Blue Lacuna — Further thoughts

I’m enjoying settling into Blue Lacuna, and I’d like to write some more about it as I play. In the interest of controlling spoilers, though, I’ve set my RSS feed to truncate posts again (as seen during the IF Competition) so that with any luck I won’t leak things to Planet IF and other aggregators that people might not be ready to see.

I hope that doesn’t annoy anyone too much, but there’s a lot here I’d like to be able to discuss while the game is still fresh and (probably) being played by others as well. And if you’re not playing it, give it a try. It’s the biggest thing to come along in years, and I don’t mean that just in terms of raw size. There is serious ambition here.

Hereafter, some thoughts about play through the beginning of chapter 2, with spoilers.

New Homer in Silicon

…this time on the iPhone game Ruben & Lullaby, in which you affect character moods during a fight and help determine how it turns out. Strange, intriguing stuff.

Blue Lacuna — Ch. 1

Some initial reactions to just the beginning of Aaron Reed’s “Blue Lacuna” — cut for very mild spoilers.

Congrats to Violet

which took JayIsGames’ “Best of 2008″ award in the interactive fiction category.

Blue Lacuna released

Aaron Reed’s enormous new IF work, Blue Lacuna, is now available to download and play. It looks formidable — check it out.

Assorted things

• Aaron Reed has a short story of sorts distributed over the face of the internet. Here is the beginning.
• Chocolatier 3: Decadence by Design is out — much like the first two Chocolatiers, but this time with the ability to mix and name your own chocolate blends. Full review later when I have time for such things.
• David Kinder has been doing some great work on Glulx speed issues, working with Iain Merrick to make Git handle some of the latest I7 features and recompiling it to be faster. Alabaster may be on hold for the month, but I’m excited to see that it may now play faster (at least on Windows) once it’s done.

Homer in Silicon

Still mad busy here, but another Homer in Silicon column is now up, this time looking at “Summer Session”.

(Away message)

In answer to inquiries from a couple places:

I’ve been more than usually bad about email, bug fixes, and other kinds of updates recently, and not doing much with Alabaster either. I hope to resume somewhat more regular service next month, but for the duration of January I’m teaching an intensive class that requires my full attention.

JayIsGames best of 2008 contest is open

Includes a whole category of interactive fiction (now no longer rolled together with “interactive art” as it used to be). This category includes all the IF that JIG reviewed in 2008, whether the game originated in that year or not.

And hey, you can vote in the other categories as well, if you’re interested.

Sonny 2

So when I write a negative commentary on a game, and then the designer comes out with a revision or sequel, I often feel a certain obligation to come back and see what they’ve done.

Sometimes that pays off, as it did with Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble.

Sometimes it doesn’t, so much.

Sonny 2 is a sequel to the zombie-fighting RPG whose lackluster, unfinished narrative I griped about in several places last year. 2 is a little better than the original. The pacing works better. I played on easy mode and didn’t get stuck on too many of the fights: they did get a bit boring and same-y, but at least I didn’t have to spend too much time grinding away at tedious battles just in order to see the story arc. And there’s a beginning and an end, of sorts, which is more than you can say for the original.

But– well, griping and spoilers follow the break.