I Play Porn Games For The Story // 25.12.2011

Hello, welcome and merry Christmas! This is my rather un-restive weekly blog in which I talk about video games and visual novels. Sure, sometimes I’ll talk about other things, but who cares about them really. I hope everyone out there is having a proper crimbo and gets a bunch of awesome last minute presents for their friends, because nothing says merry Christmas than the cheapest game available on Steam.

Dungeon Defenders

One game that my friends have been trying to convince me to buy for a while is Dungeon Defenders. Literally every time I’d meet up with my university friends they’d ask if I have it yet, and then going online a completely different group of friends would also enquire about the game. I eventually gave in to the peer pressure and got it. Much to my surprise, it’s pretty fun.

The game is one of those tower defence games that seem to be so popular lately. Albeit with the completely original twist of you also being able to control a character during the wave based attacks, which no othergamehasdoneever. The gameplay is divided into two parts, the building phase and the defend phase, the building phase is not timed in anyway allowing you to plan for as long as you need. For a while I was just relying on my character’s own attacks to kill the enemies, a strategy that got me to the third or fourth level before the game smacked me across the head and said “the hell you doing?”

One thing worth noting is this is not a game to play single player. I played an hour or so single player to start with, just to get used to how the game worked before I delved into the levels with my much higher levelled friends, and damn. There are a lot of things going on at once, and in single player it’s really hard to actually handle all of it, or at least it was for me. With multiple spawn points for the enemies, I had to rely completely on towers for some of the spawns and use the melee attacks for another. However, unless you know exactly what to do it seems that the enemies can fairly easily destroy them, and then have no hazards between them and the crystal you’re trying to defend. In multiplayer, however, this was not a problem, as the game doesn’t seem to scale for multiple players. With 3 players, each of us focused on one spawn point, and save from one point in which my friend was being bad at videogames, everything went over a lot smoothly. It also made it a lot more fun having people to talk to while planning stuff. I’m usually a single player kind of guy, and I usually hate relying on other people in co-op type games, but this certainly isn’t the game to play alone.

The game seems like it could be a lot of fun with the right group of people, but right now all my friends are a lot higher levelled than I am, so it’ll be a while before I catch up and be able to tackle the harder levels with them. Who knows, maybe this is the game that will make me actually care about tower defence.

Steam

Yup, that’s right; I’ve been playing the Steam game. It’s kind of depressing that you can be working from 9am onwards with a fierce amount of dedication, but when 6pm rolls around everyone stops what they’re doing and checks what new games are on sale. To be fair it is an entire room full of gamers who love games coding games, but still.

Steam is doing that thing it does, namely having sales. But it’s also doing that other thing it does, a giant library wide scavenger hunt. It’s an amazingly simple way to get people to buy games they might not even want, and to install games that they haven’t touched in ages. I’m firmly in the second camp here, because despite the fact that I love seeing my totally game count increasing (360 and counting) I’ve only been buying games that I’m interested in... unless they’re like 2 bucks or something I mean come on I’m practically losing money not buying it at that point.

Sequence

With all the indie I buy on a regular basis, it’s rather surprising that there was an indie bundle on Steam in which I only owned one game in the package. I rectified this by buying the rest of the pack, of course, which is how I obtained Sequence, a game admittedly I’ve been meaning to buy for a while now.

Sequence is like a mashup of Dance Dance Revolution, Puzzle Quest and Amplitude, which on paper sounds like the best game ever made in my opinion. There are three different DDR panels that you flip between; they are defence, mana and spells. If you miss any of the arrows in the defence panel your character loses hit points, the number of hit points your character loses being based on the colour of the missed arrow. Every arrow you hit in the mana panel gives you one mana. This is the panel that has the most arrows in it, and there is no repercussion to missing the arrows on this panel. The final panel, the spell panel, works a little bit differently. Your character can cast spells, if he has enough mana and the spell is available. When the spell is cast, a bunch of arrows will appear on the spell panel, hitting them all will cast the spell, and missing any of them will cancel the spell. It’s a little bit much to juggle when you first start playing the game, but working out priorities between the different panels becomes pretty easy. You just have to be ready to take damage whenever you want to cast a long spell.

