ThaaoNET Blog
~Warmth Like Home Unawares~

Apostrophes of Doom

Heyyy everyone. So, uh, I fixed the apostrophe thing lol. While I was at it, I ended up changing a bunch of other stuff under the hood even though it was probably unnecessary to do right now, but if I keep expanding the site, it will have become necessary. It was fun, though, so...

But between doing that and other stuff, I haven't written many entries. I have played a loooot more FF5, though, and a bit of the others, and have lots of content to get up. I just gotta do it lol.

Trying to update every day was a bit... overwhelming after not too long. So I'm going to try to keep updates weekly. The amount of content in a single update will vary depending on how much I'm able and willing to get done, but I'll try to get some stuff up every week. Which means I don't have long to get this week's stuff done lol...

Last night, my mate was watching Big Brother which stresses me the heck out (the show, not the act of him watching it) so I needed something obnoxiously loud and constant to blare into my ears to drown it out that also wouldn't make me feel overwhelmed... so I ended up playing Mega Man 2, of all things...

Since RoahmMythril showed that you can get past the Pippis in Crash Man's stage, I have really been rethinking my stage orders. And uh, if you don't know, Mega Man stage orders are a THING for me and I spend way too much time developing stage orders.

Importantly, I like to be able to avoid all damage as well as make use of all of the special weapons and items. Previously, I thought you needed Leaf Shield to get past the Pippis without taking damage, which meant visiting Wood Man's stage first. And in Wood Man's stage, there's a really great use for the Time Stopper and the Metal Blades, so I'd like to clear those first... I like doing Air Man before Flash Man and... well, basically, Crash Man was coming very late in the order solely because of the Leaf Shield.

But I also previously made no use of the Crash Bomber at all! But now I can actually take it into Heat Man and Flash Man's stages where I can actually use it properly...

This also changes a lot of other things up... so I'm basically completely rewriting my stage order and using a few different strategies. One thing I still have yet to find a decent solution to is those mole driller things in Metal Man's stage... I mean, other than just slowly inching through them carefully. But I hate doing that. I tried riding Item-2 through the middle, but you still get hit quite a bit (I did make it through once on pure luck, though...) and none of the weapons seem particularly useful. I haven't tried the Quick Boomerang yet, and Quick Boomerang was my last item in my old stage order.

Right now I'm pretty happy with going Air->Crash... but then I'm a bit unsure of where to go next. I actually had a better idea when playing last night, but I've of course forgotten.

I think it's something like... Air-Crash-Heat-Quick... then IDK what next. I'd like to get Bubble Lead before Flash Man now, I think. But I'd also like to have Metal Blades before Bubble Man, but I want to have Time Stopper before Metal Man... lol

I'll have to play around with it a lot. I really don't like losing some of the fun places to use Bubble Lead or Time Stopper... I wouldn't mind getting Leaf Shield last since I only really use it in Crash Man's stage, and you can use it for almost the exact same things in the Wily stages, so...

I didn't get a chance to grab the Quick Boomerang and take it to Metal Man's stage yet, though. So I'll have to do that some time. All of this is making me want to start the MM play diaries, though...

In other game news, I've gotten several more endings in Dream Daddy and it is still a fantastic game.

DREAM DADDY

Heyyy, so the commenting link issue thing is fixed. Fortunately (?) pretty much no one commented during the weekend so it may have even gone unnoticed by anyone but me :D

Also, Disqus support was very fast and helpful! I was really surprised. Not anything against Disqus, of course, just I feel like these days e-mail-based support takes forever and is usually poor quality. Even though I sent my ticket like... within hours of their closing time for the week, I got immediate responses, and was even able to send and receive replies to get the problem fixed right away. (In the end, it was indeed my fault XD)

So ++ points to Disqus customer service and support.

Weekends aren't a great time to write updates, but I did get a lot of playing done. I'm almost done with Judy's scenario. It's so short! FF5 is getting a little tedious so I've been neglecting it a bit. And I have a ton of TokiMemo3 that needs written.

In other news, I started playing that Dream Daddy game. Literally dozens of people linked me to it, so I think it is very obvious what kind of tastes I have ahhaha.

