Running Phantom of Inferno in MPC

Somehow, the English community always seems to get the short end of things when it comes to visual novels. A perfect example is the game Phantom of Inferno, which was brought to America commercially in the form of a poorly subtitled DVD rather than its original 18+ game. The one advantage to the DVD I can think of is that it has full voice acting, including the protagonist. Some disadvantages are the content is changed, featuring a narrator, editing out of all H-scenes, and a password system in place of a save system. The game itself is brilliant, but as an interactive DVD it is hard to play on a computer. Notably, everything is very picky about the software you're running it with, particularly transparencies, layers, and subtitles. To date, it seems that very few people have discovered the proper way to run it. The problems with the main two media players are:

Kinda hard to 'save', when your save system is a gun full of blanks.

VLC: The password system is completely inoperable, because it simply doesn't display passwords. More on this later.
PowerDVD: You can't fast forward through scenes. This may not seem like a big deal to regular VN players, but the whole game is in video format, so rather than clicking very fast you may have to wait an hour to get back to where you were in the story if you don't have a password(save) closer than that. Additionally, PowerDVD is not freeware, meaning you have 30 days or so to finish the game if you choose to use PowerDVD, in addition to the other problem.

Some people still manage to make money off of consumer ignorance.

Media player classic has the same problem as VLC, but worse because the game simply won't show any visuals at some points.

Here is a tutorial to continue using Media Player Classic(the best media player ever) with the game. I assume here that you've already obtained the game. The first step is to install Media Player Classic. If you don't know how to find it, google 'CCCP'. All fans of anime should already have this player. Next, download and install PowerDVD 9. We'll see why in a bit.

Now, open Media Player Classic. You can play around with the DVD before the fix to see how MPC naturally fails at this game. Keep in mind that the subs themselves are pretty glitchy no matter what media player you use, so don't expect a drastic improvement in translation or timing.

From the toolbar at the top, select 'View>Options...' then select 'External Filters' from the menu at the left.

It should look a little like this.

Click the 'Add Filter...' button to the right, and add the following three filters:
Microsoft MPEG-2 Video Decoder
MPC - MPEG-2 Video Decoder (Gabest)
CyberLink Video/SP Decoder (PDVD9)

The CyberLink Video/SP Decoder filter should be in your list of filters if you've installed the PowerDVD software.

If you have the latest version of MPlayer Classic you shouldn't have to worry about the stuff at the bottom. All you have to do is set the following options:
First click on Microsoft MPEG-2 Video Decoder. Set the option on the right to 'Block'. Then do the same for MPC - MPEG-2 Video Decoder. Finally, click on CyberLink Video/SP Decoder and choose 'Prefer'. This should(key word) only apply itself to DVDs, since that's what most MPEG-2 files are.

There's one last step to get this all working properly. Load up a DVD in MPC by clicking 'File->Open DVD...'. Once the DVD is loaded, right click, and go to 'Filters->CyberLink Video/SP Decoder (PDVD9)'.

This time it should look like this.

UNcheck 'Use DxVA'. Restart MPC, load up your Phantom of Inferno CD via 'File->Open DVD...', and enjoy! You should be able to play Phantom with passwords, with visuals, being able to fast forward or skip scenes, and you should be able to continue using MPC to play the game long after the trial on PowerDVD runs out. Coincidentally, I've been too scared to uninstall PDVD, but you should by all means try it while keeping the filter to see if MPC will still work without it.

Coincidentally, what I said about skipping scenes. Expect to end up in weird places with significant spoilers if you use the 'next chapter' function. It's like flipping to the next page in a choose your own adventure book, when you think about it.

EDIT: I did figure out that you can perform a very real 'save' in MPC by going to 'Favorites->Add to Favorites...' and making sure that the 'Remember position' box is checked. You can do the same thing in VLC, but VLC was acting really really buggy when I tried to play Phantom on it. I'm not sure if I simply wasn't using the right plugins or whatever, but it was actually displaying the subs much worse than MPC did before switching to the PDVD filters, with missing lines even in places where they are displayed in MPC.

The Unknown

There are times as a gamer when something so unpredictable, so horrifyingly foreign, so hideously absurd happens that one knows that they'd be a madman to press that 'save' button. Yet the save button is there, offering passage into a completely new world, a completely new experience. People like me often hit that save button, as a smaller act representative of our journey towards the banishment of ennui. Nowadays, there isn't as much of a dilemma since you can just save it into a separate save file, but on older games you didn't have this option.

