Recently I got my grubby paws on v1.43, the latest update as of Dec 2013, of Timber and Stone. It's a voxel graphics based indie game which can roughly be described as a cross between a Minecraft-type game and an RTS. Sounds good, yes? Check out the game's actual About page here: http://www.timberandstonegame.com/?page_id=13

The controls are pretty good - not much fumbling around, and the worst is probably stuff like unselecting/cancelling particular dig/mine/build orders. The graphics are serviceable - okay for voxels, nothing to write home about. The interface, however, could definitely use some work. For example, what resources and equipment you have are behind a button which is one of three main action buttons, instead of given a hotkey which allows you to easily toggle on/off the relevant info.

Similarly, picking an action from the buttons is a matter of trial and error, since the menus replace each other instead of cascade or otherwise indicate where you're nested at in them. Still, this is more of a nitpick than an actual problem, although it certainly doesn't help cement the stereotype of indie games as being lacking in the polish department.

No, my beef is actually with some design decisions of the developer. See, he instituted autosave-style saving, and he was quoted as saying something along the lines of "where's the challenge if you can simply load when things go wrong?" Strike one. First, he himself admitted the game's focused on singleplayer, and multi is, for now, just something on a "maybe someday" list. That said, why use this method of coercing players to play it your way, rather than theirs? It's a singleplayer game, let people play however the hell they feel like.

Not to mention the stupidity of doing this on a PC game - everybody knows all you have to do is just find out where these autosaves are made, and then make manual backups. Ta-da, we just circumvented his pain in the ass "system" using a trick so old it might as well not even be considered a trick, just common sense.

This "games must be hard" philosophy bleeds into another area, balance/difficulty. Apparently enemy spawns are determined by your "wealth", i.e. how many resources you've gathered. This is sheer folly, evidenced by the simple fact that even a newbie can bloat his wealth rating by mining and chopping trees, the easiest default actions, without any clue as to how to do anything else (the game's almost total lack of info certainly doesn't help here). Proof is all over the forums, where people are complaining getting ganked by hordes of monsters as early as day 1 before they had a chance to mount any kind of defence.

If you love roguelikes, are fine with dying repeatedly with little to no feedback to tell you what you did wrong, then you won't have any problems getting kicked in the nuts by this game. For everyone else, we were expected a sandbox - you know, as advertised, i.e. Minecraft meets RTS - but were punched in the gonads instead. Worse, you have clueless fanboys (sigh) defending this despite not knowing why we're complaining. We're not asking for a dumbed-down game, you cretins - we're asking for some balance to be put in.

The game's intensely about micromanagement - unlike RTS games, your workers here have to be handheld through most of their tasks. Okay, so maybe that was an exaggeration - they seem to be able to mine stuff, herd animals, and build by following blueprints pretty handily. But combat is a miserable failure. A decently-armored character can slog through 3 fights and survive, only to get oneshot in a different encounter. The more baffling thing is there's little to no feedback - you know, how you figure out what you did wrong and what to fix. Here it's more like "lol nope, bye noob", because the game immediately throws you back to the desktop after all your characters died - and due to the moronic autosave system it'll have saved that game over, meaning that particular playthrough is gone forever.

Meh, getting sleepy, it's midnight here, I'll write more on this later.

Sun 5/Jan/2014 Edit:

It's not all bad though, but it's definitely an unfinished game. If you're one of the few of us who got it early, there are some tips to make your life easier.

1. Play on the coastline - enemies can't walk over water, so all you have to do is isolate your tiny settlement by quickly digging out a trench on the exposed sides. Actually you can do this anywhere, but having a water border is great because you get to kill another bird with the same stone: fishing. Farming for food is too slow, while foraging exposes you to the risk of your isolated forager getting killed while unable to run due to being loaded down with the foodstuff he foraged. Fishing is OP, really.

2. The most popular mod on the forum is, ironically, one that prevents monsters from spawning. Check it out - make sure you got the correct version of the game btw, it's a .dll replacement (a simple 2-byte hack). This immediately turns the game into a much more pleasant sandbox, allowing you to figure things out at your own pace. Really nice trick. Plus you can always drop the original game .dll back in when you think your settlement is ready to start fending off monsters again.

