Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Mischief Maker"]<A HREF="http://daidai.moo.jp/top.html" TARGET="new">Sora</A>. It's not bringing a broken arcade cabinet back from the dead, but this has definitely been the hardest japanese shmup for me to buy and get to run on my English version of XP. First of all, I wasn't crazy about paying Himeya shop $30 plus $20 shipping for the game, but by chance I learned that it was available at the DL site <A HREF="http://www.melonbooks.com/item/goods/id_goods/IT0000132818" target="new">melonbooks</A> for what I think is about $25. Problem is melonbooks is entirely in japanese. I remembered that years earlier the author of the abstract shmup Exception put up a <A HREF="http://i-saint.skr.jp/exception/buy.html" TARGET="new">guide</A> for english speakers to buy his game off melonbooks. Fortunately the site hadn't undergone any significant changes and the instructions still worked. Now that I had the full game the task was complete, right? Wrong. This is one of the pickiest japanese games I've ever tried to run on my system. To spare myself the irritating popups from the Applocale program, I went to Windows regional and language opitons advanced tab, installed the japanese code conversion tables, and changed the language for non-unicode programs to japanese. I have not seen any side effects so far. NOW the game runs. While there's no danger of Hellsinker being booted from its perch as my favorite PC shmup, I'd still say the effort was worth it. It's a recent release so I think I'll write a frontpage review.[/quote]