I first went into Receiver 2 thinking that this was a first-person shooter game like any other, I was wrong. I’d read the blurb on how it teaches you vaguely how a vast array of guns work, in the most “This Does Not Qualify As Actual Gun Training” way as possible, but still thinking it was a progressive game.
I was also wrong.
You start off by getting this pistol, which it tells you how to fire and such in a tutorial area that’s in the construction site of a city. You’re facing off against robot turrets that have a line of sight you can see via the light it shines to see you. The light is blue when it can’t see you and promptly changes you yellow and starts firing at you when it can. Simple. After the tutorial area, you’re then further up in a series of buildings full of machine gun turrets, learning how to use the next gun, killing more machine gun turrets, and finding cassette tapes.
From here on, the game is samey, samey, samey. You get to the end of the level, you restart in a different area with a different gun. You get to the end of the level again, restart again with another different gun, more robotic turrets, blah, blah blah. There is nothing more to this game than restarting in the same building with a different gun each time, I got through about 5 guns until I’d had enough. I’ve actually got to in a point in this review where I’m uncertain if I’ve said the same thing over and over because that’s all there is. Nothing actually… happens…
Pros:
The game works, not graphical issues or game breaking bugs.
The game feels soooo sleek and smooth, everything about the game feels fluid and responsive, and is precisely what I’d love from a first person Hitman game.
The setting (while the same one every single time) is 100% spot on. Everything is believable in an abandoned office building, a work in progress. It’s not a forced scene and sets a really great atmosphere.
The actual implementation of learning how to use different guns and them all being finicky and different was appealing. Especially when I reset once and didn’t realise that I was using a different gun, as it looked vaguely the same until I had to reload it, and it was missing one chamber.
It gives a sense of infinite possibility to how you can approach how to finish the “level”. Walk down any corridor, up any stairs, and shoot the turrets from any angle.
Cons:
While the game works sleekly, and smoothly, it does have a few weird controls for a keyboard. More akin to a console controller. Like for sprinting, you need to ferociously tap the “W” key to start sprinting, and you need to keep it up to keep sprinting. Each action for the gun, firing, reloading, emptying the chamber, opening the chamber, have all separate keys on the keyboard, which makes for a “I need to look at my fingers” moment nearly every time. Not only that, but having to forget all of that for the next gun you use on the next level.
The setting is the same at every level, and not in a Groundhog Day way. You get to the top of the level each time and then suddenly appear back downstairs again with a different gun. The story I uncovered within does nothing to really explain why I’m here, but I know who I am. Despite being a well polished and believable building, seeing it for the 5th time was enough to know I would rather not see it again.
While I loved the intricacy of using different guns, the learning of it felt clunky and somewhat forced. It lacked the situational learning that you have in most other FPS games where when the player picks up new guns it slowly lets them learn everything. In this, you’re just handed the gun and multiple controls that you’re given to remember and gives you no repetitive learning time. But at the same time, the whole game is learning time, and you don’t feel as if it’s an actual game.
As much as I love the whole “telling the story through the tapes and notes” feature, it becomes semi-irrelevant if you can just miss them. This was something I thought about Amnesia as well until I realised that despite seeming like an open game, it wasn’t. This game, however, is very much open, and it’s easy to miss some notes and tapes. I didn’t feel as though I were getting the full story or experience. They’d do better with the Superliminal approach of areas you have to walk through which have the story in them.
Price: £15.49 Time To Complete: 7.5 hours Achievements: 34 Cards: 5 Worth The Money: Not At All
Overall, there is not a game for me, to the point where I wouldn’t really consider it a game. It’s a simulation (as it’s advertised) but not as much of a game as it feels it is. It’s super polished and is really intuitive to play, and honestly feels like something I’d enjoy playing if the environment/world I was in was enjoyable. It has that high levels of “I am more in control of this character than other games allow me to be” but gave me nothing to do with it. Honestly, it’s not something I can recommend to most of my friends, as they would all get bored with it much quicker than I did. For a gun nerd who doesn’t give a shit about a story or being entertained by changing aspects of the game, this is for you.
Zesty Rating 3.5 Out Of 10 It’s got the glitz, and it’s got the glamour, but it’s got as much weight as an inflatable hammer. An empty simulation game which gives you the story in miss-able drips and drabs, and really drags when all you do is train, again and again. I apparently felt like rhyming because the itchy trigger finger sends my frustration climbing.
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.
NOTE: This game is flagged as “Retry”.
