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For those unaware or are new to .hack, the whole franchise revolves around VR headsets as a major (but not required) part of the game that everyone plays with in the .hack series. You see headsets of all kinds throughout the series from 2002's .hack//SIGN and .hack//Infection's "Neuro Goggles". Being described either as a "HMD" or head mount display, and as the term "FMD" or face mount display. The franchise was pitched by CyberConnect as a PS2 videogame where the players wear these VR devices, and their consciousness gets trapped in the game all the way back in 1999, as a game pitch to Bandai Inc. And in later installments would evolve into 2006's .hack//Roots and .hack//GU with M2D or Micro Monocle Display, which is a visor type. And in 2010's .hack//LINK changed the formula with the M3D which did away with the visor part and was purely headphones only. Then got back on VR with 2012's .hack//Beyond the World's ALGOS FMD, which looked more like a pair of sunglasses or prescription glasses. Kinda a less bulky version of the Google Glasses or Snapchat Spectacles. But what if I told you VR for the Sony Playstation 2 existed as a product as early back as 2002, and those familiar with 2016's PlayStation VR, there was another Sony branded product between the 2002 PUD-J5A and the 2016 PlayStation VR; and that was the 2012's Prototype-SR, aka the HMZ-T2. First, starting with the Sony PUD-J5A for the PlayStation 2. It was only specifically made for 6 PlayStation 2 games, none of which was the .hack// PS2 games; which is a shame. Sadly I have no sources or citation of CyberConnect2 or it's staff using/testing this device. Second was the Sony PROTOTYPE-SR (HMZ-T2). It was shown off at Tokyo Game Show in September 2012. President of CC2 Hiroshi Matsuyama attended and was able to test out the device being tested with Resident Evil V Tribulation demo. There was another predecessor to this device, the Sony HMZ-T1 "3d viewer" in the prior year. And even further back from 1996-1998, which these devices were based on was the Sony Glasstron and it's 5 different models, most notably the PLM-S700E. Then there was Sony's big breakout, all chips in finally, the Sony PlayStation VR. Which was meant to be a strong contender to it's competitors like the Occulus Rift and HTC Vive. Being a companion for PS4 and PS5 consoles for PSVR compatible games. But even Hiroshi Matsuyama has been seen playing with the competitor devices.

Share up your ideas on which Pokemon would be best suit for each Dothack character. Here's Helba the Queen of Darkness with Absol, a dark type Pokemon.

.hack//G.U. Last Recode on sale for $9.99 on PSN till August 13th 2025 at 80% off from original $49.99 price. https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0700-CUSA07559_00-HACKGURECODE0000 #dothack #ドットハック

On January 25th 2013, Inside Games Japan wrote an article with the director Akihiro Anai, artist Tetsuya Sugigami, and technical artist Takashi Matsuo about the development of the smart phone game. Article can be found here: https://www.inside-games.jp/article/2013/01/25/63261.html

The Inside Games 2013 Guilty Dragon Development Article" offers a fascinating glimpse into the creative process behind the game. It highlights the challenges the developers faced, from concept to completion, and how they overcame technical and artistic obstacles. The article provides valuable insights into game design, storytelling, and teamwork, making it an inspiring read for anyone interested in game development or the gaming industry as a whole.

Happy Birthday Sakubo (朔望), real name Iori Nakanishi (中西伊織), born on May 26th 2006 Source from page 175 of .hack//Archives 06 #dothack #ドットハック

In The World (.hack//SIGN & .hack//IMOQ) there were originally 6 character classes Twinblade, Heavyblade, Blademaster, Longarm, Heavyaxeman, and Wavemaster from 2010 and prior. It wasn't till four years later in 2014 during .hack//Legend of the Twilight two new classes were introduced. Starting with Knucklemaster on the far right. (Source .hack//Archives 3 page 223) Translation for Knucklemaster as follows (Source .hack//Archives 3 page 223) Unlike the other 6 classes, the 7th class has a class change option, translation as follows: "A rare class that appeared as an advanced class of the Knucklemaster due to the class change system implemented in 2014. It has various features not found in the normal classes. Such as the need for a job change item for the firs time to transform into a non-human race and change class." (Source .hack//Archives 3 page 223) But this wasn't the first time we've heard of Knucklemaster, in the 2003-2004 Comptiq magazines .hack//The World Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 we are introduced to Knucklemasters as a playable class in the TTRPG or tabletop roleplaying game .hack//Infinite Generation. (source page 97 .hack//The World Vol. 2 magazine) In the 2012 doujinshi by Rei Izumi in celebration of the 10th anniversary of .hack//Legend of the Twilight manga, from pages 27-48 we see a story of Ouka, Crim, and Luke. In this story they are all helping Knucklemaster Ouka get the item needed to change class. This is what Ouka looks like as a Knucklemaster, her first class before upgrading to the Werewolf class. These two rings overlapping each other tied with a ribbon and a tail dangling, is the item needed to transform. After which obtaining it, Ouka uses it to transform from Knucklemaster class to the Werewolf class The hands change, removing the spiked bracelets and palm gloves for a fur sleeve with brass spiked knuckles. Body starts to change, real emphasis on the boa. End of the transformation This being the Ouka we all know and love (if you are a manga design lover since the anime design is different). .hack//Archives Vol. 3 on BookWalker https://bookwalker.jp/de51b97bf4-fd6e-4b2a-8ece-0e3beb15fe8e/ More on Ouka's origin's transcribed here https://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=7850995 Original written work here https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/61564877 Short video on the 10th Anniversary book by Rei Izumi

