Author Archives: playerprophet

Cyberpunk Realism – Read Only Memories Review

By playerprophet Posted in Games, Reviews

I’m a huge fan of the show Game Center CX, localized once upon a time as Retro Game Master, where I watch Shinya Arino struggle with difficult old games that I never plan to put my hands on, ever. While watching him, though, I’ve seen episodes where he’s wrangled with games that I’d never heard of; adventure and mystery games that were either rare or completely unavailable in North America. Watching Arino-san play The Portopia Serial Murderer Incident and the Jake Hunter series has left this nerd girl particularly hungry for more point-and-click mystery games neck-deep in story. I want game makers to give me more Hotel Dusk, Ace Attorney and even L.A. Noire.

Read Only Memories tapped right into that desire with such pointed direction, it’s as if MidBoss read my mind. Or maybe there was a demand out there from more people than just me. Not only did they make a story-rich mystery adventure game, they made a cyberpunk story-rich mystery adventure game, inspired by games like Kojima’s long-lost Snatcher. While I’m still waiting for more can-you-solve-the-mystery games, I enjoyed every minute of Read Only Memories and I humbly require no less than a hundred sequels.

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The story starts with you, an investigative journalist living in squalor in Neo-San Francisco. After writing a review for the low low earnings of “exposure”, a small robot shows up at your house in the night. Turing is the first autonomous AI, and his creator – your friend, Hayden – has been kidnapped. Turing enlists your help because he knows you’re poor, bored, and a super sleuth. Together, you navigate Neo-San Francisco on the hunt for clues.

Read Only Memories brings forth a refreshing new brand of cyberpunk that isn’t based in the cynicism of the 90s like Snatcher or Shadowrun. ROM takes place in 2064, where heroes and villains are at work through greed, goodness or revenge in equal measure. The purest hearts have prickly exteriors, and the warm and forthcoming may have ulterior motives, and each character is a well-thought-out artefact of the world that they grew out of. The vibe of ROM is more realistic than a lot of science fiction I’ve encountered in some time, and I cannot praise the writers highly enough for that.

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As an LGBT+ creator myself I also feel the need to point out to others the levels of inclusion that exists in ROM. Early in the game Turing creates a login system for you, where you identify your name, pronouns of choice, and diet preferences. There are many pronoun options, including one where you can put in custom ones not listed. Detective Lexi Rivers is your sister’s ex-girlfriend, and the two burly male bartenders are in love. One of your main contacts, Tomcat, is explicitly non-binary. Gender and sexuality are a non-issue fifty years from now, but other problems of discrimination have arisen thanks to the times. Hybrids who have adopted animal genes often to remedy disabilities are discriminated against, along with people who augment their lost sight with cyborg eyes and so forth. These things are valuable in an earth-based science fiction story for two reasons:

  1. Disabled people and LGBTQA are featured as window-dressing, which is entirely how we prefer to be featured. Our existences by this story’s 2064 has been so normalized that it is no longer an issue and is barely worth being mentioned in the narrative, except that it is there. This is smart world building as well as a responsible storytelling technique that has been executed with amazing tact.
  2. This is a perfect example of something I mentioned earlier about cyberpunk realism as opposed to cynicism: while we have won several battles, several more lie before us. There will always be struggles in life, but progress has been made. It is not a dystopia, and it is not a utopia. It’s realistic.

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I don’t want to spoil too much about the fascinating measures of worldbuilding that takes place in Read Only Memories. I just have to implore you to play it for yourself, especially if you’re like me and value story in a game above all else. The point-and-click setup of an adventure game is tried and true, and you can take your time to make choices and digest all of the optional dialogue about VR Drama developers in Japan, and Turing’s favorite types of trees, or not. Make yourself a classy drink, curl up in bed with your laptop, and enjoy Read Only Memories like a good book.

Website Overhaul

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows

Welcome to the new Those Without Shadows site! It may not look much different, but everything in the back end has been changed. The game sections may not be operating right away, but they’ll be back soon, too.