NOTE: There will be a few spoilers in this review. Not major spoilers, but more to do with the core functioning of the game and not to do with the story. Mentions: EXP, LV (LOVE), Training Dummy, Nature of the game’s “life lessons”, all gameplay routes, that some characters die (but not specified which do), and a brief explanation of the first 5 – 15 minutes of the story.
Undertale is a debated masterpiece by tobyfox, spanning a fandom which has been thriving for years (7 to be generally correct) which still, to this day, sparks the creative fires of its fans.
The last time I played this game was years ago, getting through the game on a pacifist run and getting really fucking stuck on the dummy level. At that point, I didn’t appreciate the music as I was too busy getting super aggravated at the bloody cheating dummy. If I went back to it now, I’m not certain how well I would fare. I’d possibly do better or there is the possibility I’d do worse, as over the years my style of gaming has changed considerably. (From being a COD and Halo player to Skyrim, Oblivion and Indie games).
Undertale is one of those games that tries to teach you life lessons, but has trouble deciding which life lesson to teach you, as there are so many relevant ones. But also, you are changing all the time as well, and what you consider to be the best decision may not be the same as what you once thought. It’s not the most groundbreaking game in terms of “I did a wonderful thing, why did things turn to shit?”, no, no, that award goes to the first 15 minutes of The Captain and a few other games I’ve forgotten.
You can play Undertale one of three ways, kill everything in sight (Genocide), kill every minor enemy in sight and spare every major enemy that has a personality (Neutral), or reason with everything and kill nothing (Pacifist).
What the game does, is set you up.
It gives you the basics of the game. Kill things, and it gives you XP, when you level up, you increase your HP. The point that this game makes however is that it never told you to do those things, and further on you can discover that killing people and the creatures you come across is bad (believe it or not). How bad? Well, if you go on the Genocide Route, one of the main characters reveals to you that EXP is an acronym for “Execution Points”, a commentary on how you’ve mercilessly slaughtered everyone. Okay, that’s pretty bad, but when you get enough EXP you increase your LV, which is short for LOVE, that can’t be bad, right? Nah, bro, you still fucked up. “LOVE, too, is an acronym.” Apparently standing for “Level Of Violence”, you’re executing of all the innocent creatures and people, levelling up just how much of a violent threat you are.
The neutral path isn’t that much to speak of, characters make remarks about your killing of the minor enemies of the world (which are classed as their citizens, no matter how ugly they are or if they attack you). The major characters will not really be pleased with these actions and will make some, but not all, friendly interactions unavailable, especially with the lawful good-type character.
The pacifist route is probably as you would expect, and while I do love grinding for EXP and advancing my levels, knowing that I can be friends with everyone instead is just so heart-warming. There are honestly a few minor characters that have my heart, one in particular is apparently always made fun of for its appearance, and is crying in its sprite (not the drink, the character sprite). You can console it and tell it that it’s good-looking, and the fight will stop because you’ve cheered it up! Just getting your first little “Awh…” moment is always great. Especially when coming to the big bosses as well, you will feel compelled to fight as each of the bosses (which is basically every main character) throws everything at you. You almost feel like turning around, saying “This bitch…” and using ye olde Attack button. Dodging every attack and appealing to their humour or trying to calm them down. Rinsing and repeating this a good few times can have you on their good side, and if you’re lucky, you could get a date with someone really great.
The story, as spoiler-free as I can put it, goes as so. You are a human child who, one day, when frolicking in the land humans occupy, fell into a deep, deep hole, onto a very convenient bed of flowers. Your character, who is called Frisk, apparently, wanders around until she runs into a very nice lady. The thing about this lady is that she’s a monster (but she looks super cute though, so she passes), she nurtures Frisk and looks after them until your character starts wanting to leave. The very pleasant monster lady, Toriel, panics and informs Frisk that they can’t leave. The only way to get back to the human world, above, is to go through the land of monsters, and they will try to kill any human they see.
Of course, the story can’t progress if you just stay, so you push on. Toriel isn’t having any of it, and this becomes your first battle. I’m sure she says something like “I can’t let you leave as they’ll kill you…” and makes reference to her doing it herself, so it’s less painful?? I’m not certain, I have a weird memory of that happening. After you decide whether your child character kills the very nice Toriel or not, you’re out into the land of monsters. From here you meet plenty of other monsters, minor characters, random chance enemies and major characters. Your main objective being “Escape”, but it’s so leisurely as while the monsters are struggling to survive underground… it’s such a beautiful and unique place. You find out how the world of the monsters works and the lengths they go to pursue and catch you, their hopes and dreams, and their ambitions and morals. They see you as a morally evil being due to the stories that were told about humans and their traumatic history with humans. No wonder they’re hell-bent on killing or capturing you.
