Free Video Game Reviews: Electric Highways

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after this article. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

Before I start this review, I must state that this game falls somewhat under the interactive experience banner of gaming: there’s nothing that you have to fight or kill and, for the most part, the only interactivity in the game is you moving around the game world. Because of this, it is surprisingly hard to critique this game fairly: the controls aren’t important, the difficulty isn’t important...heck, there isn’t even a story to speak of, really. All that really comprises the story is that a developer of a programme decides to give it one last go before it goes out live and...that’s about it.

Yeah, basically, all I can talk about with this game is the art style, my personal thoughts on the experience and mention a few minor issues I had with it. So this isn’t going to be a traditional review per se, more a recounting of my experience with the game. Take this for what it’s worth and consider that before you judge whether this game will be for you or not.

So, when I opened this game, I was expecting a somewhat surreal experience based more than a bit on Minecraft’s style of play (so, first person gaming with a focus on an pixel style) and...well, I definitely got the Minecraft bit, but the surreal part, if possible, went beyond what I was expecting. Part of it is the art style, which goes for a futuristic look that can, on occasion, result in some surprisingly impressive design work that goes beyond what you would expect from something that looks like something you’d expect to see in Minecraft. It’s also interesting because it goes for a 3D style, but in the Doom vein of things as opposed to, well, full on 3D. It’s really quite interesting to look at and I think that it’s pulled off surprisingly well.

The overall experience I had with this game can be best summed up as “...If this is what I’m seeing while sober, I hate to think what this would look like while you’re high”, as the whole experience of playing through the game had so many moments where I was wondering what I was looking at and finding the whole thing surprisingly intense. The standout section in this regard is easily the section where you’re in a dungeon, as it FELT like something out of an indie horror game, and even had a small moment where I went “...Well, THAT’S not creepy in the slightest!”

There are a few minor issues I did notice with the game, though. There are occasions where I was able to walk through stuff that I’m fairly sure was meant to be a solid object, the frame rate slowed down a little bit during the second to last section of the game (although I am playing on a fairly unimpressive laptop, so this is probably my laptop’s fault as opposed to a problem with the game) and it’s not a very long experience (around half an hour or so). However, none of those really detracted from the game much. Sure, I found them to be issues, but, overall, they didn’t damage the experience of the game at all. I don’t see the game having a lot of replayability, but, considering I am still wondering what I saw when this is going up, I think the impact it leaves more than makes up for it!

Overall, this is a very interesting game to experience. If you have a spare hour or so, download this game and give it a go. I can’t say it’ll win any game of the year awards, but it’s something you kind of have to see.

Free Video Game Review: Narcissu 1st & 2nd

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

...I never thought I’d do a short review that seems like a “get out of jail free” comment, but this visual novel...damn it, this visual novel nearly made me cry my eyes out. It’s just...god, it’s so heartbreaking and yet so touching that I don’t feel I can say much about it without getting choked up about it.

OK, to boil this visual novel down to the basics, it is basically two visual novels crammed into one. The first part is the story of two hospital patients who escape from what can be basically summed up as a death ward (you go to it if you have illnesses which can’t be treated, but which aren’t contagious, and you are basically there to die) and traveling across Japan. And it is easily one of the saddest things you will ever read, as you really get connected to the two characters over the course of their adventure and the moment when one of them chooses to simply walk into the ocean and die due to her medication having run out and her being certain of dying as a result is hands down one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in a visual novel, even putting the painful ending of Emily is Away to shame in terms of nearly triggering the waterworks (I’m tough to make cry, but this almost managed it!).

The second part of the story is basically a prequel (although, bizarrely, it also includes a prologue within the prequel, focusing on another character entirely for 2 chapters...) focusing on the female patient from the first story remembering her time hanging out with a patient on the death ward. I think this story suffers a bit from deliberately trying to answer questions in the first part of the story in ways which don’t really make a lot of sense when you think about them hard enough, but, on the whole, it’s, again, a really touching story.

The only main problem I have with the story is that it doesn’t really have any interactivity, but I can see why that wasn’t done, as there’s not a lot of ways to add to the story and spin it off in other directions. There isn’t a lot of art in the visual novel, but what is there is excellently done, and the music and sound direction is just perfect.

It’s also an interesting visual novel in that you can play it with voice acting or without it. I deliberately didn’t access it, but I heard snippets in passing and I can attest that the voice acting is actually not that bad! Nothing exceptional, but it gets the job done nicely.

