Recent reviews by cjjasp

Relaxing and entertaining. The updates are always free and comprehensive. Great music.

I'm on the fence about House Flipper/Garden Flipper.

I put off playing this game until after the second build, because several friends had mentioned it was quite buggy, and as a former tester, I don’t have the patience for dealing with buggy software anymore. I did finally purchase it in January just before it updated and like the changes they introduced in February.

I use an Xbox controller for my PC and a mouse. There are options for keyboard users, but I do prefer games where I can use the controller.

There is no option to play as a woman. You walk into your first office, which must be cleaned and redecorated, only to find a real macho man lives there. You apparently have no housekeeping skills as you are living in filth. Cleaning your way into your home, combined with a few jobs to earn money for your first flip, is your training ground.

At first, you can only pick up and clean things and remove trash. As you do a few jobs that will be sent to you via your laptop’s email, you begin to gain other skills, such as painting, tiling, knocking down and building walls, and most importantly, selling things the previous tenants left behind. The money you earn doing those jobs enables you to purchase your first house.

The graphics are exceptionally good. While I’ve played many front-view camera console RPG games, I’ve been playing top-down PC games for a while. It took me a while to adjust to the interactive aspect of the 3-D front-view camera. I found controlling the character’s movements was a bit of a challenge until I went to settings and slowed the mouse sensitivity.

The way a player can move things around within the predefined parameters is nice.

Painting walls is time-consuming and boring but satisfying, just like in real life. Cleaning is time-consuming and boring but satisfying, just like in real life.

While the options for purchasing new finishes and furnishings are limited, they’re interesting and work well. The floor plans are of a style that is uncommon here in the U.S. and are highly compartmentalized. I enjoyed bashing down walls to make the floor plans flow better.

I suspect the houses reflect a common European style, which is interesting to me. The kitchen appliances are also quite different from what I am used to, so that was fun. Ovens don't seem to be high on their priority list, and I'm excruciatingly lazy—if dinner isn't made in the Crock-Pot, I put it in the oven. Hell will freeze before I stand in front of a hot stove for more than the time it takes to make a pancake or two.

I like seeing the differences in the house layouts and styles from what I am used to. It's interesting to see a different culture's idea of the perfect kitchen. The developers seem to have become sidetracked by the doomsday prepping aspects of life. Many of the homes have underground nuclear fall-out shelters. Fortunately for all you virtual survivalists, the developers have included in the store a large array of items you can purchase for that nerve-center of any modern home, the bunker.

The inventory of houses to flip is limited, but each one has a unique history. They all look like squatters had camped for weeks and left their trash there. A couple of the houses have much darker histories, and one is downright frightening. That was fun to resolve.

While I like this game, I have a few thoughts as to why it sells well and has a loyal fan-base, despite its (sometimes fatal) flaws.

Did I mention that there is no option to play as a woman? Well, there isn’t, which seems odd, given that I know four people who each flip houses for a living, and they are all women. Fully half of the human race is comprised of women. The first office is really creepy in a disgusting, sleazy way. The minute I gained the ability to sell things, I ditched the nasty girlie poster and sold the ratty chainsaw. In fact, selling all the sleazebag’s tools and the filthy furnishings that come with the first place netted me enough to furnish it quite tastefully, thank you.

The vacuum tool is awkward and inefficient. It would almost be easier to pick up and dispose of each cockroach by hand. But eventually, the tool does work.

Hilariously Easy to Commit Operator Errors:

As I mentioned above, I use an Xbox controller. If you aren’t really careful when switching tools, you can accidentally sell an object you had intended to keep, such as, oh say, the plumbing for the toilet. When that happened, I couldn’t believe it—I laughed like a loon. The idea of being able to sell the plumbing out of a house is funny, but it’s annoying when it is not intentional.

One mistake and oops! The plumbing is gone, and there’s no going back. It costs quite a bit to replace the plumbing, and you don’t get as much for it as you must pay to replace it.

You can inadvertently sell the radiator you just bought. Doh!

In fact, if you aren’t really careful when switching tools or aiming the selling-tool, you can accidentally sell any replaceable object in the game.

Random Flaws Inherent to the Game:

Occasionally, you open your game only to find that when it loads, the colors of some furnishings have randomly changed, such as a steel refrigerator becomes bright red (the default color).

Also, I opened the game one day only to find a newly painted section on the outside of a house had reverted to its original Pepto Bismol-pink color. I had to buy paint and scaffolding—again—and take the time to paint it, again. Sometimes the fabric on chairs, or the kitchen cabinets will revert to the default color.

