Oh right, I have a Newgrounds account. I forgot that pretty quick.

Ok, let's get to talking about Starbound. From what I can tell, Starbound is the only game actually developed by Chucklefish themselves. The rest of their games are just published by them. Starbound as it stands, is super lacking to me. Like, it has the framework for something really neat, but it just doesn't have it. It doesn't have nearly enough real content. It seems Chucklefish has decided to extend the playtime of a game, simply copy and paste the same things over and over again, without stopping. The actual real content is too difficult to make a time consuming it seems for them, the story missions really show how much they rushed things. There is no Novakid mission, and the final race mission is just an arena with enemy spam. They really like spamming enemies. Honestly, I think the best mission in the game is the Floran one due to multiple routes and overall being pretty decent. However, starting a new playthrough of Starbound is super boring and painful. It makes you play the story missions and...oh boy, the scanning missions. Before every story mission, the game makes you go from planet to planet scanning objects based around the next alien race. Nobody likes these missions. They are pointless padding. Also going from planet to planet makes you realize how boring the planets themselves are. They are pretty copy and paste. There's nothing super special about each of the planet types except for the artificial difficulty. Yay, artifical difficulty in the form of enemies with more hp and more damage output! HOW FUN. Enemies in general are just boring. The walk towards you and attack, or use one of the very few weapons against you. They also lag a lot. Like, a lot. Starbound's engine is honestly garbage. I'd go as far to say worse than the engine Bethesda has been using for the last 20-something years. A lot of people say Starbound's multiplayer is the best part, which I can't really say much on since the game was pretty much unplayable online for me. The lag was insane making it downright unplayable. Terraria runs 10 times better than Starbound, and looks better.

The actual main cast is as 1-dimensional as you can get, I'd even say they are 0.5-dimensional, they are THAT uncreative and boring. They have one defining trait, and that's it. Honestly the best story in the game were codexes. Short notes written by characters you'd never see were more interesting than the main plot. Oh and about that plot, giant eldritch hentai monster destroys earth, go kill it before it destroys the rest of the universe, but you know, no rush. Seriously, the universe is gonna be destroyed, but you're gonna have me scan a a bunch of furniture beforehand. The game is honestly much better with mods, and a ton of other people look to think so too, since I rarely see people playing the vanilla game. It's pretty much Skyrim-syndrome. The base game is nothing but a base for tons of mods that can make the game actually good.

I bought back it when it was still in early access, I can't remember exactly when, if I had to take a guess...maybe 2014 or so? I expected quite a bit to be added over time, but nothing really did. The stuff that got added was either the rest of the story missions or stuff that doesn't really effect the main gameplay. Novakids really got the short end of the stick as they didn't even have villages still when the game got to 1.0, which makes me think Chucklefish was just tired of the game and didn't want to keep working on it, or they are so incompetent they forgot. Starbound is still not that great. The space mech exploration thing only gets you upgrades for the space mech so you can get more upgrades for the space mech, and the space station is pretty much just another option for base making. The end-game dungeon is also just there to give you the terraformers and some stronger weapons, but you've already beaten the game so...what's the point? You're already probably strong enough to one shot most enemies on the average planet. Starbound is not designed well in the slightest, and I can't recommend it to anyone, really. It's a shame, the game showed a lot of potential.

As always, excuse typos, I'm still getting used to writing long things this and I tend to think faster than I can type. I'm also tired right now so, that doesn't help either. Anyway, thanks for reading! Hopefully you at least got the general idea, I think I could have written this better, but...yeah. Have a good day and/or night!

/!\ This is a reupload from my tumblr with edits made to make it just read better.

Alright. So, I don’t want this to be “GENERIC VALVE COMPLAINT POST#345256″, as I think I have a somewhat different opinion on Valve than most “Valve Haters”. Hell, I don’t even think of myself as a Valve Hater. I wouldn’t consider myself one. Also, I sorta want practice for writing stuff, so hopefully I can use this blog for actual blog things.

Valve is a shadow of its former self. It still retains its name, but it isn’t the same company that we once knew. Even if they really try to be what they used to be, it won’t make up for the last 10 or so years. I’ve played so many of their games, I own the Valve Complete Pack for crying out loud! I played TF2 endlessly, I loved the Portal games (Portal 1 is better than 2 fight me), and failed horribly in Dota 2! I even tried to make SFM animations, I tried to make maps, items, you freaking name it! So seeing Valve as it currently is just hurts. Let me get this out of way before I start complaining more: Half-Life 3, if it ever came out, would most likely be the most damaging thing to Valve possible. So many years have passed, it is literally impossible to live up to the hype. The internet is the internet, meaning no matter what, the internet will complain if it doesn’t match their “standards”. Even then, the ending to the game will most likely leave off of a cliffhanger like Half-Life 1 did. Yeah, remember that? Valve had no idea if HL1 was going to be successful, and they still made it a cliffhanger. For all we know, a majority of Valve might be okay with HL2′s current ending. It just hurts more because of HL2′s character development. HL1 didn’t have a ton of character development to it, so the cliffhanger ending didn’t hurt nearly as much. HL2 stabs you multiple times in the feels and expects you leave the cinema satisfied to some extent. If Valve is smart, they will never release Half-Life 3, unless they truly trust that it will be the game everyone wanted, which I highly doubt will ever happen. As for Portal, I don’t know why so many people want a Portal 3. I mean, Portal was good, but like, we got an ending. An actual satisfying ending. The co-op ending however, probably just exists so Valve could make spin-offs without hurting the lore. Counter-Strike is…something I actually couldn’t really get into. I can’t really comment on this one much. I did play a fair amount of CS:GO, but it didn’t really grab me I guess. Team Fortress 2 on the other hand…as of writing this I have 976 hours clocked into TF2. I know for a lot of people that might just be "noob hours", but I still freaking love that game, even with all its flaws. The absence of content of the game is worrying, but I do know the team is very small, like I think it was said to be around 6-10 people or something. The community for TF2 is still super active, so it’s not dead, not even close. Community-made content is really helping it survive, without it, TF2 would have died years ago. The problem lies in the fact that I still worry. I still worry that one day updates for TF2 will just stop. I worry Valve will make a bad decision and everything will go down the drain. Artifact hasn’t been handled the best, so my worries about Valve just sorta skyrocketed. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to care anymore. I don’t want to care about Valve anymore. It’s freaking stressful and makes me so sad when I see what they’re doing, or, I guess not doing. They barely communicate with their community, especially putting F2P elements in their paid games. I can’t support that. I really can’t. It feels like Valve is getting greedier and greedier sometimes, it really does. The asset flips and general garbage that ends up on Steam showed they don’t care what gets put on Steam as long as they make money. Valve has given me some of the best video game experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ll always have those memories. So, what’s the point of hoping they’ll do it again?

I really want to support them, they made some amazing games, but all I see is them going downhill at a pretty rapid pace. Artifact really sped it up. Also, if you’re wondering if I’ve played Artifact or not, the answer is no. The main reasoning being the fact that I don’t have much interest in card games, and the whole F2P model in a paid game doesn’t really grab me.

TLDR; i’m breaking up with you, valve. but i’m keeping the action figures because they are really cool.

Have a nice day, and thank you for reading (and excuse typos, I’m still trying to get the hang of this whole blog thing and I tend to think faster than I can type lol).

December 6th, 2018 EDIT: Ok so I guess CSGO is Free-to-Play now!?! I really didn't see that coming. Huh.

"frick u tumblr"

Ok so, out of fear of my tumblr account getting borked, I'm here now. I make pixel art and rant about things.