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Photopia is good, Galatea is good, Shrapnel is good, Choice of Robots is good, Aisle and 9:05 are good Avoid Heroes Rise and the other two games in the trilogy at all costs, though. They are on Steam and they are terrible.
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Mar 1, 2016 10:56
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Potsticker posted:For Choice of Games, I thought Mecha Ace and Black Cat have been the best ones I've played. They are basiclly CYOA Gundam and Lupin stories, so if that's what you're into you should have a good time. Heroes Rise (it should probably be titled Hero's Rise, though) is terrible. I only played it recently and, for a lot of it, it kind of feels like someone's first attempt at a CYOA IF. It is rough and unpolished and has a lot of cringe-worthy things like the use of the word 'slugger' as a kind of catch-all term, including for swearing and general expletives. On my Steam review, I said the first and second installments struggle to reach what I'd consider average quality. The prose has some really awkward phrasing and rather sophomoric handling of things like sex, gender politics, and that sort of thing. In the second installment, there is actually a sequence where the plot grinds to a halt and a bunch of characters burst in and have a big heated discussion about the importance of using the right gender pronouns. Now, this is the same series that has a female character basically defined by the size of her rack. It's just a mess. There's too many characters and the ones that are there aren't exactly fleshed out in any meaningful sense. The plot just kind of happens around you and you're painfully on-rails. The series really doesn't respect player choice and agency. There are choices that amount to traps where it feels like the author is waiting in the wings to leap out and go 'AHA!' There are also choices where your character just suddenly acts like a moron. For example, you choose 'infiltrate the supervillain hideout', so you walk in the front door in your full superhero costume. Yeah. The author gives you three or four choices and you sit there and you have to consider, as a player, if the author is going to make you an idiot and make you wonder why the choice was even there in the first place. When I say respecting player choice and agency, I feel that Choice Of games need to be careful about it. When you've got a text parser, I think it's more acceptable for a choice to result in a blind bad end. However, if you present a player with A, B, C or D, it's a bit of a dick move if any of them make them feel like an idiot or result in an unavoidable game over or negative consequence. I think Choice of Robots is the best Choice Of game yet and handles player choice incredibly well, to the extent that it's in my top 10 list of IF. When you compare something like Choice Of Robots to Heroes Rise, it becomes abundantly clear how poorly Heroes handles choice and consequence. In Robots, you never feel like you've been cheated or that the author has turned you into an idiot - you've had enough feedback to know if you're going to be going down a bad path. But, even then, the bad path might be able to be turned around depending on your choices. And I say this as someone who has died at the first possible end point in Robots. I think a lot of people like them because they are very much based around wish-fulfillment and creating your own idealised self. You set your name, gender, sexual orientation, what your love interest looks like, the color of your powers, and all that sort of thing. The story amounts to 'You're great and everyone loves you; when people say you're wrong, you're inevitably right'. Oh, and Heroes Rise has what amounts to in-app purchases that tell you what the optimal choices are if you want to get the 'best' ending - which probably explains why the choices are so drat obfuscated and difficult to figure out.
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Mar 1, 2016 12:28
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Potsticker posted:Was the IAP thing added later? Either that or I was blind. Any time. I'm always happy to talk about things I've played, particularly IF because there's very little places to discuss them! It's not wholly bad. There were bits and pieces of each I liked - the second had some choices that felt hard to make, although I don't know if they actually result in anything different. The third part had a great concept that was squandered in the race to finish the story - it was over too soon. All in all, Heroes Rise feels like Zachary Sergi rushed out three drafts. There's promise there but, in my opinion, he needs to tighten things up across the board - gameplay mechanics, prose, writing, characters... Unfortunately, though, they are probably the only IF games that I steer people away from if they're exploring them on Steam.
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Mar 1, 2016 13:53
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:Sounds like it was written by a 14 year old... This made me curious and so I actually decided to go and find out about the author's background. He's apparently a television writer. I say apparently because there's no credits to his name and the most concrete information I can find is that he writes pilots for television. He's got four books on Goodreads, but they're all his Choice Of games. I did kind of hope it was a particularly earnest kid.
