-Flashback-

Actually I said the exact opposite. I successfully logged in after I cleared the cookies

Couldn't login until I cleared the cookies from this website. Anyone else experiencing this? I tried several times so I then I tried clearing the cookies and it worked...

Possibly one of the trickiest translations to get it to work properly. It envolves several steps and I took a good 4 hours just to get it to work the first time I was trying to play this game. I will make a step-by-step guide on how the process should be done. Getting Welcome To Pia Carrot (PC-FX) to work: 1) Get the .iso file and the emulator. For PC-FX emulators I suggest Magic Engine-FX or Mednafen. Mednafen is a freeware while Magic Engine-FX is a demo which you can play the games for 5 minutes and then the game freezes. You can buy the full version on their website with no limitations: http://www.magicengi...mefx-test16.zipAfter that, replace the original .exe file that came with the one you just downloaded. I tried it on the other versions and it didn't work, that's why I recommended getting the 1.1.1 version earlier on. 4) About the ISO: First, make sure it's not corrupted. The first time I got the Pia Carrot iso, it did not work when I tried loading it on the emulator. After I tried downloading it from a different source, it worked just fine. Make sure there is a .cue file and a .bin fine inside the zipped file you downloaded. 5) Get the English patch. You can download it here: http://www.romhacking.net/translations/1372/ 6) After you got the English patch, extract the files and put in one the same folder as the unzipped .cue and .bin files and the emulator. Make sure you have everything in the same folder, otherwise it will not work! Note: Do not open the patch file! Your game will not work if you do it and the .bin and .cue files will be ruined! Having the patch in the same folder as the game .bin and .cue files is enough to have it in English! Makes sense, right? 7) After you got the patch in the same folder as the .bin and .cue file, mount the .cue file into a virtual drive. Note: DO NOT MOUNT THE .BIN FILE. it will not work. Open your emulator and try booting the CD. It should work now! Enjoy Welcome To Pia Carrot!

oh, so lucky I had some pages cached!

oh come onnnnnn, after all that trouble I went through to post the Pia Carrot translation guide! I'm moderately pissed off by this.

I actually played this one! Around the summer of 2013. I don't have many memories of it, which is not a good thing. That means it didn't have much memorable about it.Here's what I do remember: - The plot is rather bland and straightforward; - The 4 girls who you can get in the end have 4 very different personalities but all very cliche; - Appealing character design and okay graphics for its time (I remember the game came out around 2002?); - Had some funny moments that made up for the thin plot it had which is a good thing; - I remember seeing several spelling and sentence mistakes showing lack of attention on their work (for example they wrote "go to to mall" instead of "going to the mall"). That's very unprofessional. It makes it seem they never even bother to test the game and read the dialogues first before releasing it to the public. In other words, they didn't give a crap whether or not it had typos - The voices audio was too low compared to the background music! I could barely hear what they were saying. The audio was in Japanese but it's still a different feeling to hear the characters while you pass the text (I never bothered to see if there's an option to cancel the background music though). - The endings were the so-called "happy endings". Quite predictable. Not too bad. Overall: I'd say it's average. Nothing memorable like I said at the beginning but not terrible either. There seems to be a lot of hate for Harukoi Otome so that's the one I'll try next!

Oh man, that cracked me up! ahahah! Does that game even have an official licence? I'm pretty sure Gordon wouldn't give it a green light! Also, notice how none of the reviews gave it a score below 4/10. First reviews of bad games will be posted shortly (few days time)!

you think so? I feel the opposite! After many consecutive hours of playing complete crap, when I play even an average game would be the best thing after sliced bread. I would be like "wowwwww, this is so totally awesome". Maybe I will learn the value the good things more after this, aha! EDIT: guys, I mentioned the Shuffle! game because there used to be a lot of hype before the English version came out! really! There was a fan-translation project and everyone was like super-duper impatient for it to get released.... and in fact, the release of the English patch was postponed for such a long time that the official European release in English actually came out first, ahahahah! I was so disappointed by the long wait and then it turned out to be the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen.