Really, there’s not a lot I can say about this visual novel that is negative. I think it suffers from a lack of replayability, but the story is so strong that I can’t even call that a problem: I really would play this visual novel a lot if it weren’t for the fact that I probably wouldn’t be able to read it more than once without crying. This is truly a gem among the visual novel scene, and I highly recommend it!

When Is It Fair To Criticise A Free Game?

OK, this is a bit later than I expected, but I finally have remembered to come back to this.

Some of you who read the site might remember in my review of Lamia Must Die that I mentioned that there is a very valid question of when it becomes fair to say a free game is a bad game and what to expect from a free game. After all, it’s a game you get for free, so you obviously can’t expect it to be on the same level of development as, say, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and, because most free games are often by developers who are starting out on their games development careers, it is very easy to take the viewpoint that a free game should not be judged by a critic.

My viewpoint? Well, I critique free games, so you can tell that I disagree with the last viewpoint. However, I feel I should take the time to try to explain my own personal stance on this debate, if only so my thoughts are as clear as they can be. After all, what I’m about to say might actually prove of interest.

Making a game at all is a process that is difficult to do well. This is something anyone who has worked on a single game before now would be able to tell you immediately, but, to give you a quick idea of what goes into making a game, you need to decide on an art direction, you need to code the game, you need to do bug fixing, you need to do playtesting, you need to consider the font and layout of everything inside the game itself, you need to get the game to run on a different combination of graphics cards, sound cards, operating systems...and that’s before you consider stuff like whether you’re going to have voice acting in the game, what the story of the game is (if you’re doing something which needs a story) and sourcing sound clips. Games development is a VERY difficult sector of work to get into, and gamers generally expect a lot from the final product due to how expensive the high profile games are. While sites like Good Old Games and stuff like Steam sales do make gaming a lot cheaper, it doesn't excuse the fact that a new game in the triple-A gaming scene can still cost around £50, and that's just for standard editions of games.

Needless to say, this is why most gamers tend to stick with the indie scene or video game sales, as spending that much on a game is not something most people can do unless they have a lot of disposable income or are a professional video game critic (in which case, they usually don’t need their money to buy a game unless they’ve been boycotted by a publisher, so the point is somewhat moot). You’d have thought the triple-A sector of gaming would have picked up on this by now, but, well, I can remember when a new high profile game cost about £30 back in the early 2000s, and the global economy was a heck of a lot better back then than it is now, so...yeah, clearly not!

Anyway, moving back a bit, free games are nothing new: even in my middle school (which was a bit behind the times because...well, this is Northumberland we’re talking about, which might as well be called The Land Which Parliament Forgot for all the attention that seems to be paid to it…), it wasn’t usual to see people playing games like Icy Tower and a tank battle game on the Internet for free and sites like Cheeky Monkey Games were somewhat common knowledge among the students. With the benefit of hindsight, most of the games on the sites were nothing special: they were fun time wasters and worked well, but, compared to what is going on in the independent gaming scene today, they were fairly primitive games. Some games were excellent, though: in particular, one free game I remember with fondness was a game which had remade Super Mario to allow you to play it with characters from other Nintendo franchises, like Contra, The Legend of Zelda and Mega Man. These free games were almost certainly made by people making their first games and putting them out there on the Internet and, in the vast majority of cases, with no major intent of turning them into a business.

Man, I sound like an old man at the moment…

Jumping forward to today, you can still see that same passion and desire in aspiring games developers today, it’s just easier to make games today (you can get game engines for a fairly small price or even special software to allow you to make an RPG like the Final Fantasy games or a visual novel) and it’s easier to be found (Steam is a good place to put a free game on due to it being among the most popular online distributors of video games, if not THE most popular). And that, ironically, is why I personally see no problem with critiquing free games now: with all of these resources now available to make games development so easy and so much information around the Internet to help you whenever you run into trouble with developing a game, there is really no excuse for a video game to be badly designed any more.

