Piece of Wonder goes on Sale

[Misu]

Till I get that crosspost/comment engine running I guess I'll manually have to add posts like these:

http://visualnews.net/2007/01/21/a-wonder-in-itself/

In a nutshell, Hirameki put Piece of Wonder on sale today.

[Vatina]

Wow, that surprised me ^^;
I think I'll wait until the boxed edition comes out though, I'm not too fond of downloading my games when I buy them....

[GreatSaintLouis]

Whoa, this is a surprise! I was just reading about the game yesterday and how the release date was confirmed for February 28th; nobody made any mention of the download edition.

I'm glad to see that the download edition also doubles as a time-limited trial, as I really wanted to get a feel for the title before committing. Although, if Rightstuf.com's price of $29.99 for the boxed edition stays correct for release, I'm definitely picking it up; considering that the download is $24.99 I don't have any problems paying $5 more plus shipping for a boxed edition.

[Misu]

Wow, I didn't realize the download version doubled up as a trail, I'll definitely give it a shot now.

And god, with the speeds CNET is giving me, I should host the damn thing >.>;;

Update:
Wow, now that I've played it a bit, PoW is damn funny =D. Socking lolicons in the face brightened my day. Also, its really apparent that Laura-chan was working on this as lead translator/QC as its quality level of English is much better then any previous Hirameki game.

[GreatSaintLouis]

Considering the thing's some 400-MB in size, I'd be surprised to get speedy speeds no matter where it was hosted.

Good to hear that the English quality is bumped up a notch. I recently picked up Ever17, and while for the most part it's done pretty well, there are just a few places where it seemed like just one more QC pass would have really helped.

Maybe this'll be done downloading by the time I wake up tomorrow...

Anyone know anything more about the download version? I want to grab it now, but I don't want something I wont be able to put on both my laptop and desktop, if there is any funny DRM stuff.

Art style makes me want to vomit BTW, but beggars can't be choosers I guess :P

[Vatina]

Didn't know about the trial either.... so, thanks for the tip ^^; just began downloading this morning. Looks like it could be finished by the time I get home from school.
I'm not too fond of the art style either, but I'm hoping the rest will make up for it.

[Misu]

The trial doesnt install anything funny. What the program does is it installs itself and has a digital timer built in. If you don't pay for it, the game will "expire" in 45 minutes and just die, asking you if you want to pay at that time. If you don't want to, hit cancel, then uninstall and your done.

I had blazing speeds on from CNET to VN server 1 (2.5Mb/s =D) when I downloaded it via Lynx, unfortunately since that was shared hosting, I don't know where the file went o.O, so now I'm uploading the old fashioned way >.>;;. You might be able to get better speeds of VN when its done tomorrow depending on your location, so I figured I might as well get up the mirror.

As for the artwork, it grew on me pretty quickly, it wasn't that bad after a while. Kinda reminds me of Higurashi artwork. I should have a first impressions review up for Piece of Wonder with a bunch of screenshots before I go to sleep tonight, so I'll post when I'm done.

[Misu]

And after working on this FOREVER, I present to you my first impressions review of Piece of Wonder:
http://visualnews.net/2007/01/22/fir...ece-of-wonder/

No funny stuff? That's not true. It comes with some DRM by a company named Protexis, that I assume disappears after unlocking the game with a serial number. It's that DRM that is providing the timer after you apply for a trial license.

[pb186]

well they have to have some way to make sure you are paying to get the full product... time trial was a great idea. So natuarally the easiest way to get this to work is to use some time limit wrapper protection. It's no where near as nasty as many of the other protections out there... especially when dealing with cd protections. Some of those actually install drivers that potentially screw up your computer to the point a reinstall is the only option... but yeah.

[Misu]

Ah... I both misread and misunderstood Guest 6. For some reason, I was thinking that he was asking if it installed any extra DRM stuff onto his computer to run the game, in which I was responding no, since all the DRM stuff is bundled within the application and is removed when you uninstall the application.

[Message]

I've been meaning to ask - has anyone else had problems with the ingame voices? If I played both bgm and voices, most spoken sentences would break off about halfway, disabling bgm solved it. It was very annoying to play either way, so if anyone else has this problem perhaps we should report it to Hirameki. (In case hirameki is reading this: winXP pro, not too ancient AC97 audio drivers, latest DirectX. Game works fine on my laptop though.)

[GreatSaintLouis]

On Hirameki's Piece of Wonder page, there's a note in system requirements that says "*Sound may not be properly supported on computers using C-Media AC '97," so that may be your problem.

[Kefit]

The audio problem has been reported on Hirameki's support board, and they are looking into it:

http://community.hirameki-int.com/mo...id=103&forum=1

No concrete solution yet, but hopefully they will come up with something soon.