17-02-2025
Currently addicted to Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The first one, but the second one looks great too. I've had it for ages but never gave it much of a chance since the only thing I ever heard about it was 'realistic swordfighting' and 'creator has weird politics'. I thought it was going to be Skyrim-y or Mount-and-Blade-y where you mostly just wander about getting into combat. It's CRIMINAL that the right marketing for this game never reached me. It's nothing like that. It's slow-paced, narrative-heavy, there actually isn't much combat unless you go looking for it (and much like real life you don't actually need all the fancy sword combos you can learn because real fighting tends to lead to one side's death very quickly), the characters are charming and likeable (it's so cute to encounter a main character wandering around town and have them greet you enthusiastically), it's lovely to be able to gather herbs I actually know and to have to learn to read before I can do any alchemy, even the requirements to eat and sleep and bathe and mend your clothes don't annoy me which is a first for any RPG... it's quickly becoming my second favourite game world to just hang about in (my first favourite will always and forever be Morrowind).
Anyway, must get back to poaching deer and gathering poppies now...
11-02-2025
Here's a YouTube video about a cute Japanese PS2 game where you raise a family: Bokura No Kazoku (PS2) Is Beautiful, Sad, and Happy (gnosis on YouTube)
You play as a man keeping a journal about his family. (Well, kind of - it's all a bit abstract.) You as the player make decisions like how many children to have, when and how to spend time with your kids, whether to spend money on activities or save up for later, what traits to encourage in your children - and as your children grow to adults you get to see what choices they make for themselves about education, work, marriage and their own families, choices that are influenced by how you cared for them and all the little decisions you made as they grew. Sadly no English translation, there are a couple more videos and a playthrough on YouTube but it's still a bit hard to follow as this is an entirely menu-based game.
09-02-2025
I was watching this ComicTropes YouTube video about Vince Colletta, a comic book inker. He mentions Colletta working on romance comics. This is one of those interesting genres, like Westerns, that were hugely popular but are now almost entirely extinct. It's hard to imagine many people picking up a comic about cheesy soap-opera affairs and flings now. There also don't seem to be that many retrospectives on these comics online, so I guess not many people are looking back at these with fond nostalgia either. It's actually a bit odd that they've never been revived in a more modern form, since people love romantasy books and BL manga and stuff, but American comics don't really seem to be capitalising on this.
The Wikipedia page gives a good overview and there's also this blog post about them: How American Romance Comics Died a Slow Death and No One Seemed to Care (Bloom Reviews blog). The Comics Code of 1954, eschewing racey stories and suggestive poses among other things (including, somewhat bizarrely, werewolves and ghouls), put paid to the romance comics. DC and Archie actually kept up the code until 2011, which is crazy!
Could romance come back around after the superhero craze finally dies out?
