[HEADING=2]So, who in Sam Hill is Mat Dickie?[/HEADING]
Mat Dickie is a man from somewhere in America, who develops freeware games on his own. He does it to show his belief that man is capable of much more than we currently do, particularly in the realms of video games.
[HEADING=2]Amazing; a young indie developer who creates freeware games with a message. How have I not heard of him?[/HEADING]
Because he has the artistic and technical ability of roadkill.
Mat Dickie, born some year that I can't find, is as stated above, a solo game designer. He has created countless freeware games for Android, Windows, Apple IOS, and many other platforms, over the course of the many years he has been making these games.
In order to demonstrate his incompitence, and list his failures that are always present:
a)His games shut themselves off by crashing themselves. Deliberately.
b)He has the art skills that I had when I was 3. And I was a slow baby.
c)He's made a prison simulator, a religious retelling/edutainment game, a deserted island sim, a reservation booking sim, a rock band sim, a war game sim, and many others, with the engine of a wrestling game sim, that he probably made in a few hours tops.
d)He composes his own music. To his credit, it's not THAT bad. To his discredit, it makes everything else stand out even more. And it's not even that good in the first place.
e)He has released a game and a mod of it as a establisher and as a sequel; they tell the tales of the Christian religion and Islamic religion. What really sad is that he actually gets a few things right. And he treats the Islamic modification about as sensitively as he treats your eyes (what, with his revolutionary art skills)
f)The menu controls are awful. I'm serious. I had to start a new game on one of his games because I couldn't find out which button was "yes".
So, I'm going to review his three best known games here: Wrestling Revolution, Hard Time, and The You Testament. I'll start with Hard Time because it was the middle of the line in terms of "I want to eat molten sand, and end up as a jagged mass of flesh as the melting glass inside me solidifies and destroys me from the inside". You know, that feeling. Or at least, you will.
[HEADING=2]Hard Time[/HEADING]
So, you make a character. Choices are pretty limited; in one version of the game, you can pick your sex (because 1:6, 1 being female, and 6 being male, not a problem, especially not in prison) but in the "heavyweight" version you can't.
There is some customisation when it comes to gameplay, though. You can pick your stats, Strength, Intelligence and Agility, each of which have a function in the prison, and there are 15 levels of crime; I... I can't exactly state my opinion on why I disagree with our friend here's judgement of how serious these crimes are without this review being quietly taken down, and my account with it, but... it's a tad.. um...
Anyway, you're always sentenced to 61 days (always. Even if you're a terrorist, rapist, murderer, drug dealer and child abuser all rolled into one) and you're immediately forced into gameplay. I'd post pictures, but you wouldn't want to see them/ Really. I could make quick sketches - and although I can only draw on an acceptable level, I'm not an artist, mind you - it'd still look better than the shit that there would be.
First problems: You're faster than the camera. Even if you lower the agility on your character to the bare minimum (20, I think) you still outrun the camera. Items don't have a use button; pick something up, you use it.. maybe being written in a wrestling game engine attributes itself to that. You also can't carry anything. So, carrying a concealed knife into the shower to shank a ************ would be cool, and the only reason to play this sack of shit, is impossible.
The room is also huge and bare. Remember Oggy and The Cockroaches? Remember how that style of hugeness and proportion gave it a sense of surreality, almost crushing loneliness that sets a contrast against the wacky things that ARE happening? Not here. Here, it just sucks. Reminds you that it was storyboarded, modeled and textured by someone who considers drool on a paper to be their masterpiece.
You also have your own room in a wing. You'll also encounter the problem that NPCs can't transition zones. All of your cellmates are here, and they'll always be giving you threats that they're going to pogostick you when you least expect it all the time. You also can't go up the stairs without having to grab someone and throw them down. So, bad programming is what makes this game what it is.
