Blogs - Qieth

Armed with a heavy-duty water cannon, Max has what he needs to vanquish his long-term nemesis: the Mutant Mudds. Max must blast and hover his way across the soiled landscape to seek out mysterious Water Sprites. Legend says collecting all of the mysterious Water Sprites will wash the filthy Mutant Mudds away for good!

Escape Goat is a puzzle platformer featuring a unique take on traps and machinery. To solve each room, you must escape fearsome foes, navigate mazes, and use the environment to your advantage. Only with the help of a friendly mouse do you stand a chance. Use the mouse to reach otherwise unreachable areas, and even warp to him - if you can find a magic hat! Escape Goat is packed with over 50 stages of fun in this unique labyrinth adventure.

Chester is a 2D platformer with over 10 unlockable characters, a light RPG element and leveling up system, loads of unlockables, around 50 levels, and 8 "styles" that allow the player to change the look of the game at will. These styles include sketchbook, 8-bit, LCD, blueprints, and many more. They also each give a unique gameplay bonus to the player. The game also includes 4 difficulty levels so that almost anyone can beat the game or get a very challenging experience out of it.

Experience a mind-bending, psychedelic sensory overload in Dyad! Blast through a reactive audio-visual tube creating a harmonious synthesis of color and sound as you Hook, Graze, and Lance enemies to master Dyad's 27 unique levels.

Here it is - the very first episode of my new show, The Daily Grind. Today we are checking out Constant C!

Constant C is a gravity based puzzle platformer, where we play as a lone security bot who wakes up next to a broken pod in what appears to be an abandoned space station. Something terrible has happened, and it is up to us to figure out what has happened! With the aid of the ships mainframe and some nifty gravity tools, we explore the quiet space station in search for what has befallen the scientists.

Warning: Spoilers to everything related to Bioshock Infinite below!

In order to tell you this story, we have to start at the end. At the last sentence uttered: "I am both".

Booker DeWitt and Zachery Hale Comstock is the same man.

Booker DeWitt fought at the battle of Wounded Knee. When the war is over, he is offered redemption in the form of a baptism. But Booker DeWitt rejects the hand of forgiveness and flees to New York where he lives a life debt and guilt.

But in another reality, Booker DeWitt accepts the baptism, and is reborn a new man: Zachery Hale Comstock. Comstock leads a religious life, one where he seeks to redeem mankind.

One day, Comstock meets Rosalind Lutece, a quantum physicist who invents the technology necessary to create Columbia. Rosalind also discovers an alternate universe where the male version of herself, Robert, resides. Together, the Lutece twins create a contraption that allow people to enter another reality and to see the future.

In Comstock's future, he sees an elderly Elizabeth standing on top of a sky scaper in 1984. From this he makes the prophecy of "the seed of the prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flame the mountains of man". Mountains of Man being the sky scrapers of the future.

Sadly, because of his work with the tears, Comstock has become sterile, and so he is unable to bear a child. But through the tears, the Lutece's finds the alternate reality where Booker DeWitt lives - biologically the same as Comstock, but not sterile - in fact, he already has a child.

Robert Lutece goes to DeWitt and blackmails him to deliver his daughter, Anna, in return for wiping away Booker's debt. When Booker changes his mind, he tries to get his daughter back, and this is where Anna's pinkie is cut off by the tear. This is also what gives Anna.. or Elizabeth, the powers to manipulate the tears.

Comstock builds the Siphon to subdue Elizabeths powers and exploit them for evil or whatever. He has his wife killed because she goes crazy, and he orders Fink to kill the Lutece twins - but because of their knowledge on quantum physics, they are able to remain alive, scattered across the possibility universe. They are given a chance to right their wrongs.

They bring Booker to Columbia. He has been living a life of torment after giving up his daughter, and he has branded her initials, AD, into his hand. The Lutece twins pulls him into a reality where he is not supposed to be, causing his mind to fabricate a reason behind being there. "Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt". He forgets about his daughter.

Comstock has forseen the coming of the false shepherd, so Booker is apprehended when the police notice the AD on his hand. He escapes and tries to make his way to Elizabeth.

Booker rescues Elizabeth, and they both go to the Hall of Heroes to get the Shock Jockey vigor, and here we learn from Captain Slate about The Battle of Wounded Knee. We are told that Comstock was at the battle of Wounded Knee, but we can't yet make the connection between Comstock and DeWitt. I suppose we just assume that Comstock is telling the story differently, which is what Slate is so pissed about.

