More delays... sorry about that.

Things have been kind of hectic at work! Not that they aren't ever, but lately it's just been crazy. I've worked 40 hours last week and will be working 40 hours every coming week, for at least over a month. As you can guess, it digs into my free time. (Not to mention it's still nighttime work, so I sleep during the day).

It's entirely possible that, after I'm done with the current set of reviews (ending with a Top 12 as usual), I take a few weeks off. I've been feeling overworked lately - and ironically, it's the combination of having an actual job and writing/editing my reviews that's been causing that.

So in about four weeks, expect me to take a break. How long? I don't know. I just need time to de-stress, relax, build a comfortable buffer of reviews and then come back with better content. I hate having to go one week without a review on the blog, so two weeks is even worse for me. Hopefully it's not three weeks without reviews.

As a side-note, this might actually give me some time to work on the fifth anniversary review, coming in July. I know it's going to be pretty big, so some extra time to work on that one will be appreciated. I just need a couple weeks without worrying about adding images to reviews, or stuff to review, or anything of the like...

All my apologies for the foreseen break. It's still a way away from now, but still. I'll try to get as many reviews ready as possible in the next few weeks, then go back into writing, at a slower pace.

I prefer to tell you guys about potential upcoming delays, even if they don't happen, than not warn you about them and you wonder why I didn't post anything one week.

So I've seen Avengers: Infinity War...

Alright!

Before I start this review, I have to say this: I missed most of the newer Marvel Cinematic Universe films. The most recent one I saw was Captain America: Civil War, and even there I had to see Avengers: Age of Ultron a little later. I missed Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Gotg Vol. 2, Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther. Blame my nighttime work and erratic sleep schedule. I'll probably catch up on those eventually...

Thankfully, I was never afraid of seeking spoilers myself, so I already know most of what happened in those films. Avengers 3 doesn’t fill all the blanks, but it does explain some stuff to newcomers. I’ll try to avoid spoilers in the story, just a heads-up that the film features approximately 90% of all superheroes introduced to the MCU since its beginnings. Though a few of them are just cameos. The absences are few and far between, but oddly noticeable as a result.

For the little story, Thanos (whose role has been foreshadowed since the first Avengers film) has put on his Infinity Gauntlet and, with one Infinity Stone already in it, he is now seeking the others. And from there, his quest gets a little more complicated… Pesky heroes, amirite?

The deaths start from the very first scene in the movie. As colorful and pretty the film may be, just be aware going in that it’s extremely bleak under the surface. Things just keep getting worse over time. It’s 2 hours 30 minutes of “Okay, how can we put the heroes into more trouble now?” Also remember that this movie was first marketed as a Part 1 of 2, with all that implies.

The film’s dozens of superheroes are soon split into 3 or 4 groups, all of whom participate in a way or another by either trying to protect an Infinity Stone or by fending off Thanos’ forces, which includes three very powerful combatants and an entire army of four-armed monsters. That’s not counting the Mad Titan himself, who is a tough customer in battle even if a full group of superheroes comes towards him at once. And of course, he just becomes more and more dangerous as he finds the Stones.

The ultimate plan from the purple giant? To amass enough reality-warping power that he can, with a single finger snap, erase literally 50% of all sentient life in the universe. His justification? There’s just too many people in the universe, taking all the resources, so erasing one person out of two at random surely must be the sole logial solution. Never mind the three hundred other solutions that could be found by someone with slightly more imagination and Godlike abilities brought by the mythical stones.

Chosen 2

Hoo boy, here we are.

As I mentioned in recent reviews, I am currently going through RPG Maker games I own. I have some that are free, available for all to play, and others that aren’t free, but included in bundles or sold cheaply on Steam. As an example, there's The Chosen RPG and its sequel, Chosen 2. 

This guy's in full armor...

