Some dude's review of Aptos Adventures DX

The following is a scathing review some guy wrote on the Aptos Adventures DX thread of my game on gamingw.net. Most of the people on there are very sad individuals with nothing better to do than play somebody's game, point out all the flaws and not mention anything nice, and then go back to playing World of Warcraft/Dungeons and Dragons/Insert really nerdy time consuming game of choice in here that they play because they live in their parents basements afraid of the outside world. I guess being a 40 year old virgin creates a blackness in people's hearts where they feel that just because a game doesn't meet their meticulous standards they have to derail it and call it crap just because it's not Final Fantasy 7-2 or whatever crappy game they are infatuated with at any given moment:

"Aptos Adventures DX is a modern-day "comedy RPG" set in a fictionalized Aptos, California. It is kind of like Earthbound, except shittier. The DX version starts with an ambitious claim:

Bug Free.

This is a horrible, horrible lie.

You are a high school student based off of the creator's persona, and are quickly drawn into a plot involving your twin brother's evil 10th grade physics teacher and some fat pink-haired alien. What exactly they are scheming really is not made that clear by the game; it sort of drifts from chapter to chapter without settling on a coherent concept, which could probably sum up the game as a whole.

Attempts are made at having custom systems, but everything feels like it was abandoned halfway through. I never encountered how to use the "suit system", hyped in the screenshots, during my playthrough. There are several ABS sections, but they are unsurprisingly clunky. Several party members are apparently available, but I only found the dog.

Game balance is mediocre. The touch-based encounters are irksome, distracting, and take far too long. Your normal attack does pathetic damage compared to your almost stat-independent special attacks, necessary to complete combat in a reasonably short time, which you do not want to use during the random battles because of their immense MP consumption. The lack of importance of stats effectively makes the already marginal gains from equipment negligible. Did I mention that you can very easily grind for the purchasable stat-improving items in chapter 2?



Afterward, I discovered that you can just play a silly weightlifting minigame to build stats even faster.

There are game-destroying bugs everywhere. During my playthrough, the engine quit in the middle of boss battles due to a trifecta of MISSING RESOURCES, UNREFERENCED EVENTS, and DIVISION BY ZERO. The "custom menu", which gives you the amazing plethora of options "GO TO REGULAR MENU", "CHANGE PARTY" (which you will only use twice), and "EXIT MENU", will freeze you in place if you were or are moving the slightest bit while opening it. I must have had to go back to the last save at least 10 times.

The game suffers from an oddly consistent "Hey! You're not supposed to come back here!" Syndrome, despite encouraging backtracking at multiple points. I saw the remnants of cutscenes and previous sections of the game at multiple points throughout; some of these situations turned the party invisible or through me back into an old scene.

What confuses me the most about this game is the target audience; for a game that will probably be enjoyed the most by a small clique of outsiders from the community, I had to enter the editor multiple times in order to progress.



The rather anticlimatic ending to this nonsense.

Demerits:
- - - Multiple game-crippling bugs, including easily avoidable missing resources and a really sucky custom menu!
- Several minor continuity bugs.
- A mandatory minigame which requires you to have a state-of-the-art computer to run at half-speed.
- - Utterly (probably unintentionally) incoherent storyline.
- Cringe-worthy humor. (Yet more asian stereotypes and gaybeams are not funny, and, no, you did not use them ironically.)
- - Game balance issues throughout.
- Sucky ABS sections.

Indulgences:
+ United Negro Gaming Fund Award for "Acknowledging the Existence of Black People".
+ Loaded with (crappy) content, including an attempt at a post-game.

Overall, nine scoffs."

What's a scoff? Is that like a cough?
Here at Tobin Industries we welcome constructive criticism and..... but it hurts! It hurts so bad! Mommy ow! Owwwwwwww!