I don’t know man, the concept for this game is really cool, but there’s just a little too much with the game that makes me not want to play it. I’m not too sure if it was the terrible tutorial at the beginning trying to be funny and quirky, or the art style that I’m not too fond of, or even the gameplay not being that responsive sometimes. I think the gameplay is the biggest thing, and sure it might just be a personal gripe, but whenever I missed an arrow, not only did it not look like I missed it to me, but there was no real indication as how close I was, a thing that DDR does so perfectly. In a rhythm game, even if the timing feels off by a little bit everything is terrible, and even though there is a delay variable you can set, there was never a point in which it felt perfect., which is really unfortunate.

PAYDAY: The Heist

Another entry in the list of games I’ve been persuaded to buy because my friends play it so often, I took the plunge and bought myself a copy of Left 4 Banks. While I’m not a huge fan of first person shooters, I seem to be drawn to them a lot more recently. I can’t really explain it to be honest, as more often than not I regret even trying to get into this genre more.

PAYDAY seems rather similar to Left 4 Dead, though you can probably say that about most 4 player co-op first person shooters. I didn’t think much of the connection until I got shot up so bad I fell to the ground, and was only able to shoot a pistol from where the character was lying. So yeah, the connection is pretty apt. However, as with quite a lot of people recently I’ve not been big on this whole zombie thing, so making it about a bank heist is really cool in concept.

The problem with the game is the gameplay. The shooting just doesn’t seem responsive enough for this kind of game. The actual objective based levels are really cool, but having to actually play the game is the biggest drawback. Again this is coming from someone who doesn’t really like first person shooters so whatever. It also suffers from the ‘why would you play this single player’ ordeal, and sure while my friends are awesome to game with, it means having to wait for my friends to want to play the game as well.

Being cornered by the police with the rest of the team only to go “FUCK THIS SHIT” and run out, gunning everyone and almost making it to the end, only to be tasered to the ground was really cool though.

The Binding of Isaac

Man, this game. When The Binding of Isaac first came out, I absolutely loved it. I played it for hours on end, trying to get all of the endings. I ended up getting it, too, and then still kept playing it anyway. The Halloween update came out, around Halloween funnily enough, and I was pumped to play more, but then ended up not even touching it. I can’t really figure out why, but I just couldn’t be bothered to play it anymore. I threw it on again and remembered why.

It’s not that the game isn’t fun, because it is, immensely so. But there’s just something about it that I hate. The game is perfect for short bursts of gameplay, with an average run taking 10 minutes, but playing for any extended length of time just makes the game feel worse and worse. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to do a specific thing, you often end up having to take multiple attempts at it. This isn’t a game like Super Meat Boy or Nimbus where if you fail over and over it’s still fun trying again. This game, and I guess the same can be said of most Rougelikes, has a very slow intro. This wouldn’t be that if the difference between the end of one run and the beginning of another was so severe. I know there has to be a great powering up mechanic to have it work, but when Isaac can fly around, cry homing bombs and teleport around the floor, it’s pretty dire to go back to the start of the game again.

After playing the game for 3 hours straight trying to trigger the devil miniboss, the game just wasn’t fun to play anymore. It’s really depressing to admit that but after a certain amount of time this fact just completely sucks all enjoyment out of the game. Sure now I can go back and attempt it, and the game is pretty addicting so no doubt I will, but I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this game as much as I used to anymore.

Others

I’m not going to go through every game that I just simply opened, played for 5 minutes to get an easy achievement, and then close again. But if you must know, those games included but are not limited to BIT.TRIP Beatand Runner, Beat Hazard, Bastion, SpaceChem, Universe Sandbox, Magicka, Super Meat Boy, Poker Night, Rock of Ages, Toki Tori, RUSH, EDGE and Jamestown.

