Tag: Classic

[LEGACY] Alwa’s Awakening

This instance for me was a first from Keymailer. What I’d done was go through my entire Steam Wishlist (Over 2k Games, it’s a story for another time) and requested EVERY KEY that I could for all the games on my wishlist. This took mostly the entire night until 4am in the morning, provided that I’d also watched my friend’s stream until midnight that night, and was also being distracted by everything and anything.
Lo and behold, I get not one but two games from the same dev, both being the same franchise and being from as early as 2017.

Alwa’s Awakening is the first of two games, the other being Alwa’s Legacy, which I am yet to play and review, and should promptly be doing it this week. From looks only and the trailer, it looks to be a nostalgic revisit to the old 8-bit platformers coming out nearer the end of the 8-bit era, graphics and movement promising to be an absolute gem and reprise many people’s memories.
I was met with this, but also met with the other thing that happens when I go back and play old games.
“Hmm, something’s not right. Something just feels a little off, like something is missing. It has everything I knew it would have, but why don’t I enjoy it?”
But this isn’t an old game? It’s not something I played in my childhood, yet it comes with that anticipated nostalgia haze, with the emptiness ensuing.

You are this fabled character that’s supposed to save this village/town/city of Alwa. I read the plot and one part said city, but the image was literally like 10 houses, and it threw me off, I think. You go through a mass dungeon crawl where there are enemies everywhere, destructible objects and permanent powerups that unlock more sections of the map for you to explore and conquer.
It gives exactly what’s promised and delivers exactly what’s expected, but why do I feel so let down?

Well, I think after going back to the game after the stream and literally meditating on it, which you’ll never get me to do for anything else, I’ve put my finger on it.
Most of which are things that other games do, but I think the overall combination of these things are what brings it down to a boring, grindy, flavourless halt.
So from here, instead of doing the pros first, here come the cons.

Cons:

  • Most of the platforming requires pixel perfect jumping. I found the platforming some of the easiest to control out of all the games I’ve received from Keymailer, but it takes the happiness of finally having that away from me when showing me the platforms. Granted, not all the jumps are hazardous, death traps, but the ones that are the furthest away from the checkpoint always are, and it hurt my soul.
  • Speaking of checkpoints, Red Cap Zombie Hunter, eat your heart out because you have NOTHING on the placement of these checkpoints when it comes to distance. The overall arrangement of the checkpoints is actually acceptable, and is not as chaotic as the haphazard tornado light show by Red Cap. However, the distance is actually heartbreaking and forced me to recline in my chair on multiple occasions.
  • So if it wasn’t for the amount of dying I was doing sending me back, I also have to do A LOT of backtracking as well. I know it was very common in most older platformers, but with everything combined I genuinely felt as if I was losing the will to live, passing the same area so many times with nothing to gain from it. I only found out that there were quicker ways of going around things, like hidden walls/doors/ceilings/floors, yet I wasn’t to know as they looked the same as everything else!
  • As if backtracking and losing progress on things wasn’t enough, your character is also very slow in comparison to big empty and expanding rooms. With not much filling them but maybe one or two measly enemies which will be super stingy about their drops.

I could probably think of more, but I honestly think that’s enough to rag on the game to make you have a second-hand experience of what happened. I have hope for playing its successor as it too also has a good amount of positive reviews. I’m hoping the next game will have expanded on these Pros I now have to list to keep the review balanced.

Pros:

  • The game works. 💖
  • The art style is cute and nostalgic with appropriate colour palettes, nothing is ugly or “meh” to look at.
  • The music fits the purpose. It’s chiptune and 8-bit, and most soundtracks fit the appropriate setting they are put in. Boss battle areas seem to lack a little, but most of the others are great.
  • There are NPCs all over the map that all have some sort of dialogue (whether relevant or not) which really brings a bit more life to the otherwise empty feeling game.
  • The powers learned by the protagonist within the game (specifically the first one where you summon cubes) were generally surprising to me and a lot more refreshing than the generic powerups most games would give you to get around obstacles.
  • Not all enemies are the same one. There are different enemies and also different variations of the same enemies that take more hits to kill. That and the bosses are interesting and, while not spectacular or grandiose, were still a nice bunch of pixels.

