Reviews

As-Salāmu 'Alaykum. In this article I'll be reviewing a lot of random things, ranging from software, games, books, visual novels, anime and manga (shortened "animanga"), food, to everything else I find worthy enough for a review on its own. This article will forever be a work-in-progress and some reviews may change!

Books

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

C-tier. I'd like to say first and foremost that I have nothing against the Jews, whether ethnic or religious, and one of my best friends is a Jew, ironically, so I don't believe that "all Jews are evil" or any of that sorta nonsense (even though Judaism has its own shit, but I can't really blame its adherents for that which they're unaware of). I read an Arabic translation with few to no commentary (except for the author's preface), and I gotta admit that this is one of the most boring reads ever since it explains the obvious; that (((they))), the Zionist mafia, are in control. Whether or not these protocols are an "outdated forgery" is a pointless debate, and I say this while believing myself that the book is written by your average deranged "Christian conservative white straight male" (obvious from the special fixation on Christianity and the "white race"); once one discovers what's going on behind the scenes and (((who)))'s driving a major portion of the global agendas (e.g., normalization of pornography and homosexuality through media and entertainment outlets, destruction of nuclear family through promotion of feminism, obliteration of stable economical equity through interest, attacking religious institutions and the gentiles (non-Jews) through vilification and marginalization, constant war in the Middle-East and the erasure of Palestinian identity, etc.), it doesn't much matter whether the document is genuine or not because it's indubitably one of the most accurate reflections of how the Zionist cabal looks upon the "Goyim," and one of the most accurate literary writings predicting the events of the past few years, as if all world events have been rolling by the book.

Games

Cave Story

S-tier. I played this game back in 2021 on my 3DS, and honestly this game is just so amazing in every aspect I can think of and is one of the most indie titles deserving of praise of all time; an absolute classic to play. Everything is so great about it, I can hardly think of an inconvenience about this game; the artwork, the weapon level system, the weird unused stuff, the character development, and going out your way and tearing your hair off to find out about the "true" ending is just the icing on the cake since the game is also so damn hard, I'd yell, scream, and go down an emotional roller-coaster more than I'd actually play the game (in fact, the game is so hard that I uninstalled the game 3 consecutive times before completing it). Whoever's reading this; please play this game, I swear that you won't be wasting your time and you won't regret it, it's even free to download and has many open-source reproductions (doukutsu-rs is a personal favorite). Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya is a real genius, and I seriously hope he goes out of his silence and make some sort of prequel/sequel to this absolute masterpiece. Even though it's replayable dozens of times, I just can't get enough out of it.

Hydra Castle Labyrinth

B-tier. I found out about this game from a homebrew 3DS port, and I immediately chose to play it because why not? The game has no story beyond what you can find on the README.txt provided with it, whose gist is that you're (somehow) dropped into a labyrinth-like castle without any guidance on where to go, and you have to defeat 8 bosses to get some sorta crown or something like that. The game itself is great overall for a freeware game and is probably the greatest example of game progression; you first get a power-up that allows you to defeat a boss so that you get a key (to another boss door) and yet another unique power-up, and it keeps going on and on, unlocking newer mechanisms and therefore still being fun. The only inconvenience I have with this game is that it requires you to know your shit a bit way too well or else you'd get stuck on a loop looking for something so obvious (which so happens to be my case, and that's ironically what made me like this game), oh and also the fact you can't jump off ladders is a huge pain the ass, and it's the main reason I gave it a B (yes, it's that inconvenient).

Ikachan

B-tier. Aside from Cave Story, this is another one of Pixel Studios' masterpieces that I'd rate a bit lower. I've played this game on my 3DS way before I found out about Cave Story, and I believe both follow a similar theme; on Cave Story, it's (kind of) about finding a way out of a collapsing floating island, and on Ikachan, it's about a cute squid trying to find a way out of a place underwater that's turning into ruins. To be frank, this is a very unique game in terms of artwork and controlsmanship although the game is extremely short I'd finish it in less than 2 hours, so it was just a short experience and there's nothing much to it. Still, I enjoyed it and I'd play it again some other time, In Shā'allāh.

