Tag Archives: failure

Games, Star Citizen

Star Citizens and Feature Creep

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So, a bit of a preface for this one, what is Star Citizen actually suppose to contain: All the stretch goals, by way of Roberts Space Industries.

Also, a bunch of information can be gotten outta the Kickstarter, so let’s start out with the intial promises:

Real quick, Star Citizen is:

A rich universe focused on epic space adventure, trading and dogfighting in first person.
Single Player – Offline or Online(Drop in / Drop out co-op play)
Persistent Universe (hosted by US)
Mod-able multiplayer (hosted by YOU)
No Subscriptions
No Pay to Win

That, would be what we would have gotten for the half million US$ Chris Roberts wanted intially, those six things are the very default, the base line.

Are any of these avaliable in the present “Alpha”? Well, no, not at all, there’s only one system, the ships aren’t working at all, trading isn’t in and the universe is about as persistent as a Just Cause 2 multiplayer map.

Now, the mod-able multiplayer, hosted by yourself, have been placed in the backburner until after “launch”, meaning we’ll almost certainly never see it again.

No Subscriptions? Well, you can actually subscribe to CIG, supporting the Community updates or some nonsesnse, and if you believe that my son, then I have a fair few bridges I’d like to sell you.

No Pay to Win? Considering that you can litteraly buy any giant super-ship using actual money right now? Sorry, that’s pretty much Pay to Win, is it time-limited until launch? Sure, Cloud Imperium claims that they’ll stop selling actual ships when it goes live.

But the damage is already done my sweet little redditors, now a bunch of whales will have a massive advantage, in theory.

So yeah, game sure hasn’t reached any of the starting promises, a great sign, after 104,500,000 US$ MORE then actually needed.

Now, using the Six Million US$ goal from the Kickstarter, Star Citizen would improve Privateer with 100 total start systems, full Orhestral Music and Squadron 42, the first Episode at least, 16 missions in total.

Not bad, does any of this exist yet? Two years after it was suppose to? Nope, not even a single one of these items are actually implemented yet.

Now, one does wonder why this is. Until you look at the Stretch Goal at CIG own website, and they conflict with the goal in the Kickstarter. Oh boy.

The Kickstarter required more than six million to get Squardron 42 to 16 missions, CIG’s own website, requires three million for 35 missions.

At 12 million, the HANGARD module get’s Occulus Rift support, the hell? Also a bunch of nonsense about Motion Capture facilities and Sound studioes, which is odd.

Most Game Studioes just rent those, not even that massively expensive anymore, you’d imagine that FAMOUS HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER CHRIS ROBERTS would know that.

At 19 million US$, a monthly series about older games would be up on the RSI website, why? Fuck knows, utterly pointless. The monthly promise was broken four years ago by the way.

Most of the rest of the Goal are either useless ships that exists only as JPGs or stuff Elite:Dangerous already did or stuff no sane human being would even consider useful or sensible.

Joy of joy, eh?

While a substantive part of the promised gameplay is now available, we acknowledge that delivery of some game elements has been delayed due to expansion of Star Citizen’s scope. This expansion is a result of the community’s declared desire to have the initial release version of the game developed to a much greater depth than contemplated originally upon start of the campaign. It is inherent to the nature of crowdfunding that such an adjustment to the project may occur. Ultimately, this will benefit all backers including yourself, since every backer will be receiving a much greater value for his/her pledge, but it may – as in this case – cause an extension of the delivery dates.

Allow me to just quote that chunk of the e-mail CIG has send to all refund requests,not the “substantive” part of the promosed gameplay? Yeah, that’s not going to go anywhere in a sane courtroom.

So yeah, either feature creep killed Star Citizen years ago, or Chris Roberts is building a Hollywood production company infrastructure using crowdfunding, which he’ll then quitely rebuy from the shambles of this failure of a game.

Or just incompetence. Probably the last one.

Games, Reviews

Train Fever, tries to be Transport Tycoon.

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Train Fever is a Transport Tycoon clone, a good old fashioned economic tycoon simulator. Good, as it’s always nice to see these kind of games, they are getting fairly rare these days. Old, because the core economic game, is utterly imcomprehensible to any human form of thought.

I’m not kidding, oh on the surface, this game is fairly straightforward, buy trucks, trams, busses and (theoretically) trains, transport crap from A to B to C etc… Build roads, railroads, busstops, trainstations, bridges ad all that which is best in life.

Sounds fairly straightforward, eh? Well it isn’t, it really, really isn’t.

