Darklord Rooke

*Cough* Back on topic, I have a request for your Sims game (and keep in mind I have NO IDEA about the Sims, never played it, never watched anybody play it etc etc) Have a character, name him death, have a drink every time he acts out a pun Death is coming for you! You have a date with death! I gave death the bird! Screw death! (This one deserves 2 drinks). Voila, a Sims 3 drinking game

What strong, manly bonds we share. I feel like we've forged a connection between us during these troubled times. A connection that is utterly superficial and practically non-existant, but a connection nonetheless, and it humbles me greatly. If you ever need anybody's help, know that Rooke will have your back bro! Need help hacking up your mother in law? Don't worry - I have an axe you can borrow! And don't bother returning it! Also, after the grisly job is done, I will write to you in prison to make sure that I, your manly buddy, am in no way connected to the crime. How good a friend am I? If you ever find yourself being mugged by a crazed druggo, ring your good friend Rooke and I will shout at him over the phone for you! I will call him names, insult his mother, do everything I can to make him incredibly angry... at you! I will also give you a decent burial the next day. Because we are men, and this is what men do for one another

Dear Tay The painting on the wall is crooked. Please fix. Yours in sincerity Rooke

His statement was made at the beginning of the 1960s, when tvs were still new but just beginning to take off and nobody even knew what a 'video game' was. What may have been true in the 1950s (remember, less than 10% of American households had tv sets at the beginning of the 1950s) is completely non-sensical now. Gaming is a very powerful medium, the internet is the most powerful medium that has ever existed. Books are no longer on the map.

Fair enough. I was a bit emotional when I created the topic. Original post has now been edited ..... ..... Same and same. Wellllll..... I'll own three PS3 games once I pick up Tales of Xillia next week. I hope it's better than Tale of Graces and Vesperia!

Winterwolves is a great english, visual novel developer http://www.winterwolves.com/ Same with Hanako http://www.hanakogames.com/fatal.shtml Check out Moacube's Cinders http://moacube.com/games/cinders/ Finally, check out 'First draft of the revolution', by Emily Short. It's not a VN, but it's unique and worth checking out http://lizadaly.com/first-draft/

Video games have a bigger audience than Visual Novels, a much bigger audience. There's very little point in spreading propaganda through a medium when that medium's idea of a runaway success is moving 50 000 copies (which almost never happens.) According to your article, the Army game alone has 1.5 million subscribers and games like call of duty and skyrim move more than 10 million copies each. Online games like World of Warcraft have 10 million people playing over a decade. These sorts of figures make the idea of propaganda and advertising worthwhile. Visual Novels are a niche medium, a medium who's small audience is still shrinking. It makes the idea of Government propaganda unlikely because they can't reach enough people. That's not to say that there isn't propaganda in the visual novel, just that it wouldn't be sponsored by the Government. 'Dies the Fire' is a pretty damn good novel by S M Stirling, unfortunately it is packed with wiccan propaganda which makes reading it a chore. It wasn't put there by the Government, it was inserted by the author, it was obvious, and it was boring. Maybe the devs of grisaia are greenies (environmentalists).

Sorry, I tried to ignore this but I just can't. It's a blatant attempt at misdirection by the people who performed the petition. A comprehensive rebuttal can be found here: http://scholarsandrogues.com/2009/08/02/152-oism-scientists-cant-be-wrong/

Seconded, thirded, fourthed. I've been promoting this game on any forum I thought would give a rats, sadly it's been mostly ignored. *Sigh* only 400k to go for Retribution. I don't know if it will be reached, momentum has slowed

Moving on to global warming. I know you don't like propaganda, so why do you reject the Government propaganda in the game by citing a terrible piece of propaganda from the daily mail? I'm on the verge of launching into a many-paragraph post on why that article you've cited is inherently flawed, but it's boring, and I've just posted something similar above. I know you want to talk about the propaganda in the video game, but points like these undermine your point.