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Mar 2, 2016 06:03
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:Tbh if was a kid under the age of 16 it would actually be pretty promising. Dude sucks though if he's promoting himself on goodreads Yeah. Somehow, this has reminded me though, that you can set your own theme song in Heroes Rise (seriously, the trilogy is big on personal vanity customisation) and one of the options is My Heart Will Go On. I don't know why, but it's there. Needless to say, I picked it and kept thinking of this particular cover whenever my hero was doing something Cool.
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Mar 2, 2016 06:32
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Megazver posted:The Ice-Bound Concordance is interactive fiction with a difference. The RPS review: I was really getting into this... but you need the Compendium book to progress. As an Australian, this is unfortunate.
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Mar 4, 2016 04:55
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Bieeardo posted:I'm old-school, Scott Adams and Infocom all the way. I played some of the Legend games, but they really didn't do it for me, and the simple noun-verb parsers other engines used drove me up the wall. I think my favourite game from that era was Trinity. I'm a big fan of Photopia and I'll see if I can puzzle out the why of it.
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Mar 15, 2016 08:22
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Photopia is one of my favourite IF stories. I agree with a lot of that article but I also know that my reasons for enjoying it don't really align with his arguments at all. I say this as someone who came to Photopia late. I want to say that I first played it around 2010 but I'm not sure and it might have been earlier. I think dismissing Alley as 'wish-fulfillment' is missing the point. Of course the text manipulates you - every text attempts to manipulate you when you get right down to it, consciously or otherwise. I think dismissing a text as manipulative because you don't agree with it is pretty boring criticism. I also think dismissing that people enjoyed it because it made them feel something for a character who then died is a bit unfair, too, especially when you dress it up with a dose of 'gamers just aren't used to such deep stories like you get in real literature where people die'. Isn't that a bit of a weird thing to say about your core audience? It seems to be misreading the situation - people aren't used to video games hitting them in the heart like Photopia does because very few games are constructed to engender sympathetic emotional responses. Undertale is, maybe, one of the only games in recent memory to really do so. Most games, when they try and be emotional fall flat and feel cheap and, dare I say it, manipulative. Alley is basically perfect. But she's also just a fourteen year-old girl and could go anywhere she wanted - she's smart, compassionate and artistic. It's why the fact that she's killed by a drunk driver works so well because it's not some grand plot that cuts her life short, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I disagree that there's no feeling of powerlessness in the text - the car crash in the first scene hangs over the entire story. When you are in the car with Alley later, you know what is coming because you know there's a car crash and you know that the character you are playing will be hospitalized from it. The strength of Photopia, and what drew me to it and why I play it again and again, is Cadre's writing. There's a lot of lines and phrases that have really stuck with me ('It was green, it was green...' and 'Suddenly the room seems colder', mainly). Some say it's a flaw that we don't see Alley's flaws. Personally, I think it's a strength of the text that we're only getting the dramatic moments. We get Alley almost drowning, we get the driver of the car in hospital, we get philosophical star-stuff discussions, we get two perspectives of the tragic moment. We get a rich if brief tapestry of all these characters who are going to be affected by her death from major (her mother and father) to minor (the boy with a crush). These might even be the memories that come to them later, after she's gone, the ones they dwell on - just like the player will dwell on them. Everyone involved, including the player, will wonder: could I have done something differently? I think people have such a strong response to it because very few pieces of media, particularly interactive ones, make death out to be some random, unavoidable thing that can lurch up out of nowhere and kill someone you care about. Death always has a purpose in games, whether it's to give you a reason to hate the villain or to close out a heroic sacrifice arc. If it is pointless, like it sometimes can be in an RPG, is it because the player has done something wrong. It goes hand in hand with most interactive forms of media being about wish fulfillment. Gijsbers might say that we should just 'stop believing' that games are vehicles for wish fulfillment, like ignoring the wider context makes a reading more valid. But a player of Photopia hasn't done anything wrong. They've done everything right. I think Gijsbers