Recent reviews by MadDog

I have only played so far through myself, and have instead watched several others play. I have one huge, tremendous complaint, and it's that often you get choices and scenarios that spiral out of your control and you essentially have to pick the loss. It makes many characters frustrating and impulsive.

I can compliment the voice acting, the length, the depth, and some of the worldbuilding. I just can't compliment the sudden ways the plot veers off a cliff to give you grueling choices.

Having now done The Test and Hypothesis Ruling, I don't think I'm going to continue. This is akin to calling a psychic- but instead of being charged for a whole reading or by the minute on the phone, it's a few dollars for the game. You answer tons of questions, you get creepy Blair Witch stuff popping up as if it's somehow relevant, and you get the hook of 'you wonder what we're doing with all of this information'. It's gonna be like Lost. Whatever they give you won't have any meaning because it relies on vagueries. Sounds great and is self-affirming in some way while picking out a common shortcoming most folks have.

I can't see giving more money after this. I went to the well twice, and I can't say I feel enlightened, entertained, or amused. It feels like I'm being dangled forward with a vague promise it'll mean something- and, it's time to step away from the empty promise.

I saw such positive reviews for the game and thought it'd allow for introspection and character depth.

... What I got was an unpleasant character (along with myself as an unpleasant avatar) that is often pushed into scenarios I would not get into. No choices really steer away from it.

Ended up with a bad ending, and I don't feel the need to revisit it. There are many better visual novels out there that don't center around two-dimesional unpleasant characters.

So let me tell you about the huge, glaring problem of this game and its tech support.

I spent over $70 in purchasing crystals and the like for the game (it's littered with microtransactions and while it's not crucial to pay to progress, it makes it far easier). The game has achievements/missions you complete for rewards. One of those achievements was to link your account. Somehow, even though I started playing on Facebook, it didn't give me credit for linking the account. So, I linked an e-mail (happens to be my e-mail I use for Steam as well).

You're given a DBID, or fancy way of saying account number. Once I linked my account, it gave me a brand new account number, and proceeded to parse different game functions to either the first account, or the second one. So neither through Facebook (where I could access one account) nor Steam could I fully play the game. It couldn't read right for arenas, gauntlets, or events, or redeeming crystals daily for something I PAID FOR.

So I let tech support know, and they're apologetic and send you a little bit of in-game currencies/energies to make up for the inconvenience. The problem is, even when they said they'd fixed it (and I got it to semi-working order, most stuff worked), one day I got this error playing through Facebook, try to reload a game.

It created a THIRD account for me, brand new, so I have to go through the tutorial junk and don't have access to anything I've purchased or worked on. It always goes to the tutorial. I have been dealing with their tech support for over a week now, and I've become convinced they just stopped talking to me and trying to address the problem.

So there you go. I paid over $70 into this game which promptly ceased to function because of Disruptor Beam's poor programming and integration, and when I complain about it, they tried to give me soothing words until they realize what a cluster it is and then- they don't tell me about how they're working on the problem. They just stop talking to me about it.

So all that money for a broken game, and now I get to start trying to push to get it back since the game is broken.

Do NOT spend money on this. Do not invest in this. At any point if your game breaks (their fault), you could lose it. And once they figure out it's not a quick fix, they just quit trying and keep your money.

I am broken.

The author did a phenomenal job in crafting personalities, in throwing tough situations our way. And, for someone with no powers, I think I did very well.

But things were just too big for me. And when events happened that I couldn't dent... it broke me. It seriously broke me. I felt powerless. Realistic? Yes. Emotionally jarring? Yes.

But I don't know if I want to continue, simply because I feel so helpless.

Take that as you will. I can recommend this, but I don't plan to finish.

Now, when I say I recommend this game, note the caveat:

I recommend this game ON SALE. It's very much like King's Quest. You wander around, pick up items, talk with people, gather info and clues, and figure out how to progress.

So it's fun. But if you're a deft player, you can be done in 2 or 3 hours. Is that time fun? For the most part. But given the total content, once you're done, you're going to evaluate whether the money you spent was worth it.

Even $10 is too much for 2 hours of fun and limited replay value. I got it for 6, and 6 I can handle.

To the developers themselves, it's not a bad effort. But I'm hoping a future chapter will have more content. I think in total I dealt with about 10 characters and 20 items. You can do better still and really make it worth the price.

This game combined a bunch of elements that I really liked. It gave you the building and terraforming ability of Minecaft, the POTENTIAL (we'll get to this in a minute) ability to work together with friends, and a leveling-by-using skill system. So, you can build your own hideaway, town, or whatever, you still have to survive (and stuff in here's deadly!), and you forge your own path on what you're going to develop.

BUT. Frickin' but. We have tried, so very hard, my friends and I, to host a server and have them see it, and to have them run a server so we can see it. We're no slouches in hosting servers. We cannot see each other, and the boards seem to suggest this is a real craps shoot. That's not how multiplayer and servers should be.

Because it takes out the interactive element that really makes it enjoyable, for now, I cannot recommend this game. I may change it if Wurm takes steps to address this.

Too chaotic with too little sense of in what direction you'd need to proceed. Some might find that freeing, but with so little to go by it's really just guessing on whatever you choose to chase after.

The multiple storylines pulled in too many directions and left it with a weak product. I deleted it a few years back and haven't redownloaded.

So, I read somewhere that this was a good make-your-choices game that you can play for free and it can teach you something.

I think it does a decent job to highlight the struggles someone has with depression, feelings of inadequacy, and the very steep uphill climb that one has to endure to get anywhere. I went through a period of disthymia for a few years, and arguably I'm still slogging out of it.

It does a good job at highlighting the sometimes circular problems that can come up, even when you try to make a good effort. I won't spoil what you learn, because in a way it spoils the lessons the game is trying to teach. ... But if you do decide to play it, it may take a few tries to get anything even bittersweet for results. And that's okay.

Do for yourself, even when it's hard. ... And don't go it alone.

So yeah. This is my first review, but then, this is one of the games I know intimately well. I may only have about 16 hours on record here, but I've logged far more on the 360 version.

The Dead Rising series seems a bit schlocky, and that's not surprising. It's meant to be a tongue-in-cheek take on zombie outbreaks. It remains serious enough to have a cohesive plot, but not so serious that a lot of the bosses and scenarios you encounter seem far-fetched or histrionic.

The fun very much comes from having a whole playground of casinos, mall shops, and an added amusement park to formulate weapons and combat them. In addition to that, you'll encounter a lot of survivors who need to be brought back to the safehouse.

Then there's the sandbox mode. It takes out the merciless clock and timer that often impeded your missions in Dead Rising 2 and the original Dead Rising. That really allows for it to be your playground.

There's a bit of humor, a bit of sexy, a 'reality' TV show that glorifies zombie-killing in a WWE-type format. And what's more: Frank West returns in the Off the Record rendition.

Some of its reviews both here and elsewhere tend to be a bit negatory because DR2:OTR took so very much from DR2... so much that, heck, a lot of it's exactly the same. But what OTR really does is fine-tune, improve, and give a little more freedom. It makes it a lot more fun. It's what kept me coming back. I've probably played through the story twenty to thirty times now... and I expect to keep going. The ride's that fun.

Grab a weapon. Get creative. Explore. You'll find plenty of crazies along the way.