Review: Muffins.exe (Creepypasta)

muffins.exe

 Today I was sitting around, expecting a creepypasta to show up in our email inbox as they usually do during this time of year, and what do you know? Some "Anonymous" person submits this game titled muffins.exe, created in GameMaker Lite and featuring a gratuitous amount of screamers (thus rendering it very NSFW).

 If you intend on playing this, I'd advise that you do so before reading below the break, as the review contains spoilers.



 Upon opening muffins.exe I was presented with options to quit (obviously for the cowards among us), start a new game or see "extras". The latter was blanked out, so I have no idea what it does, and thus I proceeded to play it with my volume lowered somewhat and without headphones. I also ran the game via windowed mode in Wine, just to ensure that my screen wouldn't get stuck on some gory Derpy picture run through a red filter.

 The player, as Roseluck, is tasked with finding Derpy's muffins and returning them to her. As is to be expected from games of this genre, the graphical style is purposefully tacky and the physics feel rather awkward. After doing this, Derpy  says that she has to tell her something very important, and then disappears for several days. Figures. You then go looking for her in the field, and surprise surprise, everything gets all red and screwed up in a completely original manner that I've never seen in a game ever before.

Wow, I never expected this.

 As Roseluck plods on through the madness, she is repeatedly subjected to jumpscares and the nasty sight of body parts lying on the floor. After a while you'd expect her to get annoyed and start demanding that Derpy stop messing around and just kill her already, but nooo. She is one of those silent types, and even if she did say anything Derpy probably wouldn't listen, because antagonists in creepypastas aren't known for complying with their victim's wishes because they are evil and stuff. Rawr.

 So why did Derpy suddenly decide to turn on her best childhood friend, as the game describes her? Perhaps she is fed up with Roseluck's slow, silent ways, and sold her soul to that shifty-eyed janitor in exchange for reality-warping powers. Then again, Roseluck could just be on a bad trip or something; I wouldn't put it beneath her to cheap out on the LSD and purchase a bad batch. I'm not entirely sure, since I'm pretty sure that I ended up with an early ending by falling on some spikes like a pleb.


 So did I like muffins.exe? The constant jumpscares got a bit ridiculous after a while, but if you like that sort of thing than maybe you'll find Muffins.exe to be a fitting diversion for this night.

Hope you all enjoy the evening! I'll be sitting around, listening to Glenn Miller and watching cartoons to calm my paranoia.

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?

Starswirl Academy

Starswirl Academy

Dev Blog

 The Brony fandom has a distinct lack of visual novels, aside from that My Little Dashie demo and its sibling, Welcome to Ponyville, which is fairly surprising given the amount of talented artists and writers we have lying around, and how quickly these games can be scripted in a good engine such as Ren'Py. Sensing this void, the Zap Apple Project team hopes to fill it with their upcoming visual novel titled Starswirl Academy, and it stars some unrevealed colt in high school who befriends humanized versions of the mane 6. In other words, this is your stereotypical visual novel about schoolgirls and romance, and like many of its peers has seperate SFW/NSFW versions. At least it had good art going for it: I'd say that it already looks quite professional despite being in such an early state. Oh yeah, and since the developers went with a modified version of Ren'Py instead of writing their own engine like Filly Gamez the game runs on Mac OS X and Linux, and an Android port of the game is also planned.

Feel like playing a visual novel while you wait? Then I would suggest that you give Juniper's Knot a try. It is fairly short and lacks ponies (even humanized ones), but then again it's not like ponies automatically make everything better, right?