Alternative Girls

» see lp.alterna.amebagames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Alternative Girls launched on 20 July 2016 with something on the front of it that most phone games did not have. You could set the handset into a pair of goggles and the scene would go stereoscopic around you. The site's own title tag read オルガル(スマホVR対応), Orugaru, smartphone VR supported, and the top page carried a banner reading VRモード搭載, VR mode installed.

QualiArts built and ran it under CyberAgent's Ameba Games brand. The game underneath the goggles was a character RPG, and the VR was held for particular story scenes rather than being the whole of it. For anyone without a viewer there was a second mode that used the phone's gyroscope and your thumb.

On 9 November 2016, less than four months in, CyberAgent announced a million cumulative downloads and attached a currency giveaway to the figure.

It was renewed in place on 20 July 2018, exactly two years after launch, coming back as Alternative Girls 2 with a second act of story. Nothing was shut down to do it. The app kept its installs and took a new number.

~ the dossier ~

~ a phone in a cardboard box ~

The VR here was the cheap kind, and that is not a complaint. There was no headset to buy, only a holder you dropped a phone into, which in 2016 could be a folded sheet of cardboard costing a few dollars. The expensive hardware of that year went to people with a PC strong enough to drive it. This went to anyone with a handset and a box.

The later additions tell you what it was for: a VR 添い寝 mode, lying down beside you, and a VR water-gun mode. Cardboard viewers were on sale everywhere in the world by then, Turkey included. The game was on the Japanese stores and nowhere else, so the cheapest VR of the decade still arrived with a border drawn around it.

~ what the second number meant ~

CyberAgent announced the end on 11 August 2021. Paid quartz stopped being usable at 15:00 on 1 September, and the refunds that followed were issued under article 20 of the Payment Services Act, the Japanese statute that makes a prepaid issuer hand back unspent balances when it stops honoring them. Online service ended at 15:00 on 31 October 2021, roughly five years and three months from the start.

An offline build was supposed to follow straight away and did not, held up by what the company called a 深刻な不具合, a serious defect. It was rescheduled on 16 December for 5 January 2022, which meant the store version had to keep running until 23:59 on 4 January to hand over to it, with save data transferable until 7 February. The marketing site at lp.alterna.amebagames.com is still up today, still serving the Alternative Girls 2 wordmark and the page explaining the goggles.

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