I do not say by this that one should treat a free game on the same level as a triple-A game: such an expectation would be flat out unfair! Instead, I say that a free game which is badly designed, uses unmodified assets from stores or stuff like that should be called out for it, albeit not in a malicious way. It is hard to put it properly, but think of it this way: the point of criticising these issues is to encourage an aspiring developer to put effort into doing it right in the future, not to scare them from games development forever. True, you will get those like Digital Homicide who will refuse to listen no matter what you say to them, but most indie developers will look at the feedback they get and take it on board (or, at least, won’t make a public fuss over someone critiquing their games). If you’re starting out with developing a game, it is very tempting to use pre-made assets to get the job done quickly, since it means you don’t have to worry so much about coding errors and whatnot and can focus on trying to make the game fun. However, the point of them (as any serious games developer will tell you) is to use them as the starting blocks for the game: effectively, they’re what you use in the game’s alpha (beta at the absolute latest) stage to check the game is properly running, then you put your own assets in to replace the pre-made ones. They’re kind of like rehearsals for a play: you usually show up to rehearsals wearing what you’re wearing and (at least in early rehearsals) carrying the script with you in one hand to read your lines from while following your role’s blocking, but you wouldn’t put that on a stage and call it a finished production. While the exact nature of the play depends on which school of theatre the play is being done under, a typical play (so, one you’ll usually see in a theatre and not stuff like Brechtian Theatre or Theatre of Cruelty...Google is your friend, dear reader!) will usually be noticeably different from a first rehearsal of a play because the actors will have their blocking, will have memorised their lines and will have costumes, props and sets to help enhance their performances.

Yeah, suddenly the theatre comparison doesn’t look so insane, does it?

However, all of this is still sort of dancing around the key question: when is it fair to criticise a free game?

Well, I feel that a free game should not be given a free pass for being a bad game just because it is free. What I would expect from a free game is a game that I will be happy to play for a few hours, has original assets (or, at the very least, that the assets used mix well together) and has the replayability necessary to prevent the game from being a “play once and forget about it” type of game. I also expect the game to actually be finished (which is why I don’t touch Early Access games unless they’re free...and, even then, I will probably not play it unless I really am out of options or the premise is one that I find interesting enough to justify playing it): if I’m playing a free game that isn’t finished, I will still call it out for not being finished. The ONLY exception is with episodic gaming, and even that will only work if I feel there has been enough of a story in each individual episode to make each episode a satisfying game in and of itself.

Obviously, you guys don’t have to be as strict as I am being. I have those standards because I critique free games and demand a lot out of them, but there’s nothing to stop you from enjoying a free game which doesn’t fall under that category. In fact, I would go further than that and ENCOURAGE you to play the free games I critique just so you can let me know if you feel I’ve been unfair to them.

In any case, a free game, to me, should not be given a free pass for being awful because it costs nothing. At the end of the day, a game which costs nothing is still a game: the cost of the game isn’t really a factor to the quality of the game, although it will affect your expectations from it. However, a quality release is still a quality release: I might not want to pay £60 to get Eternal Senia, but I would take that over Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 any day of the week, which I wouldn’t want to play even if I got it for free. Would love to see a digital release of the original game if that’s not happened, though…

No, seriously: I played the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game while growing up. It was awesome and had a pretty great soundtrack as well! Might do a brief look at all of the artists who released songs on the soundtrack for that album in the New Year, now I think on it…

Anyway, digression and rambles aside, what I want from a free game is something which is at least going to keep me busy for a few hours and/or has enough replayability to keep me coming back to it. I will have to cite a game which isn’t free to explain what I want from a game, but the sort of game I look for is like Dawn of War: it isn’t necessarily impressive to look at graphically (the original game is over ten years old by this point!), but it has a lot to offer to it that will make you want to play it again and again, it has enough to make replaying it worthwhile (specifically applies to Dawn of War: Winter Assault onwards, as there’s no branching storylines in the original game’s story mode, although I guess the multiplayer makes up for that) and it bundles that all up in a high quality game that is fun enough to play that you feel like returning back to it. That’s not a complicated formula to nail down, really, and, while a free game might require some time and effort to pull it all together, it really can be done: Hearthstone has done it, Eternal Senia has done it, Team Fortress 2 has done it and Everlasting Summer has done it. You might notice that these games are highly regarded among their target audiences (above 90% on Steam in the case of the latter 3 and, well, Blizzard games are always very highly regarded anyway) and are all free games, so they are shining examples of how to do free games well to me. True, they had development teams in all but one case (Eternal Senia was mostly done by one guy), but they show how important it is to put time and effort into games and that being a free game should not be a sign of a lack of quality.

