Sunday, September 30, 2012

Visual Novels, Why Not: Digital: A Love Story

So, this post only took 6 years to make. This is due to school work, and the fact that I constantly procrastinate from said school work, so I end up doing nothing whenever I get home.

But, without further ado, let's talk about some video games.

Digital: A Love Story was released in 2010 from Christine Love's website, which you can visit here, for free. It takes place "Five minutes into the future of 1988" all entirely on an old computer running an Amiga operating system, called an "Amie" in game. The majority of the game involves the player dialing up Bulletin Board Systems, think current day message boards or online forums, and reading/responding to either posts or private messages on said BBSs. While in most other games the tedium of typing in the numbers of these BBSs and waiting for the dial-up to work would be, well, tedious, but here it works in the game's favor.

See, this is a game about love.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Visual Novels, Why Not: Christine Love


Hey, um.... introduction? I guess? I play video games, Magic: the Gathering, spend a little bit too much time on the internet, and go to school. You call me PinkPutty if you want too... I mean I'm not forcing you or anything but it'd be nic-

WELP I GUESS THAT WAS ENOUGH.

Now time to talk about Visual Novels. I'm not an expert on this kind of game, but I do enjoy them for some reason. Probably because the one's I've played (or read, depending how much of a novel you consider it) are well written and have garnered way too much emotional investment out of me. There is the connotation of these kind of games focusing "adult themes", and some do. In fact, probably the majority of them do, but those aren't the ones I play nor do I want to play them. More often than not they're more focused on the "adult content" than anything else, which hurts the narrative and writing. Most people don't watch the films of Sasha Grey for the acting or writing after all.

But, there are a good number of visual novels not focused on that kind of stuff, and they're the ones you want to search out if you just want a narrative or story with good writing and well developed characters. Of course, that's not to say that this type of content makes it a bad game intrinsically, since it can still be done tastefully. To use movies as an example (again), just because a Hollywood action movie has a sex scene does not mean it's inherently pornography. Katawa Shoujo is a really good example of this. It's a very well done romance story, with "adult content" scenes never being exploitative or disrespectful towards the characters (With one exception, but that's for another time). It also helps that you're given an option to turn off the "adult content" from the options screen at any time.

Katawa Shoujo. This is one of the more typical visual novels...  Kind of.


However, I'm not here to talk about those games, or at least not yet. Right now I'm talking about three games with no actual pornographic content in them. The visual novels created by Miss Christine Love.