I've completely remade my Elite Plus website. Go check it out!
The remake is mostly concerning graphics, as you may see, but there's also a major change in the whole "logic" behind the site: all the manual is now written in HTML pages, easily and directly accessible online. All those ugly pdfs which were once part of the website are now the "donwloadable version" of the manuals.
Anyhow all you see was made with my bare hands so don't be too critical with your judgement =)...
Starting from today I'm an official owner of a Google wave account. A friend of mine gave me an invitation, and since I had no idea of what exactly Google wave is I had no other option than accept and give it a try.
Well, to tell the truth I still do not exactly know what this whole thing is, what can I do with it and how i can do something with it. But it gave me a strange feeling so I'll write down my impressions.
First of all, as they openly say it is still a Beta: many options are still not accessible and "will be implemented later". The layout however looks nice, it's clean and essential and all the main services they discuss in the (many) "getting started" videos are already up and running.
The general feeling I got when I first accessed my account is that Google wave is like a social network, but without all those things that make me avoid social networks, and with many things I would like to see in a social network. It is like using a chat, an email, a forum, an organiser for events and data (pictures, maps and videos) and a shared document. All together in a single window. I think it's understandable that I'm a bit overwhelmed right now, but I had the vague sensation that this thing is actually very powerful and might turn quite useful in the near future.
My girlfriend graduated in Pharmacy from her hometown's college. 107/110, so stop by her blog and congratulate on her achievement =).
I'll not waste my time discussing the wide array of humiliating pranks we played on her after the graduation ceremony ended, but she actually seemed to enjoy that part too. My guess is that she was filled with adrenaline and too stressed to fully understand what we were doing her.
That's why I filmed the "best" parts...
I've just lost my desktop computer. Yesterday night it was working almost perfectly and I had just completed my first walkthrough with Kazoku Keikaku, and then everything abrubtly froze. This is no real surprise as it has behaved strangely for the last two - three weeks. For instance, by restarting itself every time I connected a USB device.
Now, if you're not an expert the standard option when something electronic freezes is to shut it down and then restart it, so I did it. To no avail, it barely managed to get me to Windows and then it froze again. Once, twice, thrice. I got tired and I shut it off for the last time.
Now I'm here with my seemingly - fully functional laptop. I doubt I'll buy a new desktop as I do not need exceptional performances for running Visual Novels or any other kind of software I may require. This little friend here has proven itself capable of managing almost everything I've met so far, therefore I'll give it the chance to become my "official" personal computer.
Oh, by the way: Kazoku Keikaku has gotten reasonably better in the second half of the playthrough but it's far from what I expected. I mean, there is nothing wrong with it, the story's reasonably good, characters are reasonably interesting (although I did not enjoyed any of them in particular) and the general feeling is reasonably OK. The problem is just that I do not understand where all those people who hyped Family Project this much got all those wonderful adjectives. It looks "OK" to me but I can not even compare it to the Visual Novels I personally like.
I'm finally out of that Katawa Shoujo - proofreading thing, just a couple things to check in order to control if I really did it but I'm quite confident. As I already said, it's a good novel - and considering it's freelance the rating should rightfully rise from just plain "good" to "superb" - but playing it again and again just for the sake of reading every single line in the script was starting to make me sick.
Anyhow, this posed me in a troublesome situation (ah, were all my problems like this!) since I found Da Capo to be quite boring and therefore proceeded to free the hard disk space it not - so - rightfully occupied. The abrupt need to format everything helped a lot in this - and I'm seriously thinking I'll have to change my PC before this year ends, sadly.
Back in topic: I got to choose the next step, and the choice fell on the newly translated Kazoku Keikaku - Family Project.
Right now I think I've just finished a sort of "introduction", as I'm starting to discover something more about the people around the main character. Anyhow I want to achieve at least a complete gamethrough before giving a serious judgement on this Visual Novel, therefore what follows is to be considered as opinable, partial and slanted.
What I felt so far is almost surely based on the sheer difference between what I read and what I got. Actually every review of Kazoku Keikaku I found spent words of appraisal with most reviewers pointing out at how this Visual Novel is considered as one of the very best (if not THE best) ever. It's therefore quite logical to think that my delusion is only due to the fact that whatever I was expecting was more than whatever I might have got, no matter what I was actually expecting (sounds like brainwashing, uh?). In my personal taste, characters range from "slightly above average" (Aoba was an interesting subject but so far seems just a girl born with a silver spoon in her mouth, while Chunhua looks really sweet but is too much light - headed) to "plain boring" (Masumi. To describe my opinion of her would imply rating this blog as "Mature"). The story is good and nice, but nothing exceptional.
All in all, my judgement of Kazoku Keikaku will be determined by what happens starting from the second I'll click its icon tonight. Right now titles like Clannad or Tsukihime or Ever 17 are still from another planet, compared with this. I'm eagerly waiting for that dramatic capsizing which would explain those enthusiastic reviews, and I just hope I won't end up like Drogo in the Tartar Steppe...
Which actually happens to be pretty good, seriously =)