To Heart: Date Exchanger [ デートエクスチェンジャー] Game Sample - PC/Doujin

This one is pretty strange: an excellent clone of Face's odd Arcade puzzle game, "Money Idol Exchanger" (also known as "Money Puzzle Exchanger") but featuring Leaf and Aquaplus' "To Heart" visual novel characters and released in the relative window of both franchises. With its development being between 1997 and early 1998, this Windows 95 Doujin game featured several configuration options (such as enabling / disabling the opening animation, adjusting the framerate and background animations up to 60FPS, and even storing your high scores for different modes and difficulties and broadcasting them on the world wide web), great audio/visuals with opening and ending themes, CD-DA and Midi sound support, and several omake features for fans of To Heart (a custom desktop clock with To Heart characters, full color versions of in-game illustrations that aren't restricted to 63 on-screen colors, screensavers, a detailed mini-manga presented by Higeroman, the primary producer of this Doujin, etc.), it is a cool title to have for To Heart and puzzle game fans.

For those who are not familiar with Money Idol Exchanger, it is very similar to Data East's excellent "Magical Drop" series, but with extra steps so to speak. The game involves characters at the bottom of the screen who grab objects from the playing field (they can hold as many of the same type as they can get their hands on) and then they toss them back to eliminate them from the playing field. Matching and making chains is the primary goal here, but MIE adds one extra element to create a bit more of a challenge: currency conversion. While in MIE, the aim is to "exchange" currencies to equal amounts from different yen coins, TH:DE is a happy medium between MIE and MD as you must always match a minimum of four, but matching different colors will change them into other colors (exchanging them if you will) in your center column, so planning ahead is necessary if you wish to do bigger chains.

Each chain the player makes will push the field down one row (shown with multiple arrows), but there are also two special tiles players can match (you only need to match two of these). One drops a row of nuisance junk on your opponent while the other eliminates the primary color on your playing field to make easier chains. You can also manually accelerate your playing field like in Magical Drop if you have a more aggressive playstyle. It's pretty good stuff... but this brings us to the main issue for the day: running this game in a modern computer environment.

Getting this thing running was anything but fun. First of all, this game cannot just be ran off the disc -- it has to be installed first. This means if you're running Windows 10 or older operating systems besides Windows 95, you will likely run into all sorts of issues. To make matters worse, while the game runs in 16-bit color, it is a 32-bit application and will automatically deny you (with a prompt at least) that you can't use the installer with a 64-bit operating system. Trying to run the launcher in different compatibility modes doesn't work either. I WAS able to trick the installer by using "Ovtdm" (which helps computers that no longer have Nvtdm support run 16-bit applications and installers) and while this was the first big step in running this, it introduced a host of other issues.

For starters, the game defaults to fullscreen with no built-in window support and does not run properly in full-screen as the framerate is erratic, either being too slow or too fast (and slows down severely whenever you do a chain or are about to lose as the "background transitions" kick in). In other words, it wasn't cool. To remedy this, I used an English version of D3dwindower which corrected the play speed but made certain screens hyper sensitive to key inputs (so you had to tap the button extremely fast if you didn't want to skip character selection for example). Then when I tried to record the game, the opening movie is encoded differently from the rest of the game with Macromedia Flash and comes up invisible, so I had to use OBS and capture the whole screen then crop everything extra out (it would not capture the window)... but this takes the audio out of sync for some reason, so I had to re-align the music to the mouth flaps in an editor. Yeah... not the most fun I've had recording, but it's a good game worth the trouble.

This is a video of the game in action showing the opening, a playthrough with the ending, and some gameplay of the single player endless mode so you can hear the game's primary track (as the game's main track, it is long, about six-seven minutes). If you don't have the CD, you can still play the game, but you have to turn off the opening and switch to midi sound. The ending will also be modified without lyrics. Enjoy.

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