By Kieron Gillen on October 28th, 2009 at 11:26 am.
Well, not really. While John and Alec play the Torchlight demo, I try and up my indie-cred by playing this comedy-WW1 action-RPG instead. More fool me. To be fair, it’s a hyper-lo-fi thing, and does feature a three features I really like. Firstly, that there appears to be some hit-location elements, so if you head-shot, the comedy-Hun go down quicker and you save ammo. Secondly, when you get shot, occasionally your trousers fall down in an International-Karate-Plus fashion. And thirdly… well, the unusual setting married to more traditional mechanics. I’ve love to see more Indie RPG push in this direction – the Lovecraftian Cyclopean will be great, but I’d love to see a whole lot more. The rest… well, it’s not enormously good. I wouldn’t recommend someone buying it even if I could work out how to buy it. The demo doesn’t include any mention of it. Its website doesn’t either. And neither does its documentation. I highlight this, because it’s worrying Indie Marketing fail. Releasing a demo is the first and possibly last burst of publicity your indie game gets – even if the full version isn’t available, you should have explained that. Man!
28/10/2009 at 11:38 Johnson says:
Um… the title here is a play on the Rufus Wainwright song, right? I normally wouldn’t be interested, but I’ve been looked at him all night, Eastern Standard Time.
28/10/2009 at 11:44 Kieron Gillen says:
Oh What A Lovely War.
KG
28/10/2009 at 13:07 HexagonalBolts says:
haha, Oh What A Lovely War, I saw a production of that in the tiniest theatre ever in Henley. I was one of three under-70-year-olds.
28/10/2009 at 14:09 JuJuCam says:
I was in a production of it last year. We added scenes to increase relevance to our Australian audience and consequently produced a 3 hour long show.
28/10/2009 at 13:05 Krikey! says:
Well Kieron, I’m gonna have to start bugging you again since you want to “up (your) indie-cred” ;)
28/10/2009 at 13:16 Plopsworth says:
Well. It was alright. Looked and played a bit like Lemmings Paintball (mobygames link), only not as puzzly nor as smooth, even 13 years later.
28/10/2009 at 13:35 Rakysh says:
I thought is was really poor. Map didn’t make any sense and wasn’t at all helpful, damage seemed fairly arbitrary (It will either take four headshots to kill this German, or one). I gave up before I got to the village though, so I might be missing bits I spose.
28/10/2009 at 17:17 Scott says:
A whole article on the ineptness of indie (non-) marketing would be welcome. A lot of people just put their stuff out there and quietly wait for the benjamins to start piling up, yo. Or maybe they just don’t care about money.
28/10/2009 at 17:19 Rakysh says:
Communists, the lot of em.
28/10/2009 at 17:36 salejemaster says:
I’ve just found out about this Cyclopean trough this post it sound really amazing is this still in production?
29/10/2009 at 16:51 Scott says:
Cyclopean: http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,481.0.html
It is unfortunate that the one RPS article on this BRILLIANT indie effort doesn’t include a direct link to the main forum!