If the title art isn’t any indication of what this novel is about, Dusk is another kinetic novel that I was drawn to because it seemed to be a good Twilight parody. While Twilight has been parodied to death, this one was in the form of a kinetic novel. The author of this is also the same one that did Lucky Rabbit Reflex, which is a visual novel with all the proper dialogue trees and the like.

The good: Overall I found the novel to be funny. I’m not familiar with the books having only seen the movie, but this does a good job of pointing out the blatant contradictions, such as Ephraim (Edward) going up to Angelica (Bella) just to tell her that she shouldn’t hang around him or that he shouldn’t hang around her before zipping off into the crowd and such. Other parts are about how smart she is, that there are only ten kids that go to the school and sometimes Angelica has friends show up. Even Jared (Jacob), with his russet cheeks, is succinctly both blatantly stereotyped and troped to point out the problems with Twilight. Passion and constipation await you!

The bad: There’s only one music track, which repeats throughout the whole novel. Having a variety more would have broken up the repetition. The character only have a few expressions too, then again in the movie they didn’t have a lot of expressions either. I guess in part two of this novel he will get a chance to sparkle.

The extra: NASA level string theory!

The nitpick: The novel cuts off in the middle of the “book”, at least compared to Twilight. It would have been nice to have a bit more story. Also we don’t get to see Ephraim’s hot and younger father.

That Cheap and Sacred Thing is a kinetic visual novel, meaning if you bang on the enter key long enough, you’ll get to the ending. There are no branching paths, it’s like an electronic storybook.

What attracted me to this was the description of androids, male androids. I loves me some androids as they are uncommon compared to the gynoids that seem to populate everything. I can name very few pieces of art that have androids as a central character, but can name tons and tons of things with gynoids as a central character.

This novel didn’t disappoint me. Jude is the android in question and he’s a sex worker (or sex slave considering his status to serve humans) which is a double rarity. That’s what got me to download this as I don’t usually like kinetics.
The story is a simple one about robot love between Autumn and Elly, her MyPal that had to be destroyed. Jude comes in when her well meaning friends decide to buy her a sex toy (which is Jude’s function basically) for her seventeenth birthday.

The Good: The story was very emotional and the characters were well realized. The only one I felt that didn’t get too much of the spotlight was Rick. I liked his design the best :3 I also like the fact that nobody said anything disparaging against Nadiya and her love of AmorBots. The ending was satisfying and even the stinger wasn’t disappointing and added to the wrapping up of the story versus setting up a part two. The ending it should be noted, is quite emotional and might leave you crying or at least tearing up. So, don’t go into this novel if you want to feel happy/spunky afterwards.

The Bad: The world is very… sad. It seems even in the future men haven’t been taught to not rape people, thus women are assigned the MyPals and GuardBots. Even worse is that the male AmorBots are basically taught to rape women by coercing them into sex despite the fact they’ve already said no. Jude does this to Autumn even go so far as to whining about it. If robots are to serve humans I would like to think that they’d program in the “No means no” and start to execute some other program. Maybe romantic cuddling, back massage or something else. It also seems the only reason Jude stops is because of the “error” that Autumn triggers in robots. This is stated in the “bonus” section of the novel.
It’s something that seems to plague Sci-Fi novels and games, that humans can’t get over socially constructed behaviors such as that. (David Weber does it too and oh boy is it worse >.<)

The Extra: I’m wondering if the author knows about Phantasy Star Online and the CAst character :3 As CAsts are androids and TCAST and yes, my mind went there. Just an observation as I played a few CAsts in my day. (*sniff* Dannie ;^;)

The Nitpick: The music I felt wasn’t that good. At least one in particular I wanted to mute (Happy Mood). The rest were too short and the looping was a bit repetitive. Which some scenes can get a bit long. Having longer and more varied pieces would probably have been better. However the ending song was most appropriate. Another nitpick is that the sprites jump a couple pixels when they emote. I don’t know if that was intentional, but from other visual novels it seems that staying in place is the norm.

I was recently introduced to a program called OpenRPG. Link is right there.

What it does, is simulate a table with a grid that you can play tabletop RPGs with. You have a pen you can use to draw the rooms, a chat area where the players and GM can talk, you can import images from websites to have for miniatures etc. It seems like a solid tool for those people that are can’t get out to get to a TT session or those that don’t want to, if the local gamers are all trolls, or even if there is no real group out there. They can log-on and talk and get their gaming that way. With SKype/Ventrilo/etc. and such they can also voicechat for a more authentic experience.

There are two flavors of OpenRPG:
Vanilla
Traipse

Basically they are as different as Fedora and Ubuntu. Both Linux builds. Basically the core is there however there may be differences in the way that it is GUI’d or the functionality. The Vanilla flavor has an installer that will install everything for you while the Traipse version wants you to have Python and wxPython pre-installed. (Honestly I don’t like installers that have dependencies.)

Many games out there, when you have to select a race/job/portrait for your character, have very limited options when you select male or female. The men are usually somewhat ugly hulking beasts and the women are dainty little half naked flowers. In the case of JRPGs, the men might look better, however some options might only have the “less attractive” option for the men, and the alternate for the women is the busty scantily clad version.

When looking for new dungeon crawler RPGs I came across Elminage II by Starfish for the PSP. I quickly looked at the jobs and the races. While there is a “Maid” job that might be female only (I haven’t played the game, they might have a Butler option for men), I decided to look at the races.
Normally in JRPGs and even WRPGs, the men tend to be more beastly or robotic and the women will always look human. Case and point is Phantasy Star Online when the robot men NEVER had a human head, while there was more than one human looking head for the women.
Elminage II keeps it equal, even so much that the Dragonnewt women have a drab brown color while the men are a brighter red color (as it happens in nature amongst birds and other things.) Even the Dwarf woman looks scary and the Gnomes look earthy. Another note is that the women also appear to be wearing clothes, and not be dressed any less than the men. You can only really see the top of the shoulders, however you can tell that those are covered (Even the demon race Devilish).
Comparing the Ogre race to the Orcs of Wow, you can see that the Ogre women might even be more burly than the men. While in WoW the Orc women definitely look more “sexy”.

If this game ever comes stateside, I will definitely be picking it up. Not only is it a 1PDC (1st Person Dungeon Crawler), it balances out the portraits of the characters so I feel good about picking certain characters.

Of note for this game is that if you don’t like ANY portraits, and want a picture of lolcats for your party, you can “Face Load” 48×48 BMPs into it that you have put on your memory stick.

Link: Elminage II

I came across a nice tool for creating First Person dungeon crawlers. However the thing is in Japanese, as it seems all good game makers are. You can compare it to Dungeon Craft, however Dungeon Craft seems to be only there to emulate a certain style of game, while Desigeon can be scripted to emulate any of them out there.

I do hold out hope that maybe someone out there that is good with translating “Tools” (RPG Tool, Action Game Tool, etc. in that line of products.)

This however is independent from all that, so might be more open to share the code, considering the program is free.

Here is a convenient link for all interested.
Desigeon