liturgical Christmas in which your Santa hat is still on your avatar, I will be mildly enraged.

She looks displeased with the result. You character's headspace (or lack thereof) warrants an overhang, so you get spiky hat. You're giving me very little real estate to work with, Dorg.

Worse than Akagoei, in terms of being incomplete. Akagoei at least pretended to have actual endings, as short and unsatisfying as they were until the FD came out. If they had released a sequel within six months, I might have been willing to forgive them, but even then, I still would have had major complaints. This game's potential was wasted entirely because the producers didn't rein in Kinugasa's love of never finishing anything. The non-true heroine paths are pathetically short and the true heroine's path essentially shuts down in the middle of things, where the action would have begun to get going in any decent game. Worse, there is no guarantee of a sequel, despite them having set up to easily graft one on, because Kinugasa's tendency to never finish anything extends to everything he does.

How's Cafe・LittleWish sound to you? https://vndb.org/v2087 Too many things to list from Littlewitch & RUNE Soft. https://vndb.org/p97 https://vndb.org/p247 (If anyone can find a working download of Musume Shimai & Ricotte, please link. https://vndb.org/v426 https://vndb.org/v4464) Do 3D games from Teatime, Like LoveDeath, Maiden☆Breeder 2, & Yuki Hotaru, count? https://vndb.org/p342 https://vndb.org/v4793 https://vndb.org/v6069 https://vndb.org/v1737 Watashi ga Suki nara "Suki" tte Itte! has one https://vndb.org/v17376 This one might be a bit dark. Good luck finding a Hime Ichiya download link that functions. https://vndb.org/v5593 How about a Lump of Sugar game, Nursery Rhyme? https://vndb.org/p81 https://vndb.org/v310 Parody of Kodomo no Jikan. https://vndb.org/v875 Does a Yuki Nagato lookalike in a Haruhi Suzumiya H-clone count? https://vndb.org/v5330 Nanatsuiro★Drops (I couldn't figure out if the OP was called Koisuru Flow Light or Koisuru Fluorite. Turns out it's neither. It's Koisuru★Flight, according to this page.) https://vndb.org/v193 Yotsunoha & Osananajimi to no Kurashikata. https://vndb.org/v566 https://vndb.org/v1372 Wanko to Kurasou & Dote up a cat (a.k.a., Neko Kawaigari!) https://vndb.org/v812 https://vndb.org/v1320 ALcot games here. https://vndb.org/p129 Clover Day's, Clover Heart's, Triptych, & Fair Child. https://vndb.org/v13325 https://vndb.org/v176 https://vndb.org/v537 https://vndb.org/v325 Bishoujo & Shoujo Ramune. https://vndb.org/v2713 https://vndb.org/v16511 {BTW, how do I change my profile's background image?}

In action stories, often the story's quality is determined by the quality of the antagonist as much as the quality of the main characters. The antagonist acts and the main characters react, creating the drama that pulls at our heart strings and excites us. The more complex the story, the more likely the need for a strong antagonist will exist, at least in modern fiction. I decided to put down my top ten and my reasons for making them my top ten here. These are my top ten, but there isn't a particular order to them, save for the top five being the absolute best. 1- Shannon Wordsworth- 2- Mercurius- 3- Kefka- Final Fantasy VI's main antagonist. He is frequently listed as one of the craziest bad guys in all of gaming history, with good reason. He is the nihilistic result of experiments with granting humans magic, and as a result he gets the bright idea to destroy the world... and actually succeeds. His psychotic laughter (in 16 bit sound) is familiar to anyone who played the game, and his psycho clown character traumatized an entire generation of gamers into thinking clowns are inherently evil. 4- Christopher Valzeride- The heroic antagonist of Silverio Vendetta. 5- Reinhardt Lohengrin- Legend of the Galactic Heroes- While he can also be considered the protagonist of the massive space opera, he is also an ongoing antagonist. Reinhardt is an ambitious young man whose meteoric rise in the militaristic and expansionistic Galactic Empire are driven by his twin desires to wrench his sister away from her position as the incompetent emperor's mistress and conquer the galaxy. A fierce man with a warrior's demeanor that usually only serves to fuel his strategic and tactical victories, he honors both enemies and allies who show ability and contempt for those who rise above their level of competency. As a ruler, he is ruthlessly fair with those of ability who are capable of loyalty and brutally ruthless with those who are incapable of it. As an enemy, he is one of the most frightening (non-magical) men in any anime, game, or VN I've ever seen. 6- 7- Mikado Ruri- 9- 10-

What a beautiful image! I would make a new version with this higher-quality image now, but somehow I already can't find where I got that Santa hat. So I simply ask that you reposition your current avatar without the black line. Look harder, nerd.