This is honestly a review that I did not want to do. When I look at this game from afar when not having played it, I see what I want. An enjoyable look back on a previous era of gaming, brought back into the modern day, but when played it brings back all the same problems that early day gaming had with it. While £6.99 is a great price for a game with 5 – 10 hours of playtime it’s honestly, mostly filler, retracing your steps, taking the wrong route that leads to nowhere, being punished and not liking it.

Zesty Rating
4 Out Of 10

A great-looking and sounding game, but that’s about it. Has everything about a game from the 1980s including all the unintuitive and punishing game design. Nostalgia-vision encapsulated, leaves you tired, sapped of your enjoyment because it’s not as good as you remember it being, despite never having played it before.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
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[LEGACY] Huge Enemy

Huge Enemy is one of the games I’ve purchased in a Fanatical Bundle ages ago, more than likely at a cost of £4.99 for 12 games, or something along those say lines getting this game at a steal at that time. Now the game is free for anyone to play, which I think is a great thing in regard to the negative attention this game has had in the past.
In spite of those past reviews regarding the game, which a lot of I agree with, this game at least deserves some attention because it is good. It’s maybe not great, or fantastic, but it’s good.
The visuals are definitely the best thing about this game,“Paid For” and when this game was “Paid For”, the visuals were what you were paying for.

This game is a good, avoid ’em all, R-type clone, side scrolling sci-fi game. It hasn’t got much of a story to it, you’re essentially a newbie pilot straight off the bat, they pulled you into that position because they need more pilots and after one training session they set you off into the real world.
From there you’re doing that bullet-hell thing, you start blasting, and you don’t stop (until the enemies randomly stop) until you reach the boss and blast the boss as well. The game is a little inconsistent with its difficulty and the amount of enemies on the screen at one time, but while it’s difficult, it’s still somewhat manageable.

Pros:
— It functions as a game with no audio bugs or game-breaking glitches.
— The intro and the splash screen are really cool aspects to the game and set the player up to feel that this is a game of epic proportions.
— The game does well of setting up that tension and combination of feeling hyped for what’s to come but still filled with anxiousness as you know it’s just going to unleash hell on your unsuspecting self.
— The game has a vast array of weapons which keep gameplay fresh and allow the player different methods of getting around problems and overall game completion.
— The artwork in this game is exactly the type of design I love, gritty and detailed, which both looks and feels great when you’re playing it. The bright flashing of the lasers, the explosions and worn battleships all combines to paint a picture of almost hopelessness against the masses that oppose you.
— All music and sound effects are chosen well and fit their purpose.

Cons:
— The upgrade system kinda baffles me, I maybe misread or didn’t see where it told me what to do, so I went a few levels without upgrading a thing.
— Some audio effects were unbalanced in volume, some were really quiet, then the voice-over would boom in. Likewise with in-game, I’d feel as if my guns were so much quieter than the enemies.
— Not so much a con, but this game used to sit at £23.99 back in 2018, so a lot of disgruntled reviews are due to its old price. It came down in price to £3.99 before the pandemic, which is a lot more reasonable.
— Also not so much a con, but the game is pretty difficult, or at least for me who is pretty bad at these types of games, found even the first level (not the tutorial) quite challenging. I couldn’t really get a hold of the default controls of switching guns and also switching which way I’m firing.
— And the last con is kind of a mishmash, the game is a bullet hell, and not, sometimes the screen is too busy, sometimes there’s hardly anything, sometimes bosses are hard, sometimes they’re not, sometimes a level will feel like it lasts seconds, some will feel like they last forever. The game seems to lack consistency, which makes it a bit of a slog to get through.

Apart from all that, there’s also some stuff with graphical errors, nothing game-breaking (or at least from what I found). That and the guns didn’t turn to face the way I was aiming, which I only noticed until after I’d read a review that was a little too upset about that.

Price: Free
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 19
Cards: None
Worth The Money: £23.99? Not at all. £3.99? Yes, to those who like R-Type Bullet-Hell. For Free? Yes, why not? Dip your toes in it.

Honestly, the game is pretty good despite its flaws, and really, there’s nothing stopping you from trying it out to see if the cons I listed do actually affect your gameplay “immersion”. Maybe my cons are a bit too harsh on it because I don’t usually play bullet-hell games due to never being able to have my eyes keep up with what’s onscreen.
Overall, it’s free. Which doesn’t mean that flaws are okay, but considering it came from a very dear price down to a more reasonable one, to nothing at all; I can say it’s more acceptable now than what it was before. As if it was still at its original price, I probably would score this game so much lower.

