Digital comics are only about the
here and now,
interacting
with the game screen that is
currently shown and that is it. This
may seem EXTREMELY limiting
but, games like Snatcher prove it can be really
challenging even without a few hundred items in your
inventory to fiddle around with.
For many that are reading this, the concept of a digital
comic is totally alien. This is a genre that has fallen flat
on its face in North America, probably due to a lack of
properly conveying to gamers what to expect. Snatcher is
the most well known digital comic to have been released
here and that game reportedly sold only a few thousand
copies on the Sega CD (not exactly a powerhouse in sales
itself). This caused other games in this genre, most
notably the quasi sequel to Snatcher, to not be released in
North America.
Story Telling:
This is where digital
comics excel. The story is
about 98% of the fun that
you will have with a
digital comic while the
remaining 2% is from
figuring out the challenges
presented. The stories told in these games are usually
more concise than a Role Playing Game (RPG) but more
complicated than your usual action game. Super Mario
Bros and Contra both have stories tied to the action on the
screen but it is
usually less than a paragraph long.
Digital comics tell a complete story of the game world
and allow the player to bounce around in it till they figure
out what is going on and how to progress the story– other,
more devious digital comics won’t allow movement
around the game world if you are stuck.
Over the next several pages we present to you a selection
of digital comics from Japan that we never got here in the
United States