I’m so very proud of myself; I’ve actually made it through the PROLOGUE in ToHeart2.  That’s, oh, maybe a hundredth of the way thorough the game and it’s taken me 3 hours or so of fervent dictionary use.

Playing a game in a language you don’t fully understand has an interesting side effect, by the way: all the jokes have huge buildup because of all the time spent looking up kanji; I find myself honestly laughing at some of the silliest gags just because I’m FINALLY GETTING THEM.

Getting through the prologue revealed, unfortunately, a tiny problem. See, as the prologue ends you get an introductory animation.

On the Vista laptop I was playing it on, it displayed the first frame of the animation, played the music for the opening animation, and that single frame was all I saw for the next 90 seconds until it was out of music and continued on to the next screen of the game.

So I installed on an XP partition on my Macbook and… well, the video works fine.

Then, just for the heck of it, I threw the game onto a Windows 7 PC and had even worse luck.  Rather than getting a single frame of the animation, I just get an empty black window.

So, I could run the game on my Macbook, even through Parallels, and it works fine, but I went to the trouble of setting up a “Play Eroge here” desk with dictionaries and notebooks and so on and so forth and dragging the Macbook back and forth to the Eroge desk is going to mean a lot of plugging and unplugging components.

So now I’m taking the Windows XP MCE restore disk that I made on Day 1 of owning this laptop and blowing it back to its roots.  If I still don’t have video I’m going to be extremely put out.