saying that surely "it was possible for Alley's mother to remain in her office" is a bit odd, too, given that it isn't possible for her to say there, in the confines of the game. If you want to think of Photopia as some metaphysical real thing then, sure, Alley's mother could have remained in the office. She also could have not actually been Alley's real mother. This level of speculation is rather spurious. Photopia is not real. All created art is metaphor. In the text as presented, Alley's mother must, and always will, check on Alley. This is a deterministic view. I find his commentary about Wendy's father odd, too, given how he conflates player with player character. quote:In Photopia, the player is never really in a position where he (a) knows what is going to happen, (b) could plausibly prevent it from happening, but (c) isn't allowed to do so. One might argue that the scene where Wendy's father drives Alley through town does put us in this position, but this is a bit of a stretch: since Wendy's father cannot possibly know that something bad is about to happen, he could not plausibly prevent it from happening; and if he fails to prevent it from happening, this is hardly proof of his powerlessness, but rather proof of his ignorance. I mean, let's examine this. A. Wrong, the player knows what is going to happen if they've been paying attention the story. B. Wendy's father could stop the car at any time. In a more typical IF entry, the player might even be rewarded for typing 'stop car', 'turn key', 'pull over' etc. In a modern RPG, there might be a 'secret ending', even. Here, however, you can not. The plausibility of it is kind of irrelevant. C. The player isn't allowed to stop it. Stretching this into Wendy's father being ignorant is strange, too, because one wonders how someone can be ignorant of something that they are in no position to stop, never have the chance to stop, and could never be aware of in the first place. It isn't normal to call the driver of a car, hit by another car running a red light, ignorant. The car will hit them and, unfortunately, Wendy's father isn't an omniscient being that can see the past and has seen future like the player is. I don't think, however, that Photopia is a work that is concerned with determinism and free will more than most other works of IF are because, by their very nature, a lot of IF tends to touch on it (again, maybe this is something as someone who really only got into the medium in the past six years). However, a work that illustrates that characters have no choice about what they do, even when the player knows what's going to happen when Alley gets in that car, is a deterministic work. He's right, however, that Photopia is kind of the story that even though Alley has died, she will go on to exist in the minds of those who remember her, and they will be shaped by her and their futures will be influenced by her. I also think Photopia's simple construction and the use of colors to introduce chapters is immediately intriguing. I think the touches from the game in response to verbs it doesn't recognise or inappropriate commands during the story sequences are part of the reason why people like it so much because it illustrates a high level of polish, precision and care. It's late and I need to sleep, so, I'm ending this here. But I think it comes down to Photopia being a simple, accessible, easy to understand story that demonstrates a key point that is ignored by most forms of interactive media - death can be pointless and random. It dresses this story up with a simple but effective use of colors, a high level of polish, and puts the player in the same position as the viewpoint characters, looking through their eyes, and wondering the same things that the characters would wonder in the aftermath of Alley's death. What's more, the puzzle in the story reinforces the game's themes and narrative, as opposed to being a hurdle for the player to awkwardly get over before they can get more of the story. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Mar 15, 2016 |
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Mar 15, 2016 13:17
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Sinteres posted:Does anybody know if Choice of Games have participated in Steam sales or Play Store sales? I know their games are pretty cheap to start with, but they have several dozen at this point, and I'm a fast reader, so I kind of want to wait for a sale if possible before I buy way too many of them. I don't think I've ever seen them on sale. Try Choice of Robots! potatocubed posted:It turned out my piggy bank was filled with money, so I bought a copy of the Ice-Bound Compendium. It arrived today, I started playing Ice-Bound Concordance about two hours ago, and I love it. I don't think I'll have a proper grasp of it until I try another playthrough (or maybe three or four) because my inner author is forcing me to keep to a limited set of themes rather than branching out wildly into whatever seems interesting, but it's extremely polished, technically brilliant, and utterly compelling. I care a lot less about the 'AI realising it's a real boy' plot than I do about just telling the stories, but that's going to be enough to keep me hooked for a good long while. Thanks, I'll give it a look.