So, in a nutshell, I feel it is fair to criticise a free game for when it doesn’t do stuff right, but I feel that a more supportive tone should be given than the usual one that a lot of people do, especially if the developer has made it fairly obvious that they haven’t made a lot of other games in the past. Critiquing a game (as in, being a proper critic) that is free should also be fair because, well, you can say what the game does well and doesn’t do well, which, if you take the approach of being hard of the game, but put it through a supportive tone and style of writing and offer ideas to improve the game, can be FAR more helpful to an aspiring developer than you might think. However, a free game should not be defended with the excuse “Well, what do you expect from a free game?”, for it reinforces the belief that free games are always awful, which is completely untrue.

Free Video Game Review: The Secret of Tremendous Corporation

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

One of the things that I’ve learnt is that adventure games tend to not be my cup of tea. I’m not QUITE as harsh on them as, say, Yahtzee is, but I will freely admit that adventure games tend to leave me scratching my head about why people get the appeal behind them due to a few of the common threads about them being unimpressive to me. For starters, the ridiculously specific nature of some puzzles can easily grate on me because the solution runs on logic that often makes little-to-no sense when you think about it and the fact that the vast majority of adventure games often fall back onto the “only one solution to every problem” method of thinking (even if the solution is something as ridiculous as putting a carrot in a peephole to grab a ring and avoiding getting killed by having your eye burnt out by a laser you weren’t even told was behind the peephole) means that I tend to lose interest in them.

Still, I will admit that I can see the appeal behind it if you like this kind of thing, so I decided to give The Secret of Tremendous Corporation a shot. And, well...it didn’t change my mind on adventure games, although I won’t deny that it is a decent enough adventure game in its own right to warrant a playthrough if you like that kind of thing, which is all the more impressive when you realise the game was made in about 48 hours for a competition.

First of all, let me get the obvious comment out of the way: yes, the art style of the game is ridiculously simple. It goes for a hand drawn look that is somewhat reminiscent of what you see if you draw the whole game in pencil. While this probably isn’t going to be an automatic turn off if you like old fashioned graphics, it is worth noting that the art style is not going to wow anyone who has played any video game before now. Certainly, this is the part of the game I would have personally suggested the developers redo for the Steam release of the game, as the hand drawn style may make the game a hard sell for those who expect graphics more complex than your average scribbles on a sheet of paper. That said, it does make the game look distinctive (I’ve not seen a lot of games which use this sort of style even for cutscenes, let alone for the whole game), so make of that what you will.

I also will say that the puzzles do sometimes seem to be there to make a problem that needs to be solved which isn’t really necessary to do and which have solutions which don’t really make a lot of sense. The two main puzzles which spring out in this regard are fetching a newspaper from a shelf too high up to reach (why you would store a newspaper on a shelf that most people can’t reach is beyond me, but maybe it contains a fully completed crossword that the paper’s purchaser didn’t want someone to find before they submitted it off for a cash reward or something) which requires you to tie a book to a rope and cover it in chewing gum (because that’s totally not going to ruin the newspaper at all…) and opening a door by scraping a potato down into being a lockpick (I would point out why that doesn’t make sense, but you guys almost certainly are ahead of me on that one). I also find it a bit weird that the solution to a problem involves asking the receptionist for a code when, by all rights, she should not even know about the thing which requires the code in the first place, but I’m arguably nitpicking here.

The plot of the visual game is MAYBE a tad out there at points (a video game company able to make at least 10,000 games in a year is a bit hard to believe, even with the explanation offered by the game in the plot, and I find the idea of a secret company using a newspaper to place an advert for recruitment kind of ridiculous because it means that everyone who reads that paper will be able to spot the ad...potentially including people who are part of the same companies you are trying to bring down!), but, overall, there’s not a lot really wrong with the story. I think a few rewrites of the story to clear some of the more obvious plot holes would have helped improve the game a bit, but the core of the story, while cliche as all hell, is not bad. It isn’t going to win any awards for strong writing, but I at least found it fun, despite rolling my eyes like they were following the inside of a washing machine more times than I care to admit.

I suppose, if I put myself into the mindset of a old school adventure game fan, this is at least somewhat fun for a single playthrough. It’s lacking a bit of polish and it isn’t going to appeal to those who aren’t already fans of adventure games, but there’s nothing particularly wrong with it if you’re already a fan of this sort of game. It’s not personally for me, but, if you fancy giving it a shot and don’t mind a few logic issues, then there’s certainly far worse games out there.

