Recent reviews by CULT|icycalm

TALESPIRE IS FINISHED

What sustains a program like TaleSpire?

The community of creators it attracts. Without them, the cool designs of people like Istallri cease being produced, and all that's left is garbage sets that "homebrew" GMs foist on their poor players. And TaleSpire is about to start losing these creators, because next spring they will start migrating to French-developed first-person VR VTT, Menyr: {LINK REMOVED}https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7734

Menyr offers from day 1 absolutely everything that the TaleSpire team seems utterly incapable of adding to their program. No longer will creators have to waste dozens of hours trying to turn unnaturally blocky tiles into something that looks kind of natural by clipping countless props all over them (and tanking performance in the process), they will simply click a couple of buttons and fully-realized forests and mountains will materialize for dozens of square miles as if by magic, the magic of digital computing that the TaleSpire devs seem to struggle to handle.

Menyr will offer from day 1 perfect fog-of-war that the TaleSpire team seems incapable of implementing, or even prioritizing. And on top of that, Menyr will offer first-person and even VR viewmodes, exactly as I asked for in my controversial but massively popular Reddit thread that Bouncyrock banned me for: https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comments/thf5kg/fogofwar_debacle_would_be_solved_by_firstperson

For the above and many more reasons, it is unavoidable that the best TaleSpire creators will migrate to Menyr next spring once it hits beta, and that's when TaleSpire will be finished.

If it sounds like I am loving this, I am not. In my 1962-2022 GOTY Awards I even declared TaleSpire 2021 GOTY: {LINK REMOVED}https://culture.vg/reviews/awards/game-of-the-year.html

My massive TaleSpire forum thread has been the most comprehensive news source for the game for two years: {LINK REMOVED}https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7276

Even being treated like garbage by the developers across half a dozen social platforms hasn't dimmed my love for the program. I understand they're nerds and they need to be nerding, and I don't resent them for it. But I do resent their laziness and incompetence that will shortly sink their project. It all fully dawned on me when I watched their latest dev stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgL9pUX1I1E

Skip to 12:50 when poor demongund asks them for the 1,001st time to give him a blue tile for his water-related projects. I couldn't believe their reaction. They have been seeing this request for MONTHS now, for over a YEAR probably, and they still don't seem to have a proper response let alone a plan for it. All they can do is mumble while scratching their beards. I couldn't believe these are the developers of this project! Such a little thing he's asking them for, and they don't even know where to BEGIN to deal with it. And if they can't deal with THIS, how will they ever give us the SHIPS that everyone's been asking for, or any more advanced features? On their roadmap they say "some day we'll have natural-looking foam terrain or whatever". Is that sometime this decade, or century? Is it before or after Menyr delivers Elden Ring-level graphics to VTTs?

I've been waiting for the promised weather effects for TWO YEARS now. They will probably never come, or if they come it'll be some lame simplistic effect. Meanwhile Menyr can conjure entire SNOW STORMS that shake trees and obscure everything! And it can do this RIGHT NOW. Who will wait for these two slow dudes to learn enough programming to get anywhere near that? No one will wait. Everyone will migrate, and TaleSpire will be finished.

It's a shame because TaleSpire's artstyle has grown on me, and though I will ultimately prefer Baldur's Gate III- and Elden Ring-level art (and full animation including proper running that Menyr supports, and not this stupid "jumping" every tile that Bouncyrock are forcing on us), I wouldn't mind playing the odd campaign in TaleSpire's retro artstyle. The ARTIST they have working on this (they only have one) is the only guy on the team who has REALLY been knocking it out of the park with asset pack after asset pack, and I will miss his work. I could import it into Menyr, but it would look out of place there next to much sharper and animated assets. So deep down I AM hoping that TaleSpire somehow survives the onslaught of next-gen VTTs that Menyr is about to unleash, but I am not hopeful. If Istallri and co. stop making sets, it doesn't matter how many tiles and props and minis the artist makes, since there won't be any more good sets to use them in. Such a sad story.

But ultimately, that artist and countless others will start offering their works on Menyr's marketplace, and whole magical universes will materialize there right before our eyes, all the while the Bouncyrock people will be scratching their beards and wondering how it happened, and why they were left out. But it is very easy to understand why they'll be left out.

