Post B9XZog96q8i5zM7bRQ by ben@lubar.me
(DIR) More posts by ben@lubar.me
(DIR) Post #B9XZoWSEsA4Pvmzjs0 by ben@lubar.me
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Lyriel, this is Rae. She's a sex demon. Making innuendos is like the least gross thing she knows how to do.
(DIR) Post #B9XZoYK9vAnNjJEJYO by ben@lubar.me
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fucking is OPTIONALhand holding is RECOMMENDED
(DIR) Post #B9XZoZjifcps6sCF28 by ben@lubar.me
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all of the characters keep panicking because they don't know how to interact with retail employees and then they're probably the least weird person they've had to serve in the store all day
(DIR) Post #B9XZoc53xF63NeCJZw by ben@lubar.me
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oh, the pirate captain went into the bar and ordered rum? and then she drank the rum, paid for it, and left? what a weirdooh, the wizard went to the glasses store and got her eyes checked and then tried on some frames and paid for them and took the receipt for the glasses that'll be ready in three days? such strange and uncomfortable behavior for the poor ophthalmologist
(DIR) Post #B9XZodTYleHnhufOOu by ben@lubar.me
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ok so is this written with the implication that neither Your Name nor the wizard know that glasses cases are used for more than just shipping them or whether the author of the story didn't know what or what
(DIR) Post #B9XZoesPYjl83HIkm8 by ben@lubar.me
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the ophthalmologist said she's just a saleswoman but clearly she's capable of doing an eye exam so she's either underselling herself or the author didn't know that ophthalmologists are doctors
(DIR) Post #B9XZog96q8i5zM7bRQ by ben@lubar.me
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aww the developer of this game isn't enough of a sicko to update every recurring scene to have her have the glasses onI feel extra justified in not putting it on my list now
(DIR) Post #B9XZohJmTwqBck7diK by ben@lubar.me
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BRAMBLEPELT
(DIR) Post #B9XZoicFelD3eJlu8u by ben@lubar.me
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every single line of dialogue after this one has a different warrior cat name in it🧑🍳👌
(DIR) Post #B9XZok3aIcfS7NZFNw by ben@lubar.me
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this visual novel has a lot of "let me tell you about all of the thing's I know of" from the author and that's pretty charming
(DIR) Post #B9XZolQfCIisNFNBzs by ben@lubar.me
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oh no
(DIR) Post #B9XZombgon8Y1jXVp2 by ben@lubar.me
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so the author of this basically has no strong opinion about Harry Potterbut I feel like the authors of all of the games that did make the list have very strong opinions about Harry Potter
(DIR) Post #B9XZonqyBSxBtPhEHI by ben@lubar.me
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I feel like "there's a weird building that's floating in the pink nothing and it keeps giving us food and books and cursed magical artifacts and there are a bunch of women from different worlds who were about to die and then got sucked into there by this guy to save their lives and we have a lot of consensual sex all the time and cuddling in bed lets us temporarily leave the house to go to places we remember but eventually the house rubber bands us back also we have three toilets" should be fairly understandable for literally anyone in any of these worlds because I understand it and it's completely fantasy here
(DIR) Post #B9XZopGAxEi6FsUsCm by ben@lubar.me
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like "there's a weird thing called a shower" sure I can imagine a fantasy world not having plumbingbut you know what a river is, right?a pipe is just a river that's in a tubeand you definitely know what tubes are because you're wearing clothes and clothes are made out of a bunch of tubes
(DIR) Post #B9XZoqyAb9UnYc5WPw by ben@lubar.me
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lyriel you're overcomplicating this
(DIR) Post #B9XZosGHnHa5Z5ZVIG by ben@lubar.me
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hang on, they know what a lever is but not a pipe?I feel like I could explain pretty much anything that's in the house to anyone from any of these worldsthey live in buildings and wear clothes. that's like 90% of the stuff that would be hard to explain completely taken care of. and they all know about magic so the remaining 10% should be pretty easy to explain as "a television is like divination" or whatever
(DIR) Post #B9XZotPBXgIH6yk7ns by ben@lubar.me
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I feel like we could've been taking smartphone photos of stuff and people and bringing them to wherever we etherwalk to and showing them off the whole timeit's really weird that the smartphone was brought up several times but none of the actual functions of a smartphone in real life are ever relevant to itlike it's got a photo album on it but that's not actually from photos taken with a camera as far as I can understandand the other apps on it are all just either ads for sex games or extensions of the game's menus that don't make sense being on a non-magical computer screenif anything the menus that aren't on the smartphone would have made more sense being on it
(DIR) Post #B9XZoura7abPdL2Jhg by ben@lubar.me
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oh maybe the smartphone just doesn't have a camera?I'm pretty sure all smartphones have cameras, right? phones had cameras before smartphones were a thing
(DIR) Post #B9XZow69WtqtSorT3Q by ben@lubar.me
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"we should take them some food""I don't think feeding people food tied to magical rubber bands is a good idea"someone hasn't watched The Cycling Tour
(DIR) Post #B9XZoy2KK5ypTX5RMu by ben@lubar.me
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why is the protagonist refusing to tell anyone how the girls enter the house"I saw a vision of her for several nights in a row leading up to some incident that would have resulted in her death but I pulled her out of her world and into the magic sky house and I don't know the exact mechanics of how that works but it does" is probably easier to understand than the rest of the shit you're telling them and it's not like they wouldn't remember Lyriel falling off the balcony and straight-up vanishingand it's not like anyone can do anything with that information apart from saying "oh cool that's weird"
