Two days ago I fired up IRC on a whim to see if anyone had set up a decent fserve for a game I'd been looking for since last October. I look, and look, and look some more, and after about an hour of channel hopping I found one. The game was broken into three .rar files, averaging 600 megs each. Back when I was first hunting for this game, getting it at the house would have been impossible, since we only had dial-up at the time, but now that I'm DSL-powered I hunkered down and and started the transfer.

By the next day, I'd gotten all three files ( after numerous resumes -- I swear, people should limit the number of users on an fserve, not the bandwidth ) and got ready to burn it all to CDs. I opened up the first of the .rar files and realized I was sadlmy mistaken: this wasn't three CDs worth of data, it was one DVD. For a minute, I was stumped. I racked my brain trying to think of anyone I knew -- or any business -- that had DVD-burning capability. It seemed hopeless, and the prospect of finally finding the game I'd been searching for but having no way to play it was starting to really piss me off.

Then I remembered a prog I'd seen in some of the w4rez channels I'd been in, VirtualCD or something like that. I started looking, and fifteen minutes later I had it downloaded and cracked. The prog acts as a virtual drive, allowing you to load a disc image ( called ISOs -- its basically one big file that represents exactly what the data on a CD or DVD looks like in binary ) into it and running it as though it were a physical drive. I tried it on the ISO of my game, and I managed to get the installation started, but for whatever reason VirtualDVD couldn't process all the files, and so the install failed over and over.

Remember how I said I was getting pissed? It came back after that. I hit up IRC again, this time asking around to see if anyone else had this problem, and lo and behold I just happened to catch the man that uploaded the game in the first place. I ask away, and he tells me I should be using a prog called Daemon-tools instead of VirtualDVD. I say thanks, and go hunting for Daemon tools.

Six minutes later I had it downloaded, but there was no need to crack it; it was free for non-commercial use. I try it, it works, and now I'm finally playing the game I've been searching for for months. Oh yeah, you're probably wondering what game it is. Its called Sexy Beach. Ever hear of a japanese developer called Dreams? No? What about Alicesoft? No? Well then I don't know how to explain what sort of game this is other than it is what DOA Beach Volleyball would be if you took out the volleyball altogether and gave it an AO rating.

What? Don't look at me like that. Its fun, dammit.