Recent reviews by tlarb

The definitive way to do dragonball games -- completely wrong.
The way transformations work on this game is awful. They are buffs that don't change gameplay at all.
The combat is the worst out of every type of dragonball game -- it revolves entirely around your stamina bar. You get stamina broken - you can die instantly from full health and be completely unable to recover.
You have to GRIND MAPS for good abilities, all of which are incredibly boring and give you an absurdly low drop rate for what you want. These maps almost all work in the exact same way/ pattern. NPCs will pause to talk for sometimes an entire minute while you are standing around waiting for what you have to fight.
It just feels so cheap in every way. I'm a huge dragonball fan and it is very hard to bring myself to play this.

very far from a good game, unfortunately. collision & hitboxes are key in "hard" games like this, but enemies will completely ignore doorways & giant pillars as if they were never there. also, constant swarms of adds in every boss fight? thats a big no lol...

very cool

Insane amounts of very unrewarding grinding (dragons just for magic find, rng gem boxes that mid game will barely increase your stats.) The early game is probably the best part when you're initially learning the game, as it deludes you into thinking there is a ton to do. Mid-game is bad, and late game is really atrocious. Micro-transactions are so ingrained in trove; you can buy quite literally anything you want buy paying money for it. Despite what some gated-community big club members would say, the community is awful. Tons of edgy 15 year olds that will troll and leech you as actively as possible. I am sick of having to do dungeons for other people because some leech used a bunch of worthless stat gems to get into higher PR worlds (U9 & U8).
TL;DR P2W, toxic community, very unrewarding grinding.

(Hours recorded obviously do not = actual playtime, I played before steam)
An excellent MMO that has a skill-leveling system that differentiates your character
from the rest. There is no handholding, nor P2W. There is a LOT to explore and depth
to discover. Interaction is the most important part of this game, so be sure to make
lots of friends along the way and you'll have a much easier time.

This review was revised

Previous Experience

I had played Bang! Howdy over a decade ago when it was run by three rings and later Grey Havens. Back then, there was a lot of microtransactions involved that were rather intrusive to gameplay, such as a package that cost $20 to unlock full access to the game. The community was also much larger, sometimes sporting a couple thousand players online. For a game like it, that was a lot of players.

Current Experience

Bang! Howdy now, however, is being developed by "YourFunWorld Studios" which sounds like an Indian flash game company. They are very small, and tend to take awhile to get things done due to their size. I have had notable disagreements with some staff members and their lead developer on their discord, due to the fact my criticism of their game seems to either fall on deaf ears, or is called toxic and completely unnecessary. The game is also heavily under-populated, usually sporting less than 10 people online in total. It falls victims to numerous bugs with the client as well, and I currently cannot even play the game at the moment . due to the client errors of the new client [gyazo.com]

Loss of Data

9/18/2017 the Bang! Howdy servers went down for three days due to a bad run-in with their hosting company. Unfortunately, that run-in apparently cost them almost a week of data; the most recent backup being 9/13/17. They blamed it on the hosting company's refusal to cooperate and had to switch to a new host. I have my own theories for this, but that is unrelated. Unfortunately that week, I had committed over 20 hours of gameplay and ended up losing every bit of this. I was reasonably annoyed, and asked the lead developer to compensate the players for the amount of time lost with whatever he deemed appropriate. What he deemed appropriate, however, was nothing. No one that played during that time and had to re-do all their bounties and earn their badges again got anything for the amount of time they spent on the game. The lead developer claimed "We cannot give compensations either because we have no way of proving what people had and it would give the people who are getting unknown rewards for maybe or maybe not data loss an unfair advantage, which we are NOT ok with." Personally, I believe there should've been some incentive to play again and re-do all my progress; but it was clear they were taking no risks.