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Mar 16, 2016 23:42
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:Why did he do so?? If I remember right, it had a lot of very unsavory content in it. As it says, the protagonist was a sexy college girl and I think there was all sorts of sex stuff in it. I never got far in I-O because I'm just that bad at puzzles. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Apr 3, 2016 |
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Apr 3, 2016 05:27
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Zachary Sergi is about nine hours away from releasing another Heroes Rise game on Steam.
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Apr 8, 2016 08:46
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Sinteres posted:Are they really that bad? I'm not the kind of person to call anything bad as an overall descriptor. Usually, I can easily find elements I enjoy in every bit of media I read, play or watch. But these are just flat-out bad.
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Apr 9, 2016 00:12
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The Deviations posted:The low-health-alert-as-paid-DLC* bullshit is still there. i'm sorry that you had to do this, friend i would have liked to see the 'highlights'
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Apr 9, 2016 04:27
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^^^ You're absolutely right. It'd be some kind of ultra absurd art if you were to adapt any of them into any other medium.The Deviations posted:(Take a shot when someone uses the catch-all futurespeak swear word 'slugger'.) you fool, they'll be loving dead by half way through the first adventure But to be serious, part of the reason why I dislike the series is because it is trying to be progressive by marking off a check list of things and taking them to an absurd extreme. It's a series where, in the Hero Project, half a dozen characters bring the plot to a screeching halt so they can hold a long argument about the importance of using correct gender pronouns and getting gender right. At the same time, it's a series where a character named Processor is defined repeatedly not by her status as a super-intelligent AI who helps the most powerful superhero group in the world but by her massive 'rack'. Her rack - a play on 'server rack' and a term for breasts, of course - is consistently mentioned whenever she appears to the extent that I know nothing else about her beyond that fact. I think the series goes for 'tongue in cheek' but it just wraps around to flat out stupid. Whenever it deals with any sort of social issue, it reads like someone who had only digested that info through the Internet and hasn't read a single book or academic article on the topic. I understand that it's important to be gender-inclusive but you kind of assume that comes with treating the matter appropriately. But I feel presenting the player with the six following options isn't treating it appropriately. I'm female. I'm male. I was assigned male at birth, but am truly female. I was assigned female at birth, but am truly male. I was born with intersex characteristics. I don't subscribe to any gender categories. My first thought when seeing that is 'Does any of this actually affect the story?' I feel like if you're getting that detailed then it'd probably be best to write something that dealt with it more in-depth as opposed to what feels like bolting it on to your young adult superhero story series where the most indepth it gets is whether your love interest is a man or woman and which hot celebrity do they look like. Of course, I'm the kind of person who thinks that if my choice of gender doesn't affect the story, you might as well just give me a male or female or anything else and tell a drat good story as opposed to giving me a choice that might weaken it. I don't know. I find it odd that a series that tries to earn points for being super-inclusive defines so many characters purely by their physical appearance, particularly by whether they're masculine or feminine, attractive or not attractive. It's kind of the same issue I have with Overwatch, where their big muscular woman character still has a very pretty face and pink hair. It feels forced and fake, like being 'progressive' but still making them attractive to typical male standards of beauty. Sinteres posted:Is this a case where the sequels are much worse than the original? I played the first game tonight out of curiosity and didn't think it was too bad. I mean nobody's going to mistake it for subtle or anything, but it didn't seem as bad as the dire warnings. The new game sounds loving terrible though. Absolutely. The first is bad and reads like a first draft but it shows some promise there and a fair bit of novelty. You would assume that any later installments would be a substantial improvement. They're not. In a lot of ways, they get worse. The first game does have some ridiculous 'choices' though. Like when you say you're going to infiltrate a supervillain lair... so you walk in through the front door in your superhero outfit. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 12:51
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neongrey posted:The thing is, and while I feel like this is really sloppy handling of it, there are a lot of people out there for whom having it be an option and then having it not be a big deal is kind of significant. So to have a game where you can go 'my particular circumstances are reflected in a non-negative way' feels nice. The fact that this game does it entirely as a mad lib is lousy and I'm not inclined to give it much credit for that, but there are enough people out there desperate enough for literally any representation at all that I won't hold it against the game for trying. There's enough to hold against the game without having to go to that. I know, and I agree, honestly. I'm usually torn between whether to give credit for trying when it comes to media. Do we award points for ticking boxes or should we expect a more deeper understanding if a game is going to explore things like that? If I was particularly cynical, I'd say it's just a pure marketing tool. But it's not a series where, despite those choices, I'd be comfortable calling it progressive or particularly deft in its handling of sex and gender (instead of having the big rack female servant AI, surely you could have that character be uninhibited by traditional gender roles - but that'd be harder to write, I guess). So, it feels like it essentially comes down to 'It's good that this option exists, I guess'. The Deviations posted:Update: The PC has since become a bee, an owl, and is now a tardigrade. Furries are weird, man. Details, man!
