Tag Archives: games

Electronic Entertainment, Games

Apex Legends Developers are today’s failure

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Holy shit, now that’s a meltdown

Now, for those who wonder what Apex Legends is, it is a so called “Battle Royale” video game, basically just a big open map with a whole bunch of player, either solo or in teams, with the objective being delightfully simple.

Last player/team standing, everyone else must die, there’s various mechanics to ensure the whole game doesn’t end up with one player hiding in a corner, there’s a slowly decreasing play area, anyone caught outside get’s melted by video game magic or lasers or what have you.

Ever since Player Unknown’s Battleground (PUBG) released a buggy game, this has been the big thing the AAA publishers have been trying to get into, with various degrees of failure, Epic’s Fortnite is the present number one on the market, but everyone’s trying this. It’s MOBAs and MMOs all over again.

Now EA had Respawn Entertainment slam Apex Legends together to make a quick buck using existing assets from Titanfall 2, using existing assets to make games isn’t by any means a bad idea, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was assembled out of re-skinned assets from Far Cry 3, so if you need something fast, this was the correct way to do it.

Nobody planned for Apex Legends to make gargantuan amounts of cash, just a nice little share of the market, however, with people being fatigued from playing PUBG or unwilling to handle the art style and player-base of Fortnite, Apex Legends was a solid contender with decent enough gameplay.

Until this happened:

And the reddit didn’t behave properly, not the usual echo chamber, when we are all with amazing alacrity, shown just what the business strategy is for Apex Legends monetization: Massive Whaling.

Whales being a video game term for big spenders, the gambling equivalent of a high roller, gamers who lack the self-control and spent small and sometimes LARGE fortunes on silly digital items and such nonsense.

Well, nice to see what they think about everyone, except the whales of course

Yeah, this isn’t the best way to communicate with your audience, on the other hand, it’s honest, the fucking hate everyone who doesn’t burn though 100+ US$ for a silly video game.

Wow, what the fuck?
There’s a whole bunch of these.

So? Why is all this going on? Simple, Apex Legends made about 150 million US$ in revenue for EA in their most recent quarter, that’s about 10% of the company’s total revenue, from one source, that definitely wasn’t planned to be this massively successful.

So what happened? Well, EA now have an interest in really getting the revenue up as far as possible, squeezing every single penny and cent out of the players as the possibly can, which is what they always do.

But not only that, when Respawn was bought by EA back in 2017, EA paid 151 million US$ in cash, that isn’t the noteworthy part, the second part of the price is: ” Up to $164 million in long-term equity in the form of restricted stock units for Respawn”

Obviously, we don’t have a clue how this equity would work, we have no clue what the restrictions are, however, what I can tell you with absolutely certainty: The Leadership of Respawn Entertainment has a really big stake in the company’s profitability, for it’s a fairly safe assumption, to presume that a significant element of the restrictions are based on earnings.

So of course the developer goes nuts, why wouldn’t he/she/it/they? That person might have a lot of money at stake, a lot of stress, a lot of greed.

Not it matters, nothing will come of this, everyone will forget it within a week or two.

And that is today’s failure.

Culture, Electronic Entertainment

Today, I’ll write about art

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Amber Coal is obviously a complete lunatic, sadly, that’s absolutely nothing special at all. With the Internet being a giant echo chamber of idiocy, lunatics and maniacs have an awesome time on it. I mean, who’s going to notice yet another mad hatter in an ocean of silly hats.

It’s neither unusual or peculiar.

And doesn’t actually matter, Lunatics often produced some brilliant stuff, the border between genius and madness is pretty often shattered, so no worries!

Let’s just barrel into whatever games Amber has managed to vomit forth upon us all.

IwhatA Game of Cat and Mouse for example, isn’t a game, but is absolutely performance art, interactive performance art, but not a game, it sadly lacks an active objective for the player to actually do, it’s message about entropy isn’t really anything spectacular, if I needed a remind about the terminal heat death of the universe, I’d go watch Nicki Minaj videos.

And burn out my own optical nerves, just to manage the pain you see.

Still, should probably try another one of the creatures deranged games:

UFOHNO, yeah.

UFONO

Yes, we get it, you’re trying to tell us something. But the message “Not everything is what you see” is so old, that I’ve encountered them reading my way through roman graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, it’s old news sweetie, you’re not suprising anyone.

So what if I use a mind control ray to force owls to land on the ground, and then be devoured by violently agreesive rabbits?

Well done, I get the message, it’s all about control and doing crazy shit, well done, now go play Bioshock instead, it tells pretty much the same message, just wrapped in a really good game.

Or play Spec Ops: The Line, which messes around with halucinations to get the same effect, while also being incredibly good.

Or I could look at shitty pixel games with simple messages, choices, choices, so many choices.

Fortunately, they belong to me, not to you.

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.

Electronic Entertainment, Reviews

City Builders and you: Children of the Nile

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Welcome to a brand new bunch of useless reviews no one will ever read, because you’re all to busy masturbating to a disorganised list of Warhammer 40k quotes.

This series is all about the particular Video Game genre called “City Builders“, a largely Niche genre, which mainly aims towards hilariously nerdy people, me included. It can be seperated into two main sub genres: Ancient City Builders, based on anything from ancient Egypt to Medieval Castles, and Modern City Builders, who are basically just SimCity and it’s successors, also the entire Modern City Builder sub genre died out with Simcity 4, SimCity Societies sucks awfully and Monte Cristo can’t make games.