Now, I'm not particularly proud that I play The Sims. On the contrary, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I play it, though my elitist frozen heart is slightly consoled by the fact that I'm still playing The Sims 1 when everyone else has moved on to The Sims 3. Until just recently, the only version of The Sims I had played was the original, expansionless. My friend also owned House Party and I think I got to borrow that for a while as a kid but lost the disk shortly after burning it from his copy. I recently (*cough* legally *cough*) acquired all of the original Sims expansions in the form of The Sims Complete Collection, and I was a bit disappointed that I was unable with the Complete Collection to install the add-ons one by one. Since that was the form I wanted to try them out in, I was slowly building families specialized to take advantage of all the features that I perceived to be part of each individual expansion.

As I was going through the House Party expansion, one of the moments that I described in the first paragraph happened. I had gone about building my house to gear it towards throwing parties, with a small section for my Sim and his wife to live in and the rest containing massive dance floors, a large pool and hot tub, buffet tables, a single bathroom with both male and female doors on them, a karaoke bar, and a volleyball court. Now, I didn't know precisely what everything I bought did, but you can usually figure it out without too much guesswork in The Sims. One of the items I bought for parties was a firework stand. I naively thought it would innocently give a firework show and all the partiers would sit around blindly clapping like the dumb Sims they are. So here I was, throwing a party with tens of Sims at my house, and I think 'Lets set off some fireworks, woohoo!'. Well it turns out, the fireworks can fall back down to the ground and start a fire. Okay, not a big deal, except I had the fireworks next to the volleyball set. Anyone who's played The Sims sees where I'm going with this, but the ENTIRE volleyball set caught fire. The volleyball set is easily the biggest item you can buy in all 7 expansions, at 9x5 squares. Immediately after, the main female Sim whom I spent several hours on, killing her dog, making the main male character marry her, etc, caught fire. This blew me away. The sheer odds that an item that I thought was safe would cause a fire WHEN there were tens of other Sims at the house and make the biggest fire physically possible have got to be a hundred to one.

The Sims is largely a big RP game, and the concept of saving the game to the devastation that occurred and thinking of feasible reactions each of the different families involved in the fire would have was a very large challenge that I chose to take for the sheer hell of it and because the concept appeals to me aesthetically as an actual realistically unpredictable event happening within the confines of a video game. I failed to get good pictures when the fire started, but below are some pictures of after it happened with the subtitles I gave the pictures(And some with the default subtitles). Keep in mind what I said about The Sims being an RP game; I had to be a bit dramatic with some of the subtitles.

As an aside, this was the first time I really noticed the Grim Reaper system that I think the 'Livin Large' expansion introduced. I found it a little strange that Sims were not programmed to automatically plead for the lives of people who they cared for.

"Claire has burned to death!"

"Cornelia has burned to death!"

"Ester has burned to death!"

"Fanny has burned to death!"

"Cameron has burned to death!"

"Trip has burned to death!"

"The aftermath of the great fire..."

"Of course, the men from the Fire Department didn't arrive until it was practically over..."

"As the Grim Reaper claims his grotesque prize, the last of the horrified onlookers leave."

"The aftermath
exit Grim Reaper, aand curtain!"

"His wife Claire Train now a zombie, one can only wonder how poor Crazy will handle the stress."

"How fitting that the cause of the fire should be forced among the ranks of the living dead for all of eternity."

Apathy Series

So there's this series of Visual Novels that I'd like to introduce. They've never been translated to English, but from what I've seen of them and what I have been able to play of them, I've been lead to believe that they're brilliant.

One day I was innocently trying to ID eroge cg as I often do when I came across a blog containing this picture and the caption "MiColle's Arai-san's 'Nice Smile☆'----Too cute! lololol" in Japanese.

ミッコレでの荒井さんの　ナイス・スマイル☆ ----可愛すぎるｗｗｗｗｗ

This image fascinated me greatly. For one thing, the art style is eerily flat and non-revealing yet detailed and proportional, and the expression on Arai's face is incredible. After much searching, I found that the game in question is called Midnight Collection, and is a collection of horror stories presented in Visual Novel form. It comes from a set of games sharing the same characters and is called the 'Apathy' series. The series started with the 1995 game 'Gakkou de Atta Kowai Hanashi'(lit. A scary story that was/happened at school school) for the super nintendo and has had several releases. The Visual Novel Database shows 4 games, but Japanese Wikipedia shows a couple more. After scouring Youtube for videos of gameplay or fan videos I came across a couple videos which continue to fascinate me. One of my main purposes of this post is to shows those videos to you, but I also hope to introduce you to the series, and perhaps also drive up demand for a translation of the series, by however little. In all honesty, games like this motivate me to study Japanese in my spare time.