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Apr 10, 2016 06:05
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Sinteres posted:Did anyone play Sergi's other book, Versus? I'm enjoying the opinions on the trainwreck of his other games, so I'm curious if anybody has any thoughts on that one and if it escapes any of the problems in them or is more of the same. I haven't played it, so, let's find out, shall we? From the Steam store... "Empress Vaccus's desire to kill is so potent that nothing can exist alongside it. Except perhaps the lingering craving for Priscan enamel and tooth roots..." So I guess the antagonist likes eating teeth?  Pay-to-win DLC, too.
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Apr 11, 2016 03:52
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So, I'm writing a Choice Of game with the plan of getting it hosted by them. I'm about halfway complete. While I've had a lot of experience with Choicescript games, and IF over the years before that, I'm wondering if there's anyone here who has any hints or tips that they could pass along, just to make sure I'm not missing anything.
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May 29, 2016 23:48
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Megazver posted:Their model feels pretty unfair to me if they didn't give you a contract, TBH. You get 25%, they get 75%? Dang, son. There's no doubt about that, but it's a starting point. Even if I'd rate my writing higher than, say, Zachery Sergi, I can't exactly negotiate a contract without much of a folio beyond fanfiction, long forum posts and Masters work.
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Jun 1, 2016 02:12
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Choice Of have put out their design outlines on their forum. Heroes Rise violates just about all of their 'Common Problems'. I wonder how well they actually vet these things or whether the criteria have changed.
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Aug 26, 2016 06:55
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Wolpertinger posted:I'm not sure I agree with the hard and fast rule that all Choice Of games submitted must let you pick race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation regardless of the setting or the premise, and that your cast needs to be as close to 50/50 male/female as possible and have as diverse of a cast as possible unless you're literally in the ancient past where africans might not be found in feudal japan, and if you are in a historical setting where sexism might be a thing you should be able to genderflip the sexism. Well, that's one of the criticisms I level at Heroes Rise, that Sergi feels like he's just ticking boxes. Unfortunately, the official forums love those games precisely for that reason. I can't believe that they say these are the guidelines when Heroes Rise is maybe their flagship series - a game where you spend no real time superheroing, where you make choices about how you feel and not how you're going to act, and where NPCs do almost all of the heavy-lifting and where many of the choices you do make are 'gotcha' type things. I don't think there's anything wrong with most CYOA games letting people choose whatever they want - binary, non-binary, whatever - but it does come at a bit of a cost. I've played some Hosted Games where there are options where you pick your race, your eye color, your hair color, and so on... These choices are meaningless. The player doesn't need to pick green eyes over blue eyes unless it's actually going to matter. All this does is slow down the story and the decisions that're actually going to matter. Meaningless things like that - essentially protagonist set dressing - are things you can just let the player imagine. Of course, I also think sexual orientation is irrelevant too - if you're going to do romance, just let the player romance whoever (that's the one thing Dragon Age 2 did right!) The rules are interesting though, because Choice of Robots has a binary protagonist - male or female, nothing else. Of course, Choice of Robots is probably the best thing they've published. Writing my own game has been a very interesting experience. I know I hit a lot of inclusive things but it was the result of design work concerning a global story where the races and genders of these characters matter with how they've been treated, what their expectations are, and things like that. I can't imagine switching any of that because they'd be completely different people! Of course, if it's a fantastical setting where those things don't matter, sure, switch genders or whatever based on player choice. I'll just shrug and say okay but it means that the characters become that little bit more lifeless. However, the stats I used really don't matter and it's more about decisions made. Sure, there are stat-checks, but the way this design document indicates that stats rule all and should determine endings and all stats should be equal... it rubs me the wrong way. Sort of like how 'every ending must be awesome'. Which is also something Choice of Robots disregards (death at the earliest possible point ending). I was also surprised that there's no