Nestor's Cola

DJ Nestor is… Live. I play allllll the hits.

To be more precise, Ebola Cola’s very own Gonzo Radio is back on the air, which means I’ll be making your ears bleed with my eclectic choice in musics. From Touhous to rock, from anime to techno, from metal to bizarre, mystifying and off-color rap, I’ll play it all.

Listen Now

I’d like to answer some questions and perhaps identify and discard some questions and doubts and maybe some repressed childhood fears that may have cropped up in the past week.

I noticed some crazy shit happen to your blog some time back! Am I going to die?! Unfortunately, you’re not going to die. Shaun, the crazy admin that manages my webspace and owner of http://ebolacola.org/ (shameless plug) decided to merge my database with the databases of http://ebolacola.org/ (did it again, fuckers!) in order to smooth out a certain number of things and begin The Great Blogging Project.
Will ‘The Great Blogging Project‘ give me cancer? No, but it probably will give you AIDS. The Great Blogging Project is an idea that we can create a blogging site that is amusing, whimsical, and fun. Also, we want to give you AIDS. So we’ve opened up the doors. Grab a Gravatar, create an account on the site, and start blogging. We got tools and toys and fun shit to play with.
What was your reaction to Shaun The Admin moving shit around? I about shit down both legs. Shat BRIX. Enough to build a brownstone. All sorts of shit happened. There were lots of “YOU BROKE IT!” and “FUCK YOU! I HATE YOU!” and “OGOD WHAT HAPPENED?!” and “OH FUCK IT ARE BORKEN JK LOL”. Actually, joking aside he did a great job putting up with my panic.
When will your blog be cool again? When your mother hoovers my cock. We’re not talking like, a lick, a wink and a tickle, but serious down on her knees back-of-the-throat hoovering.
Can you give me AIDS? Of course! Click here for AIDS.
I really like Fujiwara Mokou. Me too.

No Name Losers (site down as of 4/9/2009) released a standalone install of ef – the first tale recently. This is somewhat irregular in the fan-translation community, so cue the shitstorm. Ethical standpoints aside, it’s certainly an interesting move. I don’t particularly care about those things; I am not going to throw my two cents in and comment about whether they were in the right or wrong. I am not a moral authority and I have no leg to stand on. What I’m doing at this point is the same thing I’ve done with every game up to this point: I’m going to play it, I’m going to write a review about it, and that’s going to be the beginning, middle, and end of my involvement.

As a preemptive strike I’ll say this now; I’ll delete any comment on the debate of right or wrong. This post will have a review of the game itself and nothing more.

Story: I’ll admit: I’ve been trying to play this since the 9th, and I can’t get into it. I can tell that the girls have substance, there’s more lurking beneath the surface, but right now, all I can think about is doing something else. I can’t play it. Part of it is I’ve taken a break from playing these games, the other part is that it’s just not particularly interesting to me.

Interface: Seems pretty intuitive. It is intuitive. moving around is easy enough. Saving, loading, autoread, etc are all one-click functions, easy to get to. there’s even a “Boss Button” (though why you’d play it at work where a boss could see you is something else entirely)

Patch/ Patching: Even though this was a standalone install, you need to install a font that comes prepackaged with the download. It also takes time to install. Mine took @ seven minutes or so.

I’ve been meaning to write a review on Fate Stay Night for a while, just never got around to it. Seeing as this is by far one of the best games I’ve played, i really should just get right on that, if you know what I mean.

Installation: Installation is a breeze in XP, provided you know what you’re doing. Indeed, if you know what you’re doing, you simply pop in the Fate Stay Night DVD (or CDs), run the installation, and then run the translation patch. if you don’t know what you’re doing, go to the Mirror Moon forums and ask. I’m sure they’ll help you out, because I won’t.

Patching: Patching is also easy. Download the patch from Mirror Moon, run the installer. That easy. If you’re feeling frisky, you can buy a copy of the Realta Nua version of the game, slap that into the computer and run the voice option when you patch to english. Your Fate Stay Night installation now has voices. Cool, huh? One small note: adding voice element dramatically increases the length of your patching process. I’ve seen it go for as long as four hours!

Game Interface: Man, I love this interface. you can get anywhere in the game within a few mouse clicks. It intuitively moves the cursor for you too, how awesome is that?

Extras: This game comes packed with extras. Music Player is pretty standard fare for these games, so there’s nothing new there. Again with the intuitive menus, you can browse through each arc’s CGs with a few mouse clicks. There’s also some RPG-style Character Sheets on the servants, as well as a weapon screen so you can take a look at all the weapons used in the game. You get a couple of little teaser movies, too. The only thing it doesn’t have is say, character themes for your Windows installation, or wallpapers, or whatnot, but you don’t need those, and if you did, you already know how to make them.

Story: (to come later)

“Relive three of the best Japanese love-sim games ever brought out for the English-speaking market, with the new JAST USA Memorial Collection. A compilation of three of the best-selling games from JAST USA on one CD-ROM, you get Three Sisters’ Story, Season of the Sakura and Runaway City, all for one great price. All three games have been totally redesigned with a great new game engine that provides many new extras for bishoujo gaming fans.
The totally new game engine support anti-aliased graphics, new background features, and more!”

What I’ve seen so far: Well, It installed easily on XP SP3 on a high end system with a 1920×1200 monitor. the menus are easy to pick from. I started with (of course) Three Sister’s Story. I had a copy of the game some years ago but couldn’t get it to run (my technical expertise being substantially less than it is now) and now with this reissue, the game of course runs fine. I found the menus to be annoyingly complex, but unrewarding- it’s hard to get immersed in (what sounds to be) a good story when you’re brought back to the menus, over and over again, forced to make the same asinine choices over and over and over… I haven’t uninstalled it yet, but at the same time I haven’t been inclined to play, those menus are daunting. We’ll see how it goes.

Review incoming:

I’ve updated my theme- I felt that the one I was originally using was too dark for my tastes. Of course, I’m just borrowing Korosu’s blog theme, but I’ll get around to customizing it …. eventually.

Also, I’ve got some older works I’m going to be importing. Look forward to it?

It’s also come to my attention that I’ve been getting hits about games. dunno if that’s good or not- but I’ll postpone a post about the latest game i’ve been playing and we’ll take it from there.

I’ve updated my “About” page.