Gameplay

With all that behind, this is the part where I actually review the gameplay.
Bang! Howdy is an RTS that is rather fast-paced and requires you to make sudden decisions based on your opponent/opponents. It uses tick-based movement, which means that after a certain amount of time passes by, a bar will slowly fill up that allows the unit to move and conduct an action. This works in a weird way, as you can pre-determine your unit's movement and attacks. Half of the time these movements wall be canceled by another unit moving in the way, or moving out of the target range of the unit. In PvP it is seemingly random which unit attacks first when they have the same amount of ticks and are pre-selected to attack each other, but I believe it is based on whoever has queued up the action first. Units also all have the same amount of ticks before they can move, so no unit is really faster than any others, but they do have different move and attack ranges. Units have special abilities that make them unique and change situations. A few examples are the Tactician, who completely negates the damage of being shot by a mortar and has a nice ranged attack. The gunslinger, who has a massive damage boost against human units and will fire back at the unit that attacks her as long as she is alive. The Dirigible, which can fly and upon death will become a bomb that does a small amount of damage to an enemy around it. These aren't the only factors in the combat, however, as cards also play a pretty big role. Cards are essentially spells that use on the tick the owner decides to consume them. They do varying things such as heal a unit, fill it's tick bar, and call a random reinforcement unit beside the unit selected. They are consumed on use both within the match, and cannot be used again unless you obtain another. In PvP, this can be rather unbalanced as cards have to be bought from the general store or obtained through some missions. Some cards are rarer than others, such as the lasso, which will take any power-up on the playing field and convert it to a card the user can use. As they can be selected before-hand, some players will have access to cards you do not have and could have a rather big advantage on you. The game is rather quirky, but it works.

PvM

There is plenty of PvM (Player vs Monster/AI) content to play through, and it will take you numerous hours to complete. This functions in the form of bounties, which have you take on a wanted person (in 3-5 different matches) for a scrip (in-game currency) reward. The reward starts off rather small at 1000 scrip (which is almost enough for 2 big card packs of 52 cards, valued at 520 scrip each) and goes all the way up to 3500 scrip, which is enough to buy one of most of the cosmetics (called duds) available. You can also buy badges from the general store that give you access to wanted bounties for higher scrip rewards. Sometimes these bounties also reward different duds (cosmetics) and badges, depending on the mission and it's difficulty. This is the highlight of the game, and likely where new players will spend most of their time.

PvP

The PvP is, at the moment, very lacking. This is mainly due to the lack of players (as stated before). The PvP and community aspect focuses on the Saloon, a place where you can create private game and chat rooms to interact with people. You will likely find almost nobody playing in them however, as the very little amount of people that are on are likely completing bounties. There is both a casual and competitive mode, where you can earn scrip, badges, and ranking on both the weekly and all-time ladder. The only rewards for placing highly (or even on top of the ladder) are badges and the scrip you get from playing. Ranking is based on other players and weighed against the performance, scores, and win loss ratios of them rather than an ELO-rating point system. This means that if there are every few players that decided to compete during this week, it will take less games to place highly on the ladder and the entire leaderboard can be manipulated by people intentionally losing games or win-trading. It can be pretty fun when you are playing with your friends, though, as long as you bring them into the game with you.

Final Statement/TL;DR
Overall Bang! Howdy is not a terrible game, but it does fall victim to it's age and needs plenty of fine-tuning to feel fresh again. There are not many dynamics to combat other than unit's special abilities and cards, so it does end up getting boring after awhile. You have to leave yourself in a very long queue to play a match against other people in the saloon or find someone in the discord server that would be willing to play with you. The amount of content is decent, but as of now gang content (essentially guilds/clans/groups) and big shots (your main unit. calvary, codger, raven, etc.) are locked behind a paywall and cannot be obtained normally. There are a decent amount of gamemodes, but a lot of them feel the same. (ex. gold grab/rush which just involve running gold back and forth into your mine protecting your units). Ticks are the same for every unit without the haste power-up, and would be an excellent thing to tinker with. Unfortunately, due to the completely dead community, current paywalls, small indie team, and massive amounts of bugs I would not recommend the game in it's current state.

btw y do u have me blocked kayaba

Finally, after a protracted and often chaotic roll-out, the new Kanye West album is here. The Life of Pablo is the first Kanye West album that's just an album: No major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. But a madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and the new record has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography.
Pablo Picasso and Kanye West share many qualities—impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses—but Pablo Picasso was never called an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Kanye, specifically, toasted them. The Life of Pablo's namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of "which one?" set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for Kanye's Blue Period (808s & Heartbreak), his Rose Period (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and his Crystal Period (Yeezus). If Kanye is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's final muse and the woman to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for his place in history.

The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that's just an album: No major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. It's probably his first full-length that won't activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. He's changed the genre's DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, he sees mirrors. "See, I invented Kanye, it wasn't any Kanyes, and now I look and look around and there's so many Kanyes," he raps wryly on "I Love Kanye." The message seems clear: He's through creating new Kanyes, at least for now. He's content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees.