Zesty Rating
4.5 Out Of 10
A game that shouldn’t be passed up, especially while it’s still free. Japanese influenced bullet hell R-type game. While I don’t tend to like or have the ability to keep up with these kinds of games, I can appreciate that the artwork is amazing, and behind its cons is a playable/enjoyable game.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.
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[LEGACY] Gedonia

Another game from Keymailer, this time one that I had high hopes for. Promising classic open-world RPG elements and fun adventures, Gedonia looked like it was a bit of a break from the burden of AAA adventure games without being an indie MMO. Allowing almost full control of doing whatever the fuck you wanted and building yourself from there.
And while the promise was fulfilled, I feel like it was fulfilled in the more lacklustre way.

Panning opening scenes and great panoramic views, all done with a low poly, but still nice enough looking design. A great deal of time spent on the opening of the game, making the player lean on the edge of their seats, drawn in and ready for an experience.
You exclaim to your dad, who is not your dad, that you had DREAMS! And those dreams make you absolutely sure that if you go to the cave that’s at the top of the mountain… The TRUTH would be REVEALED!!!
Cut to your character clipping through the rocks as they climb the mountain and find a cave. You gain control of the character to walk a few metres to find a shrine of some sort when the “ooga-booga” happens, you see some visions and then nothing.
That’s it, come back out the other side and make your way back and your character hints to knowing things but never says it.

From here on, I’m a little lost.
I feel like the story has just been dropped and there’s nothing, just tumbleweeds.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s apparently lots to do, and there are lots that I can find, but usually these games have some sort of overarching bigger quest. While I know that there is a bigger quest, after all the hype and the “exploration” and the big overwhelming seeming “ooga-booga” stuff, it’s just dropped. It’s almost as if it weren’t relevant or never existed in the first place, or like it never really mattered.
What I loved about The Elder Scrolls games is that while you have this overarching quest that you knew that you needed to do, and it was very prominent, you could go out and do anything. While you can still very much do the same here, the importance of this quest isn’t gripping enough to give me a pull to the game, and that’s the whole difficulty of balancing aspects of a game like this.
In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, the threat was there and it was very real. Within the first 10 minutes of playthrough you’re already introduced to the characters and the types of characters you meet along the way, not only that, but the enemies and the overarching threats are also shown as well. The gravity of the situation hits you as the emperor is killed right in front of you, as the cultists also try to kill you as well. You’re given the royal heirloom that will save the day as a constant reminder of your task and escape the sewers into this free world where you can do anything.
This is what Gedonia is missing, this overarching weight and threat. While I feel that it was trying to do that at the start, which is so crucial, it fell flat, which meant the rest of the game as well followed suit.

Pros:

  • The game works, no game-breaking graphical errors or audio glitches.
  • The game, while low poly, which is not to everyone’s tastes, looks great for what it is. Bright colour palettes for the first zone which is bright and cheery which contrasts lovely with other areas such as the swamp and the dead-lands.
  • The focus on exploration is great for an indie game. It has such a vast and open world with lots to discover. Off-stream, I played a bit more of the game and delved a lot further than I had on-stream, and found that the developer puts a lot of great detail into the places of interest.
  • This game has the start of a great character developer. With a different build for different types of characters and playthroughs, it really allows for some ‘re-specing’ or replayability.
  • While still a bit clunky and not polished, the crafting system is simple and is tailored to the level or level range of your character. The things you need to craft are not outrageous in comparison to the time and effort needed to find the resources, in tie with how hard it would be to obtain such resources at your level. It’s well-thought-out.
  • There appears to be an array of puzzles within the quests available. I’ve only came across one puzzle so far, but it was simple enough to solve but just as good. A good balance of being simple yet challenging is hard to find within indie games.