There are nearly a DOZEN 3D VTTs on Steam already, and NONE of them have any good creators except TaleSpire because this genre is so small that there aren't enough of them to go around, so the best program vacuums them all up. 3D building is tough and time-consuming, and 3D modeling is even tougher. There isn't enough demand in the market for multiple such projects even if they are equal, let alone when there's a massive feature-disparity between them.

TaleSpire is finished, and I told the developers months ago that this is what will happen, and I am telling them again now, but all they can think of in response to criticism is BAN BAN BAN. Soon enough though they will have no one to ban, because they'll have no players.

There are so many things wrong with Line War—from the stupid name to the developers' rotten attitude—that it'd be easy to start listing them and forget to focus on the elephant in the room: the sheer superfluousness of the lines. What the hell are all these "strategic lines" for when the unit count never exceeds Age of Empires' lmao? You barely even need drag-select mouse mechanics to play this game: you could play it by giving each single unit individual orders as in Dune II in 1992. The developers of course will retort that bigger maps that require more units are coming, but that's how they reply about every single of the game's neverending issues, until—if you're ignorant enough and understand so little about the genre—you'll be convinced that a version of Line War that isn't terrible "is coming" in some future quantum timeline in which the developers know anything about RTS—or videogames at all for that matter.

I mean "Line War"? Seriously? Even as a Geometry Wars sequel the name sounds utterly uninspired and uninspiring—let alone as a Total Annihilation and Planetary Annihilation successor—which is what the devs are aiming for, since they cribbed every aspect of these games that they could—and mangled them beyond recognition. There is not the slightest attempt to dress up the game with some kind of theme and give it any kind of backstory and context to the fighting, which makes sense when you realize no artists were involved in the development. And of course that also means the game is ugly as sin, to the point where merely thinking about playing it depresses me—let alone actually playing it. The screens and videos are deceptive by the way: it looks lame in those too, but it looks downright repulsive in action: a motley assortment of vomit-like textures draped over brain-numbingly repetitive map layouts and swarming with badly-designed units barely above the level of a teenager's doodles. The buildings are even worse to the point where, looking at the map, it's hard to even know what they're supposed to represent. What a far cry from Dune II's dazzling representation of Frank Herbert's universe, or even Herzog Zwei's varied units and battlefields brimming with personality—and these are 30+ YEAR-OLD GAMES RUNNING ON 16-BIT COMPUTERS. I am not even comparing Line War to recent games—that'd be just as cruel as comparing the aforementioned teenager's doodles to Bouguereau—I am comparing them TO THE VERY FIRST GAMES IN THE GENRE, from before when most of the players and probably also the developers were BORN, and the game STILL looks bad compared to them! And the developers have the nerve to insinuate that their ridiculous student-level project is "solving" any kind of the genre's "problems", and even that it represents some kind of "future" for it! The ARROGANCE of these utterly talentless, lazy and incompetent "indie" "developers" (they aren't developers, they are just students—and bad ones) never ceases to astonish!

The feature-list is downright LIES. There are no "cities" in the game: what the developers call a "city" is just a house from Age of Empires: it's just one tiny square building that you put down and is built in seconds, and it has a similar function to houses from other RTSes. And while they gaslight players about vaporware such as "cities", the game lacks dozens of units and building types that are by now standard in the genre. It literally has only 16 units, and they've been talking for months now about adding a 17th. At this rate they should hit Supreme Commander's unit complexity sometime in the 2040s.

As for the flagship feature, the "line war", besides being superfluous in this tiny game, it barely works. In short, they've entirely removed issuance of individual unit orders, and the only way to give commands is by drawing "strategic" lines on the battlefield like those seen in military maps, which the units then are supposed to interpret. Now this feature would be welcome in a game with sprawling maps and thousands of swarming units like a Cossacks—if it worked well, which it barely does. In practice it's an awkward and sluggish system where you're drawing whole freakin' paintings on the screen to move three units which you could have moved in a fraction of the time if you were allowed to freakin' click on them. But that's the entire point of the exercise lol, since that is the only way limpwristed players like the developers can ever win a match: when far superior players give up in disgust at the botched controls, and quit the game. It's so offensive how downright gleeful the developers are in tying the hands of good players, and they scream about it from every piece of PR they put out: "WE DON'T ALLOW GOOD PLAYERS TO CLICK ON ANYTHING MUAHAHAHAH! FINALLY WE CAN WIN A MATCH!!!" And to add insult to injury, they project renting entire exhibition centers to run in-person tournaments, as if anyone would ever get out of bed and travel anywhere to play this laughably abortive piece of 1970s-level of student pap.

