First Page of the Journal

blank paper will not judge you

My recent obsession with Recettear led me to watch a few Let's Play videos of it. It's fun to watch people's reactions to the quirky characters, but some observations, both good and bad, soon become apparent.

Warning: some spoilers about the game mechanics follow.

Recettear gets (or got, when it was new) a lot of press for its innovative concept: you're not the adventurer; you run the item shop. Many other reviews will happily note the joys and shortcomings of this system; I'll leave you to peruse those. What no one points out is that Recettear passes the Bechdel test in its very first cutscene, and constantly throughout play, even with a cast that includes a lot of men.

Infernal characters are to Exalted what the Silithus zone was in vanilla WoW: the place for people who have already beaten the game.

Just doing the research will drive you mad, and that's partly because of the way in which the game is published.

I've been watching the Extra Play videos of one of the Dans doing the Nuzlocke Challenge. First episode is here.

1993 was a great year for adventure/puzzle games. In one corner we had Return to Zork, the latest entry in a long and well-respected franchise. Then there was Myst, whose graphics were insanely impressive for the time (and still gorgeous by any metric). In the last corner was The 7th Guest, a pioneer in the use of full-motion video.