Minetest

S-tier. Minetest is one of (if not the) oldest open-source voxel-based 3D sandboxing games to date, inspired by Minecraft and a bunch of irrelevant block games. I know Minetest isn't quite exactly Minecraft, but it's at least something that's not closed-source, hardware-consuming, (kinda) pay-to-play, full of trackers and telemetry, or tied to Microsoft's privacy policies, which are a privacy nightmare. Another thing I like about it is the fact you can set up a server so easily, and that's pretty nice. Don't get me wrong because there are misconceptions that need to be cleared up; Minetest is a game engine, not a game. When people usually play Minetest and then keep rambling about the "poor aesthetics and boring gameplay" ever after, they're just plain retarded because they never cared to change the default game, which isn't supposed to be playable in the first place and is supposed to be used as a lightweight base for modding purposes. There are a lot of other extensions (i.e., games, mods, texture packs, etc.) that when coupled with the Minetest engine will replicate similar (but not exact) aesthetics to Minecraft, and I personally recommend Mineclonia, a fork of VoxeLibre (i.e., MineClone2) which is super lightweight, music-free, and is under active development by someone who doesn't openly boast about belonging to a mentally unhinged community whose only positive trait is HIV.

Yume Nikki

A-tier. This site's former co-maintainer and my old friend, Fumiyako, recommended me this, and to be honest, I don't think I can really call Yume Nikki a game; it's a work of art. The game may be a simple walking simulator but with each step there begin to unfold interesting and bizzare places and events. There are so many theories for this game that so many fans see every pixel of it as a piece to a larger puzzle, and that's where the true fun of the game lies. This game got me through a really dark period of my life, seriously. I felt like I was literally Madotsuki, in fact, and I quote one of my friends: "She is, in every single aspect, except physical, me." Playing this game at 3 AM is actual self-refinement and is such an emotional roadtrip, and so I urge the reader to play it, it's even free on Steam (but still I'd recommend the OG Uboachan fan translation). To this date, this game (although it has a total of one jumpscare) is still the best psychological horror game I've ever played, oh and there's even a multiplayer version (i.e., the Yume Nikki Online Project) for people who already experienced the original game, and a plethora of fangames which are nice and which I'm planning to play (especially Yume 2kki and .flow). Kikiyama really cooked with this one.

Software

Custom ROMs

D-tier. All those privacy freaks recommending "custom ROMs" (for Android smartphones at least) as alternative operating systems are fighting a war they can't win, because they seemingly fail to understand that phones aren't private from the get-go, no matter how private a "custom ROM" makes them. Surely, they may lessen certain privacy concerns, but they don't eradicate the cores of all problems which is all in the hardware rather than the operating system; the microphones, cameras, SIM cards, and wireless modules (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, etc.). By installing GrapheneOS or CalyxOS (for example), you might have mitigated the problems on the software level, but all of the hardware level problems are still there and nobody knows if the glowies are spying on you by embedding spyware into the hardware or by sniffing the phone's antennas near your physical location.

I2P

B-tier. Not perfect, but way better than the clearnet, even though every single site seems to be down more than a retard. I2P is a darknet protocol (like Tor, but developed by regular civilians instead of a U.S. governmental entity). Compared to Tor, I2P is blazingly fast and goes over random numbers of nearby nodes, which makes it feel just like the clearnet minus all of the bureaucratic shit (e.g., DNS, domain registrars, SSL and their CAs, IP address de-anonymization, etc.). I2P is also very accessible through installing i2pd (an I2P daemon written in C++) then connecting to an HTTP proxy on 127.0.0.1:4444, and the thing I love is that, unlike Tor that provides an entire browser (i.e., the infamous Firefox fork, Tor Browser) to make it easier to access it (and thus making more normies and criminals flocking towards it), I2P doesn't provide a browser specially for the protocol and that makes the social problems way less common since it's a nerd-only network. Discoverablity of I2P's eepsites as well is easier than Tor's "hidden services," since with I2P, you can get a hashed address and people can use an "address book" as to asign a custom domain name to access it. The final thing I'll note is that Tor is like an extension to the clearnet since it can access it entirely (unless the website blocks Tor nodes (which are openly publicized), and that's the case with 95% of the entire clearnet so Tor won't work as effectively as VPNs although it's much better than them). I2P, on the other hand, is an entirely separate internet; it has no access to anything other than I2P, which is actually a good idea since people need to get a separate space for great stuff again, making it more resiliant towards subversion. In a final note, I found I2P to be the closest representation of my concept of a better web (check the New Web Order), although it lacks a lot of what I've noted down on aforesaid article and has many flaws regarding design and implementation, especially data distribution (although it can be tackled using external software like Tahoe-LAFS). It's also written in Java, the most chaotic mess of a language syntax ever, so I'll give out a B.