1833: Sexy Puzzle Skills

I spent a significant chunk of time playing some more HuniePop today, and I’m thoroughly enamoured with it. It’s a game for which it’s abundantly clear the development team had an absolute blast making it, and it’s particularly refreshing to see a game put out without any regard for (or perhaps more likely, a wilful disregard for) the Professional Outrage Machine that perpetually whirs on the Internet.

HuniePop is rude. It’s even rude in its “censored” incarnation on Steam, but the uncensored version (available via MangaGamer or the game’s official website) is marginally ruder. (To be exact, the uncensored version features visible vaginas both with and without man-juice spooged all over them, while the censored version covers such disgraceful shame-holes with panties, but is more than happy to still depict women masturbating, boobs and posing in distinctly provocative manners.)

Naturally, the rude bits are what people have mostly been talking about with regard to HuniePop, but as with most games that happen to include sexual content, there’s a lot more going on than just a few (admittedly well drawn and rather erotic) pornographic pictures. A few days I talked a little bit about my first impressions of the gameplay; since that time, I’ve played a whole bunch more and got a good feel for the game; all that I have left to do now is seduce the love goddess Venus and two additional “secret” characters before I have 100% completed it… just in time for a promised Valentine’s Day update which is coming down the pipe.

HuniePop has evolved quite a bit over its development cycle. Originally pushed as a bit more of a “life sim” where you’d have to manage your time effectively, make money from part-time jobs and take part in numerous activities, it was gradually simplified into its current form. Part of me is a little sorry that the full-on life sim incarnation never saw the light of day, but having spent over 6 hours now playing the final release, I can say that I think they made the right decision. The gameplay is kept simple and enjoyable, and that is, at least in part, what makes it so addictive.

Even the match-3 puzzle gameplay has a surprising amount of depth to it. Match-3 is a hugely overused genre, but HuniePop puts enough twists on it to keep things interesting. There’s the need to avoid harmful tokens, for example, and the fact that each girl in the game has a “favourite” token that is worth considerably more points than others. The main depth comes from the items you can take into a “date” puzzle, though; these range from increasing the likelihood that a specific colour or type of tokens will fall when you clear space on the grid, to immediately consuming tokens of a specific type or in a particular area. Given that each girl has her own preferences — and according to how you play the game, your character will have their own strengths and weaknesses, too — it’s very important to take the right items in to a date, particularly when you’re attempting to win over the somewhat more hesitant girls, who require a much higher score in the puzzle game to advance to the next relationship level.

There’s another enjoyable twist on the match-3 puzzle gameplay once you get the girls up to 4 or 5 “hearts” of affection and take them out at night, too: they’ll demand to come home with you and that you give them a right old good seeing to. At this point, all nuance goes out of the window, and all you have to do is simply match as many tokens as you can as quickly as possible — no items, no preferences, no harmful tokens — while your partner for the evening moans and groans in what is, frankly, an exceedingly erotic manner through your speakers. It’s a complete shift in pace from the cerebral, strategic gameplay in the normal dates, and oddly, it actually does a pretty good job of reflecting the intensity and passion of a sexual encounter through pure gameplay. It’s difficult to describe; it’s something that will be very clear if you experience it, however.

I’m developing a real soft spot for the characters, too. As I noted in my previous post, there’s not a lot of plot development, though the developers have taken the time to give each character a distinct personality and relationship to the rest of the world. Porn star Jessie, for example, turns out to be the mother of college student Tiffany, though they don’t speak and they never mention each other by name; it’s something you’ll figure out by yourself as you learn the various pieces of information you can pick up about each girl. And while the game is essentially about making sure you say what each girl wants to hear rather than necessarily what you really feel, there is nothing stopping you deciding to pursue a monogamous relationship with your virtual waifu and shun all the others — or at least try and remain consistent in your responses. (Okay, you won’t get far and you’re arguably missing the point of the game, but the option is there.)

