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[twillight]

Part of the price of genious level games released was, the decline of effort and new releases, resulting in decline of quality, and what a decline it became!


Then showed up The Independent Developers. Actualy, I should've mention before this post another wave of this, but we'll be back to that.


Yahtzee created a serious of point&click adventure games. With retro-graphic, and still proved successful. He did his stuff, then I dunno, stopped?


The other was Krin, who managed to gather a large group of fans. He was part of the Flash Game Era.





Krin managed to build his fame on the Sonny 2 game, branching back&forth&sideways in time for his various projects.
Then he sorta faded out, because the promised 3rd Sonny game years afteryears of waiting failed to be developed. And after people stopped caring, the 3rd game DID come out, but was put entirely behind a paywall (previously 1 of 4 classes was only like that), and was a reboot instead of continuation, making the games he got his fame from obsolate, which pretty much killed any interest toward the guy.
Combined this with the original platform's (abandonia.com) incrisingly shitty service, straight lying, resulted that the 3rd game is now entirely free, and still none gives a shit.

[twillight]

Western Europe doesn't have a game-developing industry as far as my knowledge goes. Nationalism gets in the way, and the germans are too busy cenzoring all games on their own official market, not noticing global tendencies, like Gog and Steam where people simply shit on "no red blood" policy.


The french made some ok adventuring titles even through the 3D area (the Blair Witch Trilogy, Necronomicon, and so on), but the whole thing is pretty meh.


The Eastern part on the other hand is made of such small countries, they simply had to develop semi-internationaly, and if you lived in europe, you met with some of these titles, and they worth mention, apart they are for the most time pretty low quality, full of design-flows and so on.
One game was a pretty gem though, so let's mention Gorky 17. That's like Area 51, but in Poland or soemthing. Pretty much in the USSR area at least.





It had some pretty ok puzzles included, and just Too Much Medikit And Stuff, which means you were pretty inclined NOT to use any for a proper playthrough.
The maximum challange is of course to not be hit at all, and yes, that's possible, I've done it.

[Capo]

Guess you never heard of Cd Project

[twillight]

Originally Posted by Capo

Guess you never heard of Cd Project

Not realy.
Did my homework though, and searched for it. They have a single franchise under their name, The Witcher series.
That's not new info to my series, but I bet is a very decent game, like a couple of hundreds of titles.
I'm still glad to mention such a great famed thing from the area. Hungary did maybe some Myst-like tourism-ralted empty-town-lookaround to mention maybe (Myst was crap as fuck, I have the CD, and never played it after 30 min, I slept over the keyboard, awakened by the beeps), and half a handful probably-decent title, like S.W.I.N.E (I hated it, but was NOT crap), Imperium Galactica 2: Alliances, but I try not just to find good games, but point out turning points, or how I remember them, and show "outdated" games do better still than today's craps. Would see others' tale. Maybe their conclusion would be something else.

But hey, I found this, didn't know was hungarian, and in general forgot about it!



This was one of the very first total-obscure-mechanics game, like those "how high you canclimb up" stupid casual dumdums.

[twillight]

One thing Diablo 2 was good for to finaly remove my constant grief for the joystick. That game rly needed a megaton of buttons for control-hotkeys.


Now onto World of Warcraft. It's a piece of junk, and always was. The game-mechanic itself I betis smooth, the problem comes from another side.
Like it is an online-only game, demands an atomic reactor like Maniac Mansion in your house to run at all, and youdon't even own the game, only rent it. Fuck you. The success of it almost collapsed the entire gaming industry by the way, as EVERYONE and their mother made games online-connection only. To make it even worse, that time mostly-stable INTERNET connection was a rarity, at least weekly shutdown FOR THE INTERNET was standard. Online only my arse.





Btw, the song is pre-New 52, the Aquaman-reference is no longer valid.


Btw, I think this spinoff never got anywhere unfortunately:





Oh, and WoW degraded to panda-hugging crap.





Da fok is dat.

[twillight]

Both "games" mentioned here ar TOTAL GARBAGE. Not half-assed crap like Binding of Isaac or such, nooo. These are probably the absolute bottom of the barrel which just constitute for a "game" in a sense at all, but they're the absolute garbage.





I can't totaly be mad on Candy Crush though. It's a tetris-like online "game", which sole purpose is to take your money. Form the gazillion levels only the first handful (30-50) can be done, and those already are frustratingly RLL (reallife luck) dependent. It's bullshit.
There's no variation in the levels, aside the random cheats against you more and more, and wants you to pay $$$$$$$$$. The cherry on the top is, there's no payoff either. You go ahead on that child-book-map, and there's no ending, despite the series is at the zounded release. Ye, there is CCS1, 2, 3, zounds. and even the 1st never reach any goal.
To annoy you further, you can't even reach the final level in these craps, because afters pending literaly thousands of dollars to this nonsense, the point you'd be on Level Tom Cruise in Scientology, learning the deepest secrets of Lord Xenu, here you can be sure just add 5000 more levels to fuck with you. Because making those levels is very, very easy, just trust in on the random generator. Finishing the levels on the other hand...


