Recent reviews by Grubbo

PS1's LSD Simulator meets a creative indie story. A surprising amount of slick 2D animation. Something special here, interested to see the next chapter!

Core game is fun BUT Bandai Namco has surprised everyone a month after release with item shops, battle pass and other disingenuous gaming business practices. And now they're going after modders instead of punishing cheaters and match disconnectors. This is the final straw that made me post this review.

Please stay away from this game, at least until the company rights the course. If they stop trying to hurt their own community, I will change this review to a thumbs up.. You can see from the hours I've played that I really, really want to.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the- Wait, are those drugs? Nevermind!"

10/10

A rather amazing RPG in the aesthetic style of Mother/Earthbound. Charming graphics, locations and side-characters, and a diverse soundtrack nostalgic and haunting. But take heed -- this is at its heart a horror game. Not in the sense of scares and gore. It does have those things, but it's not the point. It's horror in the sense that Dracula, Frankenstein and Silent Hill 2 are horror. They regard the kinds of characters who are souls swimming in darkness, for whom the best sort of ending is the colossal struggle to get one foot out of the abyss, yet however victorious remaining forever defined by it, perhaps destined to one day return in full.

On top of this is a powerful tone poem about home, how our friends change, and how our childhood memories differ from reality as our perspectives evolve. By itself this would be a full-throated "buy this game," but this is the complementary meal to what is fundamentally an extremely dark story. I feel it must come from some place very real for the author. And quite frankly I don't think I'll be playing it ever again. Not because it is bad, but because it so effectively puts you in the head space of someone who will always be wading in an endless sea of oil, even as they hold a light in that dark, until the day they die.

This is not a world to bask in, but to learn from... because it's about pain.

Experience it once if you can.

You. Reading this. If any part of this game on the store page appeals to you, even in the slightest, do not wait on this ~absurd~ gem. I did, for a sale, and I was a fool. If you like stories, buy it. If you like visual novels, ANY visual novel, buy it. If you *don't* like visual novels, buy it.

It is literally one of the craziest things on Earth that this game has been out for two years and almost no one has played it. Get on the train and just... do it, ok?

Cheers.

I love Source Filmmaker.

With practice, it is a Promethean fire for creative folks, and should you find a subject you are passionate about, you will rack up the hours in no time and make dreams come to life. And you will need those hours. Here's why: you will learn entirely new skill sets, first and foremost being animation. Actual animation, like the kind used by Valve in their Meet The Videos, and by Pixar and Dreamworks. Skills that have been developed by talented artists since the dawn of the moving picture. I've been using SFM since release -- check it, that's July 2012 - and I'm just now feeling pretty decent about my experience animating. But I've got some silly standards for myself, and people can make hilarious or amazing videos without spending.... uh, the time I have. All copies of SFM do come with high quality models from TF2 and Left 4 Dead 2, complete with selectable pre-made animations so you don't have to start out in an abyss. There are plenty of tutorials online, with lots of folks willing to answer your questions. Outside the safe boundaries of SFM's wonderful community are also helpful places like Facepunch.

Besides animation, you will also learn a lot about lighting and camera work, too. There's so much to pick up on. But it's only if you want to! You get out of SFM exactly what you put into it, because its function is based on ~you.~ The man acts, the machine reacts. If you dive in for a casual experience, well... I'm not sure how much of a casual experience can be had with this program. If you want to have fun tossing ragdolls around, Garry's Mod is for you. But if you have some cool cinematic idea and you want to create a 3D movie but don't quite know where to start, SFM might be the perfect launch pad for your aspirations. It has everthing at your finger tips -- a space to load settings for putting in characters and props (it's like flying around in noclip! It uses WASD keys, spacebar, etc; very natural), tools for animating, all that. The only thing it can't do is model and texture from scratch, but any program that does can convert to SFM. Go to Steam Workshop and you'll find new content pretty much every day from loads of people! Maps, models, sounds, the works.

So, wrapping up, Valve has supported its content-creating fans since forever. I've been there since HL1, modding sounds and textures, making maps, and it's been such a wonderfully healthy experience for me. Probably no other big company would ever release an internal tool of this kind and keep it maintained, and allow so much flexibility for its users. Source Filmmaker is a beacon of virtual cinema. So look ahead, and rock it hard!