"BUT WE WILL ADD DIPLOMATS, ENGINEERING CONSTRUCTIONS AND ORBITAL WARFARE SOMETIME THIS CENTURY, and yadda yadda yadda."

You will add diplomats to go around the 3 houses on the map to do diplomacy?

You will add engineers to dig a ditch in front of the 3 houses?

You will add orbital warfare to a top-down view game?

In the entire history of the RTT and RTS genres, I have never seen such dingbats as these guys. I have been playing since Herzog Zwei in 1989, and if you would have told me back then that people in 2022 would be putting out sheer garbage like Line War to be played "over the internet" to run on what for us back then would count as sci-fi supercomputers I wouldn't have believed a word of it.

Welcome to "indie" gaming.


P.S. If you want to see the real future of RTS, go here: http://cosmicwar.net

They've been working on this game for half a decade, and it's just a HoMM clone, and it's STILL not done. I made a thread in the Steam forum to ask why it's taking them a full decade to finish a game that developers 30 years ago would churn out in 12 months, and they deleted my thread ({LINK REMOVED}https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7683). I would say it's just slow Swedish work culture, where they have meetings about meetings they're planning to meet at, and they just eat sweets and drink coffee all day instead of working, but the fact is that game development has slowed down a lot in recent decades for numerous reasons, and it's not just the Swedes. So modern devs will take a full decade to make a game that's still inferior to what we had 30 years ago, and then they won't bother making a sequel, because they'll be dead of old age by then, which means they'll never refine their craft and never create anything truly great that surpasses what has been already done.

I like the game, it's a cool little thing for what it does, but I am downvoting it because the developers deleted my thread, and because they're lazy and work slow. Learn to code, guys. There are tutorials online, just google them.

None of you morans understand. This isn't "like Elite" or "like EVE". This is A NEW GENRE, and it's called First-person Grand Strategy, or FP4X for short (first-person 4X). In other words, this is FIRST-PERSON CIVILIZATION (and Alpha Centauri and Master of Magic and so on). Just look at the tech tree! None of you ever played Civ?? So this genre was started by Life is Feudal: MMO, continued by Atlas and Last Oasis, and finally taken to the stars by Starbase (Dual Universe might have done this earlier, but I still haven't tried it to make sure: it looks janky af anyway, and Starbase is its superior in every imaginable way).

Moreover, FP4X is the best videogame genre of all time. It is the ultimate genre because it is THE GENRE OF THE UNIVERSE (the universe is a FP4X game). And since it is the best videogame genre, it follows that it's also the best art genre, since videogames are the ultimate artform. All this and more you can explore further by reading my article on "The End of Videogame (and Art) Theory": https://www.patreon.com/posts/51317891

So this is the prologue of my review. Get the genre right! If you can't even get the freakin' genre right, the rest of your review will of course be snit! So Starbase is not "an online game like EverQuest", or "an MMO like WoW". That's how journalists think because they are too dense to parse mechanics! LOOK AT THE MECHANICS! Starbase copied Atlas which copied Life is Feudal: MMO, which copied Rust but made it into a giant persistent world with tens of thousands of players, and—most importantly to qualify as FP4X—territory capture mechanics. THAT is the genealogy of Starbase, and therefore forms the basis on which it must be understood, and judged.

Beyond that I don't have much to say as of now, with my paltry nine hours in the game. I need to see station-building and fleet battles before I can weigh in on how Anna Narinen and the Frozenbyte team fulfilled the—really insanely ambitious—goals of this project. All I can say for the time being is EVERYTHING LOOKS GOOD. There are no obvious letdowns or stepbacks from the advertised vision: IT'S ALL HERE TO MAKE THE TREMENDOUS VISION WORK; all the building blocks are here. My biggest worry is performance: how will the game perform when stressed in giant space battles and station sieges? It already chugs a bit in half-empty stations, so I am worried. But they've run tests before EA release, and reportedly those tests went well, so I am hopeful. Once I have more to report, I will edit this review.