You read it right. We've all played memorable Visual Novel games that won't forget, the ones that were just great in the aspects we value the most, being it storyline, creativity, character design, innovation, humor, great endings.... but there are also the ones which are also memorable... in a negative way. And that's I want to look into this time. I am looking to see what the community values the most and despises the most about VNs, what gets people going and what ruins it.... And what the hell, it looks like fun. The funny thing is, the most popular VNs out there, the ones that are full of positive reviews are usually not that great to me, even some like Shuffle! that I simply couldn't even get to the end of it because of how tedious, predictable and just silly all around the plot was. It must have been the first VN I ever cried to... I was bored to tears! On the other hand, the dark ones that nobody's ever heard, qutie unknown are usually the ones I like best. Yeah, I'm the hipster of VNs, lol. So, give me your worst! If I get an interesting suggestion and play it, I would probably post a review somewhere about it. Just one note: No gay/lesbian/sadistic please.

Cheers guys, this is a great thread! especially for someone who is mostly a casual who likes to play VNs that are not too long and got that old classic charm. Just what I've been looking for! Here in China there are tons of VN apps but sadly my Chinese is not good enough to understand them and only a very limited number are released in English. Maybe I'll make a thread about Chinese VNs sometime. I found the app "Burn you far with me" that the OP posted really funny. Never saw this mix of working out, cute 2D anime girls on my phone screen before. This thread must be updated regularly!

I guess I'm just not that much of an emotional person. It never happened to me! This doesn't just happen for VNs, it's also the same for movies and anime series. meh. I tend not to take fantasies too seriously.

I live in China (Zhejiang province) at the moment but I am originally from Portugal (half Hungarian and half Portuguese). You can see I am a very international individual. Also, the data about the visitors origins is probably based on IP and so it's inaccurate. For example, I use a proxy to get around blocked sites because of the Chinese firewall and my IP would show I am in a different location.

Le me. (July 2014)

Well, I haven't played any from the 80s. The ones that I played are mostly from the mid or late 1990s. From that time, I liked Pia Carrot for the PC-FX ( it's in Japanese but there's an English patch out there), Season of the Sakura, One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e. All of those are in English. I wouldn't really consider Snatcher a visual novel... it's a great game yes, but I'd say interactive movie is a more appropriate label. That might be difficult... I have some PC-88 games that already have some (although very simple) elements of gameplay. Some are from as early as the mid-1980s. So I would say they have some elements of gameplay since day one, but they got better and more elaborate and complex as years went by.

You have to tell me which ones The fastest I could find was some Russian video website. I'm guessing it has to do with the geographical proximity to China.

You should try one at least. Yes, they are usually shorter and more simple. You know back in the day, the hard discs had limited storage capacity so they couldn't really do a lot. But that doesn't make them bad either. It's the same thing with anime. I mean, there are people out there who prefer to watch short anime series with 13-26 episodes while others would watch a series with 300+ episodes. I agree with the explosion of the genre after around 2002, there was an increase mostly of quantity rather than quality.... The plots are getting crazier and darker and the characters sometimes don't have as much appeal anymore.

You know what's ever more bollocks? Here in China all the western video websites where the anime series are hosted are either painfully slow or blocked. Even with a VPN they load painfully slow. So I got 2 choices: Either I download the whole series to my hard disc and take up a lot of space or I can always watch them in Chinese sites with Chinese dubs or subs from Japanese... which is not recommended if your Chinese level is "hello, how are you, fine, thank you". So enjoy what you have :>

