![]() ![]() I told myself that there was no point buying another one until he made something different, and which was relevant to my interests. After that I swore off Zachtronics games for the foreseeable future after all, if Zach’s schtick is to make the same game over and over again with different set dressing then I can hardly complain that I don’t know what I’m getting. This culminated in a rather ill-tempered review of Shenzhen I/O, a game which was literally about programming and which pissed me off to no end because it forced me to program badly in order to solve the puzzles. It’s the latest game from Zachtronics, and I already have something of a checkered history with those I started out loving the early Zachtronics puzzlers such as SpaceChem and Infinifactory, but the more of them Zach cranked out (he’s up to something like seven or eight of them now) the more their core idea of finding puzzle analogues for programming started to wear thin. The more I play Möbius Front ‘83, the more I find it is seriously testing my newfound equanimity. Or so I thought, until I played Möbius Front ‘83. ![]() It didn’t come together for them this time. Nobody sets out to deliberately make a bad game, and so these days while I’m perfectly happy to continue giving bad games the kicking they so richly deserve, and while I might still have some choice barbs for the corporate aspect of game development, I try and give the individual developers themselves the benefit of the doubt. There’s any number of reasons why a game might not come together in the way it should, many of which are wholly or partially out of a developers’ control - not enough budget, truncated schedule, interfering executives, key personnel leaving, and so on. Now that I’m older, wiser, and a little bit calmer, I can see now that this was unreasonable and unfair. Back then I took bad games rather… personally (this was before I’d formulated my Bad Game Theory 1) and if I played a bad one I had a tendency to lay into not only the game in question but also the developers behind it, and with quite a bit of venom, too. If you go back and read one of my earliest reviews on this blog, you might notice a slightly different tone from the one I try to take today. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |