Review: Doomsday Ascending Part 1

Doomsday Ascending Part 1 (NSFW!)

Warning: the game contains Rule 34 imagery, although viewing them is optional.

 Videogame adaptions of fan fiction is quite rare, and for a good reason. As can be discovered by simply picking up a story at random from FIMFiction the vast majority of them are quite lousy, and Doomsday Ascending was no exception. It has no redeeming qualities, and unfortunately falls more on the mediocre side of the scale which means that it isn't quite as amusing to read as, say Winnie the Pooh Assimilated by the Borg. The author, Jerry "Bhaalspawn" Peet, was apparently so full of himself that he decided to create an RPG based off of his cliche storm of a fanfic, and claimed that it used a "heavily modified" version of the RPG Maker VX Ace engine.

  If you have been paying attention you've probably realized by now that this game is going to suck, but just how bad is Doomsday Ascending? The only way to find out other then playing it is to read our review, and you can do so by continuing on after the break.


  In Doomsday Ascending the player will switch between controlling two main characters: Twilight Sparkle and the original character Ascentia Kortai who is a humanoid alien that destroys worlds. Apparently the twin Princesses have gained their power by draining Equestria's magic dry, and Ascentia figures that the most convenient way to solve this is by mucking about and killing everypony. Basically the entire game is just wandering around aimlessly, talking to ponies and deciding whether to "embody" (spare) them or "break" them, the latter of which involves either mind-controlling them or destroying them utterly and unlocking some Rule 34 of that character. In my opinion the only part of Doomsday Ascending that can remotely be called "gameplay" is the two turn-based combat sequences, but both instances were just as uninspired and dull as the rest of the game.

"Hey guise look at me I'm defeating goddesses lol"

  While the graphics and music are not the most important parts of the game they still do play a part, and by the looks of it Bhaalspawn didn't really put much work into it at all, instead choosing to rip all his assets from other games/artists without even bothering to credit them in the files. The tileset is one of the default RPG Maker VX Ace tilesets included in the box, as are all of the non-pony character sprites. He even somehow managed to end up giving his main character a portrait that looks nothing at all like her field sprite! As the MST3K cast would say, "They just didn't care!". The game is filled with stuff like this. Backtracking in certain areas can cause cutscenes to loop, towns are filled with inaccessible buildings with open doors, unclear quests, human clothes in pony shops, etc. The list goes on and on, and if I pointed out every little detail where the team messed up this review would be longer then In the Beginning was the Command Line.

  This game was bad enough already, but adding pony porn was the last straw. This is yet another sad example of the mentality that "mature stuff is better" where people throw in adult content in hopes of somehow magically making their product better and attracting more players. There are other, more potent ways of rewarding evil deeds ingame, but just slapping Celestia's butt on the screen after the player kills her just makes the creator of this trainwreck look childish and immature. Besides, how would Ascentia even access the R34 anyhow? It's not like Applejack carries around smutty images of herself...right?

"KILL HER AND STEAL HER PORN!!!"

 In conclusion, Doomsday Ascending was a terrible, boring mess of a game and I do not recommend playing it. Bhaalspawn claims he "takes weird or unrealistic ideas, blow them entirely out of proportion, and demand that fun times be had without any thought towards sense". Unfortunately for him neither his stories or his games are remotely enjoyable, and he writes characters that are flatter then a board. My advice to him? Turn off his computer and find something else to do that doesn't involve wasting other people's time, like getting a job. At least his game could have been so bad that it became a fun experience, but he flunked again there too and created what is without the doubt the dullest and least interesting fangame I have ever found.

What's that? He made another fangame too? It can't possible be worse then this...right?

Review: Gates of Tartarus

Gates of Tartarus

 Last year I reviewed Doomsday Ascending, a 2D RPG adapted from a mediocre fanfic by the same name. The game's creator, Bhaalspawn, has made a point of telling his followers not to submit his various works to Equestria Daily or other fansites, so until today I was not aware that he had later created another My Little Pony RPG under the name "The Gates of Tartarus". The game seemed to be in a decent enough state (although still in an unfinished state), so I downloaded it in hopes that it would be better than its predecessor...

 Does Gates of Tartarus manage to overcome its predecessor's flaws and become a decent game in its own right? Find out in our review after the break.



