Brass In Pocket. Alas, No Hand: Brass Restoration

The all-powerful, all-loving, all-mighty Tigsource pointed this English Translation out, thinking it a good place for someone to try out the whole Visual Novel thing. I agree, if only it's worth playing one to have a handle on what one actually is. Visual Novels are... well, imagine a choose your own adventure, with not much choosing or adventuring, but piling on some melodrama and gawky-anime-fanboy humour. Or porn, if you're going to go the Leigh Alexander route. Brass Restoration tells the story of a skilled percusionist who loses his arm, and then pretty much gives up. Presumably, he pulls his ass together, but in the 10 minutes I played, I spent most of my time wishing one of the other characters would inform him THE DRUMMER FROM DEF LEPPARD ONLY HAS ONE ARM and then everyone could go home happy. Anyway, you can get it from here and there's 10 minutes of footage beneath the cut.

Of course, this is one case where watching a video really is like playing the game. It takes about five minutes to get to the first actual choice in the game - that screenshot at the top of the article is immortalizing.

Stuff like this I find interesting more from a philosophical position than actually from the game itself. But that's a Nature Of The Medium question - i.e. does tihs count as a game or does this count as something parallel to a game... and if the latter, why are we making the line when it's clearly close to a game than anything else. I don't think it's something as simple as a Ludo/Narrative thing either - and I don't have time for the essay, as I'm already late for a train. I am weak!