One particular highlight of the game is the love fairy Kyu, who introduces the game concepts to you at the outset of the game, and eventually becomes a dateable character in her own right once you successfully bed one of the other characters. Kyu is hilarious. She’s the main source of the game’s self-aware humour, since she’s written to be fully conscious of the fact that she’s a character in a dating sim, and that the whole situation is ridiculous. She also comes out with some brilliant one-liners over the course of the game and sounds a bit like Pinkie Pie, which makes it all the more adorable and amusing when she not-particularly-seriously berates you for buying her gifts “just because you want to fuck [her]”.

I’ve enjoyed the game a lot and, having come this far, fully intend to 100% complete it in the next day or two. Politically incorrect it may be, but it’s a whole lot more fun than getting mad about stuff on the Internet.

1829: Life with the Hunies

I took a gamble a while back and Kickstarted a game that looked potentially interesting. Dubbed HuniePop, it promised a Western take on dating sims combined with an anime-inspired aesthetic, and the team behind it appeared to be taking it seriously as a project. I tossed them my money and watched the development with interest as the team provided regular updates on what was going on and how development was going.

HuniePop finally released this week, and I’ve been playing it a bit. And, although it’s the sort of thing that will make the social justice dickparade froth at the mouth (and indeed already has been, from what I’ve heard) it is, in fact, a whole lot of fun.

This is Kyu, the magic fairy who's going to make you better at talking to girls. — This is Kyu, the magic fairy who’s going to make you better at talking to girls.

Unlike many “dating sims”, which typically go down the visual novel route, HuniePop is a combination of mechanics from Dead or Alive Xtreme and Puzzle and Dragons. In other words, you move from place to place, buy gifts for characters and interact with them in order to build up your relationship values and other stats, then play an enjoyable little match-3 puzzle game to determine how successful your date with the girl you’ve been interacting with was.

It’s a simple idea, but it’s handled quite nicely. There’s not a lot of ongoing plot throughout the game, but the girls have all been given their own distinct personalities, and are all introduced through a short, amusing scene where they interact with one of the other cast members. The “Western” angle comes in when these distinctly anime-esque characters open their mouths: rather than adopting the usual anime tropes seen in this sort of thing (tsundere, imouto, kuudere and so forth) the characters are… well, very Western. And very human. And not necessarily immediately likeable.

Take the character Audrey as an example. Audrey is quickly set up to be the Queen Bitch of the cast when you’re introduced to her by witnessing her yelling at her hairdresser (also one of the game’s dateable girls) with a string of obscenities and frankly rather unreasonable behaviour. Then once you start chatting to her she continually puts you down as some sort of colossal douchebag that won’t get out of her way (largely because, well, you’re pestering her with inane questions, so it’s sort of justified) and threatens to “punch you in the dick” any time she gets too hungry to even think about doing anything else.

HuniePop's characterisation gives its characters some very human, relatable flaws without exaggerating too much. — HuniePop’s writing gives its characters some very human, relatable flaws without exaggerating too much.

The other girls are a little more approachable than the rather abrasive Audrey, but they each have their own interesting quirks, and their personality traits affect the puzzle part of the game to a degree, too. The coloured tiles you’re matching in the puzzle sequences represent different character traits such as sexuality, flirtatiousness, talent and romance, and each girl responds particularly well to one and not particularly well to another, with bonuses to matches made in those colours you’ve spent some “Hunie” (acquired by talking to the girls and saying the “right” things) building up the relevant stats for. Later “dates” with the girls — the ones that have the potential to lead to naughty picture shenanigans — have very difficult target scores to obtain, so you’ll have to take full advantage of these systems to be successful.

HuniePop is charming, cheeky, lewd, rude and a whole lot of fun. It doesn’t give a fuck what people think of it, and I think that’s great — although in a pleasing nod to inclusiveness, you can play the game with your character as either male or female, with the girls becoming homosexual if you choose the latter option. While it may not have the narrative depth or character development of a more visual novel-style approach to the dating game, it’s a solid and enjoyable game in its own right, and I’m glad I Kickstarted it. I can see it providing a good few hours of entertainment yet.