 After opening the game and sitting through an unskippable cutscene, it becomes fairly clear that Gates of Tartarus is a different kind of game from Peet's last project. Gone was the story-centric design, and in its place one can find a heavier emphasis on combat and more traditional dungeon crawling. This is somewhat of a relief at first, until the player realizes that the game lacks quests of any sort, leading one My Little Game Dev member on their Cloudsdale group to (rather unkindly) remark that Gates of Tartarus shouldn't even qualify as an RPG. In fact, there is very little plot in the first place, aside from "Go to Hell and kill stuff" and some dialogue between Twilight Sparkle and a character who may or may not have appeared in Doomsday Ascending.

These are scorpions, of course.

 Since Tartarus is where all the bad ponies and monsters go after they die, it's no surprise that GoT features plenty of combat. Problem is, it contains "more grinding than a highschool homecoming" (as put by Fearless Pie, another fangame developer from the MLGD community). The first dungeon is especially bad for this, as it contains hoards of identical slimes that are easily defeated, and thankfully easily avoided if you don't mind being a bit weaker for the boss, who is just another damage sponge. If you don't get bored and quit after that, the incomplete second dungeon is much better for variety, although the third regresses in that area a bit. The entire level is filled with ghosts that can instantly kill any one of your characters, and this is before you have any items or skills capable of reviving, which pretty much forces the player to either hope for impossibly good luck or participate in some save-scumming.

 Shortly after beginning the first dungeon and murdering a few slimes, Fluttershy gains a game-breaking skill titled "Bandage" that heals a relatively small amount of HP for free. Problem is, she can use it multiple times per turn, which leads to GoT becoming one massive FREE HEALING PARTY™. With this skill, combat with anything but an instakill ghost is risk-free (and therefore rather boring), as Fluttershy can heal away any damage her friends have received for free. It can also be used outside of combat, making all other healing skills and items completely pointless unless she is killed.

Apparently this was supposed to be funny. Also, Bhaal keeps getting Equestria Daily and Equestria Gaming mixed up, perhaps because he secretly wishes that his games really were featured on such a big fansite.

 The strangest part of this game, however, is that the current build supposedly features two new dungeons with a Chrysalis and Fluttershed boss, but they are inaccessible because Peet spawns the player inside of a swimming pool which they are unable to escape from after completing the third dungeon. If his word is to be believed, it's because he somehow forgot that noclip isn't a part of normal gameplay and thought that players would just be able to, ya know, walk through the walls. Just...let that sink in for a bit. Yeah.

 There are many more things I could complain about in detail, such as the fancy lighting in the bonus dungeon leaking out into the regular levels, the quirk about players not being able to backtrack and a couple instances where escaping the map is surprisingly easy, but you probably get the general idea already. Gates of Tartarus could make a decent game with a little work, but there isn't much point in playing the game at the moment unless you really like the non-sexual variety of grinding and staring at yet another game using RPG Maker's default tilesets and monsters. Even if the game is ever fixed up, you'll probably be much better off playing Super Lesbian Horse RPG or Curse of the Lost Kingdom unless Bhaal manages to pull off some kind of miracle.

 No, this game does not feature pony porn. Also, Led Zeppelin would be insulted to find their music being used in GoT.

April Fools: What Could Have Been

Some of you may have been wondering exactly what I was doing on April Fools and why I was not participating in the festivities. Thankfully Enigma saved the day with "Click the Twilight Sparkle", a stroke of sheer genius. Well, the truth is that I was at church and was not available on that day, but I was still working on something, something that nearly got finished but ended up taking too long to get finished in time. So what was it I was working on? A fake review, similar to Enigma's, but with fake screenshots and without an actual game to go along with it. I planned on reviewing an epic MMORPG titled "Of Ponies and Dragons: Rise of the Equestrian Empire", and give it a 2/10 for trivial and pointless reasons.

If you want to see more fake screenshots of the game, you can find them after the break. And please, click to enlarge and view them in their full glory (you can also do that with the one above).

A screenshot of a normal battle scene. And no, that is not my OC, I just whipped him up in Pony Creator.

A turn-based battle scene. Not very complicated and didn't take much work to make.

This image is in a less advanced state then the others, and was designed to  support my statement that the animation was quite buggy.

The vectors were rather easy to obtain (too many to list, but thanks to all that made them) and paste together, but the majority of the work went into adding depth of field effects. It involved selectively blurring out particular elements of the background in order to provide focus on certain areas of the image, and I must admit that I did a poor job with the UI, although that was not my main focus (I intended to criticize the interface in my review).

Hope that you found this at least somewhat interesting. Xtux, out!