The 2014 In Review Contest [Reviews: 97]

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Feenicks
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Post by Feenicks »

Breaking news: some people find one-note parodies and casual racism unfunny. Who'd have thought?
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charbile
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Post by charbile »

msw188,

It's a fair response. There's a few silly ohr games I enjoy without shame, but can understand if other people don't like them. I suppose it's just harder for me to get into gameplay if the context is dumb, crass, or embarrassing as you say.

The main problem with its battles, and a lot of amateur hour devs get this wrong so it might not be as big a deal to people used to it, is that there needs to be a reason for randoms beyond stretching the playtime. In the readme, the author mentions it's pointless to level up as you don't get much, which kinda means battles are pointless.

Pheonix,
:angel:
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Post by charbile »

my friendly ranger,

It's sincere. I can see how it seems like i'm being silly, but am calling out your review cause it's fun to have a dialogue, not reviewing in a vacuum. And I feel bad for asking because after I posted that, someone had to show me Fnrrf's blog where he explains some of his reasoning for things. Would have been cool if he would have responded so I could get a bingo slot (guys it's just mindless fun, don't feel intimidated!)

I get the reference humor, and agree it can be funny. Farts can be funny. The point was more to acknowledge that that's all it is, and that perhaps the crass stuff can maybe just might be too much to ignore to enjoy that. I know it can be amusing to see a wholesome brand icon turned into a monster, like Cap'n Crunch, but mix that in with the larger context? How much of the game do you have to dismiss to enjoy it?

Political correctness is about censoring what you think offends a group of people, instead of debating it. I think you're attributing to the game the quality of fighting this to somehow write off what we all freely admit is really dumb about it. Do you actually think putting a darth vader helmet on someone or naming them Captain Racist makes for great caricatures? And more importantly, was that mr pointless supposed to be a caricature of me cause it's hilarious if someone can get that mad over who knows.

Will paste some insight that kinda confirms what I'm trying to say:

---

*link removed by request - let me know if you'd like for me to remove all criticism too*

Chapter 3 was pretty much made up as I went along, with the only definite "decided beforehand" bits being "haunted house" and "Schnee joins at the end." Schnee's name wasn't even decided until right before she introduces herself, actually!

I had already shifted away from using Nebozu in the game before I had started working on the first few chapters, so I needed new bad guys, and I figured throwing in some political figures I didn't like (and who also happen to be easily spoofable) would fit the game overall pretty well.

It was also around this time that the prison that would go on to be featured in Chapter 5 got its name: Pukadonna Federal Penitentiary, named after the word "pukadontics" which was used as a word-filter for "pwnage" (I think?) on the Super Walrus Land forums a while back.

As I couldn't really justify Ronald McDonald being some sort of optional superboss on the level of the one required for this area, I ended up deciding on slipping in a reference to some of my own games (mainly the still-unreleased Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School) instead--the group of optional bosses ended up being the Swarm rather than residents of McDonaldland, with their leader being evil alien queen Bridget rather than evil fast food clown Ronald.


---

It really is that kind of game. And level of commentary. If ever there was a game that could get the comedic encyclopedia dramatica treatment, this would be it. Makes it a funny game in that sense, can give it that.

The review stands. Can use this as a supplemental captains log :hurr:
Last edited by charbile on Thu Jan 29, 2015 5:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by charbile »

Invasion... of the Mantle Dwellers!!!

Really tried to get into this but when I casted a cure spell on my character, it missed.

A cure spell missed.

And I died.

The author seems like a nice guy and wants feedback. Here goes...

The intro was fine for setting up the plot. By dragging it on past that, repeating the setup through several encounters without adding anything new, it can bore a player. The base conflict is good, now you need the B plot, C plot, and so on to keep interest. Things need to happen. Tighten maps, plot, text boxes, all of it.

Wandering Hamster is a great game to study and emulate when learning the engine. The problem is that since most everyone starts there, all the little things about it become easy to spot to anyone who has played at least a few ohr games. Things like, and you took this to an amusing extreme, putting random battles a few tiles off the gray path in town.

This doesn't mean you need to add in lots of scripts or be different for the sake of being different. A lot of times those things don't help either. What's important is shifting your perspective from what's new and interesting to you, to the perspective of the player playing your game, with a focus on keeping their attention. It's hard, takes effort. And I can't blame you if it's too much and you'd rather stay at the same level a lot of users do. It's a fun engine to play with.