Also.. the prison system itself. Gaurds don't care what you do. Kill a man? Better go back to bed, nobody'll know. They even give you jobs, so you get money, so you can hire people to kill other people. ..What would prisoners DO with money? Why are the gaurds... why do they just leave their pistols around? Why is the prison so... unsecure? Why are inmates just allowed to do what the fuck they want? Go to the exercise yard, soak up the sun, leave a shivering, terrified man, beaten up, quivering a pool of his own terror-induced piss with a half-melted, improvised shank stuck in one of his buttcheeks, whatever. They don't care. If you're particularly cunning, you can find them alkne, and kill them. Yes, you can pick them off ONE BY ONE and nobody notices.
A good idea. But MDickie did it first; now nobody who actually has any talent can do it now. Because that's the rule of indie game development: No matter how good it is, it's just a crappy rip off.
[HEADING=2]The You Testament[/HEADING][sup]Yeah, you read that right.[/sup]
TYT is MDickie's grandest work, and his "last".. not actually, he still throws out his shit all over the place, for random passers by to find and share it on twitter.
The You Testament is kind of like the New Testament but with you. It's also completely twisted, skewing everything the testament had to say, to incorporate the player instead of the disciples to "create a more interactive experience". Also, you can kick the shit out of Jesus and he'll threaten to kill you. And you can learn mystical powers, like fireballs, invisibility, conjuring, and...
I don't even want to talk about this one. It's also his worst; thousands of lines of code, and not one of them work. Tons of textures, and none of them look good. So many bugs, glitches, and simple oversights; this game proves it. MDickie has literally never played one of his games, and he never hires anyone to test play them. MDickie is a talentless, lazy bastard who will continue to make shitty games for all of eternity.
It also handles religion about as sensitively as Swollen Testicle Syndrome handles its victim's sperm count.
[HEADING=2]Wrestling Revolution[/HEADING][sup]Just get a WWE game, it's better[/sup]
Wrestling Revolution is actually almost decent. It's got a few good ideas (what if... a wrestling agmae was an RPG?) but it doesn't give enough focus on the bits that need focus. You can make a character, with a suprisingly very vast bunch of options, from masks to... foot size (no, not both feet, just one) and many others. And, ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
Bully Demise!
The fighting is simple: strong attack, weak attack, grapple attack, chainable attack; running attack, running strong attack, jumping attack, down attack. Standard wrestling game stuff. You get in the ring, you beat the person of aindetermble gender up, then you sit on them for a few seconds. The most interseting part of the combat is that you're sometimes able to pick up two enemies at once and do a piledrive on both of them at once.
Outside of the ring, you can manage your character: You can train, which is only reccomended when you want to lose out of sheer exhaustion, and you can manage your character's appearance. You can also view your contract, your gimmicks (you can bring a gun into the ring... but you can't use it, aw... IN the ring, yah!... But it costs $2000 a week... aww...) and other things that stop being interesting.
It's buggy, not fun, wasted potential, a generally idotic experience, and an ugly one at that. The framerate does whatever the fuck it wants, the enemy AI, as expected, is about as intelligent as it is in inverse proportion to how artificial it is (IE, there is no AI. It just does stuff. Same with The You Testament and Hard Time; it's hard to call an AI. Because you have to be at gunpoint for someone to convince you to). The funnest part of the game is how damn short is can be.
Also, the interface is fucked up as hell. How do you accept a contract, and thus get money to pay for your expensive drug habits? God knows. Infact, it took me a new savegame to figure out how... and I completely forget, probably with alcohol and alcoholic wipes.
Also, the ref is about as competent as the fighters. The art is, again, really ugly. Everybody's got traps as wide as their very disproportional thighs, always has the same, awkward pose, and there's no "gender" slide... as in, you can make a man or a woman and it can be mistaken for the other.
So, what's the gist of it? Well, you're in wrestling school, and you've got 16 weeks to find a contract. FOr a while, it's actually pretty fun; just mute your speakers and cover your tv in sticky notes, and it's bareable. Then the shit kicks in. Then it gets repetetive. And dull. And... buuurgghh
[HEADING=2]So, in the end?[/HEADING]
I could have spent the time I used to play these games seeing how fast it takes for an Ouya to hit the ground from a third-story building.
captcha: what planet are we on?
