Drawings, Doodles and Thoughts

Re: Alistair++ -- I played this right after finishing my second try at Fatal Hearts and it was pretty much the perfect antidote to that awfulness. You play a teenage girl who loves a WoW-like MMORPG, who finds out that an annoying fellow player calling himself Alistair actually goes to her school. She makes a bet with him that she can find out who he is. She has three suspects -- a computer club geek, a shy loner, and a rich, popular athlete -- and only a month to figure out which one is Alistair. It's a dating sim, but your character also has to solve the mystery, and there's some life sim aspects like maintaining her grades and social standing. Most of the characters are pretty three-dimensional, likeable and interesting. The story is very satisfying as well. Very very nice art and good writing tie it all together. The only thing that bugged me is the strange setting -- it didn't seem like it took place in Japan OR America, it was just generic dubbed anime-land or something, like an Inuyasha high school AU turned visual novel. haha But it's free and all around a very fun game!

Katawa Shoujo Act 1 -- This is weird. If I hadn't read the review on Play This Thing, I would have just assumed this game was a pervy hentai dating sim with no redeeming value whatsoever, and I wouldn't ever have played it. I'm glad I did. It's a visual novel about a boy who nearly dies because of a heart defect and is sent to a special school for teenagers with disabilities. He has to adjust to the fact that he's disabled and that he has to take tons of pills and can't play sports anymore, all while he's trying to adjust to this school where everyone else is disabled in various ways, too. It is a dating sim, because the different endings are with various girls you meet along the way, but it's not the obnoxious kind where you buy your way into her heart with gifts and by saying whatever she wants you to hear. It's more that the decisions you make will either endear you to a character or make her dislike you. (My first try, I was jerk to everyone and nobody really liked me in the end (also I almost killed myself accidentally)! My second, I ended up with Rin, a quirky, very spacey artist who paints an amazing mural for the school with her feet. I was very happy. ^_^) Great art, good writing -- my only complaint is that it's way too wordy for my taste and there aren't enough chances to make choices for your character. Still, it's definitely worth a play if you like this wort of thing! (And it's also free!)