If you don't know, Touhou is a popular video game series where you have to dodge waves of bullets coming at you from all directions. There are a kazillion official games, and a million more unofficial games, drawings, music, and lots of other works of art (you would be surprised). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people who are fans of Touhou have never even played any of the games. Instead, they might like writing stories with the characters, or making drawings or music inspired by them.
Anyways, I randomly decided to try out the really old games from the 90s. I (less than) legally found a copy of Touhou 4 ~ Lotus Land Story and decided to give it a try. It was made for PC-98, a non IBM compatible PC lineup that they used to use in Japan, so it was a bit of a hassle to get it running on a modern machine. I eventually found an emulator called DOSBox-X that let it all work.
Some of the screenshots are from from Touhou 5 ~ Mystic Square because I kept dying when trying to take a screenshot in the 4th game.
Yeah, like the title says, it's a fun game. The patterns are almost hypnotic, and the game is a little easier than the newer ones. As someone who is bad at Touhou, that's a good thing for me. I've also been playing the fifth game too, and it's also fun.
As I said, it's kind of hard to get them working on modern hardware, but most of the people who read this blog are techno nerds of some kind. I'm sure you can figure it out. If you are looking for a place to start, don't visit moriyashrine.org, because that's against copyright law, and breaking the law is bad. If you do want to get the games through proper means, know that only 200 to 300 copies exist. I can't help you there, but good luck. If you are using DOSBox-X, it's easier if you get a hard disk image (.hdi) rather than trying to install them from virtual floppy disks.
I don't know how to end this post, so pretend that there's a good conclusion here.
Note to I2P users: I seem to remember that there was a torrent of the games on tracker2.postman.i2p, but I don't know if it's still there.