As I mentioned last time, we’ll be switching things so that TWS updates more often, with less content. I hope you’ll appreciate the regularity, but let me know on the social media of your preference how you feel about it – if I’m somewhere, I’m on there as ‘playerprophet’. I’m going to try to update weekly, with the understanding that game sections might take a little longer. Please bear with us! There’s one coming up in chapter 4. Page 5 will be a game.

Thank you for reading!

-Dawn & Team TWS

In Loving Praise of Restraint in Metal Gear Solid V

By playerprophet Posted in Games, Reviews

One of the first critiques you will hear as a creative writer of any kind is this: show, don’t tell. The Metal Gear Solid franchise has never taken that piece of advice (not that I’m complaining) until we were allowed to get into the head of Big Boss in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. The beautiful drawn cutscenes by Ashley Wood draw a wordless parallel between Naked Snake shooting The Boss in Russia in the 60’s, to the present day 1970’s where he puts down her horse in Costa Rica. The Snakes often say little about how they feel, but this scene is where Kojima really shows what he’s learned since Metal Gear Solid IV, and uses visual storytelling to say things without using words. It’s important especially in the context of Peace Walker, where Big Boss navigates a second time what The Boss taught him, or at least, what he thought she had taught him. If she had been entirely open with him in the first place, he may have not still struggled with her message.

And that leads us to the controversy of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. There is very little in the narrative that is simply told to the player. For many fans of the earlier titles in the series, The Phantom Pain was a disappointment. As a fan myself, I understand why. I, too, miss the long codec conversations about military history and characters’ personal histories. The sacrifice of these though (and adaptation into fewer, more carefully selected tape recordings) earns MGSV an A+ in game design. The medium is the message in The Phantom Pain, and the message is about silence and projection.

I feel like here I need to leave a disclaimer that 1: there are spoilers ahead and 2: I was not on board the MGSV hype train leading up to the game’s release in October 2015. I bought a playstation 3 for the sole purpose of having it for the Metal Gear Solid IV release, and after that I gave up on the Metal Gear franchise entirely. Not because I was unhappy with IV (I wasn’t! I was pleased with it, although I have some issues with it now) but because I didn’t want to encourage a franchise that Kojima no longer wanted to make. So when I came home to Canada in mid-October 2015 to find my roommates deep in Metal Gear Solid hell, I played Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain in one go, without any expectations of what any of these games entailed. Considering the angst much of the fandom went through waiting, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I realize, however, that the marketing of MGSV led to certain expectations of the game that were not met, and it’s important to understand that this was not how I experienced it.

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TCAF 2016 + Doing Something Different with TWS

By playerprophet Posted in Canada, Comics, Doujinshi, Personal, Those Without Shadows

Okay let’s start with what’s happening in TWS: We’ll be changing how we update so that we can do it with more regularity. After doing a twitter survey it seems that the more popular option would be to update more often with a page or two at a time, so that’s what we’re going to do from here on out. That said, you should look forward to an update by the end of the weekend, probably.

Second: You can now play the games on your phone! We’re still working out some bugs from the mobile version, but it mostly works.

So here’s what happened to me at TCAF 2016:

This year I ended up getting on the waiting list for TCAF proper, but the wait ran long and I got in with the Hand Eye Society for Comics vs Games. So for my first time I had to build an interactive way to play TWS to show off all it’s capable of. So I had my comics and we got TWS up on an ipad borrowed from my lovely roommate and showed off our nice new touchscreen abilities.
It was a learning experience but it did go mostly well.

We had two OTHER new and exciting things there, too. One of them was Clark‘s burnt CD soundtrack. It’s currently unavailable anywhere but I have it on good authority that he’ll be hocking them to his patrons soon. If you’re interested you should support him, for sure!

The second was my zine about fandom, which you can download here. This was a major point to my stress coming up on TCAF but I got to say a lot of things in it that I really wanted to say.

NOW IT’S TIME FOR THE CHRONOLOGICAL PLAY-BY-PLAY OF MY ADVENTURES.

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Those Without Shadows: The Stranger release date

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows

TWS:M chapter 3 will be posted online on Monday October 12th, 2015! I’ll update here again once the time comes.

