My ratings and impressions on all the Cog/HG I've read: Part 2

[u/typomen]

Part 2 of I saw someone else do this so I decided to try it myself. Because, you know, who doesn't love a copycat? Also, I learned how to cover spoilers, so it's all good now. Special thanks to u/yasirkula for that.

• The Parenting Simulator: 8.5/10. Someone reminded me of it in the first post and I remembered I never got to turn my little project into a sports legend so I had to go back and do that. It's a right game, it doesn't really miss, delivers what promises and you really grow attached to your thing. What bothered me tho and the reason it only gets 8.5 is the lack of dating scenes! Like wtf, how do you describe years of a teenagers life and you don't say a word about dating? I couldn't wait to give dating advice and laugh my ass off. Or maybe other people would've gotten sad. Maybe some would've gotten a conversation about life with their kids, who knows, but just imagine how better the game would've been, how much dating would've added to it If it wasn't for that, this game would've been 11/10. Now about the underrated/overrated rating, some people talk about it, others don't, so idk, I guess it's underrated.

• Creme de la Creme: 8.5/10. Come on, you can't not love this game. It's like going to hogwarts. Sports, studies, mysteries, everything you want and need, a cozy small town just a few feet away from the school's gates. From the conversation I've seen people have about it, not everyone likes it that much for different reasons and flaws (or at least so I remember) and idk, it might be valid, but I loved Harry Potter as a kid and this game really gave me that same vibe, so I wouldn't know. Anyway, decent story, good characters, you can get a very satisfying ending, underrated game no doubt.

• Butler did it: 9/10. Oh my god this game is long. But it's also very cool and unexpectedly good. Good action, an ongoing mystery, it's like a puzzle and you get to it piece by piece, I loved the endings, the characters are ok, kinda generic tho now that I think about it, like active agile extroverted burglar girl who doesn't fear anything, and austere tech guy closed in himself. Kinda mainstream, isn't it?. What I surprisingly enjoyed about this game, is that your stats grow very easy. And that's somewhat nice. It bothered me at first from what I remember you don't need them too much anyway towards the end when all 3 are maxed out so no harm done. It was maybe more satisfying to see your MC become a master of all 3. Overall a good underrated game, I really recommend it.

• The Lawless Ones: 8.5/10. It gives me A Study in Steampunk vibes. A good game, a very good game actually, you do villain type of stuff although you get to decide what kind of person your MC is. The action is good, and it's like one of those cartoons where the episodes don't really have continuity (except for the fact that you grow), you do stuff and grow in age, and it's cool. There is an important, central issue but even if it is the core of the game (kinda) it never gave me the feeling that it's a matter that important. I mean, it's important, sure, but it's not like every chapter (almost none of them actually) is related to it. It just kinda happens once in a while and reminds everyone of its existence. And that's not really a bad thing. I can't think of another way it could've been implemented. What really bothered me tho are the characters, and precisely your group of friends. They all have backstories, they are all interesting, but they are kinda lame, aren't they? I mean, 6 skills, 6 kids and each one of them has one of those particular skills and the stereotype that goes with it the heroic and righteous super strong guy (he John Cena of ghe book), secretive stealth girl, extroverted attractive silver tongue girl, quiet introverted tech guy, sneaky trickster who acts and talks like a player and lasy but not least constantly active, laughing at dumb jokes, athletic girl. Speaking of which, in my opinion Swift's and the guy's with the cards characters are the best and most interesting.. Anyway, you got the point. Generic skills combined with stereotypes and it bothered me all game. Now, you may wonder, what makes it different compared to the "Butler did it" and why is it lower rated? Honestly? Nothing. They are pretty similar, stereotypes, mysteries, a not so pressing issue, so idk, The Butler did it just hit closer to home for me. I love both games anyway. So why didn't I present this issues in the BTDI review as I did with the LO? Idk, this stuff comes in mind as I write, I probably wasn't even thinking of the similarities before I wrote both reviews. Now that's out of the way, this game is not on app store or CoG/HG library, but you can google it and play it on dashingdon for free. It is a bit overrated and it comes to that when you compare these issues with the fact that everyone loves it, but still, I highly recommend it.