Free Video Game Review: Soccer Manager 2016

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

Well, I really got fucked in the ass when I missed this week originally. Previous week was a wasteland of free games (that I had a reasonable chance of playing: I don’t speak Russian!), then this week gives me a football game and ONLY a football game. Which would be fine if it weren’t for two things:

1. I am not a football fan. At all. Seriously, there are very few things I’d want to do less than watch or play football by choice.
2. I used my “get out of playing a game I really don't want to play free” card last time, so doing it this time feels like a cop out.

So yeah, this week’s catch up review is VERY much a case of me playing a game I had no chance of liking. Still, I will admit that, if I did have to choose to play a football game, I’d much prefer to be the manager because I could at least view it as a strategy game of sorts. After all, when you think about it, how a football game works could be argued as being a bit like an RTS: you have to select the appropriate player to make it easier for you to push the ball into the opponent’s side of the field or stop the opponent from doing that and tactically move the ball towards the player best suited for moving the ball further in should you encounter an obstacle.

...Actually, when put like that, football doesn’t sound that bad. Doesn’t excuse the fact I find it boring as all hell to actually watch, but hey, a revelation is a revelation! Now if only they would combine football with death traps...actually, wait, that’s basically Blood Bowl in a nutshell. Dang it!

Incidentally, someone get Games Workshop to remake Blood Bowl. They did brilliantly with Space Hulk and I would kill for an opportunity to play it!

Anyway, back to Soccer Manager 2016. Long story short, it’s not a BAD game, but I think it’s fair to say that this is not a game to get introduced to football games to, as I ended up stuck on the first match because the game kept refusing to let me move on after I’d put the new player on (my player had been red carded) because it wouldn’t tell me how to change my tactics and nothing I clicked on told me what I had to do to make the change. This is probably a game that could do with some sort of tutorial to allow those unfamiliar with this type of game a chance to get the hang of things properly, as that seemed like a really stupid thing to get stuck on for over ten minutes (and only ended because I went “Fuck this, I’ve got better things to do with my time than stare at this screen and be unable to move forward because someone didn’t think to explain how to move through this screen properly!” and closed the game down...yes, I'm impatient, but can you blame me for getting frustrated when I hadn't been told at all how to move forward and was stuck on what should have been an easy screen to navigate as a result?).

I also don’t like the fact that the game feels more like a browser game than an officially released Steam game, as it even has the buttons one would expect to find if they were playing the game on a browser. I will admit that this is a bit of a nitpick, since there are some good browser games out there, but having the game open with a suggestion to play the game through Facebook when you opened it through Steam is not a great sign. I opened it through Steam, why would I want to also open it through Facebook?

Still, quality wise, there’s not a lot of criticisms I have with it. Sure, it’s a simple game in terms of design and aesthetics (if not especially newcomer friendly), but I could see this being a decent time killer if you can’t afford Football Manager 2016 and need your fix of football team managing. The fact the game has in game purchases is something I personally have to frown upon, but it’s not to the ridiculous extent that Frozen Free Fall: Snowball Fight was, so that’s something at least. I suspect I probably COULD have gotten into this game had it been more newcomer friendly, but, as someone who has only played one football game in his life (and that was on the Sega Genesis), it’s fair to say that I probably couldn’t have been further from the target audience of this game if I tried. Which I guess is a good sign on one level: if I’m saying that I might have found this game to my liking had it been laid out to suit a newcomer to this type of game when I usually find football so boring that I don’t even bother to keep track of the names of football stars (I can name a few, like David Beckham and Gary Lineker, but mostly because I’ve heard of them for non-football reasons than because I actually hold any real opinion on them), that’s kind of like saying that you don’t think Fire Emblem: Awakening is that bad when you usually hate JRPGs and turn-based strategy games.

So yeah, if you’re not a football fan, this game probably won’t change your mind at all. If you like strategy games and football, you might want to get a more intuitive game than this one if you’re not already used to playing these types of games, but it should be a decent time sink. That’s really the long and short of it.

Free Video Game Review: Everlasting Summer

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

One of the things that people will have noticed is that I tend to criticize free games for being too short. I know this might be a very unfair criticism on some levels (after all, free games aren’t designed with the intention of being huge games which will be played forever), but I also tend to do this in connection to a game that only has one ending as well, which I feel negates the issue a bit because these are games which are short and which offer little replay value. I guess you could say that I make this criticism not because I am demanding free games be huge expansive games, but because I like seeing a free game which actually has a long enough run time to keep you engaged for many hours and which offers enough variety that you don’t feel like you’re just doing the same thing over and over again.

