Wolfire Games Forums

I joined this forum partly to express how much I enjoy the game and also to review it eventually. But my first review was deleted and that wasn't exactly the most encouraging way to keep me here. So I thought I'd try something more relevant.

Black Shades:
Don't get me wrong, this game is fun. But it's got to be the strangest storyline and experience I've had in a game, ever.

The people must have a pretty violent lifestyle, since they seem to completely ignore the people running around with knives and weapons and don't react until they have a bullet in their crotch, the assassins aren't too smart either, completely ignoring the bald Men In Black clone. But probably the most annoying part of the game is the VIP, you must have a very high reputation as a bodyguard for the VIP to continue walking along happily even as the assassins gather and I'm still gunning crowds of civilians down so that I can get to the assassin with the shotgun. There is a difference between confidence and completely ignoring all survival instincts, I wouldn't be surprised if white-shirt injected himself with horse tranquilizers before getting out of bed. But I wanted to do a double-feature today so I'm going to stop ranting about box-wars and move onto the worlds greatest acid trip.

Lugaru:
I'm not sure what the heck you were thinking when you came up with kung-fu bunnies, but I don't care, it's too weird to not work.

Let me give you one analogy. If it was kung fu ants vrs kung fu flies this game couldn't be more buggy. Sure, it's not as bad as steaming pile of- but it's still stupidly glitchy. I'm sure Usagi can pull out some evidence. Flying rabbits, exploding heads in mid-air, and this is before I get onto the debug mode. But, here comes the part where I can't continue. Because I simply can't think of anything else that is wrong with this game. Honestly, that's it...

If I ever end a review like that again I swear I will stab myself in the crotch with a sword.

These are features, not glitches.

There are some glitches, but it's not THAT bad.

And you forgot to mention the slightly flawed story.

Black Shades is meant to be surreal in many ways, which is why characters are made of triangular prisms, and are totally oblivious to everything.

I have heard valid complaints about Lugaru (short campaign, linear story, no multiplayer), but I have never heard anyone complain that it is too buggy. The only bugs I know of in L1 are occasionally strange ragdoll behavior, which is also present in modern games like Halo 3 or Unreal Tournament 3, and a camera bug that occurs when you bleed to death during a reversal.

There's this other bug that makes Turner bounce into the sky and everything disappears until the game is restarted. And the bug with the landscape collision detection when you switch the environment type in debug mode. And the occasional crashing when loading custom levels (save into two files each time!). And the texture mapping glitch ("wooden Turner").

There are quite a few bugs, but from my experience, without a full-blown dev team and limited testing resources, that's to be expected; besides, the bugs are definitely not a dealbreaker.

Edit: Whoops, forgot the bug when trying to change the nearest character from bunny to wolf - it just doesn't work at least 70% of the time, it'll still be a bunny. Yes, I counted.

Disclaimer: Those bugs are probably present only on the Windows and Linux version of the game, I don't have a Mac'ish computer thing.

That's true, there are a fair number of debug mode bugs. That was never really tested to be user-safe, but I thought some people would enjoy it anyway

also a kinda funny glitch (i'm assuming it is one) is when a rabbit ragdolls on the edge of a block, it gets the jitters while lying down, then it get thrown down at 100mph and explodes on the ground (not just the head, the whole thing) it's pretty entertaning really. *jump* *ragdoll on edge* *zoom down*
*explode* in that order.

FlagPole wrote:I joined this forum partly to express how much I enjoy the game and also to review it eventually. But my first review was deleted and that wasn't exactly the most encouraging way to keep me here. So I thought I'd try something more relevant.

Black Shades:
Don't get me wrong, this game is fun. But it's got to be the strangest storyline and experience I've had in a game, ever.

The people must have a pretty violent lifestyle, since they seem to completely ignore the people running around with knives and weapons and don't react until they have a bullet in their crotch, the assassins aren't too smart either, completely ignoring the bald Men In Black clone. But probably the most annoying part of the game is the VIP, you must have a very high reputation as a bodyguard for the VIP to continue walking along happily even as the assassins gather and I'm still gunning crowds of civilians down so that I can get to the assassin with the shotgun. There is a difference between confidence and completely ignoring all survival instincts, I wouldn't be surprised if white-shirt injected himself with horse tranquilizers before getting out of bed. But I wanted to do a double-feature today so I'm going to stop ranting about box-wars and move onto the worlds greatest acid trip.