I'm not trying to be rude, but it's hard to find a sentence in the above paragraph that is actually accurate. Take a deep breath, calm down, things aren't as bad as they seem. Firstly, every part of an animal (well, most animals anyway) can be eaten without experiencing any problems. However, western nations are on the whole rich, spoilt, and wasteful, so half the meat that comes off a carcass usually ends up in a landfill or in our pets dinner bowl. Bottom line though, there's nothing wrong with these pieces of meat, and there is nothing dangerous or unhealthy about pink slime or tuna scrape (tuna scrape isn't second grade meat, it's the pieces of fish that are hard to get at.) The article you linked to talks about how the fish is eaten raw, there's a high risk of contamination, and Indian tuna-scrape producers are not too diligent about safety standards. But rule of thumb, raw fish is always medium-high risk. Tests were recently done in Australia, and about 10% of sushi outlets were not safe. Some of the sushi places tested had bugs crawling in the chicken teriyaki roll... it wasn't even the fish! Secondly, concerning inflation, America's inflation at the moment is less than 2%. It's low. In fact it's TOO low. They're trying to get it higher, not devise nefarious policies to keep it rock-bottom. Going to Europe, Greece doesn't HAVE an inflation rate, its has a DEFLATION rate. That's how much trouble they're in and no, they didn't do it on purpose. Similar stories with Spain, Italy and the rest of western europe. Thirdly, the horse meat scandal had nothing to do with what Governments are secretly feeding their citizens. The horse meat in Europe came from Romania. What most people believe is that when the Romanian Government passed a law banning horse drawn carts from the streets, people had no more need for their horses. A lot of them were abandoned to roam the streets and if they weren't claimed then they were sent to Romanian slaughterhouses (it's legal to slaughter horses in Romania.) Poor people could also sell their horses to slaughterhouses if they so wished. This created an abundance of cheap horse meat. Now, the Romanian Gov claim that all of the horse meat exported from their country was properly labelled..... Ha ha, of course it was. Fourthly, concerning Starbucks and the crushed bugs episode, it's a non-incident. Before synthetic food dyes hit the market, ALL food dyes of a certain colour were made from crushed bugs. How did you think they got those lovely colours? Organic red dyes made today are still made from crushed bugs, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that *yum yum* Fifthly, meat glue is dishonest but not harmful, and again a relative non-issue. It's blood. What do you think comes out of meat to begin with? The supermarkets habit of injecting chemicals to make their meat look redder is probably a bigger concern. Now, if you had mentioned Japan's habit of substituting whale meat with dolphin meat, and then serving it up to school canteens I would have agreed with you. Because dolphin meat contains mercury. But everything you mentioned isn't much of a concern, and the idea that America is allowing you to eat dangerous foods to drive down inflation flies in the face of good economic policy. I believe America and Europe are trying to drive UP inflation at the moment.

Fans of 'Valkyria Chronicles' need to know about the kickstarter campaign for 'Warmachine Tactics' (on PC and Mac.) It's a turn based strategy game similar to Valkyria Chronicles... only it looks many hundred times better. There's a 5 minute video on the website linked below, be sure to check it out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/409030043/warmachine-tactics

Nobody makes strategy games better than Creative Assembly, and to prepare myself for the awesomeness that is Rome II I'm replaying Rome I. A little heads up for anyone with 'Total War - Rome', a recent Windows update makes half the screen go black when you load the game. Unistalling update KB2803821 solves the problem.

I prefer VNs with gameplay. Making them portable and affordable would make a bigger impact, I suspect.

Not really much info to go on. A plot twist involving a murder and DID? Have you ever read any Dragonlance books? Raistlin Majere, archmage and master of the present, travelled to the past to challenge Fistandantilus, archmage and master of the past, to defeat him and absorb his lifeforce and knowledge into himself (thus making him the master of the past and present, fantasy writers and their creative titles ). Unfortunately, when the victor absorbed the loser into himself he also absorbed all of his memories as well. Thus, with two full sets of memories and two full sets of knowledge the winner no longer knew who he was, and neither did the reader. Most people think Raistlin won, but a scribe recording the battle wrote down the winner as Fistandantilus, but he could have just been mocking Raistlin... so nobody really knows *chortle chortle*. Also, for inspiration, there was a Jonathan Creek episode where two twins had an amateur magic act going on, but an accident occured leaving one of them dead. Unfortunately, the twin that died had a husband and children whereas the twin who was still alive had nobody who relied upon her. Thus, she switched identities to try and lessen the anguish/consequences. Ghost in the Shell had an episode where "Pazu encounters an ex-lover scorned (Kaori Kawashima) who had adopted a body that was identical to his own down to the smallest detail. A knife fight ensues, and one "Pazu" is killed through the eye. It isn't made clear whether or not the victim was the real Pazu or the imposter (Kaori), as they both have cuts across their torsos, and the surviving "Pazu" says nothing." (from http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Pazu ) You could also try playing 'Knights of the Old Republic', which is an excellent story driven game with humour, a giant plot twist and amnesia.

It seems like Windows 8 is technically superior to Windows 7. That being said most users won't care about/notice the performance upgrades, the user interface is a mess and, most importantly, it's causing problems for gamers!

Here's something take from Holly Lisle's website which you need to read: Taken from: http://hollylisle.com/the-description-workshop/ Also http://hollylisle.com/honing-your-talent-a-workshop/ Any budding author should take the time to read Holly Lisle's site.

