One Of The Best Video Games I’ve Experienced Is Undertale.

Austin was recently here with us for a week’s work experience at the library. He is a passionate gamer, and has written a review about a new release PC game, Undertale.  

Undertale

What is Undertale? You may ask, why do I hold it in such high regard? These are just two of the many questions you may be thinking of right now as you read my blog post about this absolutely fantastic video game.

Undertale is a RPG (Role Playing Game) for the PC which is almost entirely made by one person, a guy by the name of Toby Fox. A major selling point of Undertale is its tagline which is ‘The friendly RPG where nobody has to die’.

This is a major selling point of the game, because in most RPGs you strike down enemies with no care whatsoever, as who you are fighting is evil. Undertale on the other hand, gives all of its enemies such fantastic personalities through their dialogue and even their attacks against you.

Speaking of enemies, I’ll briefly talk about the battle system in Undertale. To start with, there’s an Attack menu, an Act menu, an Item menu, and a Mercy menu. I’ll be talking about the Act menu and the Mercy menu.

The Act menu consists of various actions you can do to try to get the monster to not want to fight you; these are different for every monster in the game. The Mercy menu is for when you basically say you don’t want to fight, and most of the time this won’t work unless you use the Act menu to figure out how to convince the monster to not want to fight you anymore.

Where Undertale really shines the brightest is through its story, writing and humour. Undertale is best experienced without knowing much about its story, so I won’t go into details but I will say this so you know what you’re getting into.

A small child enters a cave in the mountains, trips and falls down an enormous hole. The child wakes up on a bed of flowers in a mysterious place.

A word of advice before thinking of purchasing the game would be that from screenshots of the game it can look quite ‘kiddy’ but don’t judge it on its looks – there are times where the game deals with some dark and sad themes.

To conclude, Undertale is an absolutely fantastic video game and I highly recommend you check it out at the very least, if you do not purchase it.

(Undertale is available for purchase on the Internet-based digital distribution platform Steam and undertale.com for $10).

Video games in the Library

Hi, I’m Alan. I’m new to the library staff and after starting work in the Library late last year, I have been eagerly sampling our PC games collection.
Who would have thought a public library would have such a good range of enjoyable games on offer?
So far I have  borrowed; Blazing Angels 2, The Sims 3, Lego Batman and Pure; an over-the-top ATV racer.

Pure

I have also seen the following titles floating about: Lego Star Wars II, Star Wars Battlefront, Sega Rally, IL-2 Sturmovik, and various Need for Speed titles.
 

IL-2 Sturmovik

As we all know, libraries are great for books, and they are becoming increasingly good for DVDs. Wouldn’t it be great if more libraries had extensive video game collections as well?
The games I mentioned are just titles that caught my eye, there are many more on offer!
Be sure you gamers come and check it out for yourself =)

Your Library@AVCon 2010

 
Your Library Staff @ AVCon
The annual Adelaide Anime and Video Game Convention took place this last weekend (July 23-25) at the Adelaide Convention Centre. For the second year running Public Libraries SA had a presence at the event, with a dozen staff from seven metropolitan public library services operating a booth promoting library services for youth. 

 

Even though this was the second time Public Libraries SA had participated in the convention, it was a major revelation to people that libraries have collections of Manga, Western Graphic Novels, Anime DVDs and videogames available for loan. Indeed, many people could scarcely believe it when told that Tea Tree Gully alone has more than 2200 titles in its collection.  In addition to promoting the library collections through a graphic novel display and Play Station games, a competition was held with first prize being a $100.00 gift voucher for Pulp Fiction Comics. 

Librarian's don't come much cooler than this!

We also took advantage of the event to promote the forthcoming Tea Tree Gully Readers Festival which will be held on Friday 6 and Saturday 7 August 2010 as well as take suggestions from the public on how they thought their libraries might provide improved services. It was great to see, when reading these suggestions, that many of them(such as allowing members of the public to participate in the selection of books for the library) were already being undertaken by the Tea Tree Gully Public Library.

 

What the author might look like if he were a Manga character

As a fan of Manga and Anime, I can honestly say that this is a great event. There are talks on costume making, a forum with representatives from Madman Entertainment, CosPlay (Costume) competitions, local artist (who will do sketches of you in manga style), Video Game Tournaments and special screenings of new release Anime. This year, the Australian Costumers Guild even did a presentation on SteamPunk (you really had to see this to appreciate it).      Once again, it was great to get out there and promote library services to this enormous and relatively untapped audience. See you there next year for AVCon’s 10th Birthday when we go RETRO!!!