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In Transport Tycoon, all stations have a chatchment area, in which they’ll pick up cargo and passengers, of there are any around, and if any lines are able to tranport them. If there aren’t any of those two, nothing happens.

In Train Fever, stations present an opertunity for passengers/cargo to get to their destination, and they will base their go/no go decision on travel time. How do you predict travel time? You can’t, you really can’t, not unless you’re some deranged purestrain hyper-sperging autism machine, who will joyfully calculated the time, based on virtual feedback, experimentation and the very quantum uncertaincy of the goddamn universe. Seriously, you’d have to be utterly mental to figure it out, no sane human being could ever do so.

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So making money can be incredibly obtuse, for passengers, not for cargo, oh no, cargo is a piece of cake. It’ll simply take the fastest route to the nearest reciving destination, and it’ll either trickle towards the avaliable destinations (Steel Mills, Saw mills and refineries) or take your MUCH faster trucks, so that’s not really an issue. However, the generic goods that the factories vomit forth? Now that one’s nice and obtuse as hell. The maximum amount of generic goods factories can produce, and thus also the amount of unprocessed goods they’ll recieve, is determined by the amount of goods the nearby cities will recieve, meaning that the optimal solution for industrial profit, is a processing site, surrounded by three or more cities, all who’ll recieve plenty of goods, now that’ll generate a solid profit.

So, that’s Truck Fever for you, plenty of fun with trucks.

As for busses and trams? Utterly unpredicatable and not even remotely straightforward, due to the travel time issue, sometimes they’ll trickle in some form of profit, but their use is almost entirely used for feeding train stations. As it should be, very realistic.

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And here we arrive, at the elephant in the room, the terror, the dread, the trains.

And they are ever so fucked, not intially of couse, in the early start of 1850, people don’t really have cars, so you’re trains? They are the only real choice, no way in hell are anyone going InterCity without your gleaming trains. And this state of joy last to somewhere around 1950, when the car arrive, as in the real world. And I guess I now know how the railroad tycoons of the era must have felt when Fords fucking Model T came along and ruined everything.

The early days are the good days, cheap trains, cheap to run, no other choice, plenty of money.

And here’s the best part, unless you somehow manage to REALLY slash the travel times, people will just take their goddamn fucking cars, like a bunch of Americans, the only remote success I had with trains, where dirt cheap railbuses, and a shitton of them, but even that, doesn’t really cut in the long run. Even tried an EXTREME long distance route straight across the map, still no success.

It becomes virtually impossible to make any money from trains, after the cars fuck everything up, cargo’s doing just fine, as they don’t spawn cars at any time, but trains? Nope, ain’t gonna happen.

Unless the devs tweak the amount of passengers, or the ticket fees or the maintainence costs of the damn trains, it’ll remain incredibly hard to actually make any money of trains after 1950, which is kinda bad, with a name like Train Fever.

Graphically, it looks okay, not terrible well optimized.

If the economy was a lot less obtuse and better balanced, this game would be recommendable, unfortunately, it isn’t recommnedable at all at present.

Music, Reviews

Katy Perry is about as interesting as late Italian Post-Modern Brutalist Brickworks

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Yeah, sorry, she really isn’t anything absurdly interesting or fascinating, as her lunatic fans make her seem like, which is annoying, I was almost expecting decent, and just got boring generic crap.

I’ll give her points for this one, not a gram of redundant fanservice sex appeal, she’s dressed perfectly normal, even if she tries to grab a bit of Bjørk’s magic with the see-through umbrella.

It’s music for the kind of people who think they are intellectuals, but are really just arrogant little bastards, who deserves to be shot for wearing enormous sunshades.

The song is really simple though, and by that, I mean boring.

Throwing in retro-sex appeal is one hell of a bewildering thing to do, personally I find any fashion from before 1959 primitive and barbaric, a remnant of a time where a woman belonged in the thralls of obedience, kitchen and children.

Sad that it’s glorified like that.

Unfortunately “Hot’n’cold” isn’t really embeddable, probably because she hasn’t realized that Record Companies are malevolent bastards who doesn’t benefit anyone beyond a few far shareholders.

It’s an odd blend of “Girl Power” and yet, the line “You change your mind, like a girl changes clothes” is so fundamentally stereotypically wrong and morally bankrupt it’s actually painful to hear.

Apparently the song is about how Katy is a hideously forceful person, and she’s trying to force some poor bastard into a marriage he’s pretty clearly not interested in at all.