Mat Dickie is a man from somewhere in America, who develops freeware games on his own. He does it to show his belief that man is capable of much more than we currently do, particularly in the realms of video games.
[HEADING=2]Amazing; a young indie developer who creates freeware games with a message. How have I not heard of him?[/HEADING]
Because he has the artistic and technical ability of roadkill.
Mat Dickie, born some year that I can't find, is as stated above, a solo game designer. He has created countless freeware games for Android, Windows, Apple IOS, and many other platforms, over the course of the many years he has been making these games.
In order to demonstrate his incompitence, and list his failures that are always present:
a)His games shut themselves off by crashing themselves. Deliberately.
b)He has the art skills that I had when I was 3. And I was a slow baby.
c)He's made a prison simulator, a religious retelling/edutainment game, a deserted island sim, a reservation booking sim, a rock band sim, a war game sim, and many others, with the engine of a wrestling game sim, that he probably made in a few hours tops.
d)He composes his own music. To his credit, it's not THAT bad. To his discredit, it makes everything else stand out even more. And it's not even that good in the first place.
e)He has released a game and a mod of it as a establisher and as a sequel; they tell the tales of the Christian religion and Islamic religion. What really sad is that he actually gets a few things right. And he treats the Islamic modification about as sensitively as he treats your eyes (what, with his revolutionary art skills)
f)The menu controls are awful. I'm serious. I had to start a new game on one of his games because I couldn't find out which button was "yes".
So, I'm going to review his three best known games here: Wrestling Revolution, Hard Time, and The You Testament. I'll start with Hard Time because it was the middle of the line in terms of "I want to eat molten sand, and end up as a jagged mass of flesh as the melting glass inside me solidifies and destroys me from the inside". You know, that feeling. Or at least, you will.
[HEADING=2]Hard Time[/HEADING]
So, you make a character. Choices are pretty limited; in one version of the game, you can pick your sex (because 1:6, 1 being female, and 6 being male, not a problem, especially not in prison) but in the "heavyweight" version you can't.
There is some customisation when it comes to gameplay, though. You can pick your stats, Strength, Intelligence and Agility, each of which have a function in the prison, and there are 15 levels of crime; I... I can't exactly state my opinion on why I disagree with our friend here's judgement of how serious these crimes are without this review being quietly taken down, and my account with it, but... it's a tad.. um...
Anyway, you're always sentenced to 61 days (always. Even if you're a terrorist, rapist, murderer, drug dealer and child abuser all rolled into one) and you're immediately forced into gameplay. I'd post pictures, but you wouldn't want to see them/ Really. I could make quick sketches - and although I can only draw on an acceptable level, I'm not an artist, mind you - it'd still look better than the shit that there would be.
First problems: You're faster than the camera. Even if you lower the agility on your character to the bare minimum (20, I think) you still outrun the camera. Items don't have a use button; pick something up, you use it.. maybe being written in a wrestling game engine attributes itself to that. You also can't carry anything. So, carrying a concealed knife into the shower to shank a ************ would be cool, and the only reason to play this sack of shit, is impossible.
The room is also huge and bare. Remember Oggy and The Cockroaches? Remember how that style of hugeness and proportion gave it a sense of surreality, almost crushing loneliness that sets a contrast against the wacky things that ARE happening? Not here. Here, it just sucks. Reminds you that it was storyboarded, modeled and textured by someone who considers drool on a paper to be their masterpiece.
You also have your own room in a wing. You'll also encounter the problem that NPCs can't transition zones. All of your cellmates are here, and they'll always be giving you threats that they're going to pogostick you when you least expect it all the time. You also can't go up the stairs without having to grab someone and throw them down. So, bad programming is what makes this game what it is.