Actually, while I was playing it, I started to become convinced that I created the game and then lost my memory, because I can't imagine anyone else making a game so specifically relevant to me XD

It's very cute, though, and you can play it for the irony/parody, or you can play it in seriousness, and you'll enjoy it either way. So whether you're just wanting to laugh at the weird jokes and references or if you're really wanting to date hot dads, it is a good game XD

Dream Daddy Hugo Aquarium Date

Importantly, though there's a mustache glasses teacher dad with brown color scheme and I don't really know how you can get any more 'me' than this. And he likes cheese boards and like... Pretty much either I had to have created this game or someone mind probed me and created this game based on me or something XD

Though oddly that's now two brown-schemed mustache teacher dads I've obsessed over in romance games... Though of course, Amanohashi is by far the least popular character in his game (though understandably lol), and Hugo seems to be the least popular in this game... going by achievement statistics, at least, far fewer people have pursued his ending compared to the others (you don't even have to get the good ending, and you can't "miss" dates so the achievement is just for pursuing him whether you fail or not...)

To be honest, though, I'd have to say that Mr Vega is a much better character than Amanohashi. Amanohashi is... interesting, and I do find him adorable, but in the end he's honestly not even that likeable. I mainly love him for his mustache and glasses to be honest, hahaha. But Hugo's got that, plus he has a much more interesting character, and feels like someone you'd actually want to be around. Except for that I hate trivia games, hahaha. But I'd go just for him~~~

Dream Daddy Hugo Aquarium Date BAD GRAMMAR

The only real problem I have is that the grammar is atrocious. There's luckily not really any misspellings, but whoever wrote the script has absolutely no idea how to use punctuation. Lots of missing commas, commas where semicolons should be, apostrophes in the wrong place, apostrophes where there should be none, periods where question marks should be... it's pretty abysmal.

Not that I'm perfect with punctuation all the time, but I think in something like this, grammar is critical. Especially for people like me who interpret everything literally as written, and get very confused when things are mixed up, because I don't read phonetically like some people seem to. So I keep misinterpreting things in the game and having to re-read and that really takes away from the experience.

Oh, and there's also some inconsistencies, like the way they stylize "DadBook" (or is it "Dadbook" ... ??? WHO KNOWS!) in the game. Also, they didn't even capitalize the word 'English' once...

So this game is dying for a proofreader. If I didn't want to enjoy the story myself, I would offer to do it for free lol...

The only other thing I didn't really like was that the voices were embarassingly bad. I think they got like a 12-year-old to do Hugo's voice. The puns were funny (even though it took me like 20 times of hearing it to finally get "Goosebumps") but the voices don't match the characters very well at all. Plus I feel like some of them were recorded with a cheap webcam mic that came with a laptop or something. But it's just Game Grumps and their friends doing the voices or something, and indie game voices are always like this, so it's not really unexpected or anything you can blame the game for. They tried and for how they tried, I think they did good. I just want to hear sexy mustache voice.

My first time through the game, I played a 'role-playing' style, choosing things I would choose IRL. Fortunately for me, there actually were choices that reflected my actual character, because the player character is terribly awkward and socially inept, and you always have choices to eat or sleep instead of doing things you need to do or socializing. So it's pretty much like being able to play as me lol.

I was also super polite and tried not to intrude, so there's a lot of times i didn't press people to say things if they seemed uncomfortable, even though it led to seeing a lot more stuff you'd miss out on if you just let them be quiet. It actually took me four playthroughs to get S rank on the second Mr Vega date hahaha.

Dream Daddy Hugo DadBook Profile

Sadly, the game is fairly short, and there are only three dates with each dad, and only one CG still per dad (a reward for clearing their routes). And at least in Hugo's case, we only got to see two outfits total. And though the game is even titled as being a "dating sim," it's very much a visual novel with a romance, and has almost nothing in common with the actual romance simulation genre. Other than, you know, the romance theme. But that's about as similar as Dr Mario is to an RPG because you "play the role of a doctor."

I'm usually one of the first people to jump on someone else to say "language is changing" but I'm very particular and strict about game genres hahaha.

But yeah, since it's meant to be a parody of romance-themed visual novels, I understand it not having tons of content for people wanting to play it unironically.

Anyway, I know I spent most of my time complaining, because that's how terrible I am, but it's a really fun game, and it has pretty good writing and characters for how simple it is. It was a ton of fun getting to know Hugo and taking care of Amanda. And I'm looking forward to going through the other guys' routes just to see their stories.

It's not like I could really get enough of flirting with hot dads without having to go through the actual experience of real social interaction. Hopefully there will be a lot of fanart of the game~ Uh, hopefully I can motivate myself to contribute to that, too...

EDIT: (Okay, I guess there's a problem with tags that have apostrophes. I'll get to work on fixing it... hopefully I'll finally get some new diary chapters up this week lmao)