video games – Page 24 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Not at all IF (again)

Posted a “Homer in Silicon” column on Retrosabotage’s ‘2001’ adaptation of Tetris.

Fatal Hearts calls itself a “visual novel adventure”: a kind of relative of IF which involves huge amounts of character dialogue (largely uninteractive), interspersed with set choices (go to the mall, or do your homework?) and puzzles (such as Theseus-and-the-Minotaur-style maze escapes to see whether you get away from your pursuers). It belongs (as far as I can tell) to a tradition of Japanese adventure games and the sort of thing done in Ren’Py (though Fatal Hearts is not itself a Ren’Py game). Play This Thing! reviewed it a short time ago, and I’ve been curious since.

Continue reading “Fatal Hearts”

Partly so that I can find this again later

but also because I think others may be interested:

A commenter on Play This Thing! posted a link to an article on story-telling in Bioshock, and then I wrote a long and rambling answer.

Friction

Play This Thing! is running my review of Gimme Friction Baby. (Not interactive fiction, or anything close to it.)

Still Alive

For months now I’ve been hearing about the astonishing storytelling power of Portal, along with its fabulous physics and game design.

I hardly ever play mainstream commercial video games — I don’t have the hardware to run it well, for one thing — but I was really curious about Portal, so recently when I got a chance to play it on friends’ XBox, I took it.

What follows is spoilery and also probably doesn’t make that much sense unless you’ve played.

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Your journey begins at the giant mushrooms.

In general I am in favor of narrative in games. However, a trend I totally do not get is that which says we should glue a framing fantasy story around some completely abstract puzzle or arcade game-play.

For instance, I just spent an hour or so with an angular-shooting game called Sparkle. Not great, not terrible. I had some fun with it on the higher levels of the demo, but not so much fun that I want to buy the complete version of the game.

Continue reading “Your journey begins at the giant mushrooms.”