Also.. the prison system itself. Gaurds don't care what you do. Kill a man? Better go back to bed, nobody'll know. They even give you jobs, so you get money, so you can hire people to kill other people. ..What would prisoners DO with money? Why are the gaurds... why do they just leave their pistols around? Why is the prison so... unsecure? Why are inmates just allowed to do what the fuck they want? Go to the exercise yard, soak up the sun, leave a shivering, terrified man, beaten up, quivering a pool of his own terror-induced piss with a half-melted, improvised shank stuck in one of his buttcheeks, whatever. They don't care. If you're particularly cunning, you can find them alkne, and kill them. Yes, you can pick them off ONE BY ONE and nobody notices.
A good idea. But MDickie did it first; now nobody who actually has any talent can do it now. Because that's the rule of indie game development: No matter how good it is, it's just a crappy rip off.
[HEADING=2]The You Testament[/HEADING][sup]Yeah, you read that right.[/sup]
TYT is MDickie's grandest work, and his "last".. not actually, he still throws out his shit all over the place, for random passers by to find and share it on twitter.
The You Testament is kind of like the New Testament but with you. It's also completely twisted, skewing everything the testament had to say, to incorporate the player instead of the disciples to "create a more interactive experience". Also, you can kick the shit out of Jesus and he'll threaten to kill you. And you can learn mystical powers, like fireballs, invisibility, conjuring, and...
I don't even want to talk about this one. It's also his worst; thousands of lines of code, and not one of them work. Tons of textures, and none of them look good. So many bugs, glitches, and simple oversights; this game proves it. MDickie has literally never played one of his games, and he never hires anyone to test play them. MDickie is a talentless, lazy bastard who will continue to make shitty games for all of eternity.
It also handles religion about as sensitively as Swollen Testicle Syndrome handles its victim's sperm count.
[HEADING=2]Wrestling Revolution[/HEADING][sup]Just get a WWE game, it's better[/sup]
Wrestling Revolution is actually almost decent. It's got a few good ideas (what if... a wrestling agmae was an RPG?) but it doesn't give enough focus on the bits that need focus. You can make a character, with a suprisingly very vast bunch of options, from masks to... foot size (no, not both feet, just one) and many others. And, ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
Bully Demise!
The fighting is simple: strong attack, weak attack, grapple attack, chainable attack; running attack, running strong attack, jumping attack, down attack. Standard wrestling game stuff. You get in the ring, you beat the person of aindetermble gender up, then you sit on them for a few seconds. The most interseting part of the combat is that you're sometimes able to pick up two enemies at once and do a piledrive on both of them at once.
Outside of the ring, you can manage your character: You can train, which is only reccomended when you want to lose out of sheer exhaustion, and you can manage your character's appearance. You can also view your contract, your gimmicks (you can bring a gun into the ring... but you can't use it, aw... IN the ring, yah!... But it costs $2000 a week... aww...) and other things that stop being interesting.
It's buggy, not fun, wasted potential, a generally idotic experience, and an ugly one at that. The framerate does whatever the fuck it wants, the enemy AI, as expected, is about as intelligent as it is in inverse proportion to how artificial it is (IE, there is no AI. It just does stuff. Same with The You Testament and Hard Time; it's hard to call an AI. Because you have to be at gunpoint for someone to convince you to). The funnest part of the game is how damn short is can be.
Also, the interface is fucked up as hell. How do you accept a contract, and thus get money to pay for your expensive drug habits? God knows. Infact, it took me a new savegame to figure out how... and I completely forget, probably with alcohol and alcoholic wipes.
Also, the ref is about as competent as the fighters. The art is, again, really ugly. Everybody's got traps as wide as their very disproportional thighs, always has the same, awkward pose, and there's no "gender" slide... as in, you can make a man or a woman and it can be mistaken for the other.
So, what's the gist of it? Well, you're in wrestling school, and you've got 16 weeks to find a contract. FOr a while, it's actually pretty fun; just mute your speakers and cover your tv in sticky notes, and it's bareable. Then the shit kicks in. Then it gets repetetive. And dull. And... buuurgghh
[HEADING=2]So, in the end?[/HEADING]
I could have spent the time I used to play these games seeing how fast it takes for an Ouya to hit the ground from a third-story building.
captcha: what planet are we on?