Finally, there are the games I disliked so much I immediately uninstalled them.
Although in the case of this first one, it’s not really the game’s fault.
I hereby present : Tooth and Tail.
The caption expresses my first issue with the game, which is entirely personal and does not bear on the enjoyment of anyone without my particularly sensitive temperament : the furry animals are killing each other.
And with a downright lustful brutality too, and an amoral zeal I find highly disturbing. I am the guy who refuses to watch Watership Down because he heard bunnies die in it and I just can’t handle that.
The fact that roadkill is a thing that could keep me awake nights if I let it.
Make love not war, fuzzies!
But I was prepared to give it a shot anyhow. So I booted it up and started a game, and then my second issue popped up because it does not work like other RTS games I have played and I am simply not in the mindset to absorb a bunch of new rules for a game with which I already have emotional issues in a genre I don’t like anyhow.
So mostly, it’s because I am too damned old to learn new things rapidly any more;. It’s the same thing that happened in what turned out to be the Linguistics Class From Hell.
So between oldness, squeamishness, and not liking RTS games, this game never really stood a chance with me.
Ergo, I am not going to give this one a rating. I barely played enough of it to have an opinion let alone an actually qualified and coherent one. All I can do is relate my experience and hope you, gentle reader, can get something useful from it.
So my review is basically “not the game for me.” Moving on.
Then there is this monstrous oddity :
I wish I had watched that trailer before I bothered trying to play the goddamned thing.
As is, I have to admit that knowing it was made specifically to hurt a certain kind of person (my guess : he wanted to hurt mastery-oriented fanatically persistent “must conquer” types) makes the game make a lot more sense.
Not the naked dude in a kettle thing. That remains something best left between Bennet Fodder and whatever fetish message board he hangs out on.
But I can grasp the sort of pent up bitterness that would lead someone to design something specifically designed to hurt the kind of person who tends to get ahead in life because they happen to have the sort of temperament that works in this world.
In fact, the whole game seems like something I would invent…. in my mind. But unlike Bennett Fodder, I would never actually make it because the sane part of my mind would remind me that the people it would hurt are innocent people who have done me no wrong and have comitted no crime so there is no justification for hurting them.
So while I “get it”, Bennett, I don’t approve.
Ergo this game gets a 2/10 for me. It sucks. It was meant to suck. It fulfilled its mission of being a game that punishes you for playing it, ergo – do not play it.
It would have been 1/10, but I have to grudgingly admit it’s a clever idea.
But seriously. Even if you get it for free. Don’t play it.
It can only lead to pain. And the whole time the game will be laughing at you for being stupid enough to keep playing.
Don’t play it. Moving on.
And that’s it for the whole bundle. Mission accomplished.
I know that my reviews are not exactly professional quality. I go on and on about my own personal experiences with the games and nobody wants to read that in a game review, or anywhere else for that matter.
Still, it was an enjoyable exercise and I think that if I can keep at it,. I will internalize what is and is not worth including, and thus free my writing skills (which are awesome) from my need to express my innermost thoughts (which is far less commercially viable).
Although I dunno. Maybe if I was blogging on one of the platforms like Tumblr and did the groundwork of commenting on other people’s blogs, I might attract some kind of following. The kids these days seem to really go for intensely personal, confessional type writing, and I can certainly do that.
The fact that I have done all this blogging – millions of words of it – on a private platform that doesn’t even link to other people’s blogs and is thereore my own little fully controllable ‘world’ is very, very… me.
It’s tragic how often those of us capable of great art are saddled with serious social and psychological issues that keep us from drawing attention to it.
That’s what agents are for, I suppose, but in order to get one, you have to put enough of your work out there so it can be published and therefore prove you do not entirely suck, and of course, if I could do that, I wouldn’t need the agent, would I?
I am such an odd bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, part of me truly thinks I am an amazing author with a lot of things worth saying to say and a lot of stories worth telling to tell, and that if I could connect with an audience, I could make a lot of people happy with my words, and that is fundamentally what I really want to do.
Would be nice if that also paid at least as much as welfare, but it’s not strictly necessary. I could be quite happy as someone with a dedicated group of fans he writes for every day and engages with on a regular basis.
At least for a while. Eventually I would get ambitious and restless.
But it could be very, very nice for a while.
But that auin’t ever going to happen if I hide away in my private little world hear. .
Has anyone seen the exit lately?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.