Your avatar is of such low image quality that I had to add noise to the hat to match it. I hope you're happy.

No problemo! I could only find one hat that matches the art style anyway, so both characters are getting it.

This is the latest game by ASa Project, a company that rose up during the Golden Age of VNs, making a name for themselves as solid comedy charage makers. To this day, their style hasn't changed significantly, but in some ways that gives them an advantage over modern charage, which tend to be less comedy-focused (actually, most newer charage makers don't seem to know how to make the readers laugh anymore). This game is focused on the harem of a young man named Hirotaka. The situation is, structure-wise, a classic 'all the girls already love the protagonist' setting, a style that you don't see as often anymore. Instead of the girls getting along and being friendly (the more common modern iteration of this setup), is almost 90% the girls fighting over Hiro. Moreover, the girls are so over the top I couldn't stop laughing throughout the common route, to the point where my voice got hoarse by the end of the day. There are four main heroines and two sub-heroines with one bad ending extra heroine and two male-oriented 'normal endings'. The main heroines are: The returning idiot osananajimi who throws everything into chaos with her return to town, Mari; the narcissistic and more than a little perverted (too self-absorbed to realize she is a pervert) Shione; the yandere-ish little sister, Nonoka; and the idol who constantly goes back and forth between being a straightforward deredere heroine and deliberately acting cute, Renna. The sub-heroines include the popular idol Yuuna and the class president Ikuyo. Something important to note about this VN is that the constant byplay with the side-characters contributes a great deal to the comedy and bringing the heroines to life, another technique that requires skill that most modern charage writers lack. The fact that Hiro is something of a forgetful airhead (who happens to be handsome and subconsciously seduces heroines without even realizes he's doing it) as well as being a bit crazy also helps, since it generally means that things never really ease up or calm down. Yuuna Yes, I did a sub-heroine first... but most people who get through the common route will understand why. There are just too many reasons to pick Yuuna for a first heroine, even aside from her being an interesting character. Though I call Yuuna a sub-heroine, she is actually a strong enough heroine with a long enough path to be called a main heroine. Her path is mostly straight-up ichaicha and dealing with the main heroines insane levels of jealousy (seriously), as well as planning for the future. It is generally heart-warming while also keeping the comedic atmosphere of the common route. I liked that the path had a 'years later' epilogue. Renna I had to play Renna's path after Yuuna's, because I wanted a good comparison between a sub-heroine path and a related main heroine path. Renna is Yuuna's understudy and younger partner in the idol group Gloria Snow. Renna is a pretty straightforward character who uses a 'cute' persona to seduce the protagonist. In all honesty, since Yuuna was my favorite from the beginning, I kind of wanted this to be a 3P path, but ASa seems to be ignoring the trend toward such paths, lol. Like Yuuna's path, this one felt like an extension of the common route, with perhaps a bit more in the way of drama (short drama that doesn't really add anything to the experience) and about the same amount of ichaicha. So, for those who just want the ichaicha comedy, it is roughly equivalent to Yuuna's path in those terms. Shione I'm going to be blunt... this is the path that kind of made me stop playing the game. It wasn't that it wasn't funny... but as a heroine, Shione's clumsy attempts to take control of the relationship made me nearly go crazy. This path spent way too much time dancing around instead of getting to the point, and as a result, I felt like it took a lot of fun out of the more humorous moments. Conclusion For fans of old-style comedy harems where the girls are constantly at each other's throats, this is actually a great VN. If you want romance, it isn't. I say this because, except for Yuuna's path, the romance is the weakest part of the game. The heroines are mostly psycho (makes for great humor and catfights, but not so much for romance), so, while I spent a great deal of time laughing, I didn't get much out of the romance. I did like that the girls never did stop trying to reclaim Hiro, even after he chose one of them... the way girls always seem to give up entirely in other VNs always struck me as odd.

As I mentioned before, I started playing Zero Escape - 999 -. It's been really entertaining so far, I'm liking it! First Impressions Positives: I liked the characters — it was refreshing to see more "adult" characters and everyone was really different haha the flowchart ("flow") — one more excellent addition to the steam port the protagonist — he is normal, that's all I ask for. Negatives: the minigames — this is kind of subjective but, personally, I was stuck for way too long on them and got frustrated a lot of times... the differences between the "novel" and "ADV" mode — I like the option of choice, but I'd like to have novel mode's writing with the ADV's design. It's just less polluted. Oh, well... NOT HAVING A LOAD OPTION ON THE MENU — C'mon! That's basic! ENDING 3 ENDING 5 Current theory (after discussing it with my pals) ----- This week, I'm playing ending 6 and 4 (in that order)! I'll finish it the week after!