Lugaru:
I'm not sure what the heck you were thinking when you came up with kung-fu bunnies, but I don't care, it's too weird to not work.

Let me give you one analogy. If it was kung fu ants vrs kung fu flies this game couldn't be more buggy. Sure, it's not as bad as steaming pile of- but it's still stupidly glitchy. I'm sure Usagi can pull out some evidence. Flying rabbits, exploding heads in mid-air, and this is before I get onto the debug mode. But, here comes the part where I can't continue. Because I simply can't think of anything else that is wrong with this game. Honestly, that's it...

If I ever end a review like that again I swear I will stab myself in the crotch with a sword.

I hate you.

Why do you hate him?

NovaNoah wrote:Why do you hate him?

*is thinking same*
tbh, i thought his points were pretty valid...even if the games were intentionally made that way, the thing is that some gamers may disagree with the way it was done so, bravo...I admire your courage...no one else has made a bad review to my knowledge but, there's something different about how you handled it

I think Count Roland was intending that to be a joke although, that said, I suppose that in my experience jokes often have slivers of truth in them.

Our mate here was just saying some things other people were too blind with Wolfire-love to say...even though he did seemingly take Black Shades a tad too seriously. The game wasn't meant to be fully realistic...judging by the zombies trying to kill the VIP (and only him)...and that's JUST a hazardous guess.

lol i was joking I have nothing against anyone on the forums and he did bring up some valid points however the fact is that kung fu bunny rabbits have been in existence for a long time ( there were several games featuring them for the snes) and that black shades I believe was sort of a fast game but the idea was great and the game itself was extremely fun none of davids ideas are that unusual if you see some of the stuff people think of for other games

Like game names along the lines of "Wargasm", "Sticky Balls", "Irritating Stick" and "Divine Divinity"?

Yeah, there's proof that two things are infinite: The universe, and human stupidity.

BunnyWithStick wrote:Like game names along the lines of "Wargasm", "Sticky Balls", "Irritating Stick" and "Divine Divinity"?

Yeah, there's proof that two things are infinite: The universe, and human stupidity.

someone who agrees at last

(though it is not necessarily proved that the universe is infinite)

I'm back.

Sorry, lots of things got in the way.

..

Damnit. I missed alot.

I changed the title to be less misleading. Let's start with the ranting.

Let me review some demos from the 360 marketplace, just a few quickies.

Vampire Rain:
The worst stealth game ever. The enemies will kill you in half a second (including time to run towards you) if they so much as catch a GLIMPSE of you. It doesn't help that to complete each level you have to do everything exactly right, which is just wrong. However, the level promised a shotgun and that when you got it the game would become much easier, so I tried again. The first time I stupidly shot them as soon as I saw them, which resulted in death, so the second time I hid behind a box, the 2 "Nightcrawlers" (A stupid word for vampire) spoke to eachother as if they were reading the lines off of eachothers shirts, then one of them walked off and the other preceded to look around for something it heard, it just happened to stumble past my box and see me WITH THE SIDE OF HIS HEAD.

I tried again and this time hid inside a toilet cubicle, the vampire said his lines, came looking for me, found nothing, then walked off. I followed him for a while and found he lead me into a really big room, on the other side there were 2 vampires, then I thought- "They can see things from over 2 miles away, this is impossible" and went back to the dashboard.

Having grown up with fighting games, I thought Virtual Fighter 5 would be fun, so I downloaded that too. I'd liked the dead or alive games and had the demo for the 4th, so I already had high hopes. I chose the first guy on the list, and was thrown into a battle with some old guy, like all fighting games, I pressed random buttons until I found the one that hurt the most and stuck with that one, the old man fell to the ground and the next guy came in to get his asswhooped by the button-mashing warrior.

I know this is how all fighting games work, but VF5 seemed like it was made for button mashing, if you press punch, punch, then kick, you'll do 2 punches, and instead of continuing the combo, you'll then start the kick combo. In other words, the only combos were-
Kick kick kick.
Punch punch punch.
Stomp stomp stomp.
Where as in dead or alive 4 you could have.
Punch punch kick kick kick
Wave arms magic teleport kick punch kick.
Giant slam to the ground with legs, another giant slam with legs, wrestling style grab while their down.
Etc.
To be honest I could have had the same sort of experience watching TV while punching a potato, when a game is such that you have to press buttons over and over while reading a book (It's actually pretty hard) to get entertainment, then they've clearly done something wrong.


Just because I'm bored enough. I'm taking requests if anyone has any.