Weekly Game Talk: C. Kane

I wasn't meaning to imply it wasn't a result of his talent and hard work, without that talent and hard work there wouldn't be attention. I do think the relationship to the movie helped, I think it gives it a certain headline factor that does lead to good exposure. That's NOT a bad thing or an insult to Surlaw or you in any way.

Ever since the Android ports there's been a renewed interest in this kind of mainstream or semi-commercial success for OHR games. If we're going to talk about OHR games and where they failed and where they succeeded, I think it's only fair to also discuss the ways they alienated or wowed their potential audiences. There's a lot of entries on our gamelist that do nothing to convince me to play them, and I'm an easily amused dude with way too much time on his hands. That's something that should be criticized, to help people make their games as inviting as possible.

C. Kane was a MAJOR success in that department, and I think determining *ALL* of the factors that lead to that is a worthy cause for everyone. I hope it won't derail the discussion of the game itself because it is such a good game, and again, without having a good game to back it up all the exposure in the world means nothing. I'm not trying to take anything away from you or Surlaw, because you both knocked this thing clear out of the ballpark. Just trying to figure out what leads to success and what doesn't.

No, no. Please don't misunderstand me. I have absolutly NO problems with anything you said. Actually, we are on the same page, here. The only thing I was reacting to was Spoonweaver's comment. Sorry if I was less than clear.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game for the 1.5 hours it took for me to finish it. The music, almost unendurably terrible (on purpose, of course) while also extremely hilarious, really grew on me. Especially the World Map music. I also love script writing where every 'hero' character is completely awful and morally bankrupt, in a hilarious It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia kind of way.

One particularly unintuitive thing that stood out, though, was the Roboshark battle. Since the correct strategy to beat him took several (like at least 5-6 IIRC) casts of the same debuff spell before you could see any difference on the damage you were doing, it felt very vague. I actually opened the game in CUSTOM to see Roboshark's stats -- initially I thought he had near-immunity to every damage type and it was going to be a Metal Slime type battle, when in fact he just had gobs of DEF that needed to be gradually shaved off. Would've been more intuitive if it had only taken 2-3 casts before noticeable damage could be dealt, and he had more HP to compensate, IMO.

Other than that, the game was enjoyable start to finish. I'm in agreement with previous posts that it strikes a good balance between a tongue in cheek "joke game" and a tightly designed miniature length RPG.

heh, I figured that would get people stirred up.


Oh the things to be said about C. Kane.
-The graphics are a bit bland. I'm not talking about the black and white thing, I'm talking about the boxed edges on the usa, the stock photo backgrounds that don't fit in the game (at least they're B&W), the solid colored tiles, the smiley trees and the grimace mountains. The graphics aren't super bad or anything, but they are far from good. That said, I'll say that the graphics are charming in their own way.
-The music is... distracting. I left the room while in town and when I returned my girlfriend had reached over and turned the sound off because of the music. She did it mostly as a joke, but the message was clear. That said, the audio of the game does add a great deal to the game. It can be jarring at times, but it's never outright bad or anything. I think the only thing that's really wrong with any of the songs is that they are too repetitive.
-The design is overly simplistic. The world map is smaller than the town. The town on the other hand is smothered by npc's, and could stand to actually be a bit bigger. As a suggestion, I think some of these outdoor npc's should be moved indoors, not only to lessen the town traffic, but also to breath more life into the mostly empty shops (mostly empty shops, a mistep most OHR'ers, I too, step in). Overall, the game seemed like a rush job or something at times, like a 48hr game entry or something.
-The concept is the worst part of the game by far. This game reminds me of those terrible rip off movies. Movies like Transmorphers or Altantic Rim, which don't try to parody the other movie, but instead simply seek to use the other movie's popularity to boost the viewers of their own terrible movie. The fact that those movies, or this game, have nothing to do with the movie they are leeching off of is exactly the problem. If this were some sort of parody, I could see that being funny. Instead, this is a stand alone game that only has any resemblance to Citizen Kane because of a silly ploy for attention.


Most, if not all of this, is really just my opinion about the game, and I understand if you disagree.
All that silliness aside, the game is solid, complete, and I'd suggest it over most other OHR games.
6/10



@jack
post in a discussion thread. only serve to further steer the conversation towards criticizing and whining.
Brillant!

