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Emotional Support Catgirl Prototype Playable At GDC 2018


Posted on March 19, 2018 by Rae Michelle Richards

San Francisco, California —  Broken Joysticks Media, a Canadian technology and interactive entertainment focused blog platform announces the release of Emotional Support Catgirl (prototype version) on the Itch.io platform. Developed during the 52 hour Train Jam game development event leading up to GDC, Emotional Support Catgirl tells the narrative of a trans woman living in the Midwestern United States who finds comfort and support through the BBS systems of the 1990s.

Emotional Support Catgirl invites players to experience the journey of Nichole as she connects with an entire cast of other queer transwomen through a private bulletin board system between the years of 1999 and 2000. Emotional Support Catgirl’s adaptation of the Unity Engine provides players with a functional command-line and era specific commands used on bulletin board systems of the era. This is a game forged from the personal experience of its developers.

Train Jam is a gathering of game developers from a number of disciplines to develop experimental and interesting titles on the cross-America journey from Chicago, IL to SF,CA during the week leading up to the Games Developer Conference.  This year’s theme was given as “Odyssey” which resulted in 84 unique entries being submitted. More information on Train Jam can be found on their website – http://www. trainjam.com/ All 84 unique games submitted to the Jam can be viewed here – https://itch.io/jam/train-jam-2018/entries.

Key Features of Emotional Support Catgirl:

  • Replica of a 1990s / early 2000s Bulletin Board System.
  • Several different threads, replies and time-states available to players to experience the narrative.
  • Command-line driven gameplay.
  • Lots of green and black for the true throwback experience.
  • Queer as hell narrative.

A downloadable prototype of Emotional Support Catgirl can be downloaded for free at https://itch.io/jam/train-jam-2018/rate/235983. Emotional Support Catgirl will be playable on the GDC Showfloor along with all other 84 entries at booth N4918 during the Games Developers Conference.


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Welcome To BrokenJoysticks 3.0


Posted on May 23, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

I’d like to welcome all of our readers, editors, past writers and future visitors to the third major version of Broken Joysticks! It’s hard for me to imagine that this site has been going strong for over four years now – It seems like only a little while ago that our founding staff (myself included) were brain storming ideas for the name of the site when it hit me, as I stared at a broken PlayStation 2 controller on my coffee table.

Over the past four years we’ve delivered over 3,200 pieces of written content to the site, attended 2 major conventions, launched our YouTube channel and a Sunday night twitch talk show. None of this could have been possible without our dedicated readers and excellent editorial staff who continue to deliver some of the most insightful and diverse written content I’ve seen in my 11 years writing about interactive entertainment.

So this new design might not look all that different from our old one. It takes the simple visual design principles from Broken Joysticks 2.0 and gives everything a fresh coat of paint. Alongside this significant visual upgrade the new design integrates our twitter feed right into the sidebar, provides visitors to our front page with visually pleasing transitions between slider items and brings our back-end up to date.

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Our reviews policy will also be changing going forward – alongside the + / – aspects system we introduced in last year’s design update we will also be re introducing scoring to our reviews. When we conceptualized last year’s update it was at a time when major sites, much larger than ours, were moving away from numbered scores and we felt that this was a good move. In hindsight not having a 20 point scale with multiple sub-categories does make reading reviews easier to digest but the they still lacked a certain visual punch. We’re still working out the details but rest assured that some form of scoring metric will return, along with a visual cue that will help inform readers about the quality of the games we review.

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Also if you’ve ever wanted to contribute to the site, we’d love to hear from you. Send a short introduction email to PR@BrokenJoysticks.net and someone from our management team will get back to you as soon as we can. There is always room for breaking news, thought provoking editorials and unique takes on your favorite games. With E3 fast approaching, there is no other time to show your burning passion for interactive mediums.

So please mind the dust as we continue to fix the odd bug here or there. With three weeks until E3 things are looking up!

Great work to our web designer, Kirk for doing such a fantastic job.

Here’s to another year of excellent coverage,

Rae Michelle Richards
Co-Founder, BrokenJoysticks

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Help Support Broken Joysticks On Patreon


Posted on March 29, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

We’ve been bringing you quality content for the past three years and after writing over 2,000 articles about the latest video games, trailers, reviews and more we are asking our readers to help us stay afloat. With our redesign last month and the removal of advertisements we have opened up the site to an entirely new audience. Our editors have never made a dime from the site and it would be nice to have Broken Joysticks move to the next level.

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