Writing Journal: Happily hacking away on The Adjusters #55. I should be further ahead than I am, but I'm still on track to finish for the end of the month. Still wish I had a bit more of a buffer, but at least, until the end of Book V, I know what all the plot lines are. Also: 1000 words is not that much. Either that, or I way overwrite.
I spent the few hours before bed this week playing Akabur's Princess Trainer, and holy fuck does that game push all of my buttons!
I suspect most of you have heard of it already.
If not, the story's simple enough. It takes place in Disney's Aladdin universe, and Jafar is in power. He had tasked you with the job of training Princess Jasmine, which he intends to marry, so that she is nice and obedient and submissive for the wedding. Your job, basically, is to break her.
The game has no time limit, and is quest-based. The graphics are excellent, though they are not interactive. But it's the narrative that ends up pushing the game beyond a curiosity for cartoon perverts. It's gripping and quite dark despite the omnipresent humor. And it's pretty linear (meaning that Akabur can actually control the story) but the quests can be done essentially independently, adding just the right level of interactiveness. Did I mention it was quite dark? It's probably not for everyone, but for this guy here, it's pretty damn amazing.
The interface is a bit painful at times—there's some grinding needed in places (not much, thankfully) and the clicking gets tiring, especially if you end up repeating a scene that you've played before and there is no way to shortcut it. Technically, the game is programmed in Ren'Py, which I had not heard of but seems worth checking out if you're the creative sort.
If you're more into traditional storytelling, have a look at a story that I bookmarked a long time ago and that I've now started to read. It's Oceania by Expresso42: “Abducted and mind-wiped by a powerful corporation, Claire Savage is forced to work in an illicit brothel. Escaping sexual enslavement and fighting to regain her memories, she uncovers a shocking secret about her past and a conspiracy that threatens to plunge the world into chaos.” Come on, who can resist a description like that? Note that it's 80% sci-fi and 20% sex. But it's pretty decent sci-fi, and worth reading. (Disclaimer: I'm maybe a third of the way through, so for all I know it may completely drop off the quality cliff before the end.)
Thanks for the pointer to Princess Trainer! Great work from Akabur! Did you ever unlock the third, locked, personal request, though? I finished all the quests, but never go the right combination or something for that ...
ReplyDeleteI managed that unlock. It isn't obvious. Basically you have to go to the brothel and try to have sex with Lola. Fat Lilly stops you. This ticks Lola off and a few days later she shows up at your door wanting to move in with you. This unlocks the locked personal request and the locked Jasmine 'outfit'.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell there's nothing explicit in the game to tell you about this. You just have to try all the options.
Well done re:unlocking. I had forgotten which one was the third personal request, but yes, that one was the one major annoyance.
ReplyDeleteWhat got to me was the "few days later". I kept thinking I had unlocked the costume but then had lost it and couldn't find a way to get it back from Lola. The random knock on the door later I thought was a bit of a poor design. But small nit about a great game.
Judd — won't be able to look at the issue seriously until the weekend, but the only thing I can think of is that the HTML file has a reference to the CSS file defining the layout, and that might be what the browser's complaining about.
ReplyDeleteOne solution is to download the CSS (b3.css), another is to just go in the HTML and get rid of the offending link. Third possibility is to try another browser. I use Chrome and instead of failing it just displays without fancy layout.
Catching up between two chores.
ReplyDeleteTry this: create an empty text file (created in notepad or something) in the same folder where you saved the chapter. Call it: b3.css (make sure there's no .txt extension or any of that) No need to put anything in it. Does that solve the problem?
Intriguing. And that's when you try to open the saved file with Word in all cases?
ReplyDeleteIf you grab the file you saved and drag it to a browser window instead, does that break too? (Try it with the internet disconnected so it doesn't try to fetch the css file.)
If you want to read the story offline, the easiest is probably to print the text as PDF and read it with a PDF reader. Or just read the downloaded file with a browser. Or possibly WordPad...
If you like the stories like Oceania, check out the stories of Al Steiner both in SOL and ASSTR. The SOL stories are easier to read. My favorite is "Aftermath", but they are all very good.
ReplyDelete