As talked about in a recent post about Knucklemaster and Werewolf being the 7th and 8th character classes mentioned in the .hack//Archives_03 book. What if I told you right now, if you popped in your .hack//IMOQ game disc and look up the texture asset xicon00 and look closely, you will see 8 character class icons. From left to right we see Twinblade Wavemaster Knucklemaster Blademaster Samurai Heavyblade Heavyaxe Longarm These icons confirm a spiked knuckle as the icon for Knucklemaster with the 3rd icon from the left, and a curved katana for Samurai with the 5th icon from the left. Now we can go further back this with several usable weapons in-game with the Twinblade weapons and the Heavyblade weapons. As you may or may not know, the Twinblade and Heavyblade have the most weapons by any of the 6 character classes in-game. But something strange happens when you equip these items, most notably Kite's twinblade weapons. The twinblade weapons can be split in two categories that Kite uses, first is the bladed weapons or two dagger type of weapons. And the second is the dual gloves, dual spikes, or dual claws type of weapons. The first type the dagger type is strictly the twinblade class whereas the glove/spike/claw type weapons are in fact remnants from the Knucklemaster class. (image above shows Kite with a dual dagger type weapon and a dual glove type weapon) Heavyblade are no different, where one style of weapons they use is a oversized bladed weapon usually as large as Black Rose, and the other style is a slender curved light sword. It is implied the slender lighter blades are the remnant for the Samurai class. It's pretty easy to see that Sanjuro was meant to be part of the Samurai class. But unlike Knucklemaster, there was no mention of the Samurai class in the book .hack//Archives_03. Also has been noted that Natsumi may have been planned as a Knucklemaster class based on her weapon on page 193 of .hack//Archives_03. ( D / Natsume: The weapon is depicted as a tonfa instead of a twin sword. ) Below are my interpretations of which weapon would have belong to which class.

Today at 5pm PST get ready to learn about the lore for .hack's "The World R1" from the .hack//Infection, .hack//SIGN, .hack//Legend of the Twilight era of the franchise as written by CyberConnect2 #dothack #ドットハック

https://x.com/DUSTHARD/status/1854901168813883702

https://x.com/10jioekaki/status/1861244017100628086

https://www.instagram.com/inkoinfinity2/p/DDLRh5iNC0q/

From the original .hack//Infection video games, you would randomly see something flying in the sky. Whether it's a bloodied mummy spinning, a giant slug, a castle flipped upside down, or four floating eyeballs. These are known as "Legendary Lands" in the original games, you'd see them flying, and later in the post game you be given access to a special dungeon related to 3 them. But in .hack//fragment we also have a 5th one, Santa Grunty. Each of these phenomena can be seen randomly per server as listed below. The Aerial Fleet - Delta server The Inverted Castle - Theta server The Giant Creature - Lambda server The Ending World - Sigma server Santa Grunty - Omega server

Preorders for .hack//G.U. Birthday Set 2 Now Available!

The answer is simply, they code in C++

When I tell you think about the box art of the original four PS2 .hack video games, you'd probably think about the famous Yoshiyuki Sadamoto art work. Infection having the main cast lined up before Aura, Mutation having Black Rose and Helba standing behind Kite at Netslums, Outbreak with Elk up front with Mia and Balmung behind him and Balmung's feathers falling, and Outbreak with Kite raising his hand up with data drain activated with a call back to the other characters from the other box art below and above him. What if I told you, that wasn't originally what was going to be used, or rather some preproduction placeholders more aligned with Infection's box art may have been used. Or at the very least were seen in store displays before .hack//Infection's release. Behold, what could have been! Much like the first of the quadrilogy the games Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine all feature simple colors with the characters being the focus and nothing else. Mutation still has Black Rose and Helba standing behind Kite. Outbreak still kept Balmung but got rid of Orca for Mia and Elk just like how the planned Quarantine was going to feature just Mia and Elk. Another feature change comes with the game's logo having a glow in the final but the preproductions having no glow. Matching the glowless logo of .hack//Infection. I don't know when these changes were made, whether they hadn't decided for the 2-4th games box art design or the feedback from fans seeing this store display caused marketing to go back and redesign the box designs. This art was featured on this .hack//Infection in-store POP display, POP standing for point-of-purchase. If you look under the Kite floor display on the bottom left, you'll see the 4 game box art. Here's a closer look at just the floor Kite display. What do you think? Which version do you prefer? The Yoshiyuki Sadamoto design Or the preproduction design