Again, this whole scavenger hunt thing is a really great thing, as it reminds me how much I loved some of the games that I have in my library. Though it does bring out a weird art of me where I have to get every achievement I can get. It’s gotten so bad that some of the games in this list haven’t even been officially added to the scavenger hunt, they’ve just have holiday-esque achievements added recently, so I went ahead and got them just in case they turn out to be a part of the hunt.

Sharin no Kuni, Yuukyuu no Shounenshoujo

So last week I talked about the visual novel Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo, it’s a great example of how great a visual novel story can be. The characters are well realised, the drama is insane and the plot twists will make you think about the entire story is a completely different light. Someone somewhere thought it would be a good idea to create a fandisc for the game, and here we have Sharin no Kuni, Yuukyuu no Shounenshoujo. I’m not saying it’s a bad product, it’s just almost entirely unnecessary.

The visual novel features six different stories. The first, and the real reason this deserves to exist, is the back story of the previous game’s main antagonist, Masaomi Houzuki. Four of the remaining five stories expand upon the different heroine’s epilogues. The last story is a bonus story, available once the Masaomi story has been read, and it features the girl he shot at the beginning of the previous game, cool?

Firstly, the Masaomi story, this pretty much details why he’s so much of a dick in the previous game. Admittedly before reading it I didn’t really feel the need to know the reason, even without a reason he is probably one of the better VN villains. In fact, there’s a certain bad end you can get in the original game that concludes with Ken being just as cold and bitter as Masaomi, which after reading that I just liked to think that’s exactly what happened. Houzuki was a lot like Ken, but when Houzuki went one route, Ken went the other. As it turns out, the writers thought of that as well.

The game opens up in the same sunflower field as before, starring Masaomi Akustu as a Special High Class Individual cadet on the last leg of his training. With him is Higuchi Saburou, another cadet. They meet the person in charge of their final test, a foreign woman called Ari Ruruliant Houzuki. She puts them in charge of a girl called Saika Miina, a girl with the obligation of not being able to spend time the way she wants, but she’s pretty used to it and doesn’t mind the obligation at all. What follows is a pretty parallel story to the original, albeit without the whole Masaomi secretly being a childhood friend hook. The parallels are completely fine, but there’s just a little too much for my liking. The entire route takes place in a flashback as Houzuki is being driven home. The very end of the route takes place after the events of the first game, after Houzoki has reminisced about his past. The ending in question, while really cool and leaves on a great cliffhanger, does sort of betray the original character, despite how badass it may actually be.

The rest of the fandisc isn’t really worth reading. While the stories are pretty well thought out, and for some of the heroines the expansion on the epilogue is much appreciated, nothing really happens in them. For instance, one of the heroines Sachi is a painter. In her epilogue it shows she became a successful painter. That’s great and all, but here, her entire route is her finding a place to paint and painting. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised as at a point that was all her route was in the previous game was as well, but there just seems to be large portions of these stories that don’t have to exist.

It’s a fandisc at the end of the day, an expansion on the original game. Meaning the only people who should read this are people who really enjoyed the first story. The back story is great and well worth reading after the first game, but in my opinion the rest of the content can be skipped over without any real loss.

And that’s it for the final blog of 2011! Now if you’ll excuse me I should probably get some sleep. No doubt my sister will try and wake me up around 8am or so so we can go open our presents. My parents I’m sure have concocted some kind of joke. One year there was only one present under the tree for me, and it turned out to be exam past papers. Oh how they love to troll.

Merry Christmas duders!

Hello, welcome and merry Christmas! This is my rather un-restive weekly blog in which I talk about video games and visual novels. Sure, sometimes I’ll talk about other things, but who cares about them really. I hope everyone out there is having a proper crimbo and gets a bunch of awesome last minute presents for their friends, because nothing says merry Christmas than the cheapest game available on Steam.

Dungeon Defenders

One game that my friends have been trying to convince me to buy for a while is Dungeon Defenders. Literally every time I’d meet up with my university friends they’d ask if I have it yet, and then going online a completely different group of friends would also enquire about the game. I eventually gave in to the peer pressure and got it. Much to my surprise, it’s pretty fun.

