恋愛

Bishoujo games featured by Wikipedia: screen cap (the pic featured is Sayaka from Pia Carrot 3) and the actual article.

A bishōjo game (美少女ゲーム, often spelled bishoujo game) or girl game/gal game is a type of Japanese video game centered around interactions with attractive anime girls. Although nearly all bishōjo games involve romantic or sex appeal of some kind, they may or may not be pornographic.

Bishōjo games are a uniquely Japanese phenomenon; they have virtually no parallel in the American or European video game industries. They form a sizeable fraction of the Japanese market; the most popular have sold over a million copies, and they make up the majority of offline PC games in Japan. Nevertheless, because of real or perceived cultural differences, few have been translated and no major mass-market release has yet been attempted outside of East Asia. Thus bishōjo games remain by far the least known of the major video game genres outside of Japan.

Notable subgenres of bishōjo games are ren’ai games (often called “dating sims”) and H games (often called “hentai games”).

It’s a pretty good article. A few points need nitpicking (can’t be bothered to edit it…) here and there, but it’s much more well-informed than what you’d learn through forums or friends. Bonus points for actually pointing out (in the subgenre section) that the usage of “hentai” to describe 18+ is purely English.

And perhaps more importantly:

Nonetheless, the selection of bishōjo games available to those who do not speak Japanese leaves much to be desired, with none of the popular hits like Tokimeki Memorial having been translated so far. Of the mainstream bishōjo games, some fan translation projects have been started (of Kanon, for instance), but these are usually abandoned and none have yet been completed.

Which basically means… only the bad ones get translated, because the American market has no taste. /o/

A piece of good news for those who do not understand Japanese: the Kanon translation project mentioned in the article is nearing completion. Haeleth’s homepage.

The script is 90% translated as of mid-October 2004 (though only about 60% of that is edited at present). The next release is likely to be complete.

The current release is version 0.57, which (as the name suggests) is about 57% complete. You can download it from the Kanon download page.