By Kieron Gillen on October 2nd, 2008 at 11:56 pm.
It’s a bit of an indie season, innit? News reaches us that comments-regular Cliffski’s latest game - Kudos 2 – is now available to buy for the sum of twelve quid. Its the sequel to his popular alternate-take on the Sims – think the Sims meet Princess Maker. And if you don’t know Princess Maker, think Championship Manager with a Teenage Girl, except Kudos is about 20-somethings. I liked the first one, and this one seems a genuine improvement, not least because of the cool indy aesthetic brought by Jamie “Suburban Glamour” McKelvie. A demo can be downloaded off the electric internet. It’s amazing! Like, a game just arriving on your hard-drive by clicking on your screen. This shit is going to catch on. Seriously, try it.
After his discussion with “the pirates” he’s also removed any and all DRM from this game. It’s completely DRM free.
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Gotta love the DRM logo with a cross over it :) The price is also something worth loving. Gonna try it out, never played any of his games but heard nothing but good and gotta support the indie scene!
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I want cliffski to have rent and food money, but I’ll have to wait till next month to buy it.
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I’m playing the demo for the artwork. Graphics rool.
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I heard Jamie McKelvie works with JC Denton. That’s what I heard.
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What was that other comic Jamie did?
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Surbuban Glamour. It was Surburban Glamour right?
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Twelve quid? How much is that in real money?
Sorry, I had to. Props to Cliffski on completion of his opus.
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Just bought it, and am desperately trying to get out of this “Waiter” rut. Also, in the game.
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looks nice. I really like the presence of a style in the art
(but the ganre of the game is not my cup)
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I’m a 21 year old Barista who drinks too much, has more IQ than I know what to do with and spend all my spare time on the internet.
I DON’T NEED THIS GAME.
(Demo is class, though, props…sorry, I couldn’t use “kudos”…to McKelvie for the hot punk girls, as always…good luck with Phonogram 2)
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Jesus you RPS guys are on the ball. here I am, about to send out a press release after breakfast, sipping my tea and reading RPS and you’ve already covered it.
That’s proper journalism that is!
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The one sort of weird thing is that while the Mckelvie art makes the women appropriately good and interesting looking, it seems to be near impossible to make a guy that doesn’t look like an idiot.
(Other small weird thing. When changing the color of the Chucks-esque shoes, it changes the opposite part form what you’re expecting, weirdly.)
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Only had a chance to quickly try it this morning. Looks great. I was getting some font corruption though, maybe something to do with switching between fullscreen and windowed? :s
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I like the demo. Seeing as the game is only 12 quid and no DRM it’d be a sin to obtain it by other means than buying it :).
Works well under Wine on Ubuntu too.
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The one sort of weird thing is that while the Mckelvie art makes the women appropriately good and interesting looking, it seems to be near impossible to make a guy that doesn’t look like an idiot.
My wife might say that’s an accurate reflection of real life, that.
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Cool, will try the demo next week. I’ll also hopefully pick up Democracy soon, as it is down in my local GAME.
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Can’t be long till we see Phonogram the game. A cross between Vampire: The Masquerade, a Japanese dating sim and Audiosurf.
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Can’t be long till we see Phonogram the game. A cross between Vampire: The Masquerade, a Japanese dating sim and Audiosurf.
Like Guitar Hero in reverse, your aim is to bring about the failure of new pop through the forces of music criticism, as told through an obscure fantasy parable and featuring eerily familiar and terrible Bath nightclubs.
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Actually it’s just a three-hour FMV of Kieron touching himself.
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Funs, though a little depressing that the demo-girl starts off with a better life than I have, coming towards my 21st birthday.
I’ll get it… just once I get £12 together.
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@Nny – When you get time add it to the wine app database
http://appdb.winehq.org/
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“Actually it’s just a three-hour FMV of Kieron touching himself.”
RPS: The Major Motion Picture Event.
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I played the demo yesterday, and he wasn’t kidding when he said he would make his demos longer.