The Chosen RPG was my first review of an RPG Maker title on this blog, and it was also one up-and-coming developer’s first creation. Created by Little Big Lee, The Chosen is a fairly basic RPG title that didn’t reinvent the wheel or made itself recognizable with unique elements. Sure, it went above and beyond by featuring bonus bosses and a special equipment item for each main character – and, to be completely fair, it had a full map, a few dungeons, and some puzzles as well. So, not all bad for someone's first game. It did, however, suffer from a story beyond cliché and a lot of odd design choices, in combat (with tiny character sprites against the normal monster sprites that looked gigantic in comparison) and in cutscenes (90% of the female characters walked around in little more than undergarments; perfectly gratuitous, blatant and unjustifiable “fanservice”). Make sure to give that two-part review a read.

...while the ladies aren't even wearing anything that could
look like the Zero Suit. Nah, just make it bras.
And while we're there, imply they wear no bottoms either.

The Chosen ended in a cliffhanger, with the three allies escaping while Edge, the “Chosen” (urgh…), remained trapped in the Underworld, Land of the Dead, world of Akuma the final boss. Let’s see where it goes from there. Hopefully this one is an improvement over the original.

Antagonist

So I recently compiled a list of games I owned in my Steam collection that were created using RPG Maker.

That’s 25. That’s a LOT of games. I want to be clear: I’m not dissing on RPG Maker. I believe it’s a wonderful tool to learn to build games, offering resources, assets, and a system to easily construct maps and events. It’s also 70$, so not too expensive, not to mention it’s always on sale during Steam’s big summer and winter events. The story? That’s for you to decide. Your talent is your greatest asset. You have the building blocks. Build something. Will you take inspiration from other stuff? Will you follow the cliché beats of a fantasy RPG?

The last RPG game I reviewed, The Chosen, was...
rather meh. 

The games made on RPG Maker can be cookie-cutter titles using only the free resources, just like they can be daring, new, innovative products made with the software and custom-made assets. I’ve reviewed one example of the former last year and – spoiler alert – in the list I showed, there are titles for both categories. Like a lot of indie products, many of these are somebody’s first attempt at producing a video game for a platform like Steam, and their work should be seen and reviewed as such. There’s always room for improvement. I gathered some of them through bundles on Steam, others were pointed to me as great examples of what the game-making software could achieve.

Today’s game was developed by NIVLACART, published by Degica (the creators of RPG Maker), and released to Steam on March 17^th, 2017. It is NIVLACART’s first game, too, so I can't wait to see how well they've done. Let’s jump into Antagonist!

Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius

I was, at first, planning to do this one as part of a Steam Pack, but then I discovered I had too much to say about it, so here goes: Full article!

And that's approximately 0.02% of the entire selection of free games.

Steam houses all kinds of free games: There’s the basic free games, mostly short experiences that one made available for all to play without spending a dime, but there are bigger games in that category sometimes. There’s all the free-to-play stuff, which can be easily avoided. Then there's Early Access, with some games that are free, others that you'd pay for, but the result is the same: The developers want a base of players to test the game and report anything that has to be changed. They’re like betas open to the public.

From this page. And if you calculate...
Yep, more than 14 times the demanded amount.

Today’s game is… technically none of these. It’s free for a reason: It was funded on Kickstarter and its developers aren’t interested in making money off the first two chapters of this story they wanted to tell. (There IS a third chapter, titled Liberation Day, and it’s not free, but I will keep my focus today on the first two). Indie developer Love In Space set up a crowdfunding campaign for the story they desired to tell, and managed to not only gather the funds, they actually collected 14 times their original goal and then some. This is a story people wanted to see made, and they delivered. And so, this game was released by Sekai Project on July 2^nd, 2014.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I won’t be critical towards it. One of the great things about Steam is how developers can simply release an update of their game as soon as said update is ready. This is one of the cases where I actually hope my criticism is constructive to the development team at Love In Space, and that they take it into account if they are to update the game in the future. Mind you, I have technical criticism as well as story-based criticism, but only the former really matters - I acknowledge that any of my gripes about the story are my problem only, as it is the story Love In Space wanted to tell. Also, to be clear, the free game on Steam includes the first and second games in the trilogy, titled “Sunrider: First Arrival” and “Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius” respectively. The free game on Steam has the name of the latter, but includes the former.