Though you probably mean to comment on what I liked. The character portraits were such an odd style, found it interesting. I like the idea of a hedge maze. It was a beautiful sunset at sea.
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FnrrfYgmSchnish
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

I wasn't going to reply to any of this. There's no point. And I appreciate that there's differences in opinions here and all, but why did people have to jump in to defend Okédoké? (If anyone had asked my opinion before doing that, I would've told them to just leave it alone... these things feed off of attention, just ignore it and it'll go away...)

But I am definitely not okay with people publicly posting links to my blog here, or passing links to it around behind the scenes like what seems to have been going on at some point. That last part, specifically, reminds me of some pretty slimy stuff from many, many years in the past that I'd rather not be reminded of.

Please remove that bit from your post.
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Post by Gizmog »

Fnrrrf:
I wish you'd reconsider on the blog. It was a very good post-mortem that explained and confirmed a lot of things about the game. Knowing that the reason the first part feels so disconnected is because there was no long-term plan is valuable insight into game design and a lesson to learn from! Nobody else makes long games like this and sure as hell no one else documents the process, your OkeDoke articles were game design gold. If you didn't want people to know more about OkeDoke, why did you ever post it to start with? Quit acting like a crazy person and realize your thoughts have merit.

Pepsi:
I don't think anyone's going to seriously argue that things should be politically correct or that Blazing Saddles wasn't a fantastic movie. The thing about Blazing Saddles though, is that we're in on the joke. From the very start it's established that the black characters are not dumb dirty slimes of color but are instead wily human beings with merit. The scene where the railroad crew asks them to sing a song, expecting a spiritual or Camptown Races and get Cole Porter in response is a beautiful example of this. The Sheriff is Bugs Bunny to the racists Elmer Fudd. It's also interesting how it avoids becoming racist in favor of blacks through the tolerance of the Gene Wilder character and through themes of equality rather than superiority.

Compare that to OkeDoke, where we see from the very first town on that these racist thoughts about Mexicans are more or less true. Had El Garbanzo's hometown been a rich cultural tapestry, selling homemade burritos with love, ice cold cerveza and artisan tequila as healing items, it would've been funny when he goes to America and finds that Taco Bell, Dos Equis and Corona serve the same function. We'd be in on the joke, laughing at how that works rather than just taking it for granted that the Mexicans are a mysterious and flatulent people.

The obvious comparison is Speedy Gonzales. The original intent, one could argue, is quite racist. Mexicans are so lazy and slow, wouldn't it be funny if one of them was really really fast? The problem (for racists) is that kids aren't that abstract. All they see is a funny fast mouse. Warner Brothers was ashamed of Speedy for a long time, but when you see him now he still has the accent he still has the speed and you'd never think in a million years he was racist. Mexicans and regular children alike look up to him as a role model and spokesman for fair play.

As far as OkeDoke's comedic compass goes, the girl who speaks Goat is probably the most well-intentioned joke. The reason it's so funny, in my opinion, is because you aren't expecting it. Just like in Airplane when June Cleaver starts speaking jive. I'm still not sure why OkeDoke wants me to think a 6 year old girl pooping herself to death is funny. For the Pop Culture references, I think they would be funnier if they weren't so super-saturated. Mountain Dew, Spicy Chicken, Captain Crunch, Geico Lizards, it's like he's trying to start his own version of We Didn't Start The Fire. I would've been able to laugh harder at Captain Crunch if he were a stand-alone character, but where every gangleader was some kind of a reference (TMNT,Geico,Capn Crunch, I know I'm forgetting a couple) the joke's worn out by the time you get to him. The lesser jokes in that town weigh down the good one. Even outside of the humor department, I remember bein frustrated in my first playthrough to have to be fighting more ghosts at a haunted house after there'd already been a ghost town level. Variety isn't the spice of life for nothin!

Maybe I missed something in Mountain Dew town, but it didn't seem like it was very well established that this was a town who valued Mountain Dew above all else. There could've been more signs and logos, just gone all out at how important Mountain Dew was to this town, the same way some towns idolize strawberries or apple dumplings or whatnot. That could've been more funny than a town that just so happens to be out of the soft drink at a time when you need it most.

Ultimately, I do agree with your central point that Charbile should review the game itself and lay bare its design flaws in a way that we all can understand. Reviewing your review or reviewing Fnrrf's excellent post-mortem debriefing of his own game can only go so far, and by teasing that he COULD address actual design problems but not doing it he's being kind of an slimehole. And we all could cut James Doppler a little slack. For as bad as screwing a woman so hard that she needs to abuse prescription painkillers was, the bit at the end with the drug dealer's girlfriend giving birth to a baby with a wizard beard was top-notch.