common mistake ruling on, say, Schrodinger's Choices. That is, a choice where the situation actually changes based on what you pick. This is something Heroes Rise did with your sidekick (they may or may not be the antagonist in disguise [yes, really] based on who you choose) and it's something I've seen in other games. The moment games start doing this is the moment I check out because it basically means there's no rules. Seeing opposition to this summed up as 'purist IF' was somewhat mystifying because I'd long expected that people would want to move away from how, say, the Goosebump books presented things. If you go to Page 31, Grandma is normal, but if you go to Page 76 then she's been a vampire monster from the start! edit: I can't believe I'm saying this - but it's one of the things that Starcraft 2 did well because while the facts of the world changed based on whether or not you sided with the Protoss, what it did was altered the themes and feel of the mini plot arcs. A story about standing strong in the face of overly zealous purifier aliens becomes a darker story about the futility of thinking you can save everyone. Unfortunately, I can't really see how expanding this kind of Schrodinger's Narrative to a more-detailed work or story arc (are there any examples?) simply due to how much you need to change to make it work. SC2 got away with it by having it be, like, two-mission mini arcs. Megazver posted:I mean, it's the guidelines for the poo poo they publish. So yeah, must and needs. Witcher 3 absolutely nailed that, though. Of course, that's because the choices were more far-reaching than just 'Does Geralt do A or B?' I think I saw a video that summed up a lot of Geralt's choices as basically being whether Geralt chooses to continue his life as a Witcher, which he enjoys but has some existential doubts about, or whether to try and let go of the past and embrace something different which might be better for him. It works really well when you think about Yennifer and Triss but also with his relationship to Ciri. It's absolutely not a story you could tell with a generic protagonist because it relies on so many pre-existing things to work. It needs Geralt to be, essentially, a father, to have had a number of tumultuous relationships, and to be known as a legend and, ultimately, to be a relic of the past. It's not a story that could work, in my opinion, if Geralt was a woman or gay or young because it's so caught up in what it means to be masculine and needing to step aside for the next generation. I can never praise Witcher 3's story enough because for all the monster killing, it's really just a story of an old man having to come to terms with the fact that his daughter is an independent woman who should make her own decisions. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 09:41 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 09:30
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John F Bennett posted:This medium has devolved into utter crap. Back in my day we had to type stuff. CYOA games are not text adventures and should have a seperate competition. This contest has become a shameful mockery. Eh, it depends. I can't say something like Choice of Robots isn't amazing IF with a straight face. However, the purist in me does think there should be a separation between parser IF and CYOA IF. Now, something that comes from the Twine arena? Like the stuff by Porpentine, like Cyberqueen? The stuff that people tell me demonstrates how great Twine can be? Then we can start talking about things that aren't really IF. If edgy grotesque pornography and repetitive scenes of vomiting, urinating or making GBS threads yourself isn't your cup of tea, don't click the link. 4/5 stars on IFDB, called "a masterpiece" with "excellent writing" with no choices that actually change things but that's okay because it is "deconstructing" the "power fantasy". Yeah. When I think IF, I definitely think 'power fantasy'. I can't help but read a lot of Twine things which are - sort of like Sergi's Heroes Rise stuff - made by people who don't really know the history of the medium, which I know sounds horribly elitist of me. But I'm also yet to play a Twine game I'd call truly great, too, because I think the 'click on hyperlinks with no idea what moves forward or what leads into a loop' mechanic is loving terrible. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 07:16
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:I weirdly agree with your twine argument, because off the top of my head I can't name a Twine game that didn't seem convoluted I really liked the one where you turn into a demon, and I think The Uncle Who Works At Nintendo is Twine, too - the latter, though, basically works on the fact that's it convoluted and requires multiple playthroughs to have any idea what choices to make when and the former makes it really clear when a choice moves stuff forward or not. But both of those always seem pretty different to most Twine games that get recommended to me. Like With Those We Love Alive which I can only really describe as a mishmash of random imagery and hyperlinks while I was supposed to be serving in a royal court? Or something?