#oneaday Day 862: Lion and Logic

I’ve been meaning to reinstall my copy of Logic Studio for ages now. For the uninitiated, Logic Studio is a suite of music and audio production tools for Mac that has become an essential part of the podcast editing process for me. I have a podcast to be editing right now, in fact, but am unable to do so until I reinstall Logic Studio, which somehow buggered itself up in the transfer process from my old Mac to my new one.

So it was that today I decided to bite the bullet and begin the several hours long process that is reinstalling Logic Studio. (There are lots of DVDs of content.) I popped in the first disc, opened up the Finder window for the disc and double-clicked the installer, only to be confronted by a message that I really wasn’t expecting.

“You can’t open the application LogicStudio.mpkg because PowerPC applications are no longer supported.”

WHAT.

Logic Studio is a Universal app — for non Mac users, this means that both older PowerPC-based Macs and newer Intel-based Macs can run the program. However, for some reason that remains unknown to seemingly everyone on the Internet, Apple decided to make the installer application for Logic Studio a PowerPC-only application.

On past versions of OS X, this wasn’t a problem, as a technology called Rosetta was included to allow newer Intel Macs to run PowerPC-only apps. This feature was phased out in the latest version of OS X (“Lion”), however, meaning that you’re seemingly fucked if you want to reinstall anything from disc that is more than a year or two old. (This is obviously not an issue for anything you have purchased from the Mac App Store, since when you download from there you always get the most up-to-date version.)

It’s pretty clear why this situation is how it is, even if no-one from Apple would like to admit it — the latest verion of Logic Studio is, naturally, available from the Mac App Store, meaning that those who are really serious about their music and audio production needs should just drop £130 and upgrade. Some of us (like me) aren’t made of money, however, meaning a frantic scrabble around Google to try and figure out what to do next.

There was plenty of advice on how to get Logic Studio actually running once it’s installed (it seems that Apple included some sort of “obsolescence” tech in the app to actually forcibly prevent it from running under Lion — another nudge in the direction of the upgrade, no doubt) but very little on how to install it in the first place. Fortunately, I eventually found the information I needed, and I thought I could serve anyone suffering the same problem well by sharing said solution. So, without further ado, I present:

How to Install Logic Studio 8 Under OS X 10.7 “Lion”

You will need:
1 copy of your original Logic Studio discs.
1 OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” DVD (10.5 “Leopard” may work, too, but I didn’t investigate)
Lots of time

1. Insert your Snow Leopard DVD into your Mac and open the disc’s Finder window.
2. Double-click on the Optional Installs folder.
3. Double-click on the Optional Installs.mpkg file to run the installer.
4. Agree to all the bumf and choose your OS X install drive.
5. Rummage through the list of optional installs and ensure that the checkbox next to “Rosetta” is ticked.
6. Begin the install process. It should be pretty quick.

You’ll probably get a warning message that Rosetta is not supported on Lion, but ignore it and proceed.

7. Remove the Snow Leopard DVD and replace with the Logic Studio Install DVD.
8. Open the disc’s Finder window and double click on the Logic Studio.mpkg file.
9. Follow the instructions as normal. The Logic Studio install process takes hours, so go and do something else and check back to swap discs every so often.

Voila! Sorted.

I haven’t finished reinstalling Logic Studio as yet so I don’t know if any of the poking around to get it actually running is necessary as yet, but the installer certainly seems quite happy. This Rosetta trick also has the happy side-effect of allowing PowerPC-only applications to run under Lion, which was previously impossible — though obviously you do still need a Snow Leopard disc to pull this off. They don’t have license keys, though, so if you have a Mac-toting friend with one, just borrow it — or doubtless some enterprising young individual has put it online somewhere, too.

I’m normally pretty patient with Apple’s idiosyncratic ways of doing things — I believe things like the App Store, the “walled garden” nature of iOS and numerous other gubbins are all excellent ideas when you consider the demographic that the Apple of 2012 is trying to court — but all this seemed rather heavy-handed and unnecessary. To lock customers out of an application that they had paid several hundred pounds/dollars/whatevers for because of their desire to be up-to-date with their operating system seems ridiculous — particularly as there’s no real reason that I can discern that the app itself shouldn’t work. I guess we’ll see once I actually finish reinstalling and try to get the bloody thing working again.

