well, color me surprised! I looked up the rating of Always Sometimes Monsters and found this
Steam rating: 9/10
Gamespot rating: 5/10
how the heck can this be?!?!
Um, I'm going with a bunch of yahoos on Steam have little taste; that's the real noggin-knocker, isn't it? Lots of people enjoy anything that anyone churns out with RPGMaker, but that's no guarantee of quality.
Frankly, the name suggests an inherent and pretentious paradox and the description only makes it further look like lukewarm dog feces.
p.s. warreni, not all RPGMaker games are poop
Well, sure, but most of them are.
I often hear people talk highly of certain RPG Maker stories, but I have yet to come across one good enough to make me forget I was playing an RPG Maker game.
Well, I'm pretty sure that
To The Moon was made using RPGMaker, and it was actually one of the best games I've played in recent memory. But it's definitely the exception to the rule in my book.
If you have RPG Maker, try to make a game. You'll see it isn't as cookie cutter as many people think and might enjoy playing others and seeing how complex simple some features are to make. I felt the same way until Humble Bundle RPG Maker and I spent 40+ hours making only about 50% of a small game. Some of the ones that look like they could have been made in an afternoon by a kid working on it in between rounds of 360 no scopes, probably took a lot longer than that and a lot more effort to create.
But if it feels cookie-cutter than that's pretty academic, isn't it? I get the idea of "I put a lot of time into this" -- I never used RPG Maker but I used to use (dating myself here)
Adventure Construction Set, <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" data-cke-saved-href="
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-" em-up_construction_kit"="">Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit and
Unlimited Adventures. So I know it can be time consuming. But just "time consuming" doesn't make it a better game. The stuff Hal mentioned is all in Always Sometimes Monsters: bad controls, crappy menus that are a pain to navigate through, plodding dialogue boxes, etc. Some of the crap is just bad design choices ("waste your gaming time loading an indeterminate number of boxes as, I dunno, an allegory or something I guess") but some of it seems to be a function of the tools. No matter how long it takes to use them.
Well, pretty much what he said. Even companies with budgets in the tens of millions for game development churn out crap--and it's crap that hundreds of people may have put tens of thousands of collective man-hours to produce. If your only point is that RPGMaker XP isn't an easy development platform or that it takes a lot of effort to make even a relatively-simple game, then I don't necessarily disagree. But if the notion that because something took a lot of time is supposed to somehow mean that we should all respect and wish to play the fruits of such labor, I think you've missed the boat somewhere. I can (and likely so can you) name dozens of games that took a lot of time to make and still weren't very good.
And as SE says here, the criticism of RPGMaker games in a broad sense is not that it isn't possible to make a good game with it; it's that it's far easier to make a terrible game with it, and thus reinforce the idea that many people have that most RPGMaker games are inherently terrible.
And at the end of the day, I personally would much rather play
Monster Loves You! than
Always Sometimes Monsters, so the similarly-named games screwed me (because like others in this forum I prefer not to add things to my Steam account just for the sake of a +1--I'd much rather gift or sell stuff I'm very unlikely to ever play).
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