This is the kind of thing I like to see about the Review Contest, and I hope nobody is taking it too violently or seriously on either side. Serious, passionate discussion about OHR Games. Its only by having strong opinions and arguing them to the death that we can sharpen ourselves as game designers and become stronger for the effort. It's a shame that it's always our best games that get dragged through the wringer like this (and a shame Fnrrrf is one of the few who consistently makes games large enough to have an opinion about), but there's not as much to learn or discuss about disposable contest games that are more likely to get flushed down the toilet than revisited by their authors.

We could never sustain a discussion about Carcere Vicis, for instance, because you can always fall back and say "Oh, it's a contest game" and because we know TMC and MasterK were a random collab team and are never gonna even look at each other again. We can never sustain a discussion about Megaman Sprite Game because "Oh, it's just a joke" and because Brotoad's blog is even more controversial than Fnrrf's. The one thing that I personally hope Fnrrf would take away from this is that he made a game that's worthy of discussion. It's not all good discussion, but any discussion is good discusssion.
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Post by JSH357 »

Ramble Planet

Well, it tried. I was fairly engaged with this game for about fifteen minutes, exploring around looking for things I could actually interact with, but fatigue set in after the next half hour. The concept is solid--you're a guy trying to find some ship parts. I think that the game would have suffered by having actual combat since the focus is entirely on exploration, so the lack of battles is a plus here as far as I can tell. Exploration is usually a good concept to focus on in a game's design, so I had reasonable hopes that just didn't pan out during my play time.

Where Ramble Planet all falls apart is just in how obscure and freeform it is. Everything is so hard to tell apart that you are basically just randomly stabbing at things, hoping you're right unless you've been playing long enough to tell the squiggles apart. Plus, sometimes you hit teleport tiles and get sent who knows where, losing your focus. Your progression and development is also frustratingly slow--in the time I played, I never even gained a level, and I found quite a few enemies in that time. Not all games need quick gains, but I never felt like I was making any progress, so the whole experience was pretty static, just walking around single tile corridors and getting tired after a while. The color scheme also made my eyes weary.

At any moment I can queue up and play variety of adventure games that are easier for me to grasp, and all Ramble Planet really offers to compare is a weird aesthetic which, while unusual, isn't something that appeals to me. The exploration is monotonous, and all you get out of it is a text box followed by an NPC disappearing when you find something, at least as far as I could tell. I think I would have liked this better if I could tell what was going on visually, but even then I'm not entirely sure the game would be engaging enough to complete. It doesn't seem like a terrible game, but just not one I could see myself spending any more time on.

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1. Megaman Sprite Game
2. Slimeomancy
3. Zero: Secret Pasts Collide
4. Dungeon Cards
5. Samanthuel's Lovely Home
6. Ramble Planet
7. Okedoke
8. James Doppler's Epic Sci-Fi Fantasy Quest of Space Time Adventure for the Mind
9. Batman & Robin
10. Carcere Vicis
11. The Pumpkin Warriors
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Post by msw188 »

charbile wrote:The main problem with its battles, and a lot of amateur hour devs get this wrong so it might not be as big a deal to people used to it, is that there needs to be a reason for randoms beyond stretching the playtime. In the readme, the author mentions it's pointless to level up as you don't get much, which kinda means battles are pointless.
I disagree. The point of battles is to provide the danger of dying. Random battles accomplish this via attrition. This is why I said "need for resource management" in my reasoning for enjoying the game. There's also that clever little area where you need to steal keys from random battle jailers to explore the map more.
Fnnrf wrote:why did people have to jump in to defend Okédoké?
Yeah I know it looks like that, but I feel it was more about defending my own opinion and enjoyment of the game, rather than the game itself. Charbile made an exaggeration along the lines of "only people with crappy sense of humor can like this game" or something, and specifically asked for answers. So I answered him. If for some reason you really don't want people talking about your game, I'll stop I guess.

As a general reply, especially to some of Gizmog's points, I'm just going to say again (I'm pretty sure I've said this every year) that this review contest is my new favorite thing about this forum. I'm getting too busy (too old?) to spend much time playing or making games with the OHR. But I still like thinking about them, and reading other people's thoughts about them. And I like having discussion like this too - definitely no negative feelings on any of this on my end.
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Post by Feenicks »

msw188 wrote:I disagree. The point of battles is to provide the danger of dying. Random battles accomplish this via attrition.
I'm going to go out on a limb and take the few minutes of going through the wrongside as a test for the rest of the game... but I could just run away from every single random battle I got into, no questions asked, and with no damage taken by enemies acting before me (I'm going to assume this changes as the game goes on). When okedoke gives such pathetic rewards from random battles that simply not fighting them is given as a viable option from the creator himself, why bother?