(DIR) Post #B9XZozPlCSJpkV3fX6 by ben@lubar.me
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I wonder why the shaders for teeth are so fucked in whatever software they're using to render these
(DIR) Post #B9XZp15ywxgcxjotyy by ben@lubar.me
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I feel like more media should give the protagonist a linguistic superpowerlike in Undertale how you have the power to SAVE and you can basically use it to do anything that forms a sentence using that verbthere are lots of verbs you could probably write one of these games focusing around"connect", "refill", "move", "set", "close", "fix"basically any verb that can be used with adjectives like "emotionally" or verbs that have contextual meanings
(DIR) Post #B9XZp2l8lQCg7g5Hm4 by ben@lubar.me
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would probably be more interesting than the average visual novel even if they just gave the protagonist the linguistic superpower to "fuck"
(DIR) Post #B9XZp3v6RrlbirkkwS by ben@lubar.me
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if I ever make a nonlinear game (and the first one probably won't be a visual novel if I do do that) I'm definitely going to add the Content Guide from GW2 or the Tenno Guide from Warframe or whatever other games call it when you put an arbitrary incomplete-but-completable objective at the top right of the HUDthis whole big multi-page thing of "here's a list of things you can do to trigger events" that every visual novel seems to have is nice, but it also feels like a solution to a problem that was invented just so that the problem could exist
(DIR) Post #B9XZp5Lj8Meq9jDX4y by ben@lubar.me
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come to think of it, almost every game does itjust gives you a huge book of optional objectives that are hard to sort througheven linear games like Half-Life 2 with its achievementsis that... good? desirable?like if it's an easter egg like flushing a toilet in AS:RD while on infested and on fire giving you a medal that can probably stand on its own without showing you how to find it because it's interesting enough for players to tell each other about itbut in games like Warframe you need some form of external guide on where to find stuff because there's like 600 different weapons all with different ways to get them and even though the game will tell you which ones you're missing it won't lead you to them
(DIR) Post #B9XZp6d8N8Ay80Mwqm by ben@lubar.me
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and, like, I'm not gonna join any kind of community for these games (ok maybe I'll occasionally send pull requests to rahi), so all of the stuff that's in the game needs to be discoverable from within the gamemaybe it's just that this specific format of events that occur when you go to a specific room at a specific time in a dating sim-like visual novel isn't good for discovery and the big list of quests is the best way people have found currently to address that
(DIR) Post #B9XZp82h7aDSVZKsKW by ben@lubar.me
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it's a little bit weird that these Ren'Py visual novels where you can move around a house or town are full of loading screens that can be skipped by the fast forward functionis this like The Room where someone saw that video games have loading screens so they put loading screens in their video game without fully understanding why they exist?or is it a pacing thing? I feel like the fake loading screens in every single one of these games are just annoying and don't really add anything to the story I'm trying to read
(DIR) Post #B9XZp9SbqiXWuET5MW by ben@lubar.me
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y'know for a game about grabbing people and things from your dreams and pulling them into your house that sure hasn't happened for a while
(DIR) Post #B9XZpAg7JywGgPnO3U by ben@lubar.me
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the whole "we need mr protagonist to get out of the house and then we steer from there" thing seems to have gotten forgotten at some point because the game has started saying that the girl is steering and then after that remembering that the barrier existsand likethat doesn't make sense if there's literally nothing between the house and the barrier
(DIR) Post #B9XZpBywTTaij5bw2K by ben@lubar.me
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so if we take items out of the house they either disappear or return with us when we leaveand if we take items out of one of the worlds we travel to they stay aroundnot sure whether that means we could take an item from one world to the house and then either back to that world or another world and leave itI wonder what would happen if we took a person back with uswould it be the same thing as etherwalking out of the house but in reverse where they get flung back to where they're supposed to be after a short amount of time? would it just be impossible to get someone from outside of the house in? would it work but they get stuck there too?
(DIR) Post #B9XZpDq9Z7kWUPVwcC by ben@lubar.me
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I wonder why some of the scenes in the game have really intense color grading and some don'tthere doesn't seem to be any difference from a narrative perspective
(DIR) Post #B9XZpF6UrqPuPOAVjE by ben@lubar.me
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I wonder whether that one that royally messed up making an interesting "james bond but a woman" story is doing anything super complicated in order to get so many character poses and costumes in under a gigabyte or if it's just 3D modelsmaybe I should redownload it and poke around inside
(DIR) Post #B9XZpGTZlWTKfFySLA by ben@lubar.me
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there are a lot of scenes in this game that seem like the author is just really excited that they know the word frenulum
(DIR) Post #B9XZpHbPZsKm9qeEC0 by ben@lubar.me
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I mean, it's what Rae had me do so I could learn to etherwalk out of this house. It's something to do with understanding your own body or magic or whatever. So maybe you could use it to not always assume that people are trying to hurt you with literally everything they say to you?