Caltrops - Mischief Maker's Maker's Mark





	[quote name="Mischief Maker"]Picking on Indie developers kind of makes me a cock, but these developers brought it on themselves by charging money for these games. #5 <A HREF="http://www.hanakogames.com/ckd.shtml" TARGET="new">Cute Knight Deluxe</A> I'm positive that Game Tunnel gave this game the 2005 RPG of the year award in an attempt at dipping their toe in the water to decide if it's safe to come out of the closet. This is a game where you play an orphan girl in a city which happens to have a dungeon packed full of monsters to explore and slay your way through in a simplified "Eye of the Beholder" manner. Oddly enough, the point of the game is not to delve your way through the dungeon and slay the foozle that lies beneath, but rather to help your character wants to do with her life within X amount of time. So you have the choice of the simplified dungeon crawl, <I>or</I> you can sweep up the tavern, or shelve books at the library, or go to the dance academy, or flirt with boys at the town square, any one of which consists of several minutes watching a fat avatar of your character looping through 3 frames of animation while popup messages tell you if she's getting tired or somehow fucking up at sweeping the floor. Are you on the edge of your seat yet? And get this, finishing the game as a maid is as much of an accomplishment as finishing as a witch. #4 <A HREF="http://www.darwinia.co.uk/" TARGET="new">Darwinia</A> Dull. That's the word for it. A slow-paced version of Syndicate with the point-controlling mechanics of Sacrifice, and any sense of urgency quashed by the fact that you cannot lose, it's just a question of how long it takes to win. The visuals are all abstract and stylish and shit, but there are a zillion other abstract games that are <A HREF="https://typo3.digipen.edu/index.php?id=986" TARGET="new">more stylish</A> without having inconsistent framerates that constantly buckle under the strain of all the minimally textured simple polygons. Shit, the basic enemy is a flat line of triangles drawn directly on the ground. The most ironic part is that the stand-alone spaceship demo for the game is more stylish and interesting than any of the full game levels. #3 <A HREF="http://www.virtualvillagers.com/" TARGET="new">Virtual Villagers</A> Gametunnel has really shitty taste in games. Take their 2006 Sim game of the year, Virtual Villagers. An ugly and dull game about assigning tasks to your idiot volcano refugees, then waiting several hours of real time for the task to be completed, only to return and find them all dead because your researchers decided it would be more fun to try to push the impossible to puch boulder instead of researching farming and thus left the village without food after the berry bush ran out. Fun! The puzzles in the game range from drool bib obvious: use a constructor on the blocked well to give access to fresh water, to Sierra-level insane: research religion to level 3 then dunk a pregnant woman in the lagoon to cause her to give birth to jesus, who proceeds to solve many of the island's problems through deus ex machina. Plus your villagers look like what you'd get if a superdeformed anime character fucked a muppet. #2 <A HREF="http://www.everybody-dies.com/" TARGET="new">Defcon</A> Defcon is no more "The World's first Genocide 'em up" than Introversion is "The last of the bedroom programmers." Cornutopia created a <A HREF="http://www.treality.freeserve.co.uk/superstar2.html" TARGET="new">vector-based "War Games"</A> years earlier. This excruciatingly slow and dull game, even on the max speed settings, coul easily be a flash game. All the oohing and ahing about the diplomacy model is bullshit, there are console-based First Person Shooters with more complex diplomacy. I am convinced that if steam never picked these guys up, no one would have heard of this game, much less declare it art because they decided to add sad music. Why steam picks up and hypes the hell out of introversion's snore-fests while turning down awesome games like Determinance is beyond me. #1 <A HREF="http://www.womgames.com/games/branch.php?game=windows" TARGET="new">Snood</A> One of the most popular puzzle games in the world! It's the ugliest Bust-a-Move clone imaginable and it installs gobs of spybots onto your computer. Fuck snood.[/quote]