I am having great difficulty expressing myself in words but I can say without question that it has been a great privilege of mine to have been able to work with so many of you the past six years. It has been extremely fulfilling for me to work in open source given the closeness that is emitted in the interactions on Bugzilla, the mailing lists, IRC, and pick-your-favourite-social-media. Whenever I reported or fixed a bug, I really felt that I was making a difference.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with all my free time after I’ve moved on. I think I’ll still be around though. I will not be submitting fixes as often as I used to but you’ll still find me in Bugzilla. Even if I stopped CC’ing myself on bugs today there are still thousands of bugs that I am currently CC’d on. ;) So, I will not actually say “Good bye”.

I will still be going to EclipseCon North America…perhaps to my future team’s chagrin, but not to mine. So if anyone wants to chat, you can find me there. Don’t try to buy me any alcohol though since I don’t drink. ;)

Gameplay:
Side 2nd, like its predecessor, has a very simple interface. I didn’t really notice any glitches or anything with it while I read through the game. It does its job so I was pretty much fine with it for the most part. Being able to jump around the chapters was very nice, more games need to support this feature.

Unfortunately, the engine in question gives you the log by inserting the text in the textbox instead of giving you an overlay. This always annoys me and I wish people would stop using and/or developing engines like this.

Art:
There aren’t a lot of pieces of artwork to speak of here but the ones that were there I was very pleased with. The background art seems to be on par with the original while the character art has improved significantly in my opinion.

Music:
The choice of background music is excellent and appropriate for the scenes in question. I really like both the instrumental and the vocal versions of the opening theme song. Going through the tracks randomly through the game right now brings a small to my face as it reminds me of the different scenes of the game where the tracks were used. :)

Story:
I’ll be honest, I really didn’t like the original Narcissu. The game felt very anti-climactic to me. Perhaps it was because I knew how it was going to end before I started, I don’t know, the game just didn’t really evoke any emotions in me.

Side 2nd on the other hand struck an entirely different chord with me. To me, the story of Side 2nd was actually trying to get somewhere. It really seemed to me like there was a message that the story was trying to get across to the reader. Besides that, there was actually development going on for both Setsumi and Himeko as the story went on here. Setsumi had to ponder over her dilemma regarding her fries and Himeko had her own thing going on with Christianity and all that. Yu and Setsumi’s characters in the original seemed rather one-dimensional in comparison if you ask me.

I think part of the reason I liked the story so much was probably because of Himeko. I loved her as a character and her voice actress Natsumi Yanase really did an excellent job portraying Himeko. I particularly liked the scene where Yuka and Himeko meet again by the beach while Himeko was out there with Setsumi. That was really quite a painful scene to endure, kudos to both voice actresses.

The game is longer than the original but I’d say it’s doable within five or six hours. I think I’m kind of an outlier since it seems to me that most people liked the original more than the sequel. If any of you reading out there didn’t like the original, please do give Side 2nd a try, you might end up enjoying it as much as I did. If you do play this game, please read the epilogue. It’s a brief scene of the events after the ending of the original.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask on our e4-dev mailing list!

As someone that’s been both a student and a mentor for Google’s Summer of Code program, it was great to see Dariusz win the 2011 Top Contributor award. I was originally sad to see that David Williams hadn’t made the top three in the Top Committer category but since he ended up receiving a Lifetime Contribution award, I guess I won’t get upset over all the people that didn’t vote for him in the Top Committer category.

My talk for the 4.x compatibility layer was pretty empty originally but it ended up being a full room in the end. Maybe the topic appealed to a lot of people or maybe there was a lot of people from the Boris Bokowski fan club, I don’t know. Admittedly, if there were a lot of people from the latter category I’m sad to say they were all disappointed since Boris was at a board meeting and couldn’t do the talk with me. I started the talk holding the mic but apparently it was so bad that someone in the audience actually came up on stage to both suggest and to physically clip the mic onto my jacket! Sorry, everyone! Two people approached me about where they could get the slides so I have uploaded them online for your convenience.

If anyone’s curious about the use of Eclipse 4 technologies in an RCP application, you might want to stop by the Stevens Creek room at 1140 today!

Sensei would have to take credit for the placement of the shin and the soe. I picked up the slack for most of the rest of the arrangement. It’s clear that the lighting isn’t great so I think I should probably start taking one with the cardboard backdrop and one without it so I can compare the two.

5pb. and Nitroplus’s latest entry into the “science adventure” series is Robotics;Notes. Nothing that’s been revealed thus far has really been of interest so I’m not going to bother translating any of it.