I'm currently playing around with a Ricoh/Fujitsu SV600 book scanner, a device that, combined with its software, is supposed to produce flat images from books laid open in front of it, correcting for page distortion. It allows you to make scans of books without having to guillotine them or break their spines, in theory. I haven't had enough time with the device to decide whether I want to keep this extremely expensive machine, but right now: I think it does its job well enough to disappoint that it doesn't do it better, if that makes sense.
I tested it with three materials: a) the Ghost Head manga, encased in phone book-thick issues of Fantasy DX; b) a volume of the Cloister of Heaven VHM fan doujin; and c) an issue of LoveLove Tsuushin (I had an idea of scanning the entire run). The tests for b) and c) were extremely brief, but the machine seemed to have problems with the tight binding/low page count of b), and the glossy pages and relatively complex visuals of c) (color magazine layouts vs. B&W line art) seemed to result in washed-out visuals and more-noticeable waviness. I'd heard about the SV600 having problems with glossy pages in reviews of the machine; there was no blanking-out due to glare, but less color depth was apparent.
There may be settings to correct all this in the software. I haven't had time to play around with it sufficiently, and the documentation and software tutorializing is wanting due to poor translation that gives the machine the impression of a chintzy product, despite being produced by a reputable firm. I know it has an option, for example, to remove the traces of your fingers holding down the pages, but I can't get it to work. This is likely in great part my failing due to time crunch, but the finger thing is going to become pertinent in the next paragraph.
Because: I've made some provisional PDFs of the Yun Kouga The Struggle Within/Ghost Head manga here and here. Note the word "provisional." THESE ARE NOT THE FINAL VERSIONS OF THESE PDFS. As threatened in the title, the tips of my fingers are lovingly detailed in almost all the images (but do not block out art; I took care to hold down on white space). The unrelated pages facing the first and last pages of the manga have not been excised from the PDF. For some reason, the software adores eating the frontispieces for each of the manga's two parts. (The art is visible but blurred & cropped at the edges in a minimally-impactful but weird way.) And there's a bit more waviness remaining after page correction than I'd like, though I think that if will serve in a pinch if it has to be the archival edition of this previously-dropped-off-the-face-of-the-Earth manga. It will not be, barring me dying in the next few months, my copies of the manga exploding, or my means of scanning disappearing, but I'm entering a stretch of time where I'm going to be taking care of business for a while, so I want to have something up there just in case.
I have more to say about this manga, and I will be translating it. I'd had dreams of releasing a PDF of the original and a scanlated version side by side, but I think I know my limitations regarding image editing, even at this manga's thoroughly-handleable length. Until then: enjoy Kouga's popped-collar, cool-as-fuck Shou:
ETA: Text translations now available, using both Japanese and English names. In further news: we are delivered from my image-editing ineptitude, as another trusted party within the CT fandom has approached me with plans to create a finger-free scanlation. The scanlation may be using some, all, or none of my translation, with my blessing - the team has an in-house translator who's produced their own translation of the manga. No competition here; after being lost for 25 years, this manga deserves all the attention it's getting. It's surprisingly good! I plan to write more about it, and I'll link that scanlation when it's available.
I've been working on the translation team for this. Toriyama! Feels like the big time.
Two Steam puzzle games I played recently! One shooting high, the other shooting...lower.
The Case of the Golden Idol
Don't write off this game like I initially did because it looks like ass. I mean, it absolutely does look like ass. But it's purposeful ass - a very studious ass. An ass designed to evoke, in part, the style of the political cartoons of the U.S. Revolutionary era, on which the story and the populist feelings it's designed to invoke are based. The art's purposefully off-putting, but it's never impolite enough to go into full-on grossness. That's not on its agenda. It's more interested in being funny, weird, and stylistically-evocative. The style does come into its own and grow on you, and there are even parts that are...aesthetically *pleasing,* mad as that sounds.
But the gameplay is the big hook here, and it reminds me of the old Crime & Puzzlement books I loved as a kid: you're presented with a tableau, typically of a crime or suspicious death, and have to ferret out what's going on and what recently happened using context clues. You get an inventory of what each character has on their person to aid in your investigation, and you're expected to fill out several Mad Libs-style accounts to demonstrate your comprehension of events. (You uncover keywords through investigating, so you can't brute-force solutions. There's an option to highlight click points; I'd say it gives a *bit* too much of the game away, as there are a few clues that require observation and imagination to uncover, but there are cases where you can be stuck pixel-hunting through pictures and messages for that one elusive word, so your call.)
What can I say? It works. The mysteries constructed are fair, smart, and satisfying to solve. Though standalone, each puzzle represents another incident in the progression of a larger narrative that entertains. It's not the single snap-tight puzzle box of frequent point of comparison Return of the Obra Dinn - it's trying to do something different, more overtly narrative-focused and messy in a human way. It's the prime choice of gaming in the moment for thoughtful folks looking for a mystery to unravel.
Also: The ending is one of the absolute best ways an evil plot has unraveled in years.
Doors: Paradox
Doors: Paradox is a dumbed-down The Room for the hidden-object audience. It's the type of game that will put giant yin-yang symbols over its Chinese-themed levels and give you a "katana." It's useless getting mad at it. It's like a dumb dog. It's well-intentioned and vapidly entertaining, but you're going to have to put up with it rolling in the mud from time to time.
Doors isn't going for the tension or horror atmosphere of The Room, obviously. It instead adapts that series' puzzle-box gameplay to a succession of picturesque portals, where you're exploring and expanding a seemingly limited game space by discovering hidden mechanisms. And at first, it has many of the same joys as The Room - ooh! that decorative band rotates! - but the designers do not have Fireproof Games' ingenuity at their disposal, and you'll grow wise to its comparatively-shallow bag of tricks soon enough. Then about halfway through, it just runs out of steam for actual puzzles, and you're simply matching shapes between your inventory and the environment like a busy box.
Again: This isn't bad; it's entertaining for a good stretch and at least time-killing for the rest of it. It's just not aiming that high. Two positives. One: it does have genuinely beautiful tableaux in a twee, Thomas Kinkade manner.
(All right: to my knowledge, Kinkade never painted any imprisoned robots.)
And two: it serves up its levels in bite-size, 5-to-10-minute pieces - perfect if you need a break from work or whatnot. It's not a bad purchase, but keep expectations in check, and be ready to bail a considerable amount of time before it declares itself over.
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