Kastel

astlibra revision thoughts

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:08:45 GMT

let's talk about the famous 15 year old free game project that turned out to be one of the most legendary rpgs of all time now.

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pride month 2023 english recommendations that are free

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 12:56:13 GMT

it's gay month, so i figured i should recommend a few free english lgbtq+ games i've played this year.

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anchorhead was fun but okay: my ambivalent thoughts on lovecraftian horror in the year 2023

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 09:00:42 GMT

so i've finished Anchorhead, the 2017 edition of a classic lovecraftian tale which is regarded as one of the best works interactive fiction has to offer and i can totally see why. it's a thrilling ride from start to finish, the puzzles in the 2017 version are pretty fun, it understands the strengths and weaknesses of lovecraft, and the atmosphere is undeniably intoxicating.

my first session, i played it at 1am because i woke up in the middle of the night and i stayed up playing till 5am. i honestly think it's a very cool game and worth playing.

but i also wonder if this game is gonna be something i'll care about as time goes on.

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children's media is cool... adults should grow up and read them...

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 07:10:57 GMT

i've been watching Nick Knacks, a retrospective detailing the rise of children's television (not just nickelodeon), by poparena and it's made me think about my own excursion into children's literature when i took up a class for writing for children.

writing for children is very tough not just because you have to get what the kids are into but also the fact you're tempted to be condescending. it's easy to talk down to kids in this genre of media. you subconsciously want children to be something they may not want to be: you think of them as mini-adults, infants, property, malleable objects that can be twisted and turned into what you want to be. in general, i think researching how kids react and express themselves has made me thought deeply about what stories for children should be. ( Read more... )

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thoughts on Photopia and "influential titles" in general

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:32:06 GMT

i recently finished Photopia, a rather important interactive fiction title that has been compared to Citizen Kane in terms of how revolutionary it was and how "standard"/quaint it feels today.

and i wanna explore what i think about so-called influential titles through this game.

anything below the readmore should be regarded as spoiler territories. the game's short enough that you can come back to the post once you're done. or if you don't care, just read lol.

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getting people to play niche games?

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 11:31:25 GMT

i recently watched this fantastic documentary on text adventure games by jason scott and they mentioned the problem of “how do we get more people to play these games”. you see these veterans and amateurs burn out trying to make these games profitable while a select few is still hustling out there and saying, “There’s an audience that is clamoring for this. We just need more visibility.”

as the enlightened redditor i am (i don’t use reddit), the answer is clearly somewhere in the middle: there’s definitely people out there who would love these text adventure games and more broadly, niche titles in general. i’m defining “niche title” broadly here: the stuff that’s not on storefront pages like Steam or consoles. there’s people who would love to immerse themselves in these text only worlds if they knew (i count myself as a recent convert) or people who would go “holy shit, this indie game is kinda cool”. and there’s definitely this David and the Goliath appeal: the underdog communities can beat goliath with more support from the outside.

i get that, but i wonder how many people will actually play these titles even when good visibility is there.

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sincerity, a strange word

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 09:42:43 GMT

i've been reading a lot of Thoughts and Opinions from many people lately and one of the terms that keeps popping up, especially in discussing a subset of video games (like Undertale), is sincerity. the idea behind sincerity is to describe a less ironic, more honest approach from the creators. if games are more like a dialog, then the conversation is more straightforward and less annoying to decipher.

and i think that's a very tantalizing idea. unfortunately, i've been wondering if language is ever like that.

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romancing saga 3 remaster thoughts

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 15:25:29 GMT

damn, this game played me like a fiddle and i fucking loved it.

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knowledge checks in abrasive game designs

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 21:21:02 GMT

is this another rambling post about how the SaGa series is a masterpiece? yes, but hear me out: the series exemplifies the best game design principle that makes for interesting gameplay and we can see this in other games.

in fact, i talk about many different kinds of games! i barely talked about SaGa! What's Happening To Me. Has My Minor Head Injury Done Something Weird To Me.

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lately been thinking about trpgs, its influence on storytelling in games and fiction, and so on

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 15:34:26 GMT

every time i play a game these days, i've often come to the realization that this smells like a tabletop game. the SaGa games are very obvious, but you'll also see this in titles like Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper that use the non-combat trpg systems out there to tell their stories. it gives it a more open-ended feeling for players to express themselves.

so i'm just gonna blog about it because i find it interesting and i like to solidify these thoughts before i post it on my real deal newsletter about player expression. this is just another dreamwidth wordvomit and should be read not as something systematic but as the aphoristic ramblings jotted down in some notebook.

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gardens of vextro thing

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:39:52 GMT

"So, what's the hiccup this time?"

This was how the fictive bartender of my imagination started his questioning. If I ever found myself hitting a writer's block, I would materialize into this dingy bar in the crooks of my subconscious. The only bar I've ever been was some gay bar in SF, so my current surroundings were a swirling of caricatured images from Hollywood and elsewhere.

