TL:DR praise good devs, shun dodgy ones, raise the bar
that's sort of subjective though, I mean, manamon, I don't like it to be honest, its OK, but its a rip off, that's a fact too its not just my opinion, its a rip off of pokemon, and there's no getting around that fact. Does it have some good elements to it, sure. I think its overpriced for what it is though. SO, Studying things like that, OK, so what if you study the wrong things, and decide it's OK to go around copying mainstream games and doing everything they do. I don't think that's very good for the audio games market.
The thing is, people are so desperate for new content, new games, and it takes the form of this almost fanaticism where as long as its not too buggy, they'll play it no matter what that developer did to bring that game to light. In the mainstream world, people get new games all the time. I mean, the PSN store is always flooded with stuff, even little things to tide you over until something big comes out, that's just fine, but here, we don't get that flood of things to choose from.
You know what's worse about Manamon, not the fact that it pretty much is a straight up clone of Pokemon, but the fact that the developer tried to hide it. That just burns me, and I can't believe I was stupid enough, and yes, I fell into the trap I just talked about above, but I did buy it. It was overpriced for what it was as well. I could have bought physical copies of pokemon games, then I'd have the legal right to use an emulator, then I could use the accessible emu with scripts and stuff to play it, and I'd be totally legit, what's more, I'd spend less than I did on Manamon too.
Price isn't the overarching factor though. I would have gladly paid $60 for A Hero's Call. I will shell out the dough if its warranted, but what I don't want to do is support developers whose morality is in question, which I have to wonder about Aaron Baker. His games aren't that captivating to me, I bought two of them, manamon and psycho strike. I tried the gate with a pirated key, and I chucked it. that game was so bad as to be ridiculous, the voice acting sucked, it had combat code right out of psycho strike, it felt the exact same, just different ambient sounds, different monster sounds. Now he's apparently developing for Leasey, yes, well, that pretty much made my point for me because I don't agree with that whole proposition. Admittedly, I don't know much about it, but i do know its apparently pretty expensive, coming in at about $300 for some scripts to help you with Jaws, which already is a boat load of money. Where do people think this money comes from eh?
Anyway, yeah, I will stand up for, support, buy from, and herald developers who work hard, are dedicated to supporting their products, are dedicated to helping their users who have trouble with their products etc. I will be just as quick to shun developers who do dodgy things, overprice their products time and time again, do not respond to the community's questions, sell out to the highest bidder, etc.
If we made this forum more like Reddit, where we plus 1'd people who do good work, like Joseph and Ian from Out of Sight Game, Liam from L-works and so forth, and we talked about the positive aspects when there was positive aspects to talk about, but we talked about the negative aspects when there was an overwhelming amount of things in the game that aren't satisfactory, I think it would send a clearer message that we will support you, but if you screw us over, forget about it, you won't sell another freaking thing around here. I kind of do wish we could be more like that.
Reddit is weird at times, but I love their up vote and down vote system. I wish we could have that for each title, if we liked it, up vote it, if not, down or just neutral. Neutral isn't good or bad, but down voting is bad.
I think if we want to see this steady increase in quality of our audio games like we've begun to see here in 2018, what we need to do is raise the bar a bit. What I mean by this is to not give attention to games that don't really deserve it. If we can collectively raise the bar, people will see that if they post shoddy work here, it won't get any attention, they'll either have to put some real effort in, or leave the arena, as it were.
Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
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