I Am Bad at Interactive Fiction.

Here’s the thing about interactive fiction. I approve of it in theory. A genre with no graphics and huge freedom of interaction seems like the perfect platform for narrative experiments. I love Stephen Lavelle’s work with IF engines, like Blendings and Atopoesis, and I’ve heard great things about Blue Lacuna. But, to my shame, I’ve never been able to play an IF game for more than fifteen minutes without starting to bang my head against things.

The most recent victim of my inability to deal with IF is Michael Gentry’s Anchorhead, a Lovecraft-y mystery kind of thing that got a positive mention at Indie Games Blog. I really did try to give Anchorhead a fair shake, but… things went badly pretty quick. Instead of a review or anything intelligent, I’m just going to present a little diary of my adventures in Anchorhead. I suppose this will be something to point to if I ever need to explain why I don’t really talk about IF games.  Lots of big images and also swears after the jump. I’m not going to give a spoiler warning, though, because I did not advance in the game even a little bit.

Dragon Age 2: The Champion of Kirkwall

It took me a long time, but I finally finished my first playthrough of Dragon Age 2. This is the first of a couple posts I’ll be writing on it. To get the overall opinion stuff out of the way first, I was pretty crazy about the game. I wasn’t too offended by the reused environments, and I found the storytelling changes generally interesting and worthwhile. And damn, it was just fun. Hot boys, engaging backstories, messy skill trees, political shitstorms: all that good Bioware stuff.  And on top of that, some clever approaches to character development and story pacing, which I’ll talk more about (with spoilers) after the jump.

Persona 3: Your relationship seems to be in a rut.

Here’s a new thing I want to start doing. Most of my posts are either reviews of short games, or feature pieces that discuss several games at a high level. As a result, I rarely get a chance to write about the long games I play in any depth. In order to improve on this state of affairs, I’m going to start doing playthrough posts on the feature-length games I play. I’ll just check in from time to time and record my impressions along the way.  As with everything else on this blog, this will naturally involve major spoilers of the games I discuss.

It’s a little awkward to start this now, since I’m near the end of the two games I’m currently playing, but oh well!  In the future, I’ll start out each playthrough with some context about the gameplay and such, but it’s a bit late to do that now. So this will basically read like I expect you’ve played the game already. Anyhow, I’ll start by talking about Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 and how it’s been going for me so far.