The game is one of those tower defence games that seem to be so popular lately. Albeit with the completely original twist of you also being able to control a character during the wave based attacks, which no othergamehasdoneever. The gameplay is divided into two parts, the building phase and the defend phase, the building phase is not timed in anyway allowing you to plan for as long as you need. For a while I was just relying on my character’s own attacks to kill the enemies, a strategy that got me to the third or fourth level before the game smacked me across the head and said “the hell you doing?”

One thing worth noting is this is not a game to play single player. I played an hour or so single player to start with, just to get used to how the game worked before I delved into the levels with my much higher levelled friends, and damn. There are a lot of things going on at once, and in single player it’s really hard to actually handle all of it, or at least it was for me. With multiple spawn points for the enemies, I had to rely completely on towers for some of the spawns and use the melee attacks for another. However, unless you know exactly what to do it seems that the enemies can fairly easily destroy them, and then have no hazards between them and the crystal you’re trying to defend. In multiplayer, however, this was not a problem, as the game doesn’t seem to scale for multiple players. With 3 players, each of us focused on one spawn point, and save from one point in which my friend was being bad at videogames, everything went over a lot smoothly. It also made it a lot more fun having people to talk to while planning stuff. I’m usually a single player kind of guy, and I usually hate relying on other people in co-op type games, but this certainly isn’t the game to play alone.

The game seems like it could be a lot of fun with the right group of people, but right now all my friends are a lot higher levelled than I am, so it’ll be a while before I catch up and be able to tackle the harder levels with them. Who knows, maybe this is the game that will make me actually care about tower defence.

Steam

Yup, that’s right; I’ve been playing the Steam game. It’s kind of depressing that you can be working from 9am onwards with a fierce amount of dedication, but when 6pm rolls around everyone stops what they’re doing and checks what new games are on sale. To be fair it is an entire room full of gamers who love games coding games, but still.

Steam is doing that thing it does, namely having sales. But it’s also doing that other thing it does, a giant library wide scavenger hunt. It’s an amazingly simple way to get people to buy games they might not even want, and to install games that they haven’t touched in ages. I’m firmly in the second camp here, because despite the fact that I love seeing my totally game count increasing (360 and counting) I’ve only been buying games that I’m interested in... unless they’re like 2 bucks or something I mean come on I’m practically losing money not buying it at that point.

Sequence

With all the indie I buy on a regular basis, it’s rather surprising that there was an indie bundle on Steam in which I only owned one game in the package. I rectified this by buying the rest of the pack, of course, which is how I obtained Sequence, a game admittedly I’ve been meaning to buy for a while now.

Sequence is like a mashup of Dance Dance Revolution, Puzzle Quest and Amplitude, which on paper sounds like the best game ever made in my opinion. There are three different DDR panels that you flip between; they are defence, mana and spells. If you miss any of the arrows in the defence panel your character loses hit points, the number of hit points your character loses being based on the colour of the missed arrow. Every arrow you hit in the mana panel gives you one mana. This is the panel that has the most arrows in it, and there is no repercussion to missing the arrows on this panel. The final panel, the spell panel, works a little bit differently. Your character can cast spells, if he has enough mana and the spell is available. When the spell is cast, a bunch of arrows will appear on the spell panel, hitting them all will cast the spell, and missing any of them will cancel the spell. It’s a little bit much to juggle when you first start playing the game, but working out priorities between the different panels becomes pretty easy. You just have to be ready to take damage whenever you want to cast a long spell.

I don’t know man, the concept for this game is really cool, but there’s just a little too much with the game that makes me not want to play it. I’m not too sure if it was the terrible tutorial at the beginning trying to be funny and quirky, or the art style that I’m not too fond of, or even the gameplay not being that responsive sometimes. I think the gameplay is the biggest thing, and sure it might just be a personal gripe, but whenever I missed an arrow, not only did it not look like I missed it to me, but there was no real indication as how close I was, a thing that DDR does so perfectly. In a rhythm game, even if the timing feels off by a little bit everything is terrible, and even though there is a delay variable you can set, there was never a point in which it felt perfect., which is really unfortunate.