I get the whole 'run away from battles you're not capable of fighting yet' thing, but there should at least be some disincentive to not fighting the things, beyond not getting any spoils from battle. Final Fantasy IV docks you increasingly large amounts of money if you run from battle immediately. A lot of turn-based games have the risk of not being able to run away, leading to enemies being able to take pot shots on you as well as just losing a turn. Harpy game, to be lame and use my own thing, docks your speed by 10, giving most enemies the chance to get an attack in anyway. Okedoke provides a lot of incentive to running away (no damage, get to keep your items and skills for a later point) and a whole lot of disincentive to sticking around to fight (paltry rewards, not much gains to leveling up anyway), which just seems all sorts of backwards to me.
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Post by Spoonweaver »

I personally thought OkeDoke was a really racist game. I'm not sure why people think it's anymore ok to have a game full of mexican racial slurs than a game full of black racial slurs. However, that alone doesn't stop the game from being great. The game has random cameos from cartoon characters instead of a plot and farts instead of spells. These things also aren't what stop the game from being good either.

My main complaint, and I wasn't going to say this originally because I don't think it will help the developer, is that the game expects too much of the player. You're thrown into a massive town FULL of nooks and crannys and have to basically explore the whole thing to move on. The level of complexity in the towns is higher than a lot of commercial games. This seems like a good thing, but it's actually not. Towns are generally boring and players want to venture out into the wilderness. There's also the battles, they're long, sometimes, epic length. There's also the resource management, it cuts things kinda tight.

Normally these are the sorts of things you'd want in a game, but it's not the case here. We're not the audience for that. Indie game players tend to give a game about 10-15 minutes of their time. Which, considering the nature of most indie games, is very generous. OkeDoke is a game that in my opinion isn't able to interest a player past that first 10-15 minutes thus the fact that it's long and drawn out work against it. Also, this type of town complexity, as well as the drawn out battles and resource management, don't match the nature of the game at all. Which is why the comments of the game's crassness come front and center.
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Post by charbile »

No, I'm not making an exaggeration about needing a crappy sense of humor. I'm just saying it's questionable.

I think the jokes could work if the author was making fun of other authors who do these one note parodies. For example, I guess he thinks the border patrol is racist, so he calls them racist, and knowing that, by itself, is a pretty shallow delivery, he makes them pop culture to somehow elevate things. I could name what would make it a parody, but I doubt anyone else can, because it's not what you found funny (if you did) and I don't think that's why he chose it given it wasn't the punchline or even hinted at.

Or maybe the joke is meta to the extreme. Like dude, maybe we are the dumb americans who see the power rangers and go DUDE! look, it's the power rangers! and we laugh like idiots getting fat drinking dew gamer fuel, and go to sleep that night thinking what a strong point was made and that it sure is fun filling a game with racial stereotypes and then calling people we don't like racists, it's not embarrassing to be a hypocrite, may as well throw in the kkk, it's art and not propaganda, and in response dress me up like hitler, put me in your game, and you've not only made me look like a racist idiot, you've also made a hilarious parody in the process cause i'm totally acting like hitler--he was a mean guy and it's mean when someone disagrees with you, that's just the essence of why people dislike him.

Damn guys, it's that easy. I think we should continue to study this game and emulate everything about it. Except the part where we talk about it in our blog. God forbid, people might read things we post to the internet.

For Okedoke 2, you can play as females (make sure McBoobs is one of them) and when you try to get into the man's world, the misogynistic power rangers cock block you! ha ha ha ha ha and then there's a street war between coke and pepsi, and you side with pepsi cause the coke polar bear is evil! ha ha ha ha ha and then you find sonic the hedgehog in jail ha ha ha :|
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Post by The Wobbler »

How will Fluttershy factor into this theoretical Okedokken 2? I like where this is going.
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Post by charbile »

I guess I should feel ashamed for feeling ashamed playing these games and wanting to pretend like I haven't. And you'd also be right to say the only valid school of criticism is to never look outside a work, even if the work references things outside of itself.

Wub a lub a dub dub, wobbler.
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Post by The Wobbler »

I didn't read any of that, what are we talking about again? Which horse is Frbrrff?
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Post by Urkelbot666 »

The Wobbler wrote:How will Fluttershy factor into this theoretical Okedokken 2? I like where this is going.
Hahaha! Don Dokken better be an unlockable character!
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