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Oct 7, 2016 08:20
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Lichtenstein posted:I've been on a bit of an Inkle binge and am craving good CYOA recommendations! Choice of Robots is actually quite good. Choice of Alexandria is also impressive, but for different reasons. There are a lot of Choice Of titles that don't quite succeed and I think part of that is due to the guidelines (and the wishes of the typical userbase). I generally play everything they put on Steam, though. I don't like self-promotion but I'm actually on track to releasing a Hosted Game in the near future (through review successfully, just doing art and such now), which I wanted to hew closer to a story with choices than choices with a story, if that makes sense. edit: Which ones have you tried? I'm happy to recommend the ones I liked (and finished) and the ones I played (but didn't finish). Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 11:51
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Lichtenstein posted:Choice of the Deathless was actually one of the demos I tried, as I like Gladstone's ideas a lot. The demo wasn't the best sell though, as it basically consisted of: I think that's more a problem of Choice Of's writing guidelines. Based on my perusal of them, it seems like they really like it when numbers affect the player's results and in order to get the best endings you need to have the best numbers. However, some of them (Choice of Robots in particular) throws enough numbers at you that grinding isn't an issue but there are neat outcomes for being critically low or extremely high in certain stats. quote:The other one I checked out was the metahuman corp one, which seemed like a fun premise, but it appeared to lean even harder on the "let's crunch some numbers and assess you after a year of performance". Any opinions on it? And do most Choice of games have this Harvest Moon structure, or have I happened to just stumbled onto such examples? Metahuman Inc? I couldn't get into it to the extent that I didn't make it past the first few scenes. It felt like I had no idea who I was, when I was, or what the world was like (some kind of superhero/magic/kitchen sink pastiche, maybe?) Opening the game with a barrage of questions at a press conference that may or may not affect the numbers I got at the end also felt like a weak beginning. I think I dropped it after the 'interview these three characters you haven't met before for a position you know nothing about'. The punctuation was a problem too, if I remember right. I liked and finished Mecha Ace, Psy High and A Wise Use of Time and it is my belief that Choice of Robots is maybe the best release in the whole CoG stable. I was not a fan of Diabolical, Pendragon Rising or Community College Hero. Stay far away from the Heroes Rise series and Versus (they actually contracted a second one of those?) because they are the peak of the dating-sim-with-numbers cluster (among many other things). Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 13:49
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Lichtenstein posted:Myself I wish for parsers to be torn down in favor of more accessible input schemes, just so that it's kept being used as a conscious choice and not a default. There's amazing stuff you can do with parsers, but there's so much awful legacy bullshit associated with it, like the terrible compass directions. Yeah, basically. As much as I love IF, it's basically matched 1:1 with my hatred for parser wrestling.
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Nov 18, 2016 15:49
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U.T. Raptor posted:Community College Hero was good CCH was waaaaay too silly. Sometimes it felt like parody ('You're a super cool superhero with roller skates and a slingshot!!') Slammed! was great, yes. I completely forgot about it!