Make friends or enemies along the way, discover horrible truths about monsters in general and about others more specifically. Even the practise dummy that you were told to hit by Toriel has beef with you, and it’s super pissed. But the end of this game is not the end, as, debatably, the best feature of this game is in its replayability.
From what I could tell, this game does not encourage you to replay the game, but it has a strange tone about you from the start, almost speaking to you like an old friend. But upon restarting the game, it’s immediately made known to you that the game knows you’ve restarted the game and will make commentary on your actions within the last run. Whether you killed everyone, killed no one or didn’t finish the game, it’s onto you. It turns out that you’re still playing the game, the choices that you’ve made impact your next play too. Though this is a “new” playthrough with a “new” Frisk, it’s hinted at that this is the same Frisk. Time rewinds and Frisk has full recollection of what happened in the previous game, whereas only a few of the monsters do, the rest of them are reset and have no memory of what happened. Even dying if you killed them the first time around. I’m sure at one point, a character you killed in the game before said something about dying in a dream when you start a new run. One of said characters directly calls you out on this with it’s always snarky tone, and one alludes to knowing, and depending on the route you take, will reveal to you how much they know.
This game is an expertly crafted machine.
However, the dark side of this game does not really come from within the game itself. People can find this game unappealing if it’s not the type of game for them, they may find the game ugly, or uninteresting, which are all perfectly valid. (But how can you not enjoy the music? I listen to this on repeat unironically.)
The real problem with this game is the toxic fandom. Real, great things come out of the fandom, going on from being completionists to lore hunters and theorists. Branching off that into discussing alternate universe versions of the characters and shipping other characters and art and… I could go on. Fandoms are wonderful. But one thing that this fandom is the absolute worst for is toxic backseat-gaming.
We will look at the case of Markiplier (yes this is the second time I’ve mentioned him in my reviews, I used to be a gigantic fan, leave me alone) and his Undertale experience. Not the video itself, but the mass number of comments in his videos relating to the toxic fandom attacking him over his choices in the game.
Markiplier, of his own volition, heard about the popularity of Undertale and decided to see what the fuss was about. What he was about to learn is that the overwhelmingly positive feedback of the game had led to overwhelmingly expectant fanatics of the game.
“Undertale is just oozing with charm, so get ready for an adventure! Moreover, my friends would not shut up about it, so I had to see the game for myself!”
Alas, he made the mistake of recording it and putting it on YouTube.
He managed to get a few playthroughs into the game before his choices enraged the overly expectant section of the fandom. Bear in mind, like in all cases, political, cultural, religious, fandom-based, the majority are usually never the “problem” when it comes to issues “created” by said group. Instead, it is usually those who shout loudest, the vocal majority that are usually the issue (as typically, the true majority of these groups want to be left to enjoy their shit in peace.) The vocal majority of the Undertale fandom is comparable to the stereotype of ‘feminism’ used to denigrate it, or the many “Karens” used to justify why your cousin’s newborn daughter shouldn’t be called that. So, when people mention the “Undertale Fandom”, they immediately think about the vocal majority, instead of the true majority.
“Everyone was disappointed in the way I was playing it, and ordinarily I would just be like: ‘Y’know, I’m doing it my way. I’m gonna do this,’”
Markiplier only got two videos into Undertale before the pressure of the wave of toxic fans of the game had completely overrun his comment section. A combined total of almost an hour of video, and Mark reading out all the dialogue to make it entertaining, had meant he’d not reached the first town yet. Which, on a solo playthrough without an audience to entertain, would take a lot shorter of a time. Mark did not get to really even experience the game, as something he’d done within the game, had made the toxic fandom so mad they had to harass him.
He gave a fan-favourite character… a “redneck voice”. Oh, the humanity! How dare he give a character which has no voice, a voice that is the wrong voice! How is it the wrong voice? It just is!
Oh, and he’s doing the genocide route instead of being a pacifist and completely missing all the friendships that he could’ve made, and that’s not how the story is supposed to be canonically… Wrong! You HAVE to play it pacifist first so that you can feel the PAIN of killing everyone and tugging at your heartstrings, oh my goodness, it’s just so wrong.
There are more threatening comments than this. This one was the more “on the fence one” before it got nasty.