A few more photographs during GU's development between 2004-2006.

Producer Hiroto Niizato

Artist & Character Modeler Junichi Taniguchi

Programmer Hyunsoo Lee

Motion Aritst Natsuko Abe

Head Public Relations Sara Nelkin

Artist Itsuki Hoshi CC2 Tokyo Studio staff

Dothack Dothackimoq GIFfrom Dothack GIFs CC Corporation Administrator Lios, the green NPC that encounters Kite on numerous occasions was confirmed having an alt account as Apeiron. The very same character seen trying to scam Mistral in purchasing a rare item for an absurd amount. This was confirmed in the .hack//Archives_03 art info book by CyberConnect2.

Unlike .hack//G.U. where most of their videos are in a video format stored on the game disc, .hack//Infection Mutation Outbreak and Quarantine has no videos on disc whatsoever (excluding the logos after the PS2 bootup). Even the intro video that plays before the title screen is not a video. So every video including the Epitaph of Twilight being spoken is not a video, the characters talking to Kite are not videos, the Phase introduction videos are not videos. The .hack//IMOQ games simply don't have no videos because everything is being rendered in-game through the .hack game engine. How the game files works is that there are file formats called .CCS which are assets for models and textures combined. The main game play uses less detailed assets while the videos use higher quality assets. You can view these .CCS files through StudioCCS, but you can't play videos from this program. The way the game stores it's data is that it puts all the .CCS files for both game play and videos in a file called /DATA/DATA.BIN, you can extract contents of this file and it will have a folder called /STR/ which is where the better detail quality "video" .CCS model/textures are stored. All the voice lines spoken and music are stored in another folder outside of the DATA.BIN, from the root directory these are stored in /VOICE/ for Japanese and /VOICE_E/ for English. Only /VOICE/ has the BGM.BIN, or background music files for both languages. But let's say we use an emulator to emulate the game from the disc, such as PCSX2. Version 1.7+ has a feature built-in called Texture Replacer, and we can replace ANY texture from the game, including the ones used in videos. You simply enable Dump Textures to dump the textures into the PCSX2 emulator directory textures\SLUS-20267\dumps for .hack//Infection, you take the PNG files from this folder that you want to modify in an image editor like Adobe Photoshop, and save the PNG to a separate folder textures\SLUS-20267\replacements for the changes to be ready to be used. Then enable Load Textures to see the changes in your videos from the video player in game from the ALTIMIT desktop. In this example I am using the US release of .hack//Infection, game ID is SLUS-20267 hence the folder name, and edit Kite's texture from orange to blue very quickly (I could have touched it up better if I gave myself more time). Then loaded the textures and now in-game in the video player we can see Kite with a blue outfit instead. But this works on anything and everything. Players, NPC's, monsters, weapons, fields, dungeons, chests, statues, monsieur, grunties, water, skybox, etc.. anything and everything can have it's texture replaced whether it's just normal gameplay or videos, you can change it. You can also replace the character portraits too for every character. So you streamers, can replace Kite's portrait for whatever your pfp is, or change Kite's clothes to match more your personal style for your livestream. Just remember the textures are more of a wrapper, you can replace what you have, you can't add anything new like wings onto Kite. But you can remove things from the game by replacing textures with a transparent texture. For example if you wanted to remove the hud, just replace the blue windows with an empty transparent texture. Or if you wanted to upscale your game beyond the emulators upscaler, you could also use the texture replace to use upscaled textures from AI assisted upscalers like Vance, icons8, Deep Image, Let's Enhance, Waifu2x, Crea8tiveAI, etc.... or just download an existing texture upscaled pack from Google.

Let's talk about about why .hack//SIGN and .hack//IMOQ have no grunty farms in Mac Anu. However Dun Lorieag, Carmina Gadelica, Fort Ouph, and Lia Fail do have grunty farms. But in .hack//Legend of the Twilight, suddenly there's a Grunty indoor shop/farm. A blink and you'll miss it scene in .hack//SIGN even shows a Grunty caravan.