I looked around and saw the usual denizens were there: my ex blog post drafts, YouTube playlists that's supposed to inspire me to write more, traumas of writing about LGBTQ+ fiction while living in a homophobic country, stashed away stories of a past that's now alien to me, and the dreams of being accepted as a white mainstream writer. They all looked gloomy as always and would watch me with envy. I could hear them mouth "please", "write", "about", "us".

Eh, maybe next time. If ever.

I turned back to the bartender who, by the way, had the same character portrait as The Silver Case's bartender. I swear, I usually write better when it comes to fiction; I take my time to research and look at photos. But for whatever reason, it's always that dude. I guess it's because his mustache amused me.

Anyway, I shrugged my shoulders and said, "I don't get reviewing."

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romancing saga 2 remaster thoughts

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 19:03:02 GMT

when i started romancing saga 2, i did not expect to find myself immersed in a game so much that i scrambled for my friedrich nietzsche books and start leafing his works for epic quotations on mortality and death.

it is a video game that resonates with me because it speaks about history, philosophy, mythology, and most importantly (for my anti-humanist/literature brain) nihilism. i cannot stress how much this game is my shit and i want everyone to fucking play this game now.

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resolutions to do media stuff in 2023

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 02:38:25 GMT

i figure i should make up a list so i can remind myself what i should read more, though my bucket list has always been pretty dry anyway. and also, i just kinda do random stuff anyway. but i think this is the "important stuff" i want to do the most because they've been bugging me for a while.

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romancing saga 1 (sfc) thoughts

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 10:24:11 GMT

when i decided to undertake the saga journey, i thought the series was just the "galaxy brain video games engineered by the madman who gave us final fantasy 2". but after going through 30-40 hours of this nightmarish buggy game with kino moments, i realized i was playing a work brimming with sheer genius.

it's jank, but it is doing something more radical than i or many western game critics gave it credit for. i thought RS1 was doing things that jrpgs and crpgs can ever dream of.

it was giving me my own journey. my own story to tell.

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the reviewer is never right: or how we're just reviewing ourselves

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 01:31:02 GMT

i've been playing and writing about niche titles for ages now and if there's one thing for certain, it's that no one knows what the hell they're talking about with game design, aesthetic choices, and media criticism in general.

for all i care, we've been winging it since the dinosaurs died out.

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reading indigenous literature reminded me of one thing:

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 12:19:09 GMT

white people talking shit about white people don't usually hit as hard as pocs and indigenous people talking shit about about white people. sometimes, they do but that's because they heavily rely on these literatures. this affects white leftist thinking too.

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ignorance is painful (for me, anyway)

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 13:08:45 GMT

for an upcoming writing proposal, i've been reading about indigenous politics so i have a better understanding of settler colonialism (as mentioned in my previous post). and the more i read, the more i am struck by own ignorance and ... how painful it is.

even with the amount of literature i've read, there's still an entire history that i don't know. i lament how frankly useless my education is and all i can do is read more. but it makes me wonder: will there ever be a point i'd be satisfied and not feel the pain of ignorance?

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kastel's terrible research/writing method: mental literature reviews

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 06:58:14 GMT

instead of doing visual novels like some aniblogger, i've come across an opportunity to write about indie video games on a pretty legit magazine read by dank leftists i admire. the commissioning editor's suggestions took me by surprise, but it was so compelling that it required me to reorient my research.

since i'm approaching the subject matter back at square one, i figure i should outline my research philosophy as i've been asked by folks about how i do things. i'm going to use what i'm researching -- settler colonialism -- as my case study.
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UE's video on theories of value

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 01:50:25 GMT

i recently finished watching Unlearning Economics's video on the theories of value, which has always been an interesting subject to me. how do we value anything in this world? what is productive and unproductive labor? is there a scientifically "neutral" way to study this objectively?

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mini-review: shuuen no virche (終焉のヴィルシュ)

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 05:24:51 GMT

Elevator Pitch: If you ever want to play a game that begins with the protagonist wanting to kill herself because she sees herself as responsible for many deaths around her, this is the game for you.( Read more... )

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happy halloween from ion

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 02:23:10 GMT

ion has become a spooky ghost especially since i've come to realize i'll have to look at every season for new ion alt clothes. ciel no surge is actually a game i'm planning to write about in the near future lol. i'm gonna scream.

( read more for ciel first impressions )

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why i might migrate to this website and not something snazzy like co-host

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 15:50:46 GMT

no more tweets.....

because i'm tired of social media platforms that might burn down to the ground and i just wanna bloggggg. twitter is an exhausting microblogging platform that's all about status updates and the content moderation there, even before the muskrat came in, stinks... who in the world thinks a twitter alternative is a great idea lol

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