Tag Archives: Ne no Kami

MoeGamer Awards 2019

The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: Ten Years, Ten VNs

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The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards I’ve devised in collaboration with the community to celebrate the sorts of things that never get celebrated in end-of-year roundups! Find out more here — and feel free to leave a suggestion on that post if you have any good ideas!

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It’s nearly the end of a decade, and you know what that means: looking back over the last ten years to arbitrarily decide what was “best” from that equally arbitrary length of time.

I was just going to do a “games of the decade” sort of affair, but I realised while putting my provisional lists together that I had enough visual novels to do them in their own dedicated, separate list. So the “Ten Years, Ten Games” award will be following next week, and for now let’s talk visual novels!

For each year of (English language) release, I’m picking a visual novel that I found personally significant. This doesn’t mean that it was necessarily the “best” that year had to offer — whatever that means — but it was important to me. So let’s delve in… and note that at the time of writing, there are holiday sales going on all over the Internet, so you can pick up many of these for pretty cheap right now!

And the winners are…

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Community

The One-Liner Challenge

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Time for a Community tag post! This one looked like a particularly fun one, and after the lovely Irina from I Drink and Watch Anime specifically requested me to do one about games, who was I to refuse?

The original tag came from The Awkward Book Blogger and was based around, as you might expect, books — but it has since expanded to encompass anime and now, thanks to my contribution, games as well.

So let’s jump right in. After the jump. Jumpy jumpy jump.

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Features, MoeGamer Awards 2017

The MoeGamer Awards: Best Couple

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The MoeGamer Awards are a series of made-up prizes that give me an excuse to celebrate games, concepts and communities I’ve particularly appreciated over the course of 2017. Find out more and suggest some categories here!

I love the fact that modern gaming is such an interesting, broad medium that it is possible to even contemplate something like the idea of a “Best Couple”. When I think back to the earliest games I played, and their mechanics-centric, narrative-free, abstract representations of various concepts and consider how far we’ve come, I get very happy indeed. Not that there’s no value in those old games or indeed modern mechanics-centric narrative-free experiences, of course; it’s just nice we also have the option to immerse ourselves in more narrative-centric experiences such as visual novels now.

There were a number of excellent candidates for the title of “Best Couple” from the games I’ve played and written about this year. But the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to one pairing in particular, so it ended up being a fairly easy choice.

And the winner is…

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From the Archives, READ.ME

From the Archives: Embracing the “H”

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Sex.

Yes, that was entirely a cheap trick to get your attention, but it’s also the subject of today’s column.

There are some interesting and varied thoughts about sex in games out there, but it’s a subject that still remains largely taboo for many developers, publishers and even critics. It’s also a subject in which Eastern and Western approaches and philosophies differ greatly, and it makes for some fascinating discussions.

So let’s talk about sex, specifically with regard to visual novels.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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From the Archives, READ.ME

From the Archives: On the “Idiocy” of Interactive Storytelling

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Back at the end of November 2012, this article appeared over on community-led games writing site Bitmob (now folded into VentureBeat’s GamesBeat).

For those too lazy to follow the link and/or read the article, the gist is as follows: Shawn McGrath, creator of the psychedelic abstract shooter Dyad for PlayStation 3, made some rather bold proclamations on how inappropriate he thought video games were as a medium for telling stories.

Specifically, he noted that “linear story and interactive anything are diametrically opposed,” that they “make no sense together at all” and that “any attempt to put storylines in games in any traditional sense is completely idiotic.”

Strong words indeed. So what was his justification for this?

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2012 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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