There is only 1 central lobby server, and only 1 is necessary. This is the main hub for fragment, however people don't play on the lobby server, they play on player hosted area servers. These are where players actually meet up and play together on in groups of up to 3 per area server. Which makes hosting an abundant of area servers necessary for people; because is there's high demand of players online at a given time wanting to play but no supply of area servers to play on, then playing would be impossible. So how do you host an area server? First you will need the Area Server program itself, and a Windows PC or Windows emulated computer There is many iterations both official and unofficial for the area server program, i.e. the original 5 Japanese ones which point to the old server, the translated one, the multi-server one, etc... I recommend this one Download the zip, extract the file/folders somewhere on your computer, run the AREA_SERVER.exe file Start with map editor go to File choose New Area give it a name and a "symbol" can be whatever you want, I just abbreviate but whatever the root town will be the root town all players will see when they enter your Area Server, they can not change, only you can from this program hit OK, and you can start making new keywords and custom maps if you want, but entirely up to you the root town shops are static to whatever root town you pick the keywords dictate monsters and whatnot, click on Word Editor and you'll get tabs like this use existing keywords or click on "Add" to create new words, whenever your pick A B C here, Result will unlock whatever you do, be sure to Save pick a slot from 0 to 100; you can create more than 1 area server, but you can only run 1 area server per .exe; you can make more copies from the ZIP file link above and host as many area servers you want you can pick a random number and press save after you make an "area server" in the Area Server program and saved, go to the Area Server icon click on Area, then click on Publish Area Server select from the list of saved area servers and click publish you'll see a bunch of messages on screen, and in the message window box; if all goes well you should see "area server is now open" this is 50% of the work the other 50% is port-forwarding your computer/router without doing that, no one can join your area server it'll just be listed but inaccessible without port-forwarding it depends on what is in profile.ini; and if you host more than one area server, you'll want to change the port in each file to be different; between 20000 to 20100 if all goes well your area server will be listed then the area server program will say "a player is joining" you can see their HP/SP live, but you can not edit the values you can even see all players on the current map; people can't wander off to different maps, everyone is limited to 1 even on the field map and if they die, they will be booted back to the root town

In the past we saw many attempts of a fan .hack game with 2D and 3D games, most were online, but more importantly trying to capture that feeling of The World en masse. Unfortunately time, upkeep, and drama dwindled down those projects and games and all we have are memories. But anyone with motivation, time, and a goal can make their own .hack game in many formats from: text adventure, visual novels, 2D game, 2D online game, 3D game, and 3D online game. I'm leaving this topic open for the discussion for people interested in attempting at a .hack game, to show off their progress on either a standalone or game/server client based on The World. If you have a game in the works, let us know your progress. If you need help, seek peer-to-peer support here, or if you need a team, pitch your idea on our discord server to find your team. Useful links to programs Text Adventure: ADRIFT http://www.adrift.co/ Inform7 http://inform7.com/ Quest http://textadventures.co.uk/quest Twine https://twinery.org/ Visual Novels: Visual Novel Maker https://store.steampowered.com/app/495480 Ren'py https://www.renpy.org/ 2D Game: RPG Maker 2000 https://store.steampowered.com/app/383730 RPG Maker 2003 https://store.steampowered.com/app/362870 RPG Maker XP https://store.steampowered.com/app/235900 RPG Maker VX Ace https://store.steampowered.com/app/220700 RPG Maker MV https://store.steampowered.com/app/363890 Game Maker Studio https://www.yoyogames.com/get LÖVE https://love2d.org/ 2D Game & Server: BYOND http://www.byond.com/download/ Eclipse Origins https://www.indiedb.com/engines/eclipse-origins/downloads Elysium Diamond https://github.com/legacygamedev/elysiumdiamond32 Genus https://github.com/jikoriko/Genus Intersect Engine https://www.freemmorpgmaker.com/downloads/ Konfuze http://konfuze.atspace.com/HOME.htm Mirage https://github.com/link2x/gMirage PyORPG https://github.com/marcusmoller/pyorpg-client 3D Game: Blender http://www.blender.org/ Godot https://godotengine.org/ Unreal Engine https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download Unity https://store.unity.com/download 3D Game & Server: n/a And should you have concerns about CyberConnect2 coming after your project, hear this statement from the CEO himself regarding fan projects. Basically, go for it!, but don't tell us. 😉 And BandaiNamco's statement. https://www.bandainamcoent.com/legal/community-events/content-creator-guidelines Basically non-profits are good, better if you don't copy/paste textures, models, or art directly from them. Go forth and good luck!