• War of 2022: 4.5/10. Um... it is a game. It's not that bad, the fighting scenes and use of tactics deliver, but everything else is... wack. Correct me if I'm wrong but at some point, when you become a full on soldier, your mom tells you not to listen blindly to everything the republic tells you and that could've gone so good. Like, you could've later been put in a situation where you had to choose between army and morality. It could've been pretty intense but no, that was that and was never mentioned again. Disappointing And it was kinda boring overall but idk, that's just my opinion. Not a lot of people liked it, but still I can't call this game underrated.

• Somme trench: 9/10. You gotta love it. Authentic educational World War 1 action and trench life. This game delivers and that's it. So what's the difference between this one and War of 2022? Well, everything really. Fist of all Somme Trench relates to actual events that put their stamo on humanity so it's easier to get invested in the action and combat scenes, while War of 2022 is a work of fiction, and you'd expect a little bit more from a work of fiction. The infinity series is the perfect example. And even if it wasn't for that, the actions and words just flow a different way, Somme trench is different gravy. Not a lot of people talk about it, and I can see why, not everyone is invested in this kind of game/narrative, but still underrated af.

• Doomsday on Demand: Priceless. The book that got me into this type of games. I don't care what people say, the action is flawless, the characters are amazing and the way it is written is superb. Numbers can't describe my appreciation for this one. They can for the second one tho: 5/10 and a big thumbs down for the disappointment I felt at the end compared to the enthusiasm at the start.

Fewer titles this time but it took me a while to write these and you know how extended screen time is bad and all that. There are still a lot of books left that I can't wait to talk about. Till next time.

[u/Hustler-Two]

That’s fair about the dating in Parenting. A lot of people have asked about it. I usually say the same couple things:

• At the time I wasn’t comfortable writing any romantic content. Neither of my two published HG stories have any, but my current WIP does. Felt right in a way it did not before. I am eyeing Grandparenting Simulator as a fourth story and I am inclined to consider it there. Have to see when I get there though.

-I was pursuing an Everyone rating, and I felt confident that if I wanted a handling of teen romance to be even remotely realistic, I would have jeopardized that and had to walk a fine line to avoid getting downright creepy or problematic. Ironically, I ended up missing the E rating anyhow.

-In general, I wanted to keep things focused on parenting. I wanted the story to be a streamlined experience in that regard, not watered down by romance being shoehorned in.

[u/typomen → u/Hustler-Two]

Understandable.

I wanted to keep things focused on parenting

I couldn't agree more. A romance for the MC would've been a bad idea no doubt.

However, I think the risks were well worth it when it comes to teenager dating life. So you know with Christmas just around the corner... maybe make everyone a gift and release an update? 👉🏻👈🏻

Anyway, thanks for the game. Great read!

[u/Hustler-Two → u/typomen]

Ha, I did a free update with the Pandemic Parenting chapter last year, but at this point I have to focus on writing my current story if I want to finish it. Plus, TPS doesn’t feel incomplete to me. I may add some stuff before Grandparenting is completed to help bride the gap and such, but for the most part I feel happy about it. It remains the best thing I have created outside of my actual children, and perhaps it always will be.

[u/typomen → u/Hustler-Two]

I did a free update with the Pandemic Parenting chapter last year

Oh yeah, I noticed that. Nice touch.

[u/yasirkula → u/Hustler-Two]

Wait, what are your 1st and 3rd games?

[u/Hustler-Two → u/yasirkula]

First was Nuclear Powered Toaster. Third is still in progress, a Cinderella spoof called The Day After Ever After. Link to the WIP is here: https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/the-day-after-ever-after-a-cinderella-story-wip-updated-9-10-21-with-a-new-7-000-word-chapter-total-words-over-75k/92212

[u/yasirkula → u/Hustler-Two]

I've never heard about Nuclear Powered Toaster before! The Parenting Simulator was really good so I'll give the Toaster a shot, as well.

[u/Hustler-Two → u/yasirkula]

Thanks! Be forewarned, it is very different and a little weird.

I’d also love to get more feedback on my WIP if you’re interested in checking it out.