Ah yes, I am familiar with the history of eroge. However, I opened this thread to know the opinions of others about it too. I have quite a few visual novels for the PC-88 that I got in a collection from an abbandonware site a few years ago which included some doujins too. Unsurprisingly, they're all in Japanese but I could tell with the help of my brother who can speak Japanese what they are about. The graphics were very anime-like. The storylines were very simple and straightforward. In most of the games, you just had to choose the actions to take from a bunch of options you were presented with, such as "look", "talk" or "touch" and you can easily get to the eroge cutscenes. Others were less straightforward. I remember one where you were the manager of a cute blue haired anime girl and your goal was to make her a successful popstar. No eroge on that one. It was an interesting concept. On the 16-bit era, I've heard (but never played) Doukyusei. It came out in 1992 and it is considered the grandfather of the date sim games. I'm guessing it was the first of its kind to get popular at least. It envolved love points and knowing what every girl likes, what times they show up, etc. The graphics are okay. 16-bit visuals are alright and good enough to make decent looking colourful characters. Take a look: Doukyusei 2 actually came out for the Super Nintendo (SNES) in 1997 so I am very curious to know whether or not it has some hentai scenes because if you remember back then, Nintendo had some of the most strict rules about the content of violence and sexuality in the games published for their systems. I wish someone would make a fan translation of Doukyusei 2 to English but I don't have much hope. Another date sim that came out for the SNES was Tokimeki Memorial. I never played that one either but I heard that it's a classic of this genre. It seems to have better graphics than Doukyusei. For the computer (MS-DOS), there are some classics that were released in English such as Three Sisters Story, True Love and Season of the Sakura, all released in the mid-1990s. I played all of these, and I can say, that the storylines of all of them were simple but pretty good overall. They also had enough interaction you get to choose who you can do on dates with, events during the year and who to give gifts which is something I personally value. It's also nice to look back at the 1990s culture and the way things were back then. I feel like some of the most recent visual novels released in the last 5-10 years got a lot more complex storylines, much longer gameplay (which are not bad things, but I personally prefer simplicity) but something negative that I noticed is that they have less interaction with the player: They focused more on the graphics and visuals than on interaction. IT's no wonder some people on this forum say "read visual novels" instead of "playing visual novels". Everytime I see "read" instead of "play", I cringe. What Ecliped posted is actually a pretty good way to summarize the changes in visuals that happened recently in a lot of VN games. (note that I said a lot, not all of them)

Heyyy piss off guys. Getting things to work here in Antarctica has to be difficult too. With all the regional lock shiz and stuff. Like, yeah. Of course you first world kiddos have no idea what that is.

How do you analyse the evolution of visual novels from their earliest releases in the late 1980s/early 1990s until now? How did plots evolve? How did characters and storylines evolve? How did the character personalities evolve as the industry started producing works that are more and more complex? Is the quality of the novels overall improving over the years? Or do you think that the earlier visual novels had a unique charm that today's visual novels just don't have? Discuss that here. I would love to hear your thoughts.

In this thread you can share any story of just about anything in your life that is complete nonsense or ticks you off. I start: You know what's bollocks? Regional lock. It's always the same thing. Every... single... time! What's the point of doing this? stoooooooop! ;_; The hardware and software developers throw us the bulls!%3 excuse that they use region lock on DVDs, Blurays, video game consoles and other electronic devices of this kind because they say that "some products are not meant to audiences outside the region they were released in." That's a crock of s#%t Today's audiences have very different and specific tastes. They look for specific products, they want to see everything as much costumised as possible and they are getting more and more demanding about this as years go by. If I live in China, why couldn't I import a video game from Japan if I liked it for example? I understand that some companies try to protect their products by cutting the imports from cheaper countries and avoid losing money that way (for example iphones are cheaper here in China than in Europe), but giving us the cultural taste excuse is just low. Everytime I try to get any electronic device from my country to work here in China, it just won't. It's frustrating. Try living in a region with a different system and you will see what I mean.

Reading untranslated novels is like punching someone in the dark. I have to admit I did try once. The kanjis are important, you will see a lot in the novels and they don't come with furiganas.

I got this game to work on the pc-fx around 2 years ago and I had an English patch. Do you still need help?

PC because the library and possibilities are much bigger than any other gaming platforms. You can pretty much play all kinds of games, from any age, including from other platforms thanks to the emulators and it has several freeware worth trying unlike the gaming consoles. But if I had to vote for a platform other than the PC, I would vote for the good old Super Nintendo (SNES). yeah, call me a grandpa all you want :> but it has an awesome and varied library and some of the best games known to date. In my opinion, 2D gaming reached its peak in the 16-bit era.