PAYDAY: The Heist

Another entry in the list of games I’ve been persuaded to buy because my friends play it so often, I took the plunge and bought myself a copy of Left 4 Banks. While I’m not a huge fan of first person shooters, I seem to be drawn to them a lot more recently. I can’t really explain it to be honest, as more often than not I regret even trying to get into this genre more.

PAYDAY seems rather similar to Left 4 Dead, though you can probably say that about most 4 player co-op first person shooters. I didn’t think much of the connection until I got shot up so bad I fell to the ground, and was only able to shoot a pistol from where the character was lying. So yeah, the connection is pretty apt. However, as with quite a lot of people recently I’ve not been big on this whole zombie thing, so making it about a bank heist is really cool in concept.

The problem with the game is the gameplay. The shooting just doesn’t seem responsive enough for this kind of game. The actual objective based levels are really cool, but having to actually play the game is the biggest drawback. Again this is coming from someone who doesn’t really like first person shooters so whatever. It also suffers from the ‘why would you play this single player’ ordeal, and sure while my friends are awesome to game with, it means having to wait for my friends to want to play the game as well.

Being cornered by the police with the rest of the team only to go “FUCK THIS SHIT” and run out, gunning everyone and almost making it to the end, only to be tasered to the ground was really cool though.

The Binding of Isaac

Man, this game. When The Binding of Isaac first came out, I absolutely loved it. I played it for hours on end, trying to get all of the endings. I ended up getting it, too, and then still kept playing it anyway. The Halloween update came out, around Halloween funnily enough, and I was pumped to play more, but then ended up not even touching it. I can’t really figure out why, but I just couldn’t be bothered to play it anymore. I threw it on again and remembered why.

It’s not that the game isn’t fun, because it is, immensely so. But there’s just something about it that I hate. The game is perfect for short bursts of gameplay, with an average run taking 10 minutes, but playing for any extended length of time just makes the game feel worse and worse. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to do a specific thing, you often end up having to take multiple attempts at it. This isn’t a game like Super Meat Boy or Nimbus where if you fail over and over it’s still fun trying again. This game, and I guess the same can be said of most Rougelikes, has a very slow intro. This wouldn’t be that if the difference between the end of one run and the beginning of another was so severe. I know there has to be a great powering up mechanic to have it work, but when Isaac can fly around, cry homing bombs and teleport around the floor, it’s pretty dire to go back to the start of the game again.

After playing the game for 3 hours straight trying to trigger the devil miniboss, the game just wasn’t fun to play anymore. It’s really depressing to admit that but after a certain amount of time this fact just completely sucks all enjoyment out of the game. Sure now I can go back and attempt it, and the game is pretty addicting so no doubt I will, but I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this game as much as I used to anymore.

Others

I’m not going to go through every game that I just simply opened, played for 5 minutes to get an easy achievement, and then close again. But if you must know, those games included but are not limited to BIT.TRIP Beatand Runner, Beat Hazard, Bastion, SpaceChem, Universe Sandbox, Magicka, Super Meat Boy, Poker Night, Rock of Ages, Toki Tori, RUSH, EDGE and Jamestown.

Again, this whole scavenger hunt thing is a really great thing, as it reminds me how much I loved some of the games that I have in my library. Though it does bring out a weird art of me where I have to get every achievement I can get. It’s gotten so bad that some of the games in this list haven’t even been officially added to the scavenger hunt, they’ve just have holiday-esque achievements added recently, so I went ahead and got them just in case they turn out to be a part of the hunt.

Sharin no Kuni, Yuukyuu no Shounenshoujo

So last week I talked about the visual novel Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo, it’s a great example of how great a visual novel story can be. The characters are well realised, the drama is insane and the plot twists will make you think about the entire story is a completely different light. Someone somewhere thought it would be a good idea to create a fandisc for the game, and here we have Sharin no Kuni, Yuukyuu no Shounenshoujo. I’m not saying it’s a bad product, it’s just almost entirely unnecessary.