Finally, as far as I can tell the devs do appear to be involved on their forums, and they've also recently started a development blog. Communication is always a good sign. Hop on and let them know what you think of the current progress.

So I was looking around at old games to review, and remembered Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Mostly high player scores as expected, but there was one with only 3.5. Hmmm. I tend to read low reviews first though - fans tend to gloss over flaws which these low score giving people may point out. Keyword being "may". Most of the time it's just some stupid retard who doesn't have a clue what the hell he's talking about. Opinion != review. Yes, reviews CONTAIN your opinions, but they should also talk about THE GODDAMN GAME. The fcking section says "Post your REVIEWS here", not "Post your opinions here". Now, a mix of good and bad reviews is generally a good sign that people are trying to evaluate the game properly instead of all high scores which can be a sign of fanboyism. But one or two low scores in a sea of high ones? It's like asking me, an FPS-disliker, to review an FPS games. But even then at least *I* know how to be objective. I see no problem with giving credit where credit is due. Not like most asswipes who simply give low scores because they didn't like the game. You give low scores if the game is BAD, not because you didn't like it. Morons. Anyway, this guy actually did give some decent reasons. The game IS hyped, and it IS easy, several of the secrets ARE nonsensical and can't be puzzled out, and some of the interface COULD have been done better. But that doesn't detract from the overall smoothness of the game. It's like if something had not-so-bleeding-edge graphics. I'd dock a point or two, but not give it something below 7, which is considered merely "good". The guy gave HALF of that. It's clear he's one of those asswipes who doesn't know the difference between "broken" (the tagline he chose, btw) and "not quite what I was expecting".

There needs to be a minimum IQ limit in order to post a review. You get crap like one-paragraph ramblings that go all over the place without actually REVIEWING the goddamn game. At the very least a comparison with other games would let people know where you're coming from. Even better if you actually explained what you liked and disliked about the game. Reviews aren't myspace posts, you nitwits. Reviews are meant to tell other players how the features in the game worked or not for you so that we can have some idea of how the game actually plays.

Omfg, a remake is out! I hear it includes the classic mode as well, even down to the sprites. Woot. Gotta check it out.

We need more of these. There aren't anywhere near enough of them, especially if you consider that most of the games which grace shop shelves are likely either EA titles or from some other huge publisher. Marketing dollar speaks, and you get what you pay for. Does this mean million-dollar advertising budget games are good? Hell no. Hollywood is proof of this. Remake after tedious remake, raking over the coals of past glories, trying to cash in on the great titles of the past. Bigger budgets, more special effects, more star power, more this, more that... and in the end, they almost always fall short. Far short. Which is sad and pathetic, considering that the originals were often low budget productions. Back to space sims. There needs to be more of the Privateer / Freelancer type, rather than mindless shooting games thinly disguised as space sims (hello Darkstar One, Space Force: Rogue Universe). Sure, these new games LOOK pretty, but are LOOKS everything? No. HELL NO. Tetris is a worldwide phenomenon and it didn't get there with the help of any 3D jazz, rah rah music, or other crap like that. It is simply gameplay, pure distilled gameplay. Look at the people defending Darkstar One, for example. The devs boasted (boasted!) that it would be "Freelancer done right". Right, my ass. You only ever fly ONE ship in the entire game. Of course, you do kit it up the wazoo just like some ricer, but it's still the same ship. Then the star systems. One star, one station, one asteroid field, and a bunch of background which start to appear suspiciously familiar the longer you play. All of the systems are exactly like that. "Uninspired" is the least unkind word I could use to describe it. Finally, the factions... they use the same old cliche "cops-and-robbers" style pirates vs police. Freelancer did factions way better than that... A DECADE AGO. More devs need to try their hand at space sims. After all the worst you can do is produce a mediocre one, but there's far less competition than if you produced a mediocre shooting game.