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Nov 18, 2016 23:40
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Sinteres posted:Did you ever actually say which Hosted Game was yours? I was also wondering if anyone has any recommendations or against any of the newer batch of CoG releases. I think the only ones from this year I've seen mentioned itt were the Heroes Rise sequel and Choice of Alexandria. Not released yet! I'm just waiting on the art from my artist and then I'll be submitting it. I'll let the thread know once it is is released!
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Dec 13, 2016 23:33
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Sinteres posted:I can't help feeling like this upcoming game from Choice of Games is approaching self-parody: I don't know. If that was by the Choice of Robots guy, I'd buy it day one.
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Dec 26, 2016 12:49
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Hey, thread. I said I'd mention when my hosted game was released. It was about a week ago, and I didn't see that this thread had dropped back in my bookmarks. Find it on their website here but it's available on iTunes and Android, of course, if you'd prefer those platforms. It's a hundred thousand words about 'realistic' superheroes and has received several user reviews about the "social justice" in it ruining video games. Beyond that, the reception seems pretty positive! It's the first big thing I've written beyond some little essays on this forum and stuff from my Masters, so, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's definitely more of a book with a set protagonist as opposed to something with a lot of game-y freedom like Heroes Rise. There's a minor hotfix patch fixing up two small issues coming very soon. One is a cosmetic issue in Chapter 3 and the other is an option that fails to trigger in Chapter 5 (it also fixes some spelling and grammar etc.) Other that that, by all accounts, everything works as it should. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 08:29
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Megazver posted:Congrats, man! I don't even have any long sequences where people argue about using correct pronouns.
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Apr 25, 2017 09:39
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Milky Moor posted:I was really getting into this... but you need the Compendium book to progress. Oh, yeah, a year later, but I got the Compendium book for the Ice-Bound Concordance. It's really cool and I recommend buying it if you like IF. I loved my playthrough with the book.
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Sep 7, 2017 01:48
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Sinteres posted:Missed this earlier, but that's awesome. Was the whole thing a good experience for you, and are you planning on working with them again? Yeah, it was a pretty good experience. Pretty painless, too. Payments come on time and they're good about all that post-release stuff. I want to give pitching an idea to them under their Choice label a try (got some big ideas that have benefitted hugely from making Paradigm City) but I'm just taking a break for a bit while I also build up some additional experience with the web serial I'm doing (link's in my avatar!) I'll probably pitch early next year.
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Sep 30, 2017 01:09
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where the red fern gropes posted:are there any games that allow you to >give the finger >I understand you as far as wanting to give the finger. Who do you want to give the finger to?
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Oct 27, 2017 13:39
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Megazver posted:So apparently Apple decided that the Choice Of titles look too similar and are in violation of their "don't spam fifty versions of exactly the same app" rule, so Choice Of is forced to scramble and stitch together an Omnibus app that all future Choice Of games will be released in. Not cool, IMO. Random rear end in a top hat posted:Wow, that's some grade-A bullshit. How are they even going to advertise new games? Megazver posted:They mentioned that they didn't really advertise before and now that it's just one app it might actually be easier to start advertising just it. And, I guess, how it will work is they hope people will keep the app on their mobiles and it will show updates "oh btw we have a new gamebook, check it out". I've been following this closely. To call it even Grade-A Bullshit is a bit of an understatement. Hosted Games will still function with its own app, an omnibus just like their premium one. Every game is going to be an in-app purchase. It could be good -- perhaps there'll be considerable 'cross-pollination' -- but I'm absolutely on the side that this is a disaster. On one hand, it sounds like a good idea: every game is in one app, in-app purchases might be more seductive than buying a whole new app, but given that the bulk of income comes in the first few weeks/months, presumably from visibility or linking to individual app pages, I think it's going to have a pretty bad effect. With luck, they can maybe advertise their omnibus apps and push them more heavily but who knows at this point. I was working on a new HG, too, and hoping to pitch a few ideas to CoG itself... but I'd be lying now if I said my enthusiasm hadn't been dulled. The other thing that might hurt is that -- understandably -- they had to slap the Omnibus apps together quickly. So, they're missing features and stuff. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 22:49
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