Hello everyone! I’m sorry that I’ve gone for so long (again), and w/o any clear reasons, too… Well, the excuse is, that I’m grow tired of the clutters that I have — through my own mistakes — here in wordpress.com. I even have three useless blogs that cluttered up my dashboards! Anyway, I had just taken the five (!) minutes needed to delete them all, so… YAY! … I should do it from ages ago D:

Anyway, if you follow Japanese dojin gaming scene, you’d notice that the demo of the famous Touhou Project series 13th official game, Ten Desires (Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires) — which was supposed to be released at the Reitaisai 8, which was delayed due to the Japanese 8.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami twin disasters in March 2011 — was released this week, on 15 April 2011.

No cover image yet, sorry!

The demo, which is composed of the first three levels of the full game, is released on the internet for free, and can be downloaded from mediafire (ddl) , or from ceena (torrent), or the one I got it from, nyaa.eu (torrent). All of them are setup files, and may need d3dx9_43.dll (DirectX 9 library) to be played properly.

Installation

As for the installation itself, it’s straight and uncomplicated, like normal software install. One thing to note is that, if you do not have Japanese system font installed in your computer, you might see gibberish on the buttons and texts (tested on an US English Win7 Pro x86 SP1). If you are well-versed in application setups however, this won’t worry you in the slightest, due to the common placement of options.

Note that the buttons are all composed of gibberishs common to Shift-JIS to Unicode transliteration malfunction. Not that it matters much.

 Before Playing

When you click the th13.exe, you are greeted by a window asking you to specify the resolutions you want to play in, which are 640*800, 960*720, and 1280*960 (There are two of 640*800 option, but since my machine can’t display Japanese, I do not know the differences between them, sorry. However, I strongly suspect that the first means full-screen 640*800) (fake-edit : I tried to become less lazy, so I tested them, and yes, the first option is fullscreen! In glorious 640*800! :P)

I still do not know what the bloody lowest ?????? means...

Oh yeah, launching the th13.exe will disable your Aero (Win7 will say “The colour scheme has been changed to Windows 7 Basic : A running program is not compatible with certain visual elements of Windows”). This is highly puzzling, due to it being 2011, and Touhou IS made for Windows, so… Perhaps it’s because ZUN still loves his XP? Perhaps, but this is certainly interesting…

Anyway, onto the game proper!

Playing the Game

TH13 splashscreen

TH13 title screen -- BTW, in widescreen computers, you'll see black bars on the sides if you go full screen.

Yep, it’s still the same like the previous Touhou games. Not that it’s bad or anything, and I love this style of menus, really.

There are 10 options in all, from Game Start (obvious), the greyed-out Extra Start (Harder bonus stage, unlocked after beating the game in normal mode without continues — not available in the demo, of course), Practice Start (Normal gameplay w/ the ability to choose stages and maximum lives to start with — I do not know why this is greyed out) , and Spell Practice (same as Practice start, only for the spellcards — bosses’ special abilities), Replay (re-watching your saved games), Player Data (High-scores), Music Room (The musical scores of the games with commentaries from ZUN), Option (obvious — however, I noticed that there is no way to set up maximum lives in the option, unlike the previous games (I haven’t played MoF and SA and UFO that much, though)), Manual (in Japanese, of course D:), and Quit

Anyway, on ward to the game!