One game which fills this category wonderfully is actually a visual novel I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now: Everlasting Summer, a game by the Russian studio Soviet Games (the name’s kind of a giveaway). It’s also their first visual novel and they’re working on a second one at the moment titled Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll (which is intended for release in the second quarter of next year). There wasn’t a lot of information about the company from when I did a search about them, so I asked them to quickly fill me in on the details (thanks, guys!).

They basically started out as users of a Russian messageboard (lichan.ru, if you’re curious: it’s changed its name since then to lichan.hk, but Russian speaking tech guys will probably be able to find the archive somewhere) aimed towards anime and other traditionally Japanese medium fans and the site had mascots made by site members (kind of like the Angry Marines from 1d4chan, I guess). There was a thread in 2008 where the idea of making a visual novel based on these mascots was brought up and it became very popular, so people willing to work on the idea were brought together to start working on it. There was a lot that changed behind-the-scenes involving team members dropping and joining the team, concepts changing, artwork being reworked and scripts being rewritten, but a final team came together and worked on the project. However, over time, the game started to distinguish itself from the “Ilchan mascots eroge” idea, so the game had its title changed to suit the change in direction, opting for Everlasting Summer. It was released in November 2013 and was eventually put onto Steam, with two free DLCs added to the game while it was there as well (and an English translation).

They talked a bit about Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll as well, but I’m going to have to save that discussion for another time (likely when Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll comes out, since I am curious to check it out). For now, though, let’s start talking about Everlasting Summer and why I have such a high regard for the game.

Everlasting Summer has a plot which is surprisingly complex, involving a character travelling back in time (sort of: it’s difficult to explain properly without spoilers) to a camp where everyone seems JUST off enough to make you (and protagonist Semyon) realize that there is something wrong about the place, but you can’t place why. As the story goes on, the story gets weirder from there, with the end result involving a mysterious figure who seems trapped in a time loop…

It’s not a story to think too hard about, basically. Still, by the standards of your average visual novel, it’s actually rather deep: there’s a lot thrown at you in it, but it is done well enough that you don’t feel overwhelmed by it. I could very easily picture this sort of game (with some adjustments) making for a fairly solid independent film, which is a good sign in my book!

The characters are all also very good. I think the only one which breaks with reality a bit is Yulya (a catgirl), but, well, this IS an anime visual novel, so it’s somewhat excusable in a “would have been more surprised if there wasn’t one” kind of way. I’m also wondering how the team got Miku into their game (I am not joking: she even LOOKS like Hatsune Miku and part of her character involves her being a good singer! Subtle...), but I get the feeling that I’m approaching things from the wrong perspective on that one, although I wouldn’t suggest showing the game to Crypton Future Media’s lawyers any time soon. I think, if I had to pick a personal favorite character, I would have to go for Slavya, but none of the characters are badly written at all. They might fall into the level of being stereotypes for some people, but I can’t say that I personally found the stereotypes to be a problem (plus, you kind of have to have characters in a dating sim which cover a lot of bases and don’t usually have the time and space to go into a lot of depth with the characters, so it’s arguably justified to have characters who seem a bit stereotypical in these types of games due to the nature of them).

The art style is where I find things get a bit iffy. The backgrounds are very well done indeed, but it’s with the characters themselves and the occasional picture that includes them as the main point where I feel things are let down a bit. It just seems a bit amateurish to me. Not bad, I should stress, but I’ve seen more professional looking artwork in other visual novels and this problem lets Everlasting Summer down a bit. I can’t complain too much in good spirit because it is a free game and originally started out as a game for forum characters, but, speaking as a critic, this is one of the areas where I would have expected better than I got.

Still, if there is one thing which I feel makes the game a good free game to play, it’s the sheer replay value of the game. This isn’t a game you will play once and everything will be the same, no matter what you do: there’s so many endings that you are almost encouraged to play it several times just to see them all, and getting all of them requires some genuine effort. It gets better when you learn that there’s actually a game inside the game (it’s basically a variant of Poker), which has consequences upon the whole game depending on how you do in it, so you do need some skill in the game if you want to get every ending. It’s not a major thing overall, but I like little touches like that, because it makes playing the game require some degree of skill aside of memorizing the appropriate option to get to the desired outcome.

