To be honest, I was looking through the photo album on my phone last night and saw an old screenshot taken in 2013, which instantly took me back to the era when I was still using the Symbian V5 system. At that time, smartphones had just started, and the App Store and Android market were not as chaotic as they are now. To play a game, you had to go to the forum to find signed and cracked versions. It was during that era that I encountered "Xiao Ninja Girlfriend Simulator" - a game that allowed me to secretly light up the screen of my mobile phone after turning off the lights and giggle at the pixel-style lolita.
To be honest, although the developer of this game, Hainan Star Jump Technology Co., Ltd., may have gone silent now, it was really a breath of fresh air in the Saipan player circle back then. 0 yuan to download, no in-app purchases, no advertising, just like mint soda under the afternoon sun of that era. When you open the game, you will see a small Japanese-style room with soft light coming from the wooden windows. Shinobu is kneeling on the tatami, tilting his head and smiling at you.
To be honest, most of the virtual girlfriend games at that time were very crude, just a costume change and simple dialogue. But "Xiao Ninja Girlfriend Simulator" is different. It has a complete daily interaction system. You have to cook for her, go shopping with her, watch TV with her, and even put her to bed. What amazes me the most is its "mood value" design - if you are not online for several days in a row, Shinobu will be depressed, and words like "Does the master hate me" will appear in the dialog box. I still remember one time when she was disconnected from the Internet for a week while reviewing for a final exam. When she logged in again, her aggrieved expression and the pixelated figure's eyes were red. I almost thought it was real.
There are not many scenes in the game, but each one is done with great care. Listening to her playing shamisen under the eaves on a rainy day, during a summer festival she suddenly grabbed your sleeve and said "Let's watch the fireworks together", at night she hugged the pillow and said "can you sleep with me today"... These scenes may seem cliché today, but in an era when mobile phone screens were only 2.8 inches and the resolution was less than 320x240, these delicate interactions allowed countless student parties who stayed up late to find emotional sustenance. To be honest, the picture quality of current mobile games is so good that you can clearly see eyelashes, but they lack the romance that is filled by imagination.
I still remember that the developer posted an update announcement on the forum at that time, saying that it would add a "travel" mode, but it was not completed because the team was disbanded. Many old players left comments under the post saying "I will wait forever", but what they waited for was that the Symbian system was completely destroyed. The mobile phones were changed again and again, and the .sisx file could no longer be installed. It's quite sad to think about it now. The independent game developers of that innocent era may have known better than us what it means to "play for the people we like."
If you want to be nostalgic now, you can try your luck at some old Saipan resource stations, or use an emulator to run on Android. But to be honest, if you play it now, you may only feel that the picture is rough and the interaction is simple. Only those of us who have come from that era can see through those pixel blocks and see ourselves hiding under the quilt with the fluorescence of the mobile phone screen reflected on our face. Xiao Ren may be just a program, but she has indeed accompanied many people through a period of time that requires gentle treatment. 😌