And there's Clicker Heroes.






They call it 'idle gaming". The idea is YOU DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the game, and still win! It even works if you turn off your computer!
But why??? It's just... You know what? Fuck you.

[twillight]

Of course there were always plent more games. Some good, some bad, some total obscurity.


The Witcher already mentioned, still no personal experience with it:





Then there was Operation Wolf, which could have had its own entry:





Or there was Karnov, avery arcade-like game, the C64 had immensly better graphic than any other version, and it was hard as fuck, and had no idea how to play with all the optionalitems (I had the game from a shop, thank you).





Then there was Firetrap, inwhich you climed a burning building as a firestarter, and up there the FRIGGIN SUN attacked you (the C64 versionhad again way cooler graphic, but this was the only versain found footage from):





Then there was FireBUG too, which looked pretty sophisticated back then, but sucked ass hard it was:





There was this stupid-ass game too, if you manage to beat the Pharao Mask level, I'd welcome the info how:

[twillight]

The story at this point pretty much ends. There are no longer good and innovative games made.


There are some titles getting famous from time to time, like the Counter Strike series, or the Assassins' Creed Series which is pretty much a CS-variant with swords instead of guns, or Grand Theft Auto which is CS with cars, or Halo which is CS with laserguns, or the Amnesia franchise which hid behind (like almost all 3D games did back then) behind an Extra Paywall of Video Card which is not required but demanded nontheless, or such halfassed crap like the Binding of Isaac, which could have been a game for a specific audience, but the lack of good games and hearsay made it a boost, and it managed to sell the same game as three different games and a bunch of DLCs. Which is just proves the game is a fraud.


To mention there's an Eastern European company, called Larian Studios, which makes the Divinity franchise, but for all sake, I don't know how they survive, because their games though become in the end pretty decent, they are at the initial release always full of bugs to the point being unplayable, and only by years of after-release development get to the state of being worthy. And every single release they perform the same crap.
Their customer service is top notch though. And they make multi-platform releases, so you CAN play their stuff.






They are in a sense like whoever made Dink Smallwood (I think abandonia has this).





There are also some games which I'd bet are crap, but are so far from my playstlye I'm not actualy sure I even understand them. Like this glass-cannon game, whichis 99% random, that's why I suspect it's actualy trash, but even if it would not be random I'd still not play it and hate it:





A similar, but not random based game, which abhorrent feature is the time limit/limited necessary resources is:





Tells a lot that I wasn't able to find a playthrough, or anything after reaching the first town from this.


There's the Gears of War franchise, butI'm not even sure it was even made for PC, so who knows.


There was Portal, which is CS with gizmo.


Actualy, I once saw a very god snowboarding game... Dunno the title,and was some-console-only, so fuck that.


But what do we have? Sequels of sequels of the same shit.Like the entirely stupid Legend of Zelda franchise, which first actualy-good release was maybe Ocarina of Time?





That's why people still keep as treasure games such as Might and Magic 6+. Though the later installments gradualy failed. 6 was the mostopen, 7 had a way linearly forced story with timed events and the teachers, tunel-areas... And the same time was easier because of badly implemented artifact-system, and the very beatable dragon at the start which provided infinite loot.
And in 8 you were forced to play a troll (race), because you couldn't hire them in reasonable distance, and the first area was bloody hard to survive otherwise.









Oh, and let's mention all the cheap knock-off crappy games, which were all of us' guilty pleasure, because they only costed 1$, so the worth/price ratio made them not to whip ourselves for punishment. Like this piece of crap, which got released at least in Hungary WITH THE FINAL KEY NOT IN THE GAME (fortunately you could put in the level-cheatcode to get around that):





You actualy spent most of the time standing around so your HP/MP refilled. But it had absolutely solvable puzzles, so cool.



Or all the movie-based piece of trash, like Die Hard Trilogy (had 3 parts, each its owngame, and if you didn't have infinite lives you were screwed, maybe even then!):





Especialy the car-chase part was hard as fuck.


What else to say? Oh ye, therewere boardgames, like mahjong, solitare and minesweaper as windows addons, or even all kinds of chess...Archon Ultra was kinda worthy:





Oh, and again don't fall for all the hype of old games, Like Command and Conquer, the original had a mission for the good guys with a laser tower enemy and no air unite, so you were fucked for good. Oh,and no harvester, just1 very big tank (which worth not enough to destroy named tower).
Oh, and remember, this was considered "fun", and "good game so to say":





It was crap and offensive, and we knew it, but didn't have anything else. So I say, if new games do the same shit, call them shit, because they are. And don't even start me with Minecraft. It suffers the Diablo 2 Hostility Design Failure. Remember all those nice, complicated stuff people showed they builded? Fuck those! Join the game, make a fire/explosive, AND BURN THE SHIT DOWN. Ye. Friggin crap. Fuck the players right in the #&@.