Cons:

  • This game is in early access, everything is unpolished and unfinished, it is not a finished product. This is more of a disclaimer than a con, but is probably the reason a lot of the cons I have so far exist.
  • There is a lot of character clipping in the cutscenes (and a little in the game itself) which is a minor flaw, but when watching it took me out of the game a bit.
  • The “main quest” of this game almost has no weight, which when starting a game like this you need some sort of momentum to propel the player forward, a little push or shove to get the ball rolling. For me, the quick intro and cutscene just didn’t hammer the nail in enough, and more or less hammered it into the coffin for the game. It left me with no motivation to explore or actually see the quest through as I had no urgency, and no sense of wonder as to what the character meant in all this.
  • The other quests in the game don’t really hit home either. The only quest so far I vaguely had any interest in was the person being constantly hit by lightening, but just like the main quest, something fell flat within the quest that just made me uninterested again.
  • The environment of the game, while being nice looking and scenic for the art style that it has, it’s very dead, there’s nothing else to it but what it is. Seeming to be full of life, but lifeless all at the same time. The NPCs, as well, also lifeless. While of course, we can’t all have wandering A.I. that have their jobs and schedules, but their animations are also rather flat and dead as well.
  • The combat for the game is very clunky, stiff, and slow. The dodging is more of a roll or sidestep, and when you’re a low level, it’s REALLY tricky for you to level up when suddenly ambushed by a bear or group of bandits. It’s difficult to tell where I’m supposed to level up because I don’t see any levels above the bar and always feel a bit overwhelmed being a new character.

Price: £9.29
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: 16
Cards: None
Worth The Money: Yes, when it’s a finished game. Not right now, however.

Overall, this game is in Early Access, there’s not much else to say. Gedonia has been in development for some time and from what I can see in the other reviews and the community for this game, it just keeps getting better and better. It also seems to be another lone dev game, which is something I love. It’s still in Early Access, for good reason, but doesn’t claim to be anywhere near finished.
I can wholeheartedly recommend this game to people who want something to follow and love as time goes on, a work in progress and hopefully not a project that may get abandoned at some point.
I cannot recommend this to people who want a full game, who long for an experience without pause, who require a robust adventure to fill their soul. I believe that there will be a time that I can recommend this game for that, but that time is not now.

Zesty Rating
4.5 Out Of 10
A work in progress by a lone dev, a promising outlook. Adventure and endless possibilities promised and a great journey to be had when finished. The unfinished part is the only negative, and it’s a little empty, but it’s acceptable by Early Access standards.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changed to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented. 
Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred.
I look forward to writing for you all again.
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Abscond –  XiNFiNiTY Games + Asset Flipping

Another one of these games that I do not remember purchasing. However, Steam remembers it as September the 30th of 2019, and I will take its word for it.
But, this is also another one of these games I will tell you to steer clear of, and this time it’s not because the game is bad.

So, here I was, probably on a shady website or browsing Fanatical Bundles. If I’d seen this game on its lonesome, outside a bundle, I would not have bought it. It came in the bundle regardless, and as part of my “I need to get through my massive backlog of games” effort on Twitch, I played it to give it a go.

About this time I was thinking, “Wow, this game cost £0.99, and it’s not bad.”

I’m zipping about in this simple, and minimalistic, but challenging, nonetheless, game, and it’s pretty damn good.
Still not groundbreaking or amazing, but nothing like the other shovelware on Steam which they let pass through these days.

Low and behold, I don’t need to look very far, and I find that this game is an asset flip, complete and utter plagiarism. The developer of this game is claiming this game as his own when the rightful maker made this available on Unity.

Here is the Unity: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/tutorials/avoid-82067
Here is their website: http://thatgamesguy.co.uk/

There are pros and there are cons, but Abscond is not this developer’s game. So, there are only cons here, which are:

“Dev does not know how to make a game” / “Dev is too lazy to make a game by themselves.”

So, what do we do now?
I’m downright refusing to acknowledge the “developer” as the creator of this game, and left with nothing to gripe about.

Things like this do leave me to be curious, however.
If a “developer” on Steam, is willing to get free assets from Unity, not alter the game in ANY manor and attempt to sell it passing it off as their own… will they benefit?

As it stands, Steam charges the developer $100 per game put through the Steam Direct program, meaning that as soon as a developer puts it up, they are $100 down. Unless you have lots of expendable cash, it’s not money you’d get rid of without being completely certain that what you’re doing is worth it/profitable.