The wave initially overflowed his chat with a wave of insults towards the voice and the fact that he was killing things because it’s not the way that they believe the game was intended to be played. There were then people trying to “reason with Mark” by pointing out why he should do the pacifist run instead. These explanations were overly detailed and spoiled a lot of the game for him.
“I’m not having fun making these videos because I know that no matter what I do, everyone will think I’m wrong.”
“I feel like I missed out on [Undertale] because people ruined it for me… Even though this game is wonderful, I feel like I missed out on it because people tried to control it too hard. And that’s a lesson to learn about something that you care for very deeply. Allow other people to experience it in the way that it should be because that’s what the game is about. That’s a lesson to learn for both the community that facilitates around Undertale and life in general in anything that’s not Undertale. Let it have room, to breathe…trust the people that you care about to find their own way, and make their own mistakes, and discover new things you may have never seen. It’s about trust, you know?”
~Markiplier at the second attempt of playing through it on a livestream.
It wasn’t only Mark who was affected by this onslaught of negativity, it had hit the entire side of YouTube that was playing the game the way they wanted to. People who had newly started the game, knew nothing of what they were “supposed to do” and were going into it blindly, as you should with games. Attacks were being felt on all fronts. And you can tell how bad a fandom is when it garners the response of the creator.
There is more than this from TobyFox on the whole “bad fandom” thing, but I could only find the one where people were spoiling the game. Which is bad enough in itself, but not as bad as harassment.
I won’t go on for much longer about the fandom, as it’s honestly not something that’s wrong with the game itself. It’s actually a sign as to how, when something is so good, that it brings together everyone to be so passionate about the game. It’s just unfortunate that they turn into mindless drones of “You’re wrong, this is the right way to do it.” Tobyfox was probably one of the people who were most affected by it, seeing their creation as an instrument used to excuse why people are turning so sour against people who are only trying to enjoy the game.
At one point, I’m confident that TobyFox even reached out, on Twitter, to condemn this behaviour. If not, there was something said, as I remember the massive uproar from both sides of the community.
However… In conclusion, this game is a subjective masterpiece. Not everyone will like the game, and not everyone will like certain parts of the game, be it pacifist or genocide. But this game, single-handedly, made such a significant dent that the impact of it will be felt until the next considerable upset. A game with a core that powerful that it drove people to be toxic (who were probably already just as vain/toxic and needed something to latch onto) to passionate levels and seek those who were in the wrong. All that mattered to me was the tricky boss fights, the freedom to choose and the epic music (which I listen to unironically).
Zest Rating 9.5 Out Of 10. Golden Lemon, super Zesty. This game is a look into the masterpieces that TobyFox can achieve. I’ve still not played deltarune and need to. Powerful enough of a story to give toxic fans a backbone to aggressively backseat regular players. The outstanding soundtrack and plot-loop is genius. I would stream the game, but we all know why I don’t.
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.
Keymailer strikes once again with a lovely looking indie game for me to have a look at, and this time, when a game says it’s “hand-drawn” you can just about smell it through the screen.
Berserker’s Descent is a 2D sidescrolling, zone arena-type game. In each instance of the game the map and what you face will be randomly generated as you make your way through, the amount of enemies and the enemies you face will be generated via RNG as well. You make your way through small segments of the level, parkouring and smiting enemies in your way using the variety of attacks you possess, until you reach a combat zone.
Just before this combat zone, the souls you will have picked up along the way and earned via slaughtering your enemies can be used to buy abilities or to heal your character. It’s up to you to spend them wisely before you enter the place of your possible, imminent demise.
From here, you will be limited to the one area while enemies spawn and crawl on from offscreen, multiple attacking you at one time. Here, you can see where the game really picks up. Using different combos of your varied attacks and keeping the kill combo going, you can rack up lots of souls in a single wave. After going through a number of these arena zones, you’ll eventually be confronted with one of these zones having a boss. Each zone gets progressively harder with damage modifiers, you get offered more power-ups and things become more expensive. This game is a roguelike game, however, so your progress does not save, and when you die you are returned to the very start of the game. Your progress is stored on a leaderboard though, which is a nice feature, making the game more repayable with the added competitiveness.
Before moving onto the pros and the cons of this game, I’d like to address the game’s art style. This game is not the best looking game ever, and in terms of visuals it’s very simple. A lot of reviews for this game on steam regard this game as ugly or looking unpolished, the latter I can agree somewhat. To say this game is ugly, I think is a bit of a fetch, while this game doesn’t have the most detailed visuals or the nicest artwork, it still serves its purpose in a clear and concise way. It’s overall, a very decent attempt at game artwork and is nothing short of acceptable. If you want an ugly game then might I refer you to Spherecraft, there is absolutely no reason why Spherecraft should exist.