Kanye's second child Saint was born in early December, and there's something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. "Ultralight Beam" opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: "This is a God dream," goes the refrain. But everything about the album's presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late.

Thankfully, he's bringing a Kanye album, and Kanye albums make pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good gifts. His devotion to the craft of album-making remains his greatest talent. Albums are his legacy, what he knows, deep down, will endure after the circus of attention he maintains around him subsides. His ability to package hundreds of stray threads into a whole that feels not just thrilling, but inevitable—at this, he is better than everyone, and he throws all of his best tricks into The Life of Pablo to remind us. He picks the right guests and gives them idealized settings, making people you don't care about sound fantastic and people you do care about sound immortal. Chance the Rapper, a spiritual heir to backpack-and-a-Benz Kanye if there ever was one, is given the spotlight on the opener "Ultralight Beam," and uses his dazed, happy verse to quote both "Otis" and the bonus track to Late Registration. His joy is palpable, and it's clear he has waited his entire adult life to be featured on a Kanye album. On the other hand, "Fade" pits Future knockoff Post Malone, of all people, against a sample of Chicago house legend Larry Heard's "Mystery of Love" and a flip of Motown blues rock band Rare Earth's "I Know I'm Losing You" and rigs the mix so that Malone, somehow, sounds more important than both of them.

This moment is also a reminder of Kanye's audacious touch with huge, immediately recognizable pieces of musical history—his best work as a producer has always drawn from iconic songs so venerated most sane people wouldn't dare touch them, from "Gold Digger" to "Blood on the Leaves" and beyond. He doesn't just sample these songs, he climbs in and joyrides them like the Maybach in the "Otis" video. On "Famous," he does it twice, first by matching up Nina Simone's "Do What You Gotta Do" with Rihanna, who sings the song's hook before Nina does, and then with Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam," which gets flipped so it sits atop a chorale-like chord progression. It sounds like a dancehall remix of Pachelbel's Canon, and it's the most joyful two minutes of music on the album.

"Waves," a song that made the tracklist at the last second at Chance the Rapper's insistence, has a similar energy. You can hear why Chance, specifically, might've wanted it back: It is a throwback to the Rainbow Road maximalism of "We Major," and it is so warmly redemptive it even makes Chris Brown, who sings the hook, sound momentarily benevolent. "Waves" is hardly the only last-second change made: The Kendrick Lamar collaboration "No More Parties In L.A." is back on here, as is an inexplicable minute-long voicemail from imprisoned rapper Max B, granting Kanye permission to use his popular slang term "wavy." Such last-second fidgets seem to say something about The Life of Pablo itself. After years of agonizing over how to follow up the conceptually triumphant 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, he seems to have settled upon eternal flux as a resting place, and the album plays like Kanye might still be remixing it furiously in your headphones while you listen.

"Father Stretch My Hands" tosses a sample from Southside Chicago icon, activist, and one-time fraud convict Pastor T.L. Barrett into a gurgling trash compactor alongside some pigeon-cooed backing vocals and an entire undigested verse from another Future knockoff, Brooklyn upstart Desiigner. It's the least-finished-sounding piece of music to ever feature on a Kanye album. This is the logical endpoint to the sort of obsessive perfectionism that led West to make 75 near-identical mix downs of "Stronger," and in the song's lyrics, Kanye admits that the same workaholism that made his father a distant figure in his childhood now keeps him from his family. On "FML," he name-checks the antidepressant Lexapro on record for the second time in a year, and alludes to something that sounds an awful lot like a manic episode. The life of a creative visionary has dark undercurrents ("name me one genius who ain't crazy," Kanye demands on "Feedback") and it's possible that The Life of Pablo title serves as much private warning as boastful declaration.

The album's most humane moments come when he reaches for his family: "I just want to wake up with you in my eyes," he pleads at the end of "Father Stretch My Hands." On "FML," a bleak song about resisting sexual temptation, he sings to Kim, "They don't want to see me love you." "Real Friends" reprises his "Welcome to Heartbreak" role as the unhappy outsider at his own family events, squirming through reunions and posing for pictures "before it's back to business"; it's maybe the saddest he's ever sounded on record.

Tuning into the humanity in Kanye's music amid bursts of boorish static can be difficult, and the most prominent example of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on Pablo comes from the instantly infamous jab "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex," which feels like a piece of bathroom graffiti

Dead game. No one even plays anymore, rather pointless and dull.

Edit: my hours "recorded" do not reflect the actual hours I have spent on this game.