Now, today’s game is Children of the Nile by Tilted Mill Entertainment, oddly enough the same damn company who made the absolutely awful Simcity Societies. However, they are also the successor company of Impression Games, one of the grand old City-builder developers, the only other members of that rare club is classical Maxis, back when they where still developing shit other that the Sims, and good old Bullfrog.

Children of the Nile is set entirely in Ancient Egypt, with it’s expansion pack Alexandria, covering the rise of Greek Egypt, during the conquests of Alexandria. And remarkably enough, it actually has plenty of unique selling points for the budding little simulation nerd to enjoy.

The graphics are quite good, for a game developed by a small independent company, and is actually fairly enjoyable to watch and observe, which is important for me, I personally enjoy watching all those little people, running around, pretending to matter.

It’s single largest selling point is the way the economy works in the game, unlike most Ancient City Builders, the players involvement in the city’s economy is actually slightly limited.

In most of those games, you have a currency, say gold, you use it to build absolutely everything, but not in this game, this is ancient Egypt after all. it was all barter economy back then, gold and silver was used exclusively to make jewellery and bribes to foreigners.

So the parts of the economy the player actually controls are based on two things, bricks, used to build most of the mid to high-tier buildings, like bakeries (Produces food for government employees) to gigantic Cult temples. And the the big dog, food.

That’s right, the most important “currency” in Children of the Nile is simply food, as King, you take a share of most of the food produced from the farmers of your city. Your own palace will, throughout the game, support from six to ten farmers, who will then deposit a lions share of the food into the city granaries, that food is used by brick makers, bricklayers, government labourers, soldiers and of course: Priests, scribes, commanders and Overseers.

There is also a large private economy, which, if done properly, is larger than the Government funded one, all farmers build their houses out whatever they can find, you simply decided how many there should be, the answer to that one is, by the way, as many as you can, and a few extra just in case.

Now, your Palace can only support, what, six farmers in the beginning, that’s not really enough to get a nice big city now is it? Of course not, fortunately enough, Egypt is a feudal society, and you can build nice big estates for Nobles, who then support even most farmers, and you get a chunk of the food produced, as taxes. Which you then mainly spend on various support structures for the city itself, ie. temples, hospitals and schools, manned by the most important educated Government employee, the Priest.

So, what does the nobles, farmers, servants, government employees and the Royal family itself, spend most of their food on? Why mats, linen, pottery, baskets and in the case of the nobles and educated, six different kinds of luxuries. In most City builders in the Ancient world, it’s up to the player and the government to set up production chains, pay wages and so on and so forth.

Not here, Common shop-owners and luxury show-owners handle everything themselves. The inhabitants of the city use their food to buy stuff from the shops as they need it, the show-keepers then travel around and gather the materials themselves, often sending out their kids to do it, and produce it themselves. They are completely outside of Government control, they only thing you as player do, is control where they build their small shops.

It’s oddly realistic, especially when you remember that most societies back then where utterly dependent on a successful and good harvest.

So now you have a lovely little city, plenty of food to go around, your scribes out collecting taxes from the fields, you priests handling the gods and the people’s health and education, your commanders commanding what military you may or may not need and your Overseers handling, oh yes, what are they doing, why they are answering a questions you would presently be thinink about.

“That’s all good, but what’s the point of all this?”. You blood moron, it’s fucking Egypt, what the hell do you think the point is? To build some damn Pyramids!

Your Overseers handle the labourers dragging the necessary stones to the sites of the pyramids, the raw obelisks and statues to those sites and temples. They can also be used for mining and quarrying when needed.

And what are the pyramids and brick tombs used for? Well, first of all, to contain your dead Pharaoh, members of the Royal family and in the case of the really small brick Mastaba, the nobles and Educated people of the city.

And guess what, they also produce Prestige, which is the “currency” that decided how many Educated governement employees you can have in total, thus really enforcing a limit to how large your city can grow. You need more priests to handle all those temples and hospitals after all.

These is also a little world map thing, which is similar to what Impression Games old products had, you set up trade routes, send out your army to murder everything that looks at you funny, complete little tasks. All to gain more prestige, resources and cool luxury bollocks to keep your nobles happy. Those dilletants even need entertainers, private economy again, and servants just to be happy. Although the servants are also used by the luxury shopkeepers to gather resources, they can afford it anyway.

Oddly enough, your shopkeepers and entertainers usual end up being filty rich, simply because they really don’t have that much to spend the money on. They don’t buy all the luxuries the nobles and educated citizens can spend their income/wages on, so it simply builds up.

Meaning that in the later game, most of your nobles are former Luxury shopkeepers and so on. It actually works fairly well, there are little annoyances, but nothing serious.

So yeah, if you enjoy these kind of city builder games, I’d happily recommend Children of the Nile, Tilted Mill apparently really do care about this little game.

Oh yeah, the military part isn’t very strong, but they rarely are, so who cares?

I would’ve have ripped Hinterland a new arsehole for being a shallow city builder with a shallow RPG smashed into it, but apparently they are releasing another freaking expansion for it, so hey, I’ll wait.