@8bit
lol, someone doesn't like your game, so they must be jealous...
jeez, a guy sort of works on a game that gets mentioned in a few articles and suddenly he's the king of france.

@Bob
There's basically two reason I don't want to extend the threads to more than a week.
First, there's already a game of the month. Granted, no one really talks about a game while it's GotM (this game being a clear exception). I suppose we could just turn this into the talk about the GotM thread, but I'd rather not. I suppose this could go bi-weekly, but even then, people would be hard pressed to really complete a lot of those longer games.
Second, I want the thread to be able to get through a ton of games. For now, the thread is focusing on games that got at least a bit of attention already, but later I'd like it to put focus on games that many people might never play otherwise.

@wobbler
As I have in the past, I only started this thread because I saw a chance of it not happening otherwise. It wasn't exactly my idea and I'm completely ok with Giz taking over actually.
And yea, sorry for posting the thread for your game late, had a busy week.

@Shadowii
You only talked about how the game is popular. Talk about the parts you liked about the game, you can't just post in a thread and say, "this game is popular, i like it"

@Giz
Your argument concerning the other games with popular movie/game titles is pretty solid. However, I have to wonder how some of those other games would fare if they were ported, or otherwise advertised more.
But clearly, the fact that this is also a complete and fairly solid designed game helped too.

@Spoonweaver

Just calling a slime a slime. I wasn't the only one who picked up on it. Try not to be so transparent.

@8bit
I understand you're a bit defensive about the game.
But I'd rather not fill the thread up with a flame war.
If you'd like you talk about it, please pm me or come on IRC or something. Otherwise, let's just drop the silly name calling, ok?

I think the best part about splitting the weekly game talk by specific threads is to give stragglers the chance to add their thoughts to a discussion, even after the majority of the community has moved on. As the author of one of these featured games, I would love to receive additional feedback about ideas that haven't been previously discussed, even if the main focus is on another game. I'm sure JSH feels the same way. Starting Monday, I'm sure The Wobbler will feel the same way.

I think the best thing you can do for this series is to keep it weekly, but remind players which games have been featured already and remind them that discussion doesn't have to close if they have some afterthoughts to share.

That's my thought on the matter.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Spoonman, most of your points there are legit and thanks for going into actual detail.

But as for the concept, I feel like a jerk saying this but you didn't "get" the game. It isnt meant to be a parody or a rip off of the film. It's satire of gamer culture, from it's awful reduction of the women in the game to the Dew jokes to the RPG cliches to the last minute out of nowhere villain. As far as specifics go, it spoofs Final Fantasy more than anythjng else.

Moreover, the main point is to satirize the massive movement in games journalism to find "the citizen kane of gaming." The very concept is a dumb desperation to legitimize games for people who dont like them and misses the point of Kane's importance to film. I reacted to this movement by literally giving them what they asked for: a loud, brash, pretentious nonsense story that's faux intellectual. And full of poop jokes.

It's also a joke on bad, nonsense translations that often happen when movies become games. The result in those cases is 99 percent inaccurate gibberish. C Kane makes fun of that.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

@Pepsi:
Good point. Thankfully, the format is already set up for all this so nothing really needs to change. I suppose, I could link to the old threads in the current threads.
Also, I guess I should date the threads, so people know the old threads are old, even if they got bumped recently.


@8bit:
sigh...
Getting people stirred up, and having people resort to name calling are 2 different things bro.
I assumed having a negative stance towards the game would get people talking, defending the game. Hence "heh, I figured that would get people stirred up."

@Wobbler:
Yea, I think some of that stemmed from being kinda egged on to write the review. Which isn't fair to the game. (I actually removed a part that was written in bad taste)

I did sort of get it, but mostly you're right.
How I kind of felt about the game's concept was... remember that whole thing that happened with the terrible game contest, where it turned into the ridiculous game contest because people were misunderstanding the nature of the contest? I feel like the game kinda of went past ridiculous and into terrible. It's like, I feel like I did get that it was meant to be silly, but I couldn't actually get past it. Which is why I found it hard to review and thus I wasn't going to.