ID:1605364
 
Keywords: avalon, gm, has, i, kin, meh, reveiw
(Original was deleted as "spam" when I posted it to the game's directory)



Hub Found Here.



This is a gif, cause I didn't feel like uploading a bunch of images.



I saw this game with a lot of update posts, being gravitated by the name and idea of a taint wizard I decided to try out this game. Much like a taint, it started in a dark place, saw some light, and returned to the dark.


First Five Minutes:

The game opens up and instantly creates three windows, all of which are black, and an alert. You sit in this big black threesome for some time. The alert asks you to type in a name, and demands it be unique. Unique was taken so I became Unik. (If it were with a c instead of k, you could see my taint with ease!)

I selected to be a necromancer, who does his stuff with "psychaotic" powers, and it sounded really edgy and vague - that's what I'm all about. My first skill shot a flaming skull out of my taint. Psychaotic and radical. Upon trying to use my legs I discovered it was not WASD and W is to chat. T is to talk, F is to Fight, G is to Grab and A is for Apple. P is for Proper, K is for Key, and C is for Controls, P is also for Please.

I was told to attack random guards standing around for no particular reason, and dispatched quiet a few of them (whoever they're guarding must be an utter shit head.)

I wander over the corpses of the world's weakest guards and enter a castle where I'm greeted by someone who already knows me as "the destined one" (I didn't even have to show him my birthmark on my taint or anything.) He told me to be right at home and find Olga the oracle. To my left is "taint spirit" (aw yiss) but it turns out she's not the oracle.

I see the icons are a bit wonky and try to resize my game to discover the map is not anchored at all. I can never resize it perfectly, a true tragedy. I wander around broke as hell and unable to shop - which is done in the tab window in a conditional tab.

I finally find "Oga", can't remember if the king said Olga or if I overlooked it, anyway she identifies my magical taint birthmark and sends me off to find some guy staring at a pool of magical water. He says I have to get the skull of a slime thing and I follow a buddy of mine who had been on for a bit longer than me.

I follow him into the forest where all of the god damn spider smell my taint and attack - they can't hurt me but they're lightning fast and surrounded me so I couldn't move. I had to drop my Jainist beliefs and rekt me some spiders. They learn their lesson and don't mess with me.

We enter the fabled slime cave only to discover it is filled with god damn tourists. Slimes are totally and expectedly lightning fast and really strong, they more or less 4 hit you and as it turns out, in this multi-player game, you can't fight with others if the monster is focused on you.

We're unable to slay us a simple slime at first and we came to an in-pass where a slime blocked the way. I kicked it and gave my life so my pal could run on ahead. He wandered some more and exited the cave before being "killed by a bee".



Reaction:

I expected I would have to kill some more spiders to kill some slimes but really don't feel like it. The combat is boring as all hell. Hit F key while facing a monster(or not, standing by it counts) - fighting those spiders was just me standing in one spot hitting F.

The game feels both unpolished and poorly executed. There seems to be some sort of story and quest-line but not a defined control scheme. Besides the control scheme the triple window interface makes no real sense. Tabs are really outdated and switching between them for shopping, techniques backpack and stats seems silly.

Those things could easily be interface elements over the map (like a grid for pack/shop/skills and a label for stats) or even on-screen objects. The output could also be semi-transparent and over the map as-well, it has been done before and makes more sense than having a totally detached window.


Personally, the presentation of the game feels the most lacking, and it's things that should really be well flushed out before moving on to story implementation. The first thing someone sees shouldn't be three totally black windows and alerts.
I wished there was a like button
We're reviewing games now?
Jittai has been reviewing games for a while.
Haven't done one in a while so I went slumming on the front page.
Pretty accurate assessment from my experience, though it's a shame the owner doesn't agree. Reviews like this show where you can improve through other peoples insight and at the same time offers a laugh.
The owner thinks it's god's gift to BYOND as far as I've seen.
I didn't really pick this out for any other reason other than the fact I saw it was being constantly updated and ws on the front page list - I post the first-impression reviews on the game's forums more so for the creators to see it.

He threatened me with deleting it and said it was just my opinion. As far as I can see deleting it made it worse for his reputation - but I'm gathering his reputation is already shot?
BYOND Journalism EX Plus Omega Alpha Redux: Interview with Taint_thewizard.

(lol jk BYOND Journalism reboots keep failing)
BYOND Journalism should get it's own thread/topic area. JS.

@Jittai - I think this is the hardest I've laughed in a few days. More reviews plox.
BYOND Journalism should be brought back, they could do reviews, monthly favourites, competition coverage and interviews with developers and BYOND mods.

It would be a good area for players to get together and talk about BYOND's games and what they have to offer, rather than complaining or trolling for a pleasant change!
It looks a lot like Mystic Journey (though that might just be because they both used RPG Maker sprites).
In response to LordAndrew
LordAndrew wrote:
It looks a lot like Mystic Journey (though that might just be because they both used RPG Maker sprites).

most if almost not all systems in Mystic Journey are in his game , so no surprize there!
I actually played MJ after, short summary: Journey's class selection actually described what classes did, other than that was the two games were more or less the same. Lots of commands that were annoying to use a lot of stuff that looked outdated.

But then I messaged Secxs after I saw the update log being very slow and a lot of the threads were old but he was online. Turns out he's writing a new version and only applying small fixes to the current.

But yeah, more than once it felt like they share the same source though.
Just a quick question. Does this game allow you to select how much red, green and blue you want in your hair? I refuse to play any games that lack this crucial feature.
I don't think so, but I don't remember - you pick from a short input list. The whole character creation is a bunch of alerts.

Either way, before you guys go crazy with burns and quips, the point of the review was to give people some feedback (while obviously trying to be entertaining for others (hopefully) ) - hopefully the author takes this as a challenge to be better.
dat necro tho

Edit: played the game today. Still sucks.
Did you actually change anything that I pointed out needs work, or are you just going to keep taking it as an insult?

Your interface is also all over the place and not defined. You can make the hotslot's screen loc "NORTH" or "NORTHWEST" to force it to the top no matter what if that's the issue. No reason to have multiple tiny windows but I guess that's an improvement on multiple giant windows.

The character creation is really bad still.

Combat is still boring and all the AI move with no delay.
You guys don't have to be so mean and say the game sucks... (Not necessarily you Jittai). The game does need a lot of work but lets not push away the people attempting to make games on BYOND.
Yut Put wrote:
if you want to get better at this type of game design, try making a really tiny rpg. like something with 1 little dungeon, and then it's finished. see how fun you can make it.

the thing is, when it comes to rpgs, if you can't get 1 little dungeon to be fun, you can't get any dungeon to be fun. focusing o the minute design details of what will make that dungeon "fun" will improve your approach to rpg design as a whole

This is actually really legit advice. I'm posting this on facebook.