So, the developer, XiNFiNiTY Games, takes a free asset bundle and sells it on Steam without further modification.
— $100.
If you’re a nerd like me and have Augmented Steam and SteamDB browser extensions, you will be given some useful information, but I’ll touch on that in a second.
Looking at the initial data of the game that the regular Steam user gets, you can see that the game only has 9 reviews despite it being “released” in December 2017. You’d possibly think to yourself, “Fuck, maybe it’s just because it’s an endless, simplistic little arcade game that’s not had a ton of spotlight.”
Scrolling further down, you’ll see the usual thing of there being actually more than 9 reviews, there actually being 24, which is still not a great deal despite the game being released for 5 years.

The bigger majority of these reviews being negative, calling towards the simplicity of the game, low effort and not being worth the money being asked of it.
A couple of others, including myself, using these points others had made along with the fact that the game is an asset flip to point out why it was so ridiculous that it was paid for.

24 is still a small number, but thanks to my add-ons, you get a rough estimate of how many people actually own this game.

Now, as you can probably tell already by looking at the picture. 20k to 50k is not really that much of an “accurate number”, nor is it really all that accurate at all. It’s quite the ballpark range.

Okay… So let’s outsource this a bit, and try a different thing to guess how many people own this game.

Oh…

So, we have the same numbers from SteamSpy, but some huge numbers from PlayTracker. And honestly, on first viewing of that number it seemed unreal and did not want it to be accurate.
But concerning the number of reviews, and also looking at that third number (actually the first in the set, but the third that I mentioned), it looks a lot more realistic.

Therefore, on some basic maths, entirely ignoring a few factors such as Steam sales, discounts, and devs giving their keys away to bundle sites:
If SteamSpy’s upper estimate is correct, and 50k copies have been sold, then you’d be right to assume that they’ve pocketed $44,900. Which would be absolutely ridiculous.

Even going by the “Owners By Reviews” lower estimate it would still mean that the “developer” made a net profit of $1340, which is still disturbing considering that this is not even their content.

So, looking a bit further into this game, on various blogs, I happened upon a very useful site, or maybe I found it useful as it provided me the information I wanted to see. (Rather than the news I wanted to hear).

A site known as Game-Stats that has a lot of information on games had something more in mind of what would’ve been earned by the so-called developer. Fair enough though, despite being a lot more realistic and what I’d had in mind, it was still unfortunately above the $100 they had to pay to release “their” game.
Meaning, at the end of this (if this website’s more realistic looking evaluation of the revenue is correct) they still gained $70 from essentially stealing someone else’s work and slapping a different name on it.

Meaning, if anyone wants to almost double their money, just steal someone’s game and slap your name on it and pop it on Steam, they won’t do anything about it. (obvious sarcasm)

Hi, I’m not finished yet.
So, this “developer” can yoink practically an asset pack from Unity, not change anything about it and claim it as their own, gaining almost double their money back.

What if this is not the only time they’ve done this?
Or at least, that’s a question that I start to ask myself because I’m a weird one like that and apparently have too much spare time, despite never seeming to have any at all.

XiNFiNiTY Games have 22 games to their name, 6 of which being DLC (Downloadable Content), so we can bring that number down to 16. One of the first-ever games, of which being “Infinity Wings – Scout & Grunt” actually gathered enough reviews from people to generate an average audience score, which is not a good one.
What the more early games of XiN have in common is that they’re not the sole publisher of the game, and that OtakuMaker SARL are the ones publishing instead. These games also still not getting great receptions, but looking and seeming to be more fully fledged games than the Abscond rip-off.

The first one that we actually take a look at is another game with a very similar thumbnail to Abscond (in fact, they all are very similar looking in terms of simplicity).
Spinning Around is a basic game where you have to fly your Spaceship into the correct colour, while the colour position that you have to fly through changes.
You’ve all seen someone playing a mobile game with this concept.
This is another blatant rip-off, another asset bundle ripped from the Unity Asset store, a different title slapped onto it and published on steam as their own content.
What is the net profit that site predicts this time? $320.

Okay, let’s try another one. Infinity Trip.
Another unity asset flip, as the real developers can be seen right here.
How much is their estimated return? $56.
Okay, thank goodness, nearly everyone reviewing this one knew that it was an asset flip immediately. Must be a more popular asset bundle than the rest.