P.S. Starbase wipes the floor with Space Engineers. 16-player servers lol. Enjoy your 8v8s across a freakin' star system, losers!

I have some impressions on FG(/FGU), having used it for the first time last night as a DM.

It is a remarkable program. dan and I are constantly whining and moaning about its obtuse interface, but the fact is we wouldn't know where to start if asked to design a more user-friendly version. Take for example the issue of the locking of the character sheets. For weeks we'd wondered why the DM can't lock the character sheets so the players can't alter them (so that they don't mess them up by accident, which is extremely easy to do); after all, he can lock pretty much everything else on the screen. Well, last night we ran the first battle, and I realized that the players have to adjust the values on their sheets practically every round: every time they fire a spell or arrow, for example, or when their characters use many special abilities and feats, or acquire special statuses, like buffs and nerfs. There is zero reason to lock the sheets when you need the players to adjust them every round, unless you intend to make all the adjustments yourself, which is possible I guess but grossly inefficient. You are much better off, at least in the long term, training your players to use their sheet effectively. Then when they know how to do this well, you can use the time they are messing around with their sheets to study the enemies' tactics notes, prepare the next encounter or text block, queue up the next music track, and so on. There ARE minor issues that could be improved in the interface and functionality of the program, but the unlocked character sheets is not one of them. The program simply does so much, that a steep learning curve is unavoidable. There need to be buttons and menus and commands everywhere because that's how much functionality is required to run a D&D session. And the program STILL doesn't automate all of it. If I had to take a guess I'd say it automates about half of D&D's functionality, give or take. Which is a downright miracle I never thought I'd live the day to see.

I'd like to check the competitor VTTs. It's hard to imagine one offering the same level of functionality and customization with significantly improved usability. Even the people posting negative reviews of FG/FGU on Steam tend to say that they are still sticking with the program despite all, citing one or more of the following reasons (and the more comprehensive reviews, all of them):

-Breadth of preprogrammed rule systems and customizability
-Massive library of DLC rules supplements and adventures
-Aesthetics

Any given of the above advantages would have sufficed to give FG the edge over its competitors, but all three of them taken together make it unbeatable, even after a decade and a half in the market. I am extremely glad I chose it for D&D Battlegrounds[dndbattlegrounds.net], and I am certain now I made the right choice. It really is Videogame Art (even though it's not strictly a videogame, but without it neither is D&D, so in a way it is), and GOTY contender for the year of its release.


P.S. The line-of-sight mechanics of FGU are more advanced than any isometric CRPG's I've ever seen. In D:OS, you can see inside locked rooms, by looking over their ceilings...

So Gris just came out and I bought it the moment Steam emailed me.

For months I've been waiting on this game. But I was exhausted when the email came, so instead of firing it up immediately, I headed over to its Steam page to idly browse early feedback on it until I mustered up the energy to actually play. What I saw there killed my enthusiasm to play on the spot. In short, people are calling the game a walking simulator that can be finished in three hours, and one player summed up the issue with that pretty well, for those who had trouble grasping it (and there were quite a few, as you'd expect from the confused contemporary gamer crowd):

I don't want a crazy challenge, but I also don't want to let the right key pressed while I watch the TV.

Proponents of walking simulators, or "meaningful games", or "art games", or "not-games", or whatever the euphemism in vogue might be, have never had properly explained to them what's wrong with all these "games": precisely the fact that they aren't games, and therefore, when evaluated as games, they are by definition bad, and OBJECTIVELY bad, just as a bicycle is objectively bad at being a car and will be trashed by car reviewers if its designers had the nerve to call it a car and try to pass it off to them as one.

So understand that the new thing that videogames bring to the artistic table is INTERACTIVITY. If your piece of software is not interactive, it's not a videogame, and therefore, when evaluated as a videogame, it is by definition garbage. We don't even need to "play"/watch it to know that it's garbage—we know it immediately the moment we learn that it's not interactive. Whatever its other merits may be, it's not a videogame, and therefore it would be cosmically moronic to claim that it's a good videogame. It's not even a BAD videogame; i.e. even bad videogames are better than it at being videogames; that's how much of a piece of garbage your non-interactive "game" is.