There is a fundamental bug in that randomly leaves the “ghost” of an object where it had originally been, so you can’t place furniture there, even though the space looks clear. I discovered how to resolve this accidentally when I couldn’t put a sofa in the place one had originally been, and when I pointed the selling-tool at the visibly empty spot, I was able to sell the ghost object for $52.00. Score! The ghost object was the wallpaper bundle that I had redone the family room with. Once I had sold all the ghost objects, I made $156.00.

The recent DLC update for this game, Garden Flipper, has some serious flaws.

1. A lawnmower would be nice. The weed eater is even less efficient than the vacuum. It takes forever—it’s easier to mow your real yard than to mow one in this game.

2. I stopped playing this game because the garden in the Unwaced House vanishes and reverts to empty every time you return to work on it. It happened three times in a row, so it’s definitely a problem. That is extremely annoying when you have spent thousands of dollars (to say nothing of the hours wasted) completely landscaping the entire yard and only need to finish the interior of the house so you can sell it.

The game takes forever to load. I do a lot of graphic design, so I suspect the massive database of images and graphics are what hangs it up.

To Wrap This Up:

All in all, House Flipper is a fun game that a person can get quite involved in, but it feels unfinished as if they didn’t quite get all the beta concerns resolved before they rushed it to publication. That is a common mistake we indies in all walks of the arts often make.

For the most part, the game is immersive. If trying to work around these major kinds of flaws are not your thing, I suggest you wait for all these bugs addressed before you buy it.

I am a full-on Aveyond Kingdom fan. Amaranth/Aveyond Kingdom and John Wizard are my 2 favorite game makers, and they frequently collaborate with each other. Their games are reminiscent of the old Square Soft games, for the Super Nintendo with strong stories and fun sidequests. They are as much fun as The Legend of Zelda or any early Final Fantasy game ever was.

Aveyond Kingdom’s Aveyond 4, Shadow of the Mist is in many ways, a more polished production than their earlier work. The graphics and backgrounds are the best they have produced by far. The storyline is both deep and hilarious, and the characters are, for the most part, engaging.

This game incorporates the traditional elements of puzzle-solving, action, and adventure into a neat and enjoyable package. There are the usual elements of high fantasy, with the characters ruthlessly poking fun at themselves. The enemies are creative and fun to fight.

Because they are failed villains, Boyle and Ingrid are unhappily in love, and that storyline adds ongoing humorous elements. Myst and Robin are naive and make good foils for Boyle and Ingrid. Hi’beru and Rowen arrive later in the game, and Phye arrives so late I did wonder why he was included at all. As a Draghar, Phye does have some power, but I think like a writer, so in my opinion, all the characters should be in place at the midpoint. Because he arrives so close to the end, we don’t get to know him as well as I would have liked.

I purchased the game the day it was released. I have played the game through to the end four times. The first time through, I had Ingrid join Lorelei’s coven and married her off to Boyle. With that scenario the game played smoothly with no glitches. I was in love with the game!

The second time through I had Ingrid join Jinx’s coven, but when I tried to complete the task of selling the craft in Robin’s store, the game froze and I had to take drastic measures to close the game down. No matter what I did, in this scenario the game froze at that point every time.

So I went to their website and, following the suggestions in their forums, I reinstalled the game. I never got past that point on that particular attempt.

So I started a new game, and that time I had her join the transformations coven. This went well for the most part, but with one major flaw. Ingrid gained the ability to transform into a dragon, but the skill didn’t appear in her menu. When I went out to the forums to see how to solve that, the answer was that it would be resolved in the next build. I was disappointed, as I did want to have the ability to play her as a dragon.

However, that time I married Ingrid off to Hi’beru, which was cute.

The environments that the game is set in are lush and beautiful, dark and moody. The music is amazing and really contributes to the enjoyment of the game.

The game is fun, hilarious, and when it works properly, it’s a great way to spend 25 or so hours.

I am an old-school RPG gamer from way back, beginning in the Final Fantasy Mystic Quest days, and I like Aveyond games. This one is in conjunction with John Wizard, which seems to bring the best of both creators to the game. This game has all the qualities I love about about fantasy--magic, mystery, and a good story line. The character interactions are really fun and sometimes hilarious. The love stories are fun too. I love that there are so many side quests. I am currently on my 4th time through the game. Ordinarily I am a console (PlayStation) fan, but I haven't had the time to get into anything deep lately. For fun and relaxation I've been pleased with the quality of Aveyond and John Wizard PC games, and think Stargazer is every bit as good as Lord of Twilight. I have set Aura's magic up diffently each time, and it's been a treat to see things I didn't notice on other times through it.