In other news, expect a new Squadron of Shame SquadCast by the end of the weekend, all being well!

#oneaday Day 626: Farewell, Mr Jobs

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” said Steve Jobs to a group of Stanford University graduates during a commencement speech in 2005. “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”

Wise words from a great man — who sadly passed away yesterday, aged just 56. I’m actually quite sad about this because, although I obviously didn’t know the man personally, he’s had a profound impact on my life. I’m not the only one, either — this morning various social networks are filling up with tributes to Jobs, his life and the influence that his company Apple’s products have had on their lives. My good buddy AJ Minotti, for example, noted that he’s been podcasting with his brother for four years now — and this is longer than anything else he’s ever committed himself to in his life, whether that’s work, school or relationships. Podcasting defines him, and although podcasting may well have come along in a different form with a different name had Apple not pushed it as a publishing medium, in his mind it’s inextricably associated with Jobs and Apple as a whole.

For me, my exposure to Apple products began with an early stint as a freelance writer for the Official Nintendo Magazine in the UK. I was putting together walkthroughs for Turok 2, Star Wars: Battle for Naboo and Banjo-Tooie. To take screen grabs from these titles, I had to play the game through a video capture card linked to a Mac and take shots from the video feed as I played through. I’m not sure exactly why they used the (then-OS 9 sporting) Macs for their office work, but I guess it was due to the supposedly common knowledge that Mac software was good for creative and design work.

Subsequently, I got myself an iPod with a 20GB hard drive. At the time, I couldn’t imagine ever being able to fill it — but having graduated to it from a 32MB (yes, really) MP3 player it was a revelation to be able to carry that much music around with me in my pocket. I took it everywhere with me, and it lasted a good few years, too. It moved house with me several times, remained an almost permanent attachment to my car stereo and joined me at the gym on many occasions. I came to know and love the music on it and, to this day, that first iPod is one of my favourite pieces of technology I’ve ever owned.

After joining Apple back in 2007, I got my first exposure to the modern OSX Mac, and I was instantly smitten. Here was a system that ran smoothly and efficiently, did what I wanted it to do with minimum fuss and yet still remained powerful enough to let you tweak it as you saw fit. The online community agreed, too, and Macs remain a great platform for independent publishers to release awesome and useful applications, utilities and — to a lesser extent, admittedly — games.

It was the creativity side of things that really grabbed me though. Apple’s iLife suite was excellent, allowing you to do things that many inexperienced users who came through the doors of the store assumed to be difficult, challenging or demanding on their computers. Things like editing and organising photos; editing video; making a DVD; or producing professional sounding music — all of it was within reach of the average user, and all of those applications gave users a firm understanding of the concepts they’d need to be familiar with prior to graduating on to more advanced, professional software.

When my role changed from the in-store “Mac Specialist” salesperson position to the in-store “Creative” personal trainer position, I got to spend all day every day working with these applications, teaching people how to use them, presenting workshops and tutorials on them with genuine enthusiasm — I believed in these products because I’d used them extensively myself — and even training new members of staff on what they needed to know about the computers and their applications. It was, for a very long time, absolutely the best job I ever had, and I felt very much what Steve described when he was addressing those Stanford graduates in 2005. I’m sorry that I had to leave — but, without going into too many details, poor in-store leadership that seemingly rejected many of the core values of the Apple credo meant that I, and several others, saw little choice but to move on to pastures new. In my case, this pretty much marked the “beginning of the end” for me, as from that point I was to only have one more short-term teaching job before a year of unemployment and the collapse of my marriage — along with my life as I knew it, of course. I won’t lie — I regret some of the choices I made back then, but what’s passed is passed, and you can’t change what’s already gone by.