Spherecraft – Minecraft worked because with cubes you don’t have gaps.
Pros:
The game fully works, no audio or graphical glitches/errors/bugs.
The game has mechanics for both attack and defence, both have many different combos and with the added power-ups and special attack move styles make for really addictive gameplay. Not only do you have to use different keys for different attacks, but also need to use specific keys for directional attacks as well. An addicting challenge to master.
The added power-ups pre-zone creates for so many styles of gameplay, leading to character types. While the RNG prevents you from being able to get exactly what you want, you can create similar character builds most of the time, making it really fun to test different methods of approaching bosses.
The game has online co-op, I’ve not seen it played nor did I find anyone online that wanted to play it with me, but imagining tackling these bosses and levels together with someone else is definitely interesting, and I would love to feel just how powerful we are with two people.
Cons:
The platforming rooms are the weakest part of this game, the character is quite heavy and can land quite quickly after having a floaty jump. Enemies in this area are hard to dodge too, or are just placed in difficult areas for you to hit them from. These resulting rooms feel slow to the rest of the game and contribute to you getting a lower score due to it killing your combo.
The hitboxes on some creatures are way off, on others it’s slightly off, while on most it’s fine. It’s one thing that you feel as if you get used to, up until you come across a new enemy type, but there are a lot of times in the game you’re swinging and missing despite the character’s sword visibly swing through the enemy.
The early game bosses are punishingly hard. I will admit that if I wasn’t so interested in the game, I may have given up in my first playthrough due to the first boss’ difficulty. It is a learning curve, and it does beat you down, and as much as I can say that it’s part of the game, and it’s to make you step up your game a little in regard to skill, it can be really off-putting to come up again something that hard that soon.
I do not consider this a con, but as it’s a con for a lot of others in the steam review section, I’ll pop it here. The game doesn’t look the best. It looks like a game that you wouldn’t look at a second time if you had a quick glance. This is largely to do with the dark, grim and bland colour palette that’s displayed in at least 65% of the game. (I feel as though the colour choice is apt, and the grim, scruffiness of the artwork is charming and fits) The artwork is heavily under-polished, and regarded to as ugly a lot of the time.
Price: £7.19 Time To Complete: N/A Achievements: 27 Cards: No Worth The Money: Not quite. With a decent discount, yes.
Overall, this is a neat little game. While not having a lot to do entirely and everything being down to RNG, it’s set up in a way where it gives a lot of replay-ability due to the permadeath nature of the game, leaderboards and the addicting difficulty of “Maybe if I’d just taken that power-up instead”. The dark theme and design, coupled with the almost bedraggled state of the artwork, create for a dire looking game with the bleakness of your chance at victory with your huge, dull sword.
Zesty Rating 4.5 Out Of 10 A small roguelike game where you run and slice everything in site, referred to as an “ugly” game, but instead in its roughness I see character. Difficult and unforgiving, challenging to it’s core. Could do with some refining in animation and cleaner hitboxes.
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.
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.
Kartofelka is another game that I have no idea how it got into my steam library. It’s not free and never has been free. The lowest it’s ever been being £0.39 and still not enough to make me consider buying the game. Yet, I still have this game in my library, so at one point I asked myself, “what would be the harm in playing it?”
This game appeared in my library on the 14th of August 2019. I do not know what I was thinking when (more than likely in a shady £15 for 150 games bundle) purchasing this, nor do I wish to know what mindset I was in.
Now to make a very obvious statement. This game is not a masterpiece, nor is it even something you’d want to compare to a masterpiece to improve how the masterpiece looks. This game is another one of those games that I choose as an example to show people shovelware games, or low-effort games making the indie scene look like it only holds rubbish.
It’s another game to add to your library in the sense that it increases the game count that you have +1. It’s another game to add to your library as it has achievements. How many achievements you ask? Why… 4999 of course! Four thousand, nine hundred and-fucking-ninety nine. Not 5000 for some bloody reason.
This game is the same as what happens when people think they can just stream on Twitch and get 100 followers a day. Thinking they’ll start making enough money to support themselves within a month of just fanny-ing around on their webcam whilst streaming Fortnite. The developer of this game threw a platforming game together and created the game to give you 5k achievements. People who are on Steam who value achievements over anything else bought this game at £0.79 just for those. The developer abandoned the game around 20 days after posting it on Steam and reaping the rewards.