I'm going to split this up over a couple of posts. It needs a general revision. You need to tighten up your prose and make your language more precise (to avoid confusion,) fix up your grammar and make sure you don't confuse your tenses. Avoid info dumps - avoid info dumps - avoid info dumps. Once more for good measure. Avoid info dumps. If you're writing in 3rd person then show, don't tell (there's lots of exceptions to the rule, but it's a good rule of thumb.) Don't tell the reader it was this place where every possible life form could come, live and exist, describe your setting and show (through your description of everyday life in the city) that it was a place where every possible life form could live and exist. Or reveal it through conversation (your character could be racist and hate that the city is overrun with *insert race here*.) Same deal with Only the richest of the rich can stay here. Though this city is extremely huge, the number of people is ridiculously low. and In such a city, there was one peculiar man. However in no sense can he be noticed as peculiar. He may be called peculiar yet at the same time he seems normal. This ties in to the above point as well. Show your info to the reader, don't give your story a prologue and write a lot of information about the piece system. Don't tell the reader that the city has 2 main languages, instead show people talking in both Japanese and English. Get rid of needless adjectives and adverbs. the crowd roared AS SOON as, - it was TRULY amazing - she can ACTUALLY use - SIMPLY amazing - ENERGETICALLY jumped etc. Pay attention to how you pace your novel. If Kushi had to wait a few minutes, don't write a few minutes pass and launch right back into your story. You while away the time on descriptions: what's happening around her, what she's thinking about, what she's feeling, so the reader actually has a sense that a few minutes have actually passed. Your character starts analysing things and your perspective as a narrator widens. Learn to write using most of your senses. Smell, touch yada yada

'Brave Soul' is a game regularly recommended to people looking for good h-rpgs. Just because there have been so few translated, and the best known ones (Kamidori, Tears etc) are usually SRPGs. And some people just don't like SRPGs ... like my sister ... and ALL of my gaming friends You're doing a great job with the marketing btw. As for marketing to RPG fans, you'll have to try and find a forum where a lot of JRPG fans hang out. I doubt you'll have much luck with western RPG fans. You could also try the usual anime fan route...

It shouldn't be funny, but I laughed so hard.

Will buy Yumina the Ethereal, not when it's released in August but probably in September when I can spare the cash. I'll probably pick up an official copy of Demonbane at the same time (I'm currently playing a pirated version, which has been great so far.) I'll also pick up Django, Sumaga, Little Witch Romanesque, Raidy 3, and Ef the latter tale when they're released.

KnS2 and Cartagra are too dark for me. I prefer lighter fare. Also, not enough love for Raidy 3 in this thread

Ideals are standards of perfection, reality has no place in such discussions . It's something to aim at, that's all

I suppose my IDEAL visual novel would emphasise infinite variation and infinite choices. The game would have over a thousand decision points: At each decision point, the game would present at least 7 different choices the reader could make Every choice would branch the storyline in a significant and real way. No 2 choices would lead the character down the same path. You would not have access to every choice at each decision point. Some options would only be available if your character had a)certain abilities or b)specific knowledge. If a decision you made leads to your death, be prepared for a fully animated and voiced lecture from Yoda: “Mind what you have learned! Save you it can!” “Told you I did. Reckless is you!” Yoda would be voiced by Frank Oz! You would have many opportunities to fully define who your character is, and this would influence HOW you get to the end of the game. It would change available romances, which options you could take at each decision point, where you hang/live/work. It would change your buddies and whether you’re married or still living with your parents. Your choice in protagonist will determine how and when you could die. So a ninja character would be able to stealth their way pass yakuza henchmen, but pelvic thrusting your way into the room to Snoop Doggy Dogg would get you a very special lesson with sensei Yoda. Unless your character is a wookiee ninja, of course. At a random point during your adventure, the game would seek to ENHANCE your gameplay experience by pretending not to understand the choices you make. For example, it would say the word ‘menu’ is foreign to it. So is the word ‘save’ and ‘Load’. ‘Exit’ is VERY foreign, as is the word ‘mongrel-dog’. There would be many different ways to play your character. You could be evil or good, be a savior to all or kill everyone you pretended to love. You would be able to ‘pick your sides’ yet still be able to reach the end of the novel. Evil characters would always get the better endings because, lets face it, they’re more fun and more interesting. Also, these endings would be glorious. Good characters would get the uptight endings, where they end up broke, homeless yet with all their morals intact (you’re not only playing a game, you’re getting an education at the same time!) You would be able to design your own lightsaber. The term ‘lightsaber’ would NOT be a clever euphemism for ‘your penis’. That is something you would not be able to design. If your character is male, the size and shape of your penis would be determined by a very rigged (heh) dice roll.