They use shock jockey to steal the First Lady's airship, but when Elizabeth knocks Booker out, he is found by Daisy Fitzroy, the leader of the Vox Populi, who forces him to help overthrow the weapons dealer Jeremiah Fink. While doing this, Elizabeth transports us into a different reality, where we have already succeeded, but where we have died. Fitzroy sees us, the not dead Booker, as a threat to the ideal of her dead Booker DeWitt, which is why we have to kill her off.

We get back on the airship but are attacked by the Songbird because Comstock's statues are set to play a tune every time a Elizabeth is near -- I guess. We escape, but now we must get to Comstock to put an end to him once and for all. During the journey through this part of town, we learn that Elizabeth is not Comstocks real daughter, how he became sterile, that his wife thinks Comstock had an affair with Rosalind Lutece and we learn that Comstock had Fink kill the Lutece twins.

Songbird kidnaps Elizabeth, we get her back, we raid Comstocks airship to kill him and to have a way to escape. When we finally meet him, he tells us that he has known the truth from the start and that he should just have told Elizabeth everything from the beginning - but we still can't quite make the connection.

Thanks to Future Elizabeth, we are able to control the Songbird with the musical notes C A G and E and we use the Songbird to destroy the Siphon. Doing this destroys the musical device, but it has released all of Elizabeth's powers.

Because of this we learn that the realities of Booker DeWitt and Zachery Hale Comstock both originated from the same moment: the baptism after the battle of Wounded Knee. In one reality, Booker accepts the baptism and becomes Comstock, and in another he rejects it and becomes the Booker DeWitt who will suffer the fate of being dragged through this entire infinite loop over and over again.

Elizabeth understands that only by killing Booker right then and there can she stop the events from unfolding. Booker never becomes Comstock. Comstock doesn't live to create Columbia. Anna is never born. And Elizabeth seizes to exist.

The end.

I think that the review feature on Desura is a wonderful way to get your review seen by both the developer and people who might be interested in buying the game. But I feel that the system is misused by unrealistic scores or outright lying.

A lot of games - a LOT of games - are getting many 10-score reviews. I wont argue if any particular game is "the best game ever" but the amount of games that are actually scoring 10, the highest score possible, is quite staggering. In my book, 10 is reserved for games that are perfect, or near perfect. Minor bugs aside, these games are the dope. I can count on one hand the amount of games I have played that I would give a solid 10.

I know that different people like different kind of games, and different games should be evaluated independantly - you wouldn't penalize Portal 2 because the graphics are worse than Bioshock, because Portals graphics fit the game and does what it needs. You don't deduct points from To The Moon because it doesn't have turn based combat.

If I look at the latest reviews on Desura (Indiedb.com), 61% of all reviews posted gives a 10. Wow, that is amazing - we must be sitting on some of the best games this year! Do you see what I mean?

But using unrealistic scores does nothing good for anyone. It might help motivate a developer to continue working on the game - or it might be a developer trying to pad his numbers. It might also be someone trying to get on the developers good side, or simply someone trying to bump their rank on Desura for a bit of an ego boost.

But if I buy a game, thinking its a solid 10, then I have some really big expectations to the game. If they are not met, then I will tell my friends that "The game was ranked really well, but it suuuucked". Suddenly, we are discrediting the value of rankings on Desura altogether.

And now, it's not about getting an accurate representation from the masses of Desura, it's suddenly about getting as many 10's as possible. I've posted a few reviews on the site, and I have felt bad because my "8" pulls the game down - when in fact I feel it is an accurate representation of my experience with the game.

So please, consider how you rate when you rate. I am not saying that my way of reviewing games is in any way perfect, but I do feel that very few games deserve a 10. God, I wouldn't want to play the games you rate 1.

Ps. In my book, any game above 5 is a playable and enjoyable game. A game doesn't have to be 10 to be awesome.

I spoke to the developers behind Teslagrad when they had a semi-working alpha build of Teslagrad. They asked people on Reddit to try out their game. I approached them and asked if I could make a video on the game. They said yes, but that they would prefer if I could wait with playing the game until they had solved out a few bugs and crashes. That is perfectly understandable, because if you are going to get your game showcased to a lot of people, you don't want any embarassing bugs to surface.

Several months later they wrote me back, and I am surprised that they remembered me. They had a stable build - well, stable enough - and they sent me a press demo of the game. I had seen the gameplay trailer, but I had not played the game those months earlier, because I prefer to go into a game with a fresh mind, completely blind.

It was a very intriguing game, and I was very sorry to see a big, fat sign saying "END OF DEMO". I wanted to play more. I really wanted to see where the game would take me. Eventually, I will, when the game is released. Until then, feel free to check out the video I did on Teslagrad:

- Qieth