As a quick note, I played the game as it was available upon Steam, which means that the adult content was not available in my copy of the game (it is easy to restore the adult content, as a quick search online will be able to point you in the right direction very quickly, but I opted not to do that while playing the game for this review). I don’t feel it detracted from the game at all, in all honesty, although I would certainly encourage people who want to play the game as intended to do so.

Overall, even in the censored version, I found Everlasting Summer to be a very enjoyable visual novel. Is it perfect? No. But it’s very well made and I have very few complaints overall, so make of that what you will and check it out if it sounds like your kind of thing!

Ronnie Radke Gang Rape Accusation: My Thoughts

Oh boy, this is gonna be unpleasant to talk about...

Let me start this article off by stressing this: I do not intend for anything that I say in this article to be victim blaming. I might not personally know anyone who has been raped, but I have read stories from people who have been raped explaining how awful the situation is to a victim. I find rape as a whole to be a disgusting thing that can have no justification, as nobody, no matter how unpleasant a person they are, deserves to be raped.

Similarly, I do not write this article intending it to be a defence of Ronnie Radke: beyond reviewing Falling in Reverse's most recent album for a website I do writing for (which I thought was a somewhat schizophrenic mess of an album, but still potentially enjoyable if you like pop punk and metalcore, if you're curious as to my opinion on it), I have never had to listen to anything he has been on and I have no intention of ever seeing his band live because I was simply not interested in them. If these accusations are indeed true, then I hope that he gets returned to prison and stays there for a long period of time, for anyone willing to commit rape (whether on their own or as part of a group activity) is not someone who should be allowed to walk freely among people or be seen as an idol by anyone.

With all of that said, let's get into this.

A recent story that has been in the news of the metal scene is that, on the 3rd of June, Ronnie and his bodyguard is claimed to have gang raped a woman (I will do what most of the media has not done and refuse to name her out of respect to her privacy) after Falling in Reverse's show in Salt Lake City, Utah. I will leave out the details of the victim's injuries (again, out of respect to the victim), but the basic gist is that she was apparently gang raped, during which time she was fighting back and, when those involved were done, they dumped her on the side of the road. The victim's posts mentioned that she had got a rape kit (I will be honest, I have no idea how readily available those are, so I'm going to have to assume that those can only be obtained after getting in contact with either the police or a hospital) and that those involved in committing the crime had been arrested by the police as the tour bus was leaving and had posted bail the morning after the event.

I have to say, that very last detail already seems a bit off to me. I'll admit, I don't know how the legal system works in the US (I'm British), but I'd have thought that you'd have had to be charged with something first to have to post bail. If I'm wrong, I'll accept my error and retract this whole point, but I can't help thinking that something doesn't add up with that detail. Bear with me for a second if I am wrong, because this still could be worth paying attention to: an allegation is not the same as being charged with something. If you've been charged with something, you would have to post bail to leave prison, but the news so far has only stated that it's an allegation, which could well mean the police did not find sufficient evidence to charge those involved. That does NOT mean it didn't happen (and a charge for the crime could indeed have happened and it's just not been communicated very well), just that they'd not need to post bail to leave if they weren't charged with the crime.

I also feel I must echo the sentiments of Coverkillernation with regards to his response to this and point out to the friend of the victim that telling people not to make jokes or start an open mic forum on the internet is not something that's going to happen, even if it's on something as serious as this. The sad truth is that, on the internet, there is no topic that is completely safe from having jokes made about it and there's no topic which will avoid having comments made connected to it that are sickening to read (even now, there are some parts of the metal scene where mentioning female vocalists results in horrific amounts of misogynistic comments and other comments that could potentially set off triggers to those who have PTSD from being raped in the past). While I get that some people just want to vent about stuff when something awful like this happens, it is not exactly a way to avoid people doing stuff like that: if anything, the fact they have to tell people not to make jokes or start talking about a friend being raped probably says more about the people who follow them than anything else! I would stop short of saying the friend should have just kicked the wall instead of venting, but, if you've been on the internet for any real period of time, you should probably be aware that sometimes, there are occasions when not talking about something where anyone can read it, no matter how serious it is, is actually the more sensible course of action.

I should stress, again, I'm not trying to victim blame and I certainly don't want people to get the idea that I'm saying "You should have kept your mouth shut" to the victim's friend: these are just my thoughts on this and I'm trying to give as balanced a view on it as I can.