  • Trigonometry? Probably Fake. Net Revenue $340.
  • Jump! Jump! Jump!? Likely also fake. Net Revenue $56.
  • Infinity Escape? 100% Stolen. Net Revenue $110.
  • Stellar Warrior? Phone-game esque, so most likely also stolen. Net Revenue $0 (Seems improbable, yet there are no good reviews at all about this game).
  • Lozenge. Definitely fake. Net Revenue $94.
  • Dialing? Would not put it past them to steal this, but can’t find an original. Net Rev $18.
  • Genius Calculator? It is apparently an asset flip, but I can’t find the source. Net Rev $260
  • Outline? An obvious offender. Net Rev $130.
  • Cubic Color? More than likely. (Can’t find original source). Net Rev $37.
  • Color Circle? No evidence as far as I can see, but it looks exactly like what they’d usually steal. Net Rev $75.
    *All “Net Revenue” are estimates made by the Game-Stats website.

So, from the asset flipping, player scamming side of things, we have 13 games that have possibly been attained from the unity asset store. All of which have been turned around, had a new name slapped on top of the old one and put on Steam to be sold as “their” game.

13 x $100 = $1300
So, the devs have spent this much putting the games on Steam, but did they get back what they spent?
$75 + $37 + $130 + $260 + $18 + $94 + $0 + $110 + $56 + $340 + $56 + $320 + $170
When you look at it, there are plenty of small numbers that are below the $100 threshold, but a few big numbers.
The gamble was really risky, as not a lot of their flips generated a profit, but the ones that did generate a profit only did so marginally in comparison to indie games that have any real effort.

Estimated Net Revenue for all (possible) asset flip games being $1,666. (*Gasp* 666)
Provided they paid for each game to be put on Steam, they presumably made a $366 profit, assuming the website is more accurate than the others.
This is not amazing, and taking a close look at their profits from each game, if Trigonometry hadn’t done as good as most of the others, they would not have as much of a profit as they do now.

Color Circle

But realistically speaking, however, what if this hadn’t stopped in 2018 and this developer kept selling asset flips?
Also bringing to attention, these games are still live on the Steam store, waiting to be bought. This “developer” can still obtain money right now from any unsuspecting buyer.
This slow gain of $366 has happened over the course of five years, acting like an offshore bank account or investing in a really slow-moving stock, but it’s still there.

You can probably guess my opinion on the matter. I find it morally unethical, and completely condemn this as while it’s still apparently legal, it’s harmful to the image of “indie”.
Not only that, but it damages the reputation and the credibility in the eyes of players towards other games that use bought assets for their games, such as PUBG.
Many indie game devs either do not have the skill, time, or the know-how to pursue making their own assets. Buying these asset bundles and game templates are what gives these developers a head start and a clear direction of where to improve from, or what to use, or how to use what they have.
Unlike these innocent game devs who use these assets as intended, XiNFiNiTY take templates as they are, change nothing, and slap their name on it.

Call this whatever legal term you wish, forgery, plagiarism, theft.
At the end of the day, it’s certainly a scam. You can get the tools to make these games for free, you get the templates for free (sometimes paid, but a lot XiNFiNiTY took were free or cheap), and “make” exactly what XiNFiNiTY copy and pasted yourself.

If you come across any games by XiNFiNiTY Games, then please do not add to their pool of money that should’ve been distributed to the real developers.
There are many other better indie developers, and there are many other better indie developers that actually have done the work they are advertising.

The amount of time and research put into this topic could’ve been a lot more, and I would’ve gone further into this if I had the energy. However, this was made a lot quicker due to two characters on Steam. The first being Zaxtor99 TTV, whose review first alerted me to such a thing as an asset flip. I’d always suspected as such, but after playing Abscond and then being shown where it originally came from, I was gobsmacked that someone would actually do this. Secondly, to the person behind the curator called Sturgeon’s Law, Obey the Fist!, who almost had every link to all the assets that were stolen.
I’ve also now read a whole Wikipedia article on “Asset-Flips” and an article/interview with Bennett Foddy and am a little asset-flipped out now.

Edit: I’ve been made vaguely aware that it’s somehow possible for developers to cheat the $100 entry fee for releasing a game on Steam by dropping more than one game at a time (or something). I’m not fully versed in this knowledge and can’t find any info on it at the moment. But it does, however, change a lot of the “predicted profit” if these “developers” managed to do this too, I, however, will probably look at this another time.

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