And finally i get to play ai sp@ce, lol. It eventually finished updating, and there i was before i downloaded it thinking “hmm, 64MB, can’t be much content yet”, a week or so later and the updater has been downloading – crashing – downloading – crashing, and now i have an install folder with 1.8GB of content, lol, but we’re all done now!

First steps were character creation, get some basic options: gender, choice of 4 faces, choice of 3 (may have been 4) hair styles, and a choice of hair colour (blue, black, brown, red, gold i believe were the options).

After that’s done you’re presented with a short opening video of you on the train to Akihabara with Kotoko singing the theme song in the background, and you watch as your character opens up a questionnaire to fill in. Name, birthday, blood type (and we all know how important selecting a blood type is in these games… don’t know my actual blood type but went with AB), and then it gets exciting, you get to answer 5 random questions… the ones i got asked were:

What do you most want right now?
Dream      Money
Friends     The World
Time

What is your favourite type of girl?
Imouto        Weak (ill)
Tsundere Yandere
Kuudere       Ane
Megane       Dojikko

What is your favourite day of the week?
Monday         Tuesday
Wednesday    Thursday
Friday            Saturday
Sunday

Are you the criminal of this incident?
Yes                             No
You’re the criminal!    Incident?

Where is this?
Japan The Earth
The Moon    The Universe

(my answers in bold)

And then you’re thrust into Akihabara train station ready to explore the world. First things first, it’s pretty much an exact replica of Akihabara, lol, though there’s only two areas open, the area outside either exit of the station (not the giant Yodobashi Camera side though)… now if only i could get into that building with the Korean BBQ over there, lol.

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The 2nd important thing you notice is the TV screens, they’re all playing live streams from nicovideo, i was walking around wondering where the noise was coming from at first, but it was the tv screens, lol. Nico ani news first, and then episodes of Penguin Musume Heart (complete with nicovideo comments scrolling across wwwwwwwwww), what a brilliant idea! Only problem with it is it appears to be slightly temperamental, videos will work one minute, and then the next the tv screen will show an error message saying “your browser does not have flash, please download flash here”, lol.

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After that, the 3rd thing that came to mind was “Right, now where’s my girl, where do i find her.”, i saw lots of girls running around and was beginning to think i’d made a critical error when creating my character… “Are there no ‘partners’ that you get given, was i supposed to make a girl character, am i now stuck with a man forever…”. And with those thoughts i went exploring, eventually found what i assume was an estate agent place in Akihabara, and chose which world my apartment would be in (i chose the Clannad world).

And so i made my way to the Clannad world by train from Akihabara (they’ve obviously upgraded the train network since i was last in Japan, lol)… “ahh, maybe i can get my girl from one of the anime worlds”. I arrived in some sort of shopping mall, and seeing several female shop attendants selling stuff (clothes, room items etc.) i thought “Do i have to purchase one?”, clearly not, so i continued my search.

Eventually i ended up in my apartment, and bloody hell what a small apartment it was, basically there is just enough room for you to lie down lengthways down the room, but not enough to lie across the room, lol, room looked like it was about 7 foot by 4 foot, oh well, it’ll do i thought. No girl in here though, it was completely empty, so off to continue exploring…

Clicked the door and wait, what was this, there is a girl waiting outside my room with ??? as her name, lol. Not entirely sure what the plot was, but either way she’s now mine and living in my room (which is definitely not big enough for a double bed). Anyway i was satisfied now, i assume the choices you make on the questionnaire at the beginning affects what girl you get.

Now i was sorted, after wandering around other people’s rooms (and accidentally walking into some sort of house party, lol) i went off to figure out how to get cash to buy clothing items and furniture. All of the three anime worlds (Clannad, Da Capo, Shuffle) have three areas, the shopping mall, the apartments, and the school. Clearly the only place to get quests was the school… got there, and as expected i was right. The quests were pretty basic “speak to this person, then speak to this person, then speak to the original person” quests. Involving such things as “Deliver this love letter”, “Find my cell phone” etc. Within about 30 minutes i’d completed all of the quests in the Clannad world (basically i just spoke to every single person in the school about 5 times and i was done, lol). My rewards… 20,000 cash, a 14 inch tv (why was he carrying such a thing around school, and why did he give it to me, lol), and a notebook.

Off to make some purchases for my girl and apartment and i was sorted… i think the picture of my now furnished apartment is pretty self explanatory, lol:

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There’s a trick to getting things to float… you can stack items on top of each other, remove the item from the bottom and the item on top doesn’t fall down, and presto after a bit of stacking and removing you have a wall mounted tv!

Also, no, there is no dirty dirty porn in the game, it won’t even let you fully undress the girl “she must at least have a top and skirt on” (though why the guys are aloud to go around with no top is a mystery, lol).

There are a couple of things that i haven’t fully played around with, like the drama stuff… basically you can record yourself in the game, and upload it to the drama store and either sell it, or give it away for free. Looks interesting however i couldn’t get downloading other people’s video’s to work “Download complete!”… complete? where? where do i watch it??? lol. There’s also a section called “Ai-tune” which from initial impressions seems to be a way of giving your girl actions to do when she’s idle, or when certain triggers happen (i could be completely wrong though), looks a bit complex, need to look into it more. There’s also a section on user generated content which should be quite interesting… user made clothing, room items etc. like second life i guess.

Overall i think it’s a pretty cool game, the embedded nicovideo on the tv screens is a great idea. It’s all a bit buggy right now and definitely needs a lot more quests (well it is a closed beta test, i guess that’s acceptable). Basically seems to be second life but in Japanese and with anime characters. I wonder what the events will be like, lol.

If anyone wants to find me in game, look out for “ポール”, or head to my apartment in Clannad land (it’s unlocked, so anyone can enter)… Room number: 0000-4071… Room name: フリールーム！！

(oh, and i’m halfway through a rough translation of the ai sp@ce manual… i’ll stick it up here when i’m done, along with several observations about sections of the manual that are commented out and aren’t published when you view it in the game… *cough* live concerts *cough*)