Okay, so, not such a big deal, right?
This was far from the truth, what had actually happened was that there was a huge problem coming from the target audience of the game. Those who bought it primarily for the achievement spam. The achievements didn’t even work! Through my personal experience playing the game, these reports were correct (and I was playing this a year after this issue unravelled), when I loaded up the game and the main menu popped up, the achievements started flowing in. However, when I started playing the game, the spam stopped. I thought that maybe it went silent because I was now playing the game, and it went onto a “Do No Disturb” mode. After about 30 minutes, I checked to see if I’d got all 5k “cheevos”, but I had not. They were broken, as people said.
So, the only two posts by the time I’d bought this game (Aug 2019) were, “HOW TO GET ACHIEVEMENTS” and “Achievements Stuck”. Considering that the last time that the game was updated was 20 days after the game was released, and that these discussions were made after that, it is reasonable to believe that the developer never addressed this issue.
In fact, in the post that the developer made on how to get achievements, they stated that they cannot fix the game due to having lost the original files for the game and only have the copy that was released. The fact that they couldn’t fix it was a little weird to me, as they created the game, and being experienced in computer game development myself, wondered why they couldn’t. Or why they didn’t bother.
One person in the comments of this discussion made a very valid point, however. “If the achievements aren’t working as intended, and the way to get them is to not play the game and idle the main screen for 3 hours, then take the achievements off.” This, of course, never happened. It was the main selling point for this game. And it’s continued to have sales, and discounts to encourage people to buy this broken game for it’s broken achievements.
Despite it being broken, and the developer acknowledging this, they refused to take the false promise of 5k achievements off the game as it was still bringing in money. Game-stats.com estimating that it’s brought in a net revenue that exceeds the cost of putting a game on Steam.
So, that was the tea about the game. Is there a lot to say about the game itself, besides the broken achievements?
Painful music that loops for every level. It sounds okay at first, maybe a bit elevator music-esque. About halfway through the loop, it sounds as if their cat decided to wreck the entire music production, jumping on everything and clawing at it. I’m in no way music professional, but I had to mute the game as it was setting me off sensory-wise.
The best jumping mechanics (sarcasm). If you are right beside what you want to jump onto, it won’t do it. It’s almost like there’s an invisible ledge preventing you from obtaining your goals, like a glass ceiling. Instead, it accurately represents what fat folk, like me, need to do to even get over a small fence, get a running start. Basically, you need to go backwards to go forwards+up. Oh, and jump is shift, so forget about opening Steam Overlay the default way.
The best glitches. There are moving platforms in this game. It makes the case for the best bugs. Basically, when you miss jumping onto the moving platforms (and you will) you will get stuck inside the platform. Not only that, but when you are on top of the platform, your sprite will float mid-air at the peak of the moving platform’s vector.
None of these are game breaking, but are incredibly frustrating from not only a player’s standpoint, but a game maker’s as well. Just a warning, though, don’t press the Esc key. If there’s a pause, Esc is not the pause key. You will lose all your progress and have to start again. But hey, more fun for you, you get to play it twice!
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: 1 Hour (3 Hours Idle on Main Screen if you actually want the achievements) Achievements: 4999 Cards: No, thank goodness. Worth The Money: It’s not even worth being free.
Zest Rating 2 Out Of 10. Infuriatingly Bland An “OK” looking platformer, thrown together to make a quick buck out of people seeking to artificially fill out their Steam Achievement hoarding problem. Sloppy coding, hitboxes, and horrible music aren’t the least of your worries when the 5 Thousand Achievements don’t work either.
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.
DISCLAIMER: While this in my perspective is a “repost” of sorts, this review was never published on my previous place of writing. This is due to the owner of the website refraining from supporting any Russian developers because of the Russia/Ukraine war. I, myself, am making the executive decision to post this despite the war, as not “all publicity is good publicity”.
The next couple of reviews will be shovelware from (more than likely) Russian developers. These reviews are not positive, and I do not expect the negative things I say to prompt people to support these developers. Likewise, I'm aware that Russian game developers are not who are waging war on Ukraine, and countless people don't want this conflict.
Okay, so you’re probably wondering what I’m doing, reviewing a game like this. The answer is simple. The game is simple. I’ve played the game. I can make a review, so I will.
Bang Bang Fruit 2 is the sequel in a line of physics based, 2D, puzzle games, where the aim of the game is to shoot a fruit (strawberry) through the level and have it land on top of the cake. A basic premise, which as usual, is horribly implemented with very little effort.