There is also the problem of Breaking The Pace. Diablo 2 has this if you pick Barbarian's Find Item. Which is totaly useless, if you rly want that shit get only Find Potion to destroy corpses. It's that bad. But there's a whole game I know of which suffers from it: Abe's Exodus.





This was a very very good platformer, only 1 problem: for the True Ending you have to find more hidden places than your mom, and that should tell something. And there're no signs for them, and they're hideously frequent,and are commonly placed where there's absolutely nosense for 'em. It absolutely gamebreaking trying to find 'em all.


Oh, oh, I wanna show you a game I ragequitted. I got it dunnowhen, and could not play it for friggin many years, because originaly it only played if you plugged in friggin cables ina friggin specific ways, and only if friggin specific hardwares (CD players or shit) were also inyour coputer, and made special shit withspecial analprobes on realalien beings and shit, so Isaid fuck that. But oculdn't find what the actualy game was, because it was some 2nd grade shit, so it wasn't A, but wasn't trash either, so got shit from anyone. Then finaly got a new computer, put it in, played it for two hours or shit, then realised all my efforts for cleaning levels were wasted. Because enemies respawned. Maybe even loot (ammoand stuff), but at that point I just pissed allover that shitty shit which shitted on me. the Devil Inside. Fuck that game.





Cmpare it to Shadow Man, which had its fair share of flaws, but I made it,and was the only game I suffered mapping myself for:





That game told you whatit is, and reached to the expectations. Unlike for example Bad Mojo, which told you whatit is,but never got to the expectations:





I remember getting it from Home of the Underdogs, and after a fair share of frustration by its size, got underwhelmed by it.


Come to think of it, there was yetanother total failure juststruckmy mind: Lure of the Temptress:





It was totaly fine, UNTIL you gota company, and had to divert the attention of the alchemist, send in the company with a specific range of instructions, on a trial of error basis, with a shitton of possibilities. Result: ragequit.


And before I finish for now, Floor 13 is another offender. Sure, you can be part of The Illuminati in this game, but it relies on RL-luck entirely. You canfail ALL cases if the random doesn't like you.





Oh, andI forgot its title, was some freeware game or shareware, whatever the distinction. You played some hacker investigating after dolphins(?),and the basic method of your hacking was Random IP-search On The Whole Internet. Within the game of course, but that still had like thousands of results. Good luck with that.And to note, you could like suddenly jump to a later chapter, because its requirement was to find a specific IP. And as I said there was no restriction, or aim on your searches, just plain random on the whole database. When you realised that, you never tried that shit again.

[twillight]

With the market going downhill faster than a falling star, there came the trolling games.





Yep. These games made frustration fun. It's a weird concept, but at times can be satisfying. And yes, I know the video is not english, doesn't matter, mostly it's fuck-fuck-fuck anyway.

[twillight]

I got several of the best twohanded maxes, both unique and set (Immortal Kingl), so I have to make this comparsion.


Stuff:
- elite upped Steeldriver (found a Pul fully legit for this with my berserk baba, all items also from that character)

- IK Maul
- Windhammer


Any 2H maul with no IAS is dumpster, being too slow. 40% is ok. So while Bonesnap don't even play.
Bloodtree Stump while has probably insane damage, is very very slow, not even a Shael (20% IAS) would elevate it nice, sry.
The Black runeword alsodoes not give speed, and evenhas knockback what is annoying. Most other rws for a berserker demand hrs, so there those go.

If you'd pick Ribcracker (staff) you'd have to sacrifice Weapon Mastery, and AR is a problem untwinked.

Gravel of Pain is not good at all.
Earth Shifter is too slow for a Barbarian.
Steeldriver looks cool. The problem is, from execptional to elite variant (nightmare to hell) the base item does not get the same damage elevation as it got the first time (from normal to exceptional), what makes this, or to be honest any plain-damage item a lackluster.
The IK Maul is nice, and has 2 socket. In comparsion to Windhammer it has slightlly lower dmg, but deal way more to a crapload of enemies (undead and demon 200%, WH only has 50% undead). IK has 20% slower IAS, equal to a shael, which'd take a slot. Idealy I woudn't fill in a shael though, but a -15% req, 20-30% dmg rare jewel, and an Eth rune (-25% def from enemy).
Windhammer also has substantialy (10-15%) more Crushing Blow which is RAW DAMAGE. If I put on a Venomgrip (5% CB), and that 35% CB helm, that like a LOT (90%). In a normal play I'd craft to it a belt and boots Blood Crafted to make it 100%!