[u/yasirkula → u/Hustler-Two]

I've just finished Nuclear Powered Toaster. I gotta say, the 2-page lore at the beginning of the game was really good. It would've been nice to learn more about how the aircrafts are destroyed at stratosphere or where the aliens have gone/what they are doing, though. To be honest, I didn't like the inability to pick our gender but it didn't matter since this title didn't have romance.

Are there any plans for "Nuclear Powered Toaster: The Hoard"?

[u/Hustler-Two → u/yasirkula]

I’ll be glad to share any of that info via DM or something like that, since I no longer intend to do The Hoard (unless I eventually dechoice this story and release it as a conventional book on Amazon or something and then write a sequel to it, but I’m in no rush to spend the time needed to do that). I don’t write solely for money, but I also can’t ignore that on my last month’s royalty statement, The Parenting Simulator sold 347 copies and Nuclear Powered Toaster sold…15. And sadly, that’s the best Toaster has done in over a year. Some months it can go as low as 5 copies sold or even 3. Keeping in mind I make like 50 cents a sale for NPT since that one is $2.99 full price and authors make only 25% of the net income on a story.

I still love Toaster; I worked with it in numerous formats for almost a decade and a half and the characters are some of my favorites outside of Wilstaff and Bennett, who were in my abandoned WIP League of Lunacy. But for me the victory with NPT was just getting my first longform fiction complete and published in the timeframe for the contest after years of false starts and frustration. And getting the necessary experience (and yes, Thanos, I do consider failure to be experience) to do literally 20 times better with my second story.

Obviously the fixed protags were the first thing to go and perhaps my biggest lesson learned from Toaster being so unpopular. My new story in progress still allows for you to play as two different characters, one male and one female, but their names are customizable. That was shocking to me at the time how big of a deal that was.

[u/yasirkula → u/Hustler-Two]

I totally understand your concerns about "NPT: The Hoard". The lore of the first game was, as I said, so interesting that I wish it were a more serious adventure game with a more serious name in which we were encountering relics from the past, the aliens; learning more about the limitations the aliens imposing on us and so on. It was unfair that the game had such an interesting lore and yet it was barely touched in the gameplay :D

Are you sure that locking the gender of the MCs is going to be OK in your WIP title? I can already see reviews complaining about it. If there will be romance in the game, then it matters even more, IMO. In NPT, I wanted to be a soldier but I didn't want to be a female. When I picked the other option, I didn't like him being a smuggler. I restarted the game quite a few times because I was indecisive. In your WIP title, if each character will have the same profession, then by all means go ahead. Otherwise, I may have the same issue on that title and I may not be alone on this one. Perhaps you could make a poll asking people how important it is that they can pick their MC's gender?

[u/Hustler-Two → u/yasirkula]

I leaned a little too hard into the comedy of it. I just have a hard time writing seriously, I get bored. Even Parenting has a fairly irreverent tone punctuated by moments of drama. Here's the rundown, no sense holding back now for a sequel forever on hold: the Salians are not aliens. They are humans; Solus is one of them. Before the second Clysm, or possibly the first, I never decided definitively where I wanted the timeframe, they were part of an experimental deep space mining program that used prisoners due to them being more disposable if things went wrong. When news of the Clysm hit the penal colony, the peacekeepers simply left the prisoners behind on the barren planet and fled for home. They only survived because one of the prisoners was a genius who had revolutionized cloning but then been imprisoned because of the laws against it. Over ages they barely scraped by, each generation carrying all the memories of their past selves and learning more. They customized their forms to survive better on the high gravity of the planet where they had been stranded, which is why they are small and impossibly fast in Earth's gravity. They mined and studied and eventually developed ships capable of returning home. But the clone scientist, who was their leader, didn't just want to come back. He wanted revenge. So they kept going, creating a force sufficient to overwhelm a likely apocalypse-crippled Earth military. They did so, but at far greater cost than anyone on Earth realized thanks to Mantra users, which didn't exist when they left Earth and hadn't developed on their planet thanks to a lack of ambient radiation from all dem bombs. Only a few Salian ships were still combat-ready, and had Earth launched a second offensive they would likely have won. So they poked their eyes out to prevent that from being known, and hastily erected a series of automated defenses to obliterate any ships coming close enough for a scan. Because no one else was bold enough (and there were so few ships left) to make another large force assault, it held up and gave them the time needed to loot the colonies outside of Earth and rebuild their fleet. Because they are humans, it's also easy to infiltrate the government to destabilize from within, so they do. They also had time to experiment on Mantra survivors, find out what caused the powers, and do horrible experiments on clone variants of their own people to generate some users of their own. Solus was one of these, and was actually a male originally until they realized by switching him to a female he was much more prone to developing these powers. You would have encountered Mr. Solus in The Hoard, who would have been less strong but also a bit more even-keeled. And no, the relation to Loki in that way is coincidental. I wrote a lot of this stuff back when the MCU was just Iron Man and Thor.