Kudos 1 demo, I didn’t even finish my first course. Kudos 2 demo, I completed one, started another and reached my first birthday!
What’s he trying to do, get us to buy it?
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The demo was very nice and very convincing ;)
Well done, cliffski!
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It’s good and the art work style works very well. More clothing/hair styles would be nice.
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Liked it. The demo was definitely about the right length to get me hooked, and it was surprisingly addictive.
If I don’t get it, though, it’ll solely be because I’m juggling GalCiv, Mount & Blade, Stalker and occasional incursions back into Team Fortress. Stardock just emailed me to let me know that The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is online and good to go. There are way too many good games around at the moment. I may still get it anyway, it’s definitely quite different from any of the others I’ve mentioned…
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@AbyssUK
Submitted the app to Wine appdb.
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Like the graphics of the new version, they’re much nicer than the previous one. The game itself seems to keep the old problems though — relationship sliders decay so fast, makes the whole experience feel like constant (and losing) uphill battle just to keep things from deteriorating too much. At the end of demo my relationships were worse off than when the game started, and that was literally with ever 2-3rd activity being social and ending with everyone having ‘excellent time’ (kudos meter reached ~70 or so) … trying to spend even more time with other characters would be pretty much impossible because they weren’t interested.
The weight indicator has similar issues — it sends you jogging like every 2nd day just to keep your weight in the same spot, and that’s with avoiding like plague every kind of eating activity. Can lead to rather silly situations where your character is extremely fit, but yet still weights as much as little elephant….
Also, “unlocked” a few new activities during the demo which would be nice (if i didn’t hate this whole new trend of hiding and forcing player to “unlock” 3/4th of game before you can actually play) … but there’s no clue given what it actually was that i did, that unlocked these things. This means with each new game rather than plan some short-term goals to get these unlocks i have to guess, fumble about and hope for the best. It feels a bit like playing the Sims with the sim’s desires and fears hidden from the player — what could be fun mechanics turns into frustration.
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Tmp
You do realise you can view what the NPCs like in the game? Just right click on the buggers portrait.
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Sumo wrestlers are fit but heavy :D
regarding the friends thing, it might be that you are taking up every social opportunity, rather than picking the right ones. Friends can be dorks, and invite you to play golf in the rain. Nobody will enjoy that, so don’t go!
Also, your mood will affect how people enjoy the night, so if you have a bad day at work it’s worth skipping the socialising a bit (unless you are really lonely and need to socialise).
Added to all this, some friends are plain irritating and you should only invite them out alone. Others are introverts and hate big groups.
So to really get everything working well, you need to do a bit of chin-stroking in terms of picking who to invite where with who, and when.
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Yes, of course. Note i said all out social activities ended with everyone having ‘excellent time’, because they were served exactly the things they liked. The relationships sliders would jump quite a lot after each of these meetings, half of max possible change or so. Then one day later it’s back to where it was and two days later they’re giving you “huh, who are you?” looks. Ouch.
Btw, that ability to view the preferences reminds me of another thing. Since the NPC preferences are put on the secondary tab, organizing each event leads to terrible lot of clicking (right-click portrait, left-click tab, drag window around so you have room to compare with others, rinse, repeat) to check who is likely to go along well with whom. The green highlight for currently selected activity is a nice start here, but there’s still room for improvement.
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I imagine the deterioration levels can be adjusted with the games config files.
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The salaries seem a bit odd, as well, to the point of being bugged. The most basic of sales jobs, allegedly 6K a year plus commission, was paying me something like $15 a day plus a $5 – and every day was a bad day at work. Regular good days in a job supposedly worth about 13K or 14K only raised about $17 a day.
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Haha, now I see what Cliffski was talking about. I thought this was about CliffyB.
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Been playing this a bit. When I decide I want to raise a particular stat, though, it sometimes becomes a little unclear how I go about it.
