It's been eleven years. I hope everyone's doing well.

[Hyperguy]

Truth is I still visit this forum from time to time to see how everyone's doing. But I try not to post for a few reasons.*

I'm glad it's still around. JG deserves all of the credit for keeping things running all of this time.

*Well, about those reasons...

As much as I love forums I don't always have time for 'em. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Just really depends on what's going on that year. Don't want to make any promises I can't keep or have to check in when I can't. And I wouldn't want to disrupt any ongoing discussions by interjecting haphazardly or drawing attention to myself.

Today on December 30th, 2022, just one day before the last day of the year I've suddenly found myself being able to spend one day with no obligations. And that's why I'm posting today. This was a very busy year for me and there was always something trying to pull me in one direction or another. Via fluke I found myself with nowhere I need to go and nothing I need to do. "So fuck, let's chime in to see how the boys are doing..." I thought to myself as I broke the eleven year silence.

I think when I was last around...

I was heavily playing 3D Custom Girl and learning how to use it.
We were all still on Web 4.0 with our 6 MBps connections.
Hongfire still existed and we were on the seventh console generation, which meant everyone was playing Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and the original Wii.
1080p was expensive as fuck. A lot of the technologies we have and take for granted today just either didn't exist or were hard to come by.
I believe around that time we were just about finished figuring Viper out...
The industry had yet to be affected by mobile phones or high speed internet. That meant that if someone wanted to play something they'd load it via physical disc.

Today

I'm still into hentai. Except that, now I have something like twenty years of experience consuming it. I feel like some kind of grand wizard or a sage in regards to it. I've gotten to the point where I buy games directly from Japan within moments of their release if I'm not just pirating them on the Japanese dark web. Similarly, I know what's worth paying for what isn't, how to buy it with yen or just get it for free. You know, important, resume worthy skills.

3D Hentai games kept on getting better and I kept up right alongside them. I moved on from 3D Custom Girl to Custom Maid 3D 2 and then Koikatsu and Honey Select and...Well geez, I guess you can't really sum up a decade's worth of hentai games that easily. I know I'm not even mentioning a lot of the more revolutionary or quirky ones.

As far as Viper goes, in my opinion the series is something I can consider solved. All of the games have been uploaded, downloaded, distributed and otherwise made easily accessible to the hentai community at large. Those special files that I never got around to sharing with JG00 were eventually found by him without my help(Phew!) and there's scans of every artbook and the games themselves have had their files extracted back and forth.

For nonhentai gaming I'm...And it feels a bit dumb to be saying this...Just now checking out Rumble Roses XX via an Xbox Series S I picked up during Christmas sales. After playing it for a few hours I completely understand why the series died back then. The sequel just doesn't do the original justice though even that had its own rough edges. Really just reiterated the conclusion my pal MrWhFlks came to so many years before...The games 3D models dropped in quality halfway through development and a new team must have had to pick up the pieces.

I picked up DoA 2 Ultimate and DoA 4 and the former's been my go-to jam whenever I'm waiting for something on the PC to finish. I don't care that the game is barebones on content. It's fun to play and the core mechanics are the best in the series and I don't really need anything else. Later DoA games just aren't as fun because they fucked up the counter system by trying to make it a competitive fighter rather than the flashy anime fighter it's supposed to be. DoA 5 was a mixed bag for me as a lot of the female models ended up looking worse. Look what they did to my girl...Petite Ayane is suddenly in her late thirties and tall enough to be in the WNBA and her head is now almond shaped rather than the oval it was before and goddamn new Ayane--Well, perhaps that's a rant for another time.

Other than that I've just been trying to learn 3D on the side. Would like to try making my own 3D hentai animations in the future. Technologies progressed to the point where it's possible to make 3D cell shaded models that replicate the look of anime characters from classic hentai. The reason I hadn't tried tackling it before is because I lacked the time and the hardware. Well, at least I have the hardware now. I want to spend 2023 learning 3D.

--

Please, tell me how you're doing. Whether it was last week, last year, or last decade, I want to read about it.

[JG]

It's great to have you pop in every so often Hyperguy.

I'm still trying to collect anything and everything Sogna. I'd love to finish off the last set of telecas but most of the ones I'm still missing are all incredibly rare. I pick up something new every month or wo but its getting harder to find stuff I don't already own, and the series has aged so much that there's only about one new doujinshi a year.

I still appreciate the h-games that have animation, but they've all gone to video lately. Which I guess makes sense since you get more frames per second for smoother animation, but I wish there were more that did it the classic way, like Sogna did.

Still playing video games. Still don't have enough time to play all the ones I want. I must admit Dragon Quest Builders 2 has really taken over the last few years - I may be nearing the 4000 hour mark. A new game will pop up for a few days or weeks, but eventually back to DQB2 before too long.

I wish I would do more on the site. Add more character bios, finish the teleca section, etc. So many half-finished bits. I keep making new years resolutions to do more, and keep failing

Also, VIPER-BTR still remains a bit of a mystery. I don't think we've figured out how to make tools to extract graphics and text correctly. And while the videos and graphis are extractable form the Paradice/Lanjerie games, we can't recode them to make our own maps or change language.

[黒い灯影]

I'm still working on reverse engineering the old PC98 viper games,
although with my job i can't dedicate too much time with it.
I still need to put more work on my tools,
my anxiety has been terrible to me this year, been to the hospital a few times,
some health issues that i think were rooted in my anxiety,
had a heart scan but thankfully they said my heart was okay.

[Moge]

Been over a decade and i'm still ripping and animating hentai, although i've moved from h games to anything goes (mostly the anime kind). In just 4 years, i've racked up 13,000 followers on deviantart who pay attention to my rips. I have a feeling one day though that it'll all come crashing down if and when deviantart bans me for the lewds, but i'll ride that out until it lasts.

In the past couple years, i've gotten more into image editing and combining that with my vectoring skills. Hoping one day this will lead me into drawing on my own, but i'm not sure i'll get to that anytime soon because i have a stronger desire to get into game development, the 2D pixel art kind specifically. Although 3D game development interests me very much as well if it's the low poly PS1 kind, so i might dabble in that.

You should join us hyperguy and post your videogame rants in the videogame thread here. I like hearing any discussion about videogames. As for DOA, can't say i mind the new looks in the more recent games. The DOA2 style needed to be more retired.