Saturday, July 24, 2010

ARGH! or is that AARGH?

So i have been moaning today. What i have been moaning about today might be a trifling thing to a lot of people, but to me it feels quite important. I haven't put any pictures lately into my blog posts, as i have been away etc. Well today you get to see someone elses artwork (i could call it that).

I like Xblig, i like some of the community, and i certainly some of the games that are there. It is an amazing place for so much good stuff. However it has a bad reputation, and one i gues it might truly deserve. It really is hard to find the good stuff from the crap, at times. Sometimes it is real easy.

So i finally got some peer reveiwing done today. I had a rather good time and it only took me 3 hours for 3 games, and one of them was very simple. So after i had finished my third game i went looking for a fourth,and it was while i was looking that i noticed somethings horrible.

These pictures were in the list of games to be Peer reveiwed... ARGH!

I know they are on a white background, but i am sure you can understand my surprise to see such utter crap in Peer reveiw. I had to go check to se if i had selected Playtest instead.

I was disgusted, but more was to come. They are games created by a dev named Aab. Yes that is right. some crapola name to get them further up alpha sorted lists. It may not make any difference, but it does to me. They are trying to game the system, even if they are not doing a good job of it. so then i had to click into them to see what other horrors they could hold. I also wanted to see that they were suffering from noone reveiwing and passing them.

I was wrong... They were both at 50%, though not a single person in the individual games forums had posted that they had passed it. How odd that seems. Maybe they only have 5 friends or accounts (enough for 50% maybe?). I was also shocked to se the amazing and none verbose descriptions of these games.
TriangleReversi   AvatarViewer
Yea, that's right. This crap is gonna get onto Xblig, my beloved Xblig. further bringing down it's rep. Why is this dev doing this? Maybe they think they will make some dosh. I however sure hope they don't and then they go away asap.

That's enough of me moaning about aabs. I was gonna write about the games i tested, but BAH Humbug instead!

Laters

6 comments:

  1. ya know though aabs is very bad and should be complained about...unless they can bring something amazing ....which its clearly obvious by the thumbnails they cannot

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  2. Wait! You complain about this chap gaming the system with his name, yet you yourself call your game A-Shooter and Aceball for exactly the same reason!

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  3. Hey Upgrayed_D,
    I would mind less if their titles were called Triangle reversi and Avatar Viewer, but mostly i wouldn't care if their games were even reasonable. At least 2 stars worth :D Or maybe if they had just put some effort into making these games i would aok too. Their total lack of effort etc makes me have a major downer on this crap. The viewer looks like it was probably built on the demo that we can all get for free as well, though that may not be true. And those thumbs... ewww.

    Da Voodoochief

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  4. OOh, we have an Anonymous poster, I love these as usually that is where the contentious stuff comes from. So my reasoning for my games names first off.
    Aceball is called that cos it has a deck of cards in it and a ball. I had to stay away from pong and ping etc which was annoying,. So after a looong list of names i got Aceball, which was a much better name than cardball etc.
    A Shooter is supposed to represent the easiest Most obviious name for the game i could come up with. This is taken from research based on the iphone, where a lot of their simple and obvious named games have done rather well. Calling it 'Shooter' does not imply quite the same thing as 'A shooter' or it would have been called that. So it is just a name that makes sense for it being as obvious as possible to any person browsing. Am i lucky it starts with an A? I don't know. I have no research to say A's are better.
    Finally i want to say that the biggest difference with these games and those of Aabs, is one of commitment and hard work. I put a lot of time into every part of my games, they have not. As i have said somewhere, if they had put in the effort i couldn't care less. As Navifairy put it, Aah has a game called little atlantis, that dev puts in the effort, and you have never heard me conmplain about their company name.

    laters
    Da VoodooChief

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  5. Look like it's an attempt to game the system (which is a fail if anyone could prove that) but I don't think it makes much of a difference anyways. If the game is half as bad as it looks from the box art, the ratings will be terrible and sales will tank within a week.

    The system is self correcting in that way :) Of course I do wish we could impose some kind of standards as it does overall give us all a worse perception to the community but for now I'll just continue to hope that lazy developers make games that get bad sales and then stop making games because they're not making money.

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  6. I do agree with you. However i wonder just how many half hearted devs like this are out there. If they keep coming along and producing even 1 game, it makes our rep worse, and also harder to find the other middling games. Not everyone writes a 4 star game, though many 3 star games are a wonderful fit for certain fans etc. I would also tentatively mention that the rating system does not get accurate until about 100+ votes. So many games including my own seems to start at 1 vote. But with a sell thru of about 20% that just doesn't seem right.

    Anyway, enough waffle. so long as they go away asap, that is a good thing. Or start to care maybe?

    Da Voodoochief

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