The visual novel features six different stories. The first, and the real reason this deserves to exist, is the back story of the previous game’s main antagonist, Masaomi Houzuki. Four of the remaining five stories expand upon the different heroine’s epilogues. The last story is a bonus story, available once the Masaomi story has been read, and it features the girl he shot at the beginning of the previous game, cool?

Firstly, the Masaomi story, this pretty much details why he’s so much of a dick in the previous game. Admittedly before reading it I didn’t really feel the need to know the reason, even without a reason he is probably one of the better VN villains. In fact, there’s a certain bad end you can get in the original game that concludes with Ken being just as cold and bitter as Masaomi, which after reading that I just liked to think that’s exactly what happened. Houzuki was a lot like Ken, but when Houzuki went one route, Ken went the other. As it turns out, the writers thought of that as well.

The game opens up in the same sunflower field as before, starring Masaomi Akustu as a Special High Class Individual cadet on the last leg of his training. With him is Higuchi Saburou, another cadet. They meet the person in charge of their final test, a foreign woman called Ari Ruruliant Houzuki. She puts them in charge of a girl called Saika Miina, a girl with the obligation of not being able to spend time the way she wants, but she’s pretty used to it and doesn’t mind the obligation at all. What follows is a pretty parallel story to the original, albeit without the whole Masaomi secretly being a childhood friend hook. The parallels are completely fine, but there’s just a little too much for my liking. The entire route takes place in a flashback as Houzuki is being driven home. The very end of the route takes place after the events of the first game, after Houzoki has reminisced about his past. The ending in question, while really cool and leaves on a great cliffhanger, does sort of betray the original character, despite how badass it may actually be.

The rest of the fandisc isn’t really worth reading. While the stories are pretty well thought out, and for some of the heroines the expansion on the epilogue is much appreciated, nothing really happens in them. For instance, one of the heroines Sachi is a painter. In her epilogue it shows she became a successful painter. That’s great and all, but here, her entire route is her finding a place to paint and painting. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised as at a point that was all her route was in the previous game was as well, but there just seems to be large portions of these stories that don’t have to exist.

It’s a fandisc at the end of the day, an expansion on the original game. Meaning the only people who should read this are people who really enjoyed the first story. The back story is great and well worth reading after the first game, but in my opinion the rest of the content can be skipped over without any real loss.

And that’s it for the final blog of 2011! Now if you’ll excuse me I should probably get some sleep. No doubt my sister will try and wake me up around 8am or so so we can go open our presents. My parents I’m sure have concocted some kind of joke. One year there was only one present under the tree for me, and it turned out to be exam past papers. Oh how they love to troll.

Merry Christmas duders!

What the hell, no comments? :(

I got my two PC-gamin' friends Dungeon Defenders for Christmas, knowing that they were both huge Diablo nerds in high school. We brought our PCs together and played it for like six hours a few nights ago, it was amazing. You're right, it's not much fun to play by yourself, and playing it with friends makes it awesome. Maybe we should play sometime or something :D

Being cornered by the police with the rest of the team only to go “FUCK THIS SHIT” and run out, gunning everyone and almost making it to the end, only to be tasered to the ground was really cool though.

Is there a vs. mode where some people play the SWAT Team? Or where you have to get past Scruff McGruff the Crime Dog to get to the escape chopper? I would totally play if it had that.

@DocHaus: My god that would be the best! But unfortunately it doesn't look like it, just AI cops. I think the versus stuff could be cool but, as opposed to Left 4 Dead, the 'enemy' side wouldn't be that fun to play in my opinion.

@takua108: When this blog has no comments before I go to sleep I cry to myself for hours. ;-;

And yeah we should totally play it! It seems like a really good game to just load up for a little bit and have a good time, though my strategy right now is just spam those bouncing spike things everywhere so I don't know if I'm the best person to play with.

@Psycosis said:

@takua108: When this blog has no comments before I go to sleep I cry to myself for hours. ;-;

As a regular blogger, you should probably get used to it. I post my blogs first thing in the morning, and I still have a few blogs with absolutely no comments. (Although in some cases, there's somebody who shows up a few months late to tell me how much Legend of Legaia sucks. That's an actual thing that happened.)

I enjoy reading your blog when it updates, but since I'm kind to it I'm really curious: Do you really complete a VN at a rate of about once a week? Because that sounds like an insane pace to keep. Anyway, looking forward to more.

damn, i was planning on buying Bindings of Issac, but now i'm not so sure

A brief aside about comments: I've been playing the less than stellar game The Last Remnant, putting together screenshots with somewhat-amusing explanations and creating a slew of Endure This! Run! blogs. In many of these blogs VGK is the only one who bothers to comment, even when I started an audience poll in my last one to affect someone's role in the game. One of my not-as-difficult blogs got about 40 comments recently, but the flipside was that I started a small flamewar due to the (not-unjustified) Haterade flowing within it. So that's the double-edged sword of quick e-fame.

Besides, I don't like being one of those guys who just says "YEAH!" or "ROIGHT ON!" to every other blog and has nothing else to really say. Then again I guess that's what image macros and youtube clips are for.

@DocHaus: That is a very good point, I'd still be writing these even if absolutely no-one gave a shit just because I enjoy, but at the same time it's always nice getting comments. I also shouldn't complain at all because it's not like I'm active in the community in any way other than this, like for instance I've probably read every instance of your blog (and it convinced me to buy The Last Remnant, which probably wasn't your intended effect) but I don't think I've ever commented.

@Bam_D_Leprechaun: I still say the game is a lot of fun, just in small doses. It's currently sitting in my top 10 of the year and I've put in a good 50 hours or so. It can just be tedious trying to trigger an event that has so little chance of happening, and I'm too stubborn to give up.

I should note I triggered that mini-boss shortly after posting the blog.

@SpaceRunaway: On average yeah. Some of them I've read in the past so I just re-read to remember the main points about it. I did finish this one the day after last weeks because they're the same story, and also because the VN for next week is 50+ hours long... I should probably stop playing Pushmo and get back to that soon.

@Psycosis:

That is crazy! I don't play too many VN's, but the ones I have played have been all pretty massive (I don't know if there's such thing as a "short" visual novel. The shortest one I've read was Planetarian, but that was definitely more short story than game). I'll also tend to become so engrossed in the story that I'll just spend the whole day reading. Anyway, I'll look forward to next week!

@DocHaus:

Yea, I'm the same way. The best way to get comments on your blogs is to give people something to comment on, which usually means one of two things: saying something stupidly controversial (that's the reason I've stopped playing FPSes that begin with "Hal") or including something really weird (somehow, an AC:B blog devolved into comments dissecting the logic behind "Nipples the Enchilada").

@Psycosis: If you don't mind me asking, what is your favorite VN? I'm fairly new to them and Yume Miru Kusuri would be my favorite. I don't think I've encountered a story in any medium that affected me the way this one did.

@TopSteer: Out of everything I've read my favourite is True Remembrance, though if you narrow it down to just VNs I've covered in this blog so far via this convenient list, it's Cross Channel.

I did not like Yume Miru Kusuri, I didn't like it for quite possibly the same reason you love it. It had too much of an impact with one route that I simply can't stand the other two. I covered it 3 months ago if you want my opinion on it, but be warned, it was near the start of me doing these blogs, and the further you go back the worse my writing gets. Which is saying a lot considering how bad it still is today.

@Psycosis: I rarely replay VNs as I tend to play them similar to how I play games like Heavy Rain, make the choices I feel are right and whatever happens, happens. I went with Aeka and from reading what you wrote I probably would've liked that game less had I played another route.

Looking over your list, the only game I see that I've played that you haven't covered is Koihime Musou - A Heart-Throbbing, Maidenly Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Have you played/heard about it? I love anything to do with the Three Kingdoms period so that definitely helps with my enjoyment of it.

@TopSteer: That one is installed on my computer and I will get around to it at some point! I just need to dedicate a lot of time to it. Though with all the people that have recommended it to me I'm really excited to try it out.