But of course, that's where the euphemisms come in, which go through many variations but ultimately end up with the "not-game" label, because, as I explained, the damn thing isn't a game. That's what this label expresses—of course in a roundabout, moronic way, since the people that invented the label and need to use it are morons.

So the last-ditch argument of the morons is that, while their piece of software might be a bad videogame—or, even worse, not a videogame at all—it might be good as something entirely different, in the same way that Proust's In Search of Lost Time is garbage as a videogame while simultaneously being the greatest novel of all time.

This argument, however, falls flat on its face with but a few moments of deliberation. For we ALREADY have a long-established category for a "non-interactive videogame"; we don't need to invent brand-new ones to express this concept; it has existed for centuries by now, and it's called MOVIES, since after all a videogame is a movie with interactivity added. Remove the interactivity—the "game" part of "videogame"—and what you're left with is the "video", i.e. a movie (which, in videogame terminology is called a "cutscene").

Do you understand, moron?

So your last-ditch defense is in fact the cosmically hilarious sight of you digging your own grave, and the more furiously you use the defense, the faster and deeper you dig your grave and that of your argument and your piece of crap garbage software. For in your attempt to distance yourself from the new artform of videogames—and thus avoid comparisons with the best works in it—you end up setting yourself against the old artform of THE CINEMA, and suddenly realize that all you've accomplished is to trade a puppy for an enemy with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lion. For though game criticism is so abortive nowadays that when I tell people that Far Cry, GTA, Halo and the like are the best games ever made and towering works of art, they laugh at me, no one laughs when you say that Heat, Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine are some of the best movies and artworks ever made, and your piece of crap garbage non-interactive app is now going up against them if you continue to insist that it shouldn't be critiqued as a videogame—which is correct, as a notion, but, in your mind, for the wrong reasons. You use it to avoid ALL comparisons and competition, whereas the correct, non-fraudulent, non-scammy way to use it is to group the artwork with its particular type of artworks, and compare it with them, which in this case, as I explained, is movies.

So, to get back to videogames, precisely because interactivity is the new thing that videogames bring to the table, the best games will be those that maximize interactivity, just like—since superior intelligence is the new thing that ♥♥♥♥ sapiens as a species bring to the genetic and animal table—it is precisely those of us that excel in that regard—that excel in intelligence: the thinkers and philosophers—that are considered the best people throughout the ages, and not for example some brutish neanderthal with 40 IQ who never learned to count, because he's so dumb that he can't.

So should I spend three hours watching Gris, or The Godfather? Gris or Schindler's List? Gris or The Last of the Mohicans?

This is such a stupid question I won't even bother dignifying it with a response.

However, since I am the number one videogame critic and theorist in the world, and the most passionate videogame player alive, I will watch Gris simply due to the graphics because I can appreciate the good parts in bad works in exactly the same way that Pauline Kael said that she did with bad movies; but I won't do it now because right now I am in the mood for something truly good, and I won't do it at full price because I don't like throwing my money away at inferior artworks.

Your walking simulator is getting refunded. I'll pick it up when it's $4, which is about how much it's worth, if it really is just a walking simulator. icycalm out.


I am the world's greatest videogame theorist and critic. Follow my work on Insomnia | Videogame Culture & Patreon:

{LINK REMOVED}https://culture.vg/
https://www.patreon.com/icycalm

It's horse manure. Crappy unresponsive controls, ball pretty much sticking to your feet, on top of being unplayable online due to execrable netcode. A million miles away from the original. I guess Dini thought he could dumb down his own game to reach casuals. Judging by the number of people playing this, I guess he wrong.

It has a better feeling of height when jumping across rooftops than Crackdown. For reals. The controls and moveset are incredible for an isometric game. The ambience and general production values are great, with only minor ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (the odd ugly character portrait here or there, etc.) All the systems seem to have considerable depth, and there are many of them. The only things left to check are mission, story and role-playing quality, but this will take time. Until then, I am recommending this.

Solid sci-fi Rust. Best-in-class material, but still needs lots of work.

Taking FPSes away from corridors, one amazing interactive landscape at a time. Welcome to the Far Cry series.