Not sure what’s with all this marriage bullshit in these days, it’s like how society just moves forwards and backwards all the time.

In the 1980’s it was popular to marry years after you had freaking kids, rather than before, sure kept the divorce numbers down.

And why the hell is she dressed like that? Did her sales start to drop, so her “manager” is forcing her into a more mainstream slut image? How delightful.

Yep.

They sure have.

Let’s play the “Katy might be lesbian” card, well done Record Company, well done indeed.

Like to demean an entire sexual preference a bit more? Perhaps manufacture a further reinforcement of the twisted vision of femininity the youth gets today?

No fucking wonder we have a lot of youth crime today.

And guess what? It gets worse.

I like how she throws out Penn and Teller, sure they are reactionary lunatics, but they still have more talent than she does.

Should have stick with Gospel, saved us from yet another generic pop-star.

Not even worth the pain really.

Fairly decent pair of breats I suppose.

Another fine example of the cultural impact of the overwhelming ocean of mediocrity commited by the media upon the whole bleeding world.

Electronic Entertainment, Reviews

Aion: Tower of Obvious Grind

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Let’s get something out of the way before I start pouring out the bile and hatred on this little stupid Korean MMORPG.

It’s very, very, very pretty. In most cases, when it comes to the environment and scenery, I’ll go as far as “beautiful”, and that’s going far when it comes from the horrible human being who adores Impressionist art.

The environment is utterly alien and completely awesome, it vaguely reminds you of old Morrowind, simply because you see so much odd shit, unlike World of Warcraft, which is actually fairly generic fantasy bollocks.

The character design is as retarded as you’d expect from a Korean MMO, utterly useless armour, wings, bling and more bling.

It’s like some accidentally walked into a Cosplay convention covered in glue. Which I suppose is what Aion’s primary focus group wants: Anime chicks in steel bikinis. Or anime chick in metal dominatrix gear.

It’s silly, useless and about as practical as a sword during the Battle of Midway, standing on a battleship, on the Japanese side, before it gets fistful of torpedoes up it’s ass.


Now, onto the actual gameplay.

It plays like World of Warcraft, pretty much like World of Warcraft, select enemy, murder it, collect loot, enjoy the seething anger of Greenpeace.

There’s one or two stupid little gimmicks and one pretty large stupid gimmick. One of the small ones is the whole combo system, which I believe Age of Conan introduced into mainstream MMOs, which works I suppose, the timing doesn’t have to be absolute, so at least they know about the concept of lag.

The second much larger gimmick, and the one Aion’s been selling itself on, is flight. When you get to lvl 10, you go though a silly little cutscene, get a pair of wings and what? 40 or 50 seconds worth of flight. Woohooo!

I’ll admit that the ability to attack from the air is awesome, to bad there’s plenty of place where you can’t fly, due to gameplay issues and magic wizards of Oz.

So it remains a gimmick.

Now I never made it beyond lvl 12ish, because the game is boring as all hell, if you’re not some weaboo lunatic who lusts after Son-Goku’s useless arse.

I suppose it’s heaven for that particular part of the market, but it’s not heaven for any sane person with tastes that move beyond flashy lights and big muscular men screaming at each other.

Supposedly, there’s alot of active PvP and bollocks, but then, supposedly, Atlantis lies in Sweden and Copenhagen is the capital of Amsterdam.

So yeah, plays like World of Warcraft, looks pretty, has retarded character design only a delusional madman could possibly enjoy.

Which brings me to a small little spot of hatred: The female voices, occasionally you’ll get to hear your character produce some odd moans and noises, presumably in order to be “awesome” or something similar.

To bad the experience was ruined when my supposedly dark and hardcore fireball-slinging sorceress squaked like a four-year old during a cut-scene.

Dear merciful Osiris, they didn’t obliterate the retarded Asian high-pitched girlish scream from the game when they transferred it to the West?

Why am I surprised? This is a game for the deranged anime fans who watch Naruto like it was the second coming of Napoleon.

Anything else? Oh yeah, as I said, I never actually managed to get anywhere impressive with this silly game, so I’ll leave you with this, possibly outdated, little image:

Now, to be fair, I don’t know if it’s still accurate, but the fact that a company is capable of misjudging the entire MMO customer base of the Western world that badly, is kinda scary.

This isn’t the old EverQuest years NCSoft, there aren’t many hardcore loser gamers left, they’ve all gone casual, or have somehow managed to get a life.

The final verdict? Don’t buy this piece of shit, spend your money on something more useful.

Like a lobotomy.