Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story

I'm going to be brief here. You need to play this game.

It's a visual novel, so if you don't like them, you won't appreciate it. Too bad, you're missing out.

It's free. I'd pay money for it.

It's one of the best games I've played, period. It's rare that a game affects me emotionally, but this one did. Very quickly. And repeatedly. I went from uncomfortable to squee to a miserable wreck in a very short space of time. I played it practically nonstop without breaks until I finished it. It's now 2.30am and I am making this thread right now to let you know:

[color=red][size=30]YOU NEED TO PLAY THIS GAME RIGHT NOW.[/size][/color]

That is all.

Oh, fine, have an RPS review if you need to read some coherent words about it.

The game is very good. If you liked Digital: A Love Story you should absolutely check it out.

I wrote up a thing about it, which maybe you shouldn't read until after you play the game. The ending left me feeling kinda conflicted about the direction it went and I'd love to get a big spoiler-tagged discussion going here once a few people have played it.

I will play it. But if you screw me, Floomi, the consequences will be dire.

4xis.black wrote:

if you screw me, Floomi, the consequences will be dire.

That's what all the ladies say.

Since the RPS post I've gone to her site and have been slowly digesting her work in order of release. I'm on the second half of Cell Phone Love Letter. Can't wait to get to the acclaimed Digital and DTIPBIJAYS.

I've started Digital, but I'm having trouble with it because I'm uneasy about hacking and using codes. Think I'm gonna have to, though, given that thing has just happened.

Tagging.

I might not get to it for a few days (or next weekend) but I'll play it.

Ugh. I just finished Digital: A Love Story and now I'm super-super sad. Christine Love is a horrible lady who should never, ever stop doing what she does. Even when it's breaking my heart.

Played through it in one sitting, so it was definitely engaging. The way the story was presented and the various side-plots were, for the most part, excellent.
That said...

Spoiler:

The big twist with Isabelle was pretty weak. It was telegraphed too early and too often, and it just didn't work all that well anyways. The fact that all of the protagonist's conclusions were drawn from vague posts online was interesting, but are we honestly supposed to believe that when a student withdraws from school her teacher would receive no official notice whatsoever? Even when he sends emails trying to track down her contact information?

Also, while I liked the whole twist that everyone knows about the snooping and doesn't care, the way that message was delivered at the end seemed way too heavy-handed. Did we really need a long speech from Ichigo about how the concept of privacy has evolved over time? And the fact that the kids didn't even know what the word privacy meant is flat-out ridiculous. Does this Enlightened Future World have no doors, bathrooms, or underpants? The concept of privacy extends far beyond Facebook posts.

All rants aside, this was a damn impressive piece of interactive fiction.

@muttonchop:

Spoiler:

Agreed. I thought the last third or so of the game was a little flat. For me, the game was about trying to encourage and nurture the students, and to some degree having to deal with the responsibility of their grades failing as a result. I took the privacy speech at face value, assuming the kids didn't know the meaning of the word in an online sense. You make a good point about underpants, though.

The whole ghost thing unnerved me at first, although I was surprised (and a little disappointed) that the game would take a supernatural turn. As someone said on IRC (RNG or Fedora, I don't remember who), the entire practical joke there seemed utterly wrong-headed: We want you to lighten up, so we're going to make you think you're responsible for the death of one of your students! Umm, what?

The clumsy foreshadowing really irked me. I could have done without 12ch entirely and it would have made the game better for me; it was at best a needless distraction, and at worst a big bag o'spoilers. Kendall and Akira's presentation at the end was terrible; if I was their teacher (and not Rook), they'd have got a properly sh*tty grade for it. Again, the foreshadowing was clumsy (although it was at that point I realised the Isabella thing was a prank), although the "yo dawg" joke made me giggle endlessly.

I've had the Digital: A Love Story shortcut staring at me forlornly from my desktop for months now, I guess this one may as well join it.

Thanks for bringing this one up. I'll be talking about it a fair bit on the show next week! Tied into the topic pretty well too.

I really enjoyed it, probably because I'm too dense to have seen how the ending would turn out.

Subscribing.

Liked this a lot. Two playthroughs later, it's interesting to see what can change, and what seems to be hardwired into the game.

Floomi wrote:

Ugh. I just finished Digital: A Love Story and now I'm super-super sad. Christine Love is a horrible lady who should never, ever stop doing what she does. Even when it's breaking my heart.