October Wallpaper preview

In the meantime I’ve already posted the monthly wallpaper spoiling what the stranger looks like. Oh well. Please consider buying it or supporting me on patreon!

The Devil is Real – We Know the Devil & Theological Terror

By playerprophet Posted in Games, Reviews

I grew up in a white Christian community with a family that were not passionate Christians. My mother would occasionally decide that yes, this week we’ll be going to church. Every Sunday. For real. She’d pick a church that looked interesting (as long as it wasn’t Catholic) and we’d attend for a few weeks until she worked on a Sunday or was too tired, and the ideal would fall apart. I had the building blocks. I had the cultural osmosis. But I did not have the real experience.

I have a degree in religious studies (sort of) which has led me into a very atypical relationship with it. I love religion, the same way that someone loves science fiction movies. Every day I am a happily non-denominational agnostic, educating people on comparative religious views and why we should say “happy holidays” instead of “merry christmas”. A former roommate has politely asked me on at least one occasion to stop talking about religion. It wasn’t until much later that I understood why. From top to bottom, We Know The Devil made me think of her.

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TWS Belated Blog Post

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows

Due to my attendance at Tracon last weekend, I didn’t have time to make a proper blog post with the release of TWS:M Chapter 2, so here’s a small one now instead.

We’ve been working on getting a nice mobile version going, and after some hiccups, it should be ready soon. Since I manage all of the writing/art and most of the webstuff, I’ll probably be implementing it once I’ve gotten a fair bit of Chapter 3 done. Maybe next week.

In other news, I’ve begun what I hope to be a monthly wallpaper offering:

September Wallpaper preview

Pay what you want for it at gumroad! Patrons are receiving these things for completely free and to their inbox if you wanna join them.

The next con I’m signed up for is Hal-Con in Halifax, although I have no dates or certainty about how to get there.

TWS:M Chapter 2, The Pilgrim

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows

I love to make big lovely blog posts to match my updates, but Tracon is tomorrow and I’ll be vending there. If you’re attending, please come visit for some TWS freebies! I’ll be at Artists’ Alley table 3.

Those Without Shadows: Mind / The Pilgrim / Patreon

TWS – Anna’s Tale Begins! Patreon Launch

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows

Thank you for your patience. Today, Those Without Shadows has updated with Chapter 1: The Prince. It took us quite some time thanks to the boss battle on page 9, which we had to program and create assets for from scratch. I seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take to make those sprites, with all kinds of conventions and traveling happening in the middle of it. I wish it hadn’t taken so long.

With Chapter 1 comes the real hard premiere of Those Without Shadows. The Prince should make a better example of what the heart of the story will be like, so please help and promote it if you can! Chapter 2, The Pauper does not have a playable segment, so it should be out early September. I hope to update Those Without Shadows with a full chapter once a month.

With the hard premiere of Those Without Shadows I have also launched a Patreon if you’d like to support it. There are lots of goodies available for anyone who does!

Thank you all for reading. I hope you enjoy.

-Dawn

Those Without Shadows Begins

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows

This post was originally published on thosewithoutshadows.com on 14.04.15.

Welcome friends and new readers! I hope that this story will means as much to you as it does to me. This one has been long coming down the pipeline and now we’ve finally arrived at a release! Things might be a little buggy as we work things out and the updates will be a little slow while we’re still programming some things on the back-end, but here it is! Please look forward to the story!

Those Without Shadows is a tale that I’m calling a “composite media narrative”, which is to say a story which is told with many creative devices at work. Stories are often defined based on the medium of their publication. While I toyed for a long time referring to Those Without Shadows as a “browser novel”, that removes the aspect of interactivity that is pivotal in the storytelling. While there are several stories like this on the internet, there has not (as far as I know) been a term chosen for tales like this. Often they default to calling themselves “webcomics” because there is a strong visual element comparable to a comic, and published on a browser. Those Without Shadows is more like a novel than a comic, and too interactive to be called a novel. It is a composite media narrative. I can’t decide if I’d rather shorten it to “comena” or “webcomp”.

Please enjoy this not-so-new concept with a shiny new name.

-Dawn