When I realised that winning a chess game boosted my confidence, I started playing chess with people a lot, and my chess skill rose quite high. But when I didn’t have a game for a week or so, my skill fell back down, and then I stopped gaining any chess skill from playing it. My chess skill is now at 0, and won’t raise at all – I’ve already read the chess books. Seems a bit odd.
I also can’t figure out what boosts my Knowledge(IQ).
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Hopefully yes; was just providing some feedback on how the default demo/game can be perceived by a player.
@Quirk: could it be you had some extra expenses at that point (work travel costs, gym membership, whatever) that’d cut into your daily earnings..?
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I bought the Sims for my wife and she hasn’t played it yet. I’ll have to show her this demo and maybe it’ll click.
I’ve already got Democracy2 and like it quite a lot, so I’ll likely end up buying this too. The no-DRM is a great selling point :)
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No – the waiting job is, nominally, for 6K per year as well, the same as the sales job. It comes in at a little over a tenner a day plus tips. The sales job, with no promotions, brought in fifteen dollars per day plus commission. I was walking to both jobs (though the costs of commuting are handled explicitly anyway). This would make sense only if I’d found a way to save a fiver a day somehow by working at the other job.
In any case, salaries are screwy. I started it up and checked.
Basic salary, 6K p.a., nets ten dollars and change a day. Moving up, without promotion, to 9.5K p.a. for a cashier job however provides just eleven dollars and some change daily. No newspapers, no new fancy expenses. That’s one murderous tax regime – of the extra eleven dollars I’m getting gross were the tax band calculated identically, the state is taking most of ten. So, out of the 6K sales job, the 6K waiting job and the 9.5K cashier job, the cashier job will leave you worst off as the tiny amount extra that you make won’t make up for the loss of tips, and is under the sales job even before commission.
I’d expect this to be trivial to patch though, it’ll come down to one particular calculation having bugs in. Playtesting a game with that many options has got to be a nightmare for a small studio, so I can understand why things like this might get missed.
Getting my programmer hat on, at a wild guess, tax bands might explain the discrepancies between waiting base and other job base pay – if moving to a new job gave you a new tax band, but that tax band were incorrectly applied over the whole gross sum rather than being only applied to the portion that had gone past the earlier lower-tax allowance, I’d expect to see something similar to the behaviour it exhibits with jobs of ~10-15K. The sales job however seems to have a different bug. My guess there would be that somehow commission is being counted twice, or something like that.
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“Haha, now I see what Cliffski was talking about. I thought this was about CliffyB.”
Yeah, poor cliffski being in any way mistaken for that guy..
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The demo was good; but I have to give it a “tut” as it crashes when I try to run it from my (1280×800) desktop, but runs perfectly if I set my resolution manually down to 1280×768.
Which is annoying to do, obviously.
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…My girlfriend still bought it, though.
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God, this game makes me hate significant others. Can’t I go out with the guys once or twice without you kicking up a storm?
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Knowledge(iq) is raised by watching the international news or reading the broadsheet newspaper or the encyclopaedia. I think there might be a website that boosts it too.
I shall investigate these reports of a chess related error. I need to sober up this morning before I re-read the tax discussion though :D
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I do agree that the chess ability drops a bit too fast, usually one doesn’t lose so much of his strenght at board games even after a 1 or 2 years pause.
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I’ll patch it. but that value is here:
\data\config.txt
GAMESKILL_DEGRADE
needs to be higher :D
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Thanks!
And btw, I’m glad I don’t live in the UK nor in a city, where there are oh so many thieves, who are apparently fond of geek books, chess boards and umbrellas! :D
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Right, I think I’ve figured out what’s so screwy about games and skill. You only gain skill when you win a game. Is that right?
Shouldn’t that be the other way around? Shouldn’t you be seeking out people with a higher skill in a game than you in order to learn from them?
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My brain doesn’t seem to have been functioning correctly earlier. The 6K to 9.5K calculation should read, “of the extra six dollars (not eleven!) I’m getting gross were the tax band calculated identically, the state is taking most of five.” I would still argue that that’s a hell of a tax hike.
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