With that said, we now have to look at Radke's side of this story. His side of things is that nobody connected to the band was arrested in Utah and that, while police were at the scene, they were called to the scene by someone connected to the band because someone was under the influence of something and the band were concerned about them. Thus far, evidence indicates that Radke is at least telling the truth on the first part, as the Salt Lake City Sheriff's Department has no record of Radke being held by them, but the Murray City Police Department (which Falling in Reverse's attorney stated were the ones actually called to the scene) have, at the time of writing (so this might well have changed while I was writing this), not provided any evidence in support of or against Radke's claims, so this could well be proven to be wrong.

Honestly, there are two things that I find strange about this side of the story (one of which is TECHNICALLY answered, admittedly). The first is that the fact Radke opted to release the statement only to AltPress is a VERY odd move. It's very likely that he didn't want it everywhere to avoid a lot of people finding out about it and minimising the potential for this whole thing to go nuclear, but the problem is that giving the statement to only one website could also be disputed as being a case that he does not want to be caught out by being proven to be lying. If Radke DID do it and had put out the statement on every website he could, then he'd be in a HUGE amount of trouble with the media when revealed to have lied. Considering Radke's not exactly got a good reputation due to his time in jail and two other incidents in the early 2010s, I wouldn't blame him for wanting to avoid the situation becoming big because most people wouldn't believe his side of things at all, but choosing to only give the statement to one website could be read into really badly.

The other one is that, in his statement, he does not directly acknowledge the crime that he has been accused of. Now, to be fair, he DOES say "[t]his isn't the first time people have taken it upon themselves to spread ugly, unsubstantiated claims about myself and my friends" in his statement, so it's obvious that he's including this incident alongside a few others in a general comment there, but I feel he should have acknowledged what he's been specifically accused of and directly stated that he didn't do it, as a case could be made that he didn't directly challenge the claim.

Ultimately, though, I can't say this is a situation that either side will walk out well from. If Radke is innocent, then the victim has brought a HUGE amount of trouble upon herself for several reasons: lying about a serious event which causes serious emotional distress to those who suffer from it, attempting (probably not deliberately) to take an innocent (in this case) man's liberty from him by using his bad reputation against him, wasting valuable police time, trying to ride off of controversy, sympathy and another person's fame to secure their own fifteen minutes of fame and exploiting popular opinion of rape to attempt to organise a witch hunt on an innocent man (OK, that one might be stretching it a bit, but seriously, do a search on what support is out there for male rape victims sometime, then consider how male rape is depicted in the media and compare both of those details to the same circumstances for female rape. You might be surprised at what you find...). However, Radke's reputation will forever be stained (remember, being accused of committing rape, even if you're later proven innocent of it, can SERIOUSLY damage your reputation among people due to people assuming that you did actually do it and just avoided going to court over it) and, with his previous reputation making it easy for people to go "There, you see, I knew he'd never changed!", there's a very good chance that Radke's career (and, by extension, Falling in Reverse's career) would take a huge hit, possibly even ending it.

If Radke is guilty, however, then, frankly, he is a horrific example of a human being who has proven that he does not deserve another chance in society. Rape of any sort is one of the worst things you can do to a human being and, if he did do it, then he does not deserve any place in society ever again. However, the victim will almost certainly be forever hounded by rabid fans for basically destroying Falling in Reverse and putting Radke back in prison, meaning that chances are that she's never going to hear the end of this matter, despite what she said being the truth. Even if that doesn't happen, she's going to have to live with the memory of what Radke (and the people with him) did to her for the rest of her life, and, from what I've read, it sounds like she's had stuff like this happen before to her, so chances are good that she might well have serious PTSD, suffer from depression and/or be suicidal, even before this incident.

What do I suggest everyone interested in following this do for now? Well, it's nearly half past two in the morning where I live and I need to go to sleep, so I'm not going to do anything myself, but I'd suggest that everyone reading this who is able to dedicate some time to following this avoid making any firm decisions on who is the one that's made this situation happen and wait to see what the police report from Murray Police says.

I fully intend to follow this article up with something a bit less serious than this once I've had some sleep and done my other stuff that I need to do, as I don't want to keep talking about serious stuff like this, so, if you do want to keep following the news on this story, then I have to urge you to look elsewhere, because I'm going to go back to doing my usual brand of stuff when I wake up.