You folks really should follow Fringe Busters.

RoughneckGeek wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:

You folks really should follow Fringe Busters. ;)

OMG. This forum site has articles?

I thought it was just a bunch of grumpy old men making recordings about how the kids should get off their lawns.

Tagging, I'll check this out in a week or two when things quiet down.

I played through this in one sitting yesterday. I found the story/twist fine, but absolutely *loved* the characters. There was some pretty amazing characterization going on there.

Spoiler:

I loved the last email from the administrator where everyone's grades got curved up to As. =)

Since both Floomi and Switchbreak enjoyed this, I'll download it just to see how much I hate it.

I don't normally write this, but I'm tagging this thread for later. I don't think my boss would appreciate me spending 3+ hours playing internet games, so I'm going to save this for when I have more free time at home.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Since both Floomi and Switchbreak enjoyed this, I'll download it just to see how much I hate it. ;)

I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on both of them.

So i played through Digital: A Love Story, then took a second spin through this one to try some different choices. This time, I noticed a fun little detail:

Spoiler:

There are a lot of obvious links between the two games, like the Amie computers, Akira's grandmother, and the "missing girl was really an AI" spoiler in Kendall and Akira's presentation. What surprised me, though, was that on my second playthrough Ichigo's friend (the one who pretended to be the shinigami) had the same last name as my character from Digital. I guess it must have read my save file.

muttonchop wrote:

So i played through Digital: A Love Story, then took a second spin through this one to try some different choices. This time, I noticed a fun little detail:

Spoiler:

There are a lot of obvious links between the two games, like the Amie computers, Akira's grandmother, and the "missing girl was really an AI" spoiler in Kendall and Akira's presentation. What surprised me, though, was that on my second playthrough Ichigo's friend (the one who pretended to be the shinigami) had the same last name as my character from Digital. I guess it must have read my save file.

Really? That's very smart; I'll look out for that. I did notice that

Spoiler:

Rook says he used to work in computers before he was a teacher, and sure enough his name turns up in Digital. He's the person who runs the LCL BBS - his name turns up on the Matrix BBS after LCL gets hosed, and he's the one that gives you *Emilia's message.

Floomi wrote:

Really? That's very smart; I'll look out for that. I did notice that

Spoiler:

Rook says he used to work in computers before he was a teacher, and sure enough his name turns up in Digital. He's the person who runs the LCL BBS - his name turns up on the Matrix BBS after LCL gets hosed, and he's the one that gives you *Emilia's message.

Spoiler:

I noticed that too, but it doesn't seem to fit the timeline. Rook's only 38 in the second game, yet one of the BBS posters is Akira's grandmother and she announces that she's pregnant with Ichigo. So unless he was running a BBS when he was like 2 years old there isn't really time for Ichigo to grow up and raise a 17-year-old son.

I downloaded it awhile ago, but haven't had a chance to put much time in. I'll post my thoughts once I finish it.

I wrapped up the first chapter, and I thought I'd post a few thoughts before finishing it. I should preface this by saying that the only reason I'll be finishing it is because of you guys.

There are some interesting storytelling mechanisms on display here. This is the first work I've seen that's successfully used the asynchronous nature of social media in a storytelling context. It was fun, if slightly cumbersome, to read the students' conversations during the instructor's presentation. However, while reading I was itchy to take a red pen to the script to clean up the writing itself.

It does feel like you're making a fairly significant interruption to check Amie; I don't know whether that's deliberate. I think I'd have preferred the right-hand pane to be an automatically updating scrolling feed; that way you'd have one-click access to what's happening and be able to flip through the history without a million clickety click clicks.

The forced breaks to check 12ch really annoyed me. As far as I'm concerned, the author could have dropped 12ch entirely and the game would have been better for it. I found it really clumsy, for a number of reasons.

I'll check it out, tagging for future reference.

While I enjoyed Digital: A Love Story and I thought the way the player interacted with the world was novel it just wasn't all that entertaining to me.

I couldn't get it to work on my machine... I installed, and got some cryptic error message when trying to start the game. I figure the universe was trying to tell me to go play some more DA2. Oh well.

wordsmythe wrote:
Floomi wrote:

Ugh. I just finished Digital: A Love Story and now I'm super-super sad. Christine Love is a horrible lady who should never, ever stop doing what she does. Even when it's breaking my heart.

You folks really should follow Fringe Busters. ;)

TL;DR

Taggin' along.