Besides, nowadays things are seemingly back on track, of course. In Apple terms, I still use my Mac every day for work. While it’s getting on in years a bit and, like a faithful old dog, is a little sickly and decides not to do what it’s told at times — Apple products don’t break, you know, yeah, right — it’s still my weapon of choice for all sorts of things: browsing the web, working on documents, working with photos, making music. While I have my PC for gaming, now, Macs will always be a part of my life, as will my trusty iPhone, which never leaves my side.

In short, Steve Jobs has — at least indirectly — had a profound impact on my life. As an employee, he was an inspirational leader with an obvious vision for where he wanted the company to go, and even for those who aren’t Apple “fanboys” it’s difficult to deny that he was a figure in the tech industry who commanded — demanded — respect. He will be greatly missed by all — whether they knew him personally or not.

Farewell, Mr Jobs — and thank you for the good times.

#oneaday, Day 543: Farewell for Now, Mac

Soooo… I may have killed my Mac. To be fair, it asked for it. It had been grinding to a halt to the degree of unusability to some weeks, necessitating a restart approximately every half an hour. And yes, I’d done all the usual repairing permissions and letting it to its overnight UNIX cleanup routines to no avail.

So today I decided that enough was enough and I was going to reinstall the bastard. This would have been a straightforward process were it not for the fact that my DVD drive had failed a month or two back, getting firstly to the stage where the only means of getting a disc out of the slot was to use gravity, and finally to the point where if a disc went in, it sure as hell wasn’t coming out again. I nearly lost my Deathsmiles soundtrack CD to that — fortunately, the nice people at the Apple Store helped me retrieve it.

This is the third major fault my iMac’s had in the space of about four years. My hard drive failed once, my graphics card failed once, and now my DVD drive along with whatever was causing it to be incredibly slow.

Have you ever attempted to reinstall a DVD-based operating system onto a computer with no optical drive? I don’t recommend it, because it, well, doesn’t work. I tried every possible approach to it — I tried Apple’s own Remote Install software which it turns out only works on certain models of Mac, mine not being one of them, apparently. I tried cloning the OSX install DVD on to a USB flash drive, but that also didn’t work, failing at the verification stage and thereby failing to create a bootable flash drive. I tried installing with my iMac in target disk mode, and that went well for a while until the Mac that was running the installer decided that in order to finish the installation it needed to restart, failing to take into account the fact that it wasn’t actually installing OSX onto itself. Then I tried installing with the other Mac in target disk mode in order to use it as an external DVD drive. This worked for a little while, too, until the dummy Mac decided that it didn’t feel like doing work any more and ejected the DVD in the middle of the install process, causing the whole thing to fail. (You’d think there’d be some sort of failsafe in there for if something like that happened, really. But no.)

So I’m now left with an iMac that won’t boot that I can’t install OSX onto without lugging it to my nearest Apple Store (12 miles away) and forking over at least £100 then waiting however long it takes them to replace the SuperDrive.

Looks like I’m going to be a Windows user for a while — I have my gaming PC and my netbook for now, so they’re going to have to do. This is also the reason for the recent lack of comics, incidentally — the software was just so excruciatingly slow on the Mac that I really couldn’t be arsed to faff around with it.

Oh well. If I’ve learned one thing from this whole experience it’s that everything I learned during training for my job at the Apple Store (Macs don’t break! Macs don’t slow down like PCs do! Even if there is a problem, it can be resolved easily! I like to touch Steve Jobs on his gnarled old willy! Forget that last one.) was, in fact, as I suspected slightly at the time, complete and utter bollocks.

I’m not too pissed though — as I say, I’ve still got two other computers that I can use for now, and if and when I do get the SuperDrive fixed the Mac, when it’s working, does make for an excellent workhorse. Another example of Apple’s advertising being bollocks, though — remember the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” adverts that implied Macs were more fun while PCs did all the boring office shit? Yeah, I totally do all my work on Mac then play on the PC. Nice one.

Ah well. Have a rest, Mac. Lord knows you’ve earned it. I’ll help you get better soon.