Rogue Legacy has a good concept, but it feels too grindy, and the gameplay itself not quite as polished as you might expect from a Castlevania-type game. It doesn't anticipate the actual entertainment expectations of an audience like it should. It also throws in lots of little inconsistencies in how it runs, creating unneeded delays in game pacing (the beginning, where it forces you to wait through mini interactions just to get things done instead of getting out of your way so you can play) that should have been caught in playtesting, and would have elevated it up the chain of games.

Graphics are alright for the type. Levels and enemies are straight out of Castlevania, which is to be expected, with a cartoony edge. Music and sound effects do the trick and never seemed particularly annoying. That's about it for its presentation. It does the job.

Since Rogue Legacy's claim to fame is its "Family System," I'll tell you why I don't think that works.

Concepts that would actually make it fun to keep track of your family line are absent. Once a family member dies, you can not review what they were like in detail by selecting them in the "tree." All you get is a really simple card. The interface for the family tree doesn't seem to be built for anything more than casual perusal; certainly not for backtracking very far. It lists members like achievements, one by one in a horizontal row, and forces you to use the keyboard to go back and forth, and doesn't get noticably faster if you hold the keys. Play this game any long length of time and I can easily see it taking minutes to get back to your first family member. Another complaint is family member last words are nothing more than gameplay tips instead of being relevant to who they are or the journey they had. The lone exception I noticed was a character who spent his entire time cursing -- his last words were also cursing.

In fact, besides gameplay quirks (which really are just that) there isn't anything in the family system that makes you feel you've taken the role of the next in line, and are instead just playing the exact same character with random modifiers thrown in so you hardly get a chance to be excited about using a new skill to advance or have fun. And as soon as you start using a new character quirk, the game's high difficulty curve annihilates your character with no chance to go back and recover, depriving you of the experience of getting attached to either the character or the family he/she belongs to. Then after that, the game takes away all your money after you level up your stats, and unless you want to get future-reemed financially by the castle unrandomizer, you have to take your new character into a totally different castle, throwing off your sense of balance. This all leads up to a feeling of wasted time as the game constantly pushes itself away from you instead of intimately bringing you in for a good time.

You may see I have about an hour of playtime at the time of this review. Is that really fair? I don't know. But the game's flaws were obvious enough for me to write a pretty fast piece about it. It's a not-so-great, grind-heavy Castlevania clone with a forced random modifier element that should be exciting, but because of the execution of its lone hook, instead feels like an uninspiring chore.

Do not recommend. I want to, but I can't. Someone else should take this concept and run with it, though.

And I wish there was a demo for me to try out.

This is the beginning of the sort of Zombie game I've been waiting for for a long time. Board up fortifications, collect resources and save survivors to add to your Family, etc. But it is VERY early, and a console port.

First of all, controls are EXTREMELY finnicky on keyboard and mouse. For example, if you want to change direction, it doesn't work like it should -- you have to fake it by aiming with the right mouse button! On the upside, over time it does become second nature to tap the key anytime you want to go somewhere else, but this shouldn't have to be the case, and even if you become proficient at aim-turning, it still gets in the way when you need mobility during a zombie horde flee sequence. The S key works like it's from bizarro land, and if you're trying to back away from zombies using it, most of the time it'll turn your character around right back into the horde like a moonwalking Michael Jackson. And there are definitely some annoying graphical glitches. On my computer, all my heroes' weapons are invisible (but not for any other survivor.) This takes a small amount away from the feeling of the game, and can become frustrating when you don't quite know what the range on your weapon is and get eaten by a zombie.

But it's still fun to go out into the open zombie world and survive. If you've been waiting for this sort of game and want to support the group, check it out. Once you get past the initial curve of figuring out ways around bugs and limitations, it becomes pretty entertaining.

Verdict: Basically recommended if you don't mind the risk. In the end it's just a (fun) proof of concept. Look forward to the sequel to this game -- that'll be the one to get it right and make bank.