Quantity over quality is how developers like these operate who create games like this.
This game is an extension of the sequel, which has the same concept. I’d even go as far to say that they’re probably just the same game, but I don’t think these developers would sink that low. (fingers-crossed they’re not like the devs of Abscond) However, they do jump on the all popular train of churning out easy-made games, quick throw-togethers to follow popular online memes, and hentai. Now, there’s nothing especially wrong with hentai, but when you’re able to throw out one a month, I start to wonder about the content.
Ah, battleship where if the opponent loses then they strip? Or maybe for each hit, a layer disappears. And the game previously?
*Shudder* One of those tile slider games…
Okay, so the developer of Bang Bang Fruit 2 mass produce things, but it’s not plagiarism, despite being blatant shovelware. Still not completely good, but at least the game is legitimate.
The game itself is a sound concept as far as simple puzzle games go, if it were not for the failing of multiple things. Firstly, the game in itself is not the most challenging. With about 30 levels in the game, the levels are altered in different ways to produce new experiences, new obstacles and new ways of trying to think out the puzzle. All of these things, however, can be completely voided by the fact that I can just shoot for trial and error, over and over again, with no downside. You aren’t concerned with the puzzles after a while, but it probably takes the same amount of time to shoot the fruit at the cake with this random chance. Things are altered, but not in such a way that continues to make it interesting. Colours are changed, backgrounds are different and that’s about it, asides from the new obstacles. The new obstacles being few and far between and not really engaging in raising the difficulty at all. I’ve actually found, myself, that on a few of the maps that encourage you to use the new mechanisms added, you can actually just fire the fruit regularly and pass the level.
Any difficulty experienced in the game is down to the horrible level design and weird physics.
So, how are the physics odd? They are not entirely. The fruit uses generic (non-bouncy)ball physics for the most part, acting like a lead sphere most of the time. Fruit does not bounce, but I’m sure at the velocity that it would achieve after being shot out of a cannon would give it enough energy to not act as flat as Amber Heard’s acting.
Once you have wrapped your head round that part of the physics, the cake itself is an entirely different demon. It has its own peculiar sense of gravity that is made so that when your fruit hits the cake, the fruit stays on the cake. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. One of the biggest problems I had with the game was getting the god-damn fruit to stay on the god-damn cake. It sounds like a cakewalk, it was not, even with the odd gravity applied to the cake. Every so often, the unusual gravity was not enough, and I had to watch the fruit slowly roll off the cake. Why did it not stop? No one knows! But on the other hand, at times the stopping mechanism for the cake was just too good! A shot that may have been a bit risky, but would’ve completely paid off, is your worst enemy. Your fruit landing on the corner of the cake, going in the direction where if it hits the cake it would roll to the centre… Cake-Gravity says no. In fact, the cake gravity is made in the way that regardless of what direction you hit the cake from, the fruit is programmed to only roll in the one direction. Which, in the risky case, is right off the cake.
Another point to stay away from this game is the lack of save function. Any progress you make, up to any level, of any stage is not saved. If you exit this game, even after completing 90% of this game, despite there being solid level structure with definite ends and beginnings, you’ll have to play the entire thing again from scratch. This is an absolute pain in the arse, specifically to those people who bought this game to reap the achievements from them. Why are the achievements relevant? They always are, but in this context, the previous game was one of those which gave you all the achievements as soon as you opened the game. Essentially purchasing a bundle of achievements and a completed game for money, without having to put in any skill or labour into earning anything. I don’t agree with the people that support this, who actively go out and purchase games like these, just to make their perfect game / completed game count higher. There’s no merit to it besides making yourself look like a huge “sadd-o”.
Example of said person I found making a “review” for either this game or another game. With 459,245 hours playing, which equates to 52 years. This person I doubt is even in their mid-30’s. 1332 Perfect Games with a 98% completion rate. Nah.
Continuing to lead players on in the false promise of steam trading cards, targetting another gullible audience (not all steam trading card hunters are gullible) which will scoop up any game with cards or the promise of cards. Cards for this game initially were promised via the tag system that devs can use after publishing the game, and at one point had even a dialogue that hinted/alluded to cards. These were eventually taken away, but the irritation by older buyers of the game is still seen in old reviews and discussions complaining about the blatant false advertising.
Developers had later informed those asking about cards that it was no longer possible due to the actions that Steam has taken to reduce the amount of money made by fake developers by introducing a “confidence metric”.
Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we’re going to move to a system where games don’t start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it’s actually being bought and played by genuine users. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who’ve played the game prior to that point. So going forward, even if you play a game before it has Trading Cards, you’ll receive cards for your playtime when the developer adds cards and reaches the confidence metric.
This is a great metric, while it does nothing to stop fake developers and Steam’s quality control continues to be at an all-time low, it’s guaranteed that fake developers are making less money than what they would.
Otherwise, a few last points for this game:
The music is abysmal. It’s the same thing over and over again for the whole 20 – 30 minutes you spend playing the game.
There is only one sound (which I heard) that is when you fire the fruit from the cannon, no contact noises and no noise for when the fruit hits the cake.
The level designs are really lazy, consisting of copy-paste elements of the same standard shapes, over and over again.
What’s even more lazy is that the only thing you need to do is time your left-click right. There is no finesse to the game or requirement for any brain strain. No changing the pitch of the cannon, no adjusting the strength of the blast, no factors that you can alter at all.
The game description on the store page is “Just make a cake.” The cake is already made! You’re just putting the strawberry on top! Also, shouldn’t it be a cherry? Cherries don’t go on cakes, but the phrase is “the cherry on top”, or “the cherry on the cake”, why is it a strawberry?
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: 38 Minutes – One Full Sitting Achievements: 36 Cards: No. Worth The Money: It’s not even worth the time I spent writing this.
Zest Rating 2 Out Of 10. As Sweet As Out-Of-Season Fruit. A cheap, nothing-more-than-template game, which adds to the clogged and oversaturated market which is Steam. Bright colours, but generally tacky. Works as a game, but that’s about it. A full 38 minutes in one sitting of your life that you’ll never get back, and you ask yourself, “Were the achievements really worth it?”
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.
Agross is a simple survival management game. It is truly basic. The person you control is not even humanoid, it’s essentially a player counter from Sorry! In a way, it makes the game a different experience as you are being told these people are human despite not seeing them that way. For me, I feel that it makes me act differently in the game as I would if they appeared human.
For instance, all the people who worked for me had their health at 20 as I didn’t feed them for 4 days and made them work flat out until they were almost dead. Whereas in games like Sims or Settlers, I’m a little more… morally sound. The carrots looked like carrots, the chickens were chickens, so they were treated as such. The people being nothing more than pawns made me the ruthless overlord of the carrots.
There are a few things I would change, which most would only be me being nitpicky. The only thing I actually think is viable from that list and what other people have mentioned too (where both reviews have the exact wording and seem to have been copied) is changing the market from 12 hours to 8 hours. You know, because most of us like to shove some toast in our mouth before we head out, we can imagine these farmers just stuffing a carrot in their walking off to market.
Pros:
The game works soundly, with no graphical errors or musical bugs.
The aesthetics are simple but pleasing. The simplicity brings out the “simple life on the farm” feeling but adds a sort of sole barren-ness which you have to deal with.
Decent music.
A solid game concept which has been done before, but tackles it in its own way and does a good job of that.
A challenging juggle between “Do I feed my workers, myself, or force everyone to work hard, so we can sell our produce tomorrow?”
Cons:
The lack of humanoid humans brought out the sadist in me, while not even really a complaint, the style lends itself to the minimalism, the other items in the game look more like what they’re supposed to represent.
No upgrade system, for anything at all to make things a little easier over time. Like upgraded tools or cheaper labour.
Only one music track looping over and over again, the music was decent, but 1 track looping is kind of bland.
The hour usage per action could use a bit of tweaking, while I do believe that you could spend 12 hours going to, in and coming back from a market, your character had breakfast before that. The farmers around here drive their tractors with toast in their mouths and their breakfast hot drink in a flask.
The little red cylinder is your farmer or worker.
Price: £0.79 Time To Complete: No Ending Achievements: None Cards: None Worth The Money: Yeah, it’s okay for a £1 game. Definitely good when one sale.
Overall, it is a perfectly sound game, the game is good. For £0.79 it’s honestly not all that bad if you’re into these kinds of management games and can handle the tough starting challenge it presents you. All the mechanics are there for a management survival game. The only thing I would suggest is slight changes to the times and maybe an upgrading system.
Zesty Rating 4 Out Of 10. Has the minimalistic blandness of an avocado, but plenty of people like avocados. I prefer guacamole. A simplistic, farming-survival game. Tend to the chickens, plant some carrots, and don’t forget to feed yourself. Become the ruthless overlord of the carrots, and starve your workers. Barely recommended, but a good grab nonetheless.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 calledSturgeon’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.
jinxlgamez
Leighann Paige
Doubtful Player 