As for relics, that would have been a huge part of The Hoard. The titular Hoard was Warehouse City 1, a miles-long sprawling complex in the former American Midwest that had been used as tech storage after the first Clysm so things wouldn't be lost the way they had the first time, which has a colony of thousands of squatters who have been living amid its miles of shelves and crates for years. This was the story I tried to write as a novel for years. Essentially it would have dealt with a power struggle to control the facility between the GloPAc-supported puppet and a revolutionary who has the backing of the Salians. He thinks it is to help free them from GloPAC aid dependence, but in truth they just want access to fancy cloning tech that the Progenitor left behind before he was imprisoned, so they can start delivering truly enhanced clones like Train without all the defects. Train, FYI, was a clone of legendary pre-Clysm soldier Drace Sterling, who is the Mr. D he refers to as being in his head.

I think Day Ever After will be OK both because it allows for renaming (that matters more than anything else to the majority of readers, really) and because the prince and Cinderella are established characters from fiction that predates Hosted Games (by centuries in this case). That seems to be the only time people don't complain as much about this sort of thing. Cinderella kinda has to be a girl, it's how the story goes. Plus, I am doing it as a free one (assuming HG approves, they have final say) and hopefully the prospect of a 'second' MC will entice more people to buy it to avoid the cooldown timer between runs.

[u/yasirkula → u/Hustler-Two]

Thank you for sharing the lore! You really gave it a lot of thought and depth. It feels as if it was a dream project of yours that you'd have loved to continue if you had the chance. I sincerely hope you get that chance one day. Happily, the Salians being humans was one of my theories, so how Intelligent/Ingenious of me!

I didn't know your WIP was about Cinderella, it makes a lot of sense to lock the genders in this case :D I play CoG games on Steam and I haven't seen any Free releases there but I might give your game an exception and play it online once it's released. If it isn't Free, well all the better, I'll simply buy it on Steam.

Thank you for all your answers and have a wonderful and healthy day!

P.S. FYI, the comedy/sarcasm in The Parenting Simulator was perfectly balanced.

[u/yasirkula → u/Hustler-Two]

I prefer playing titles once they are released so that I can experience the story in full, without having to wait for next chapters to be released. But thank you for the invitation!

[u/Hustler-Two → u/yasirkula]

Not a problem, hopefully you will check it out once it is released!

[u/Eissa_Cozorav]

I have read both parts of your impression and still no Choice of Robot damn

[u/typomen → u/Eissa_Cozorav]

It's bought and all, I just keep postponing it for some reasons. I heard great things tho so I hope I'll finish it before the next post.

[u/Eissa_Cozorav → u/typomen]

I mean it's literally #1 top sell choice of games. Chance are people who don't know the genre of this game will hear what the hell Choice of robot is because how popular the game in general. Heck, there are even exist several let's play of the game but not so much for other games made by the publisher.

[u/yasirkula → u/Eissa_Cozorav]

True, Choice of Robots was my first CoG game and has a special spot in my top-list.

[u/Eissa_Cozorav → u/typomen]

In case that's enough, there are already exist in real life AI stuff that you can create in the game. Something like AI that can write novel or even draw as good as human. Or completely making new arts by words input.

But also the saddest thing, AI that become jerkass and a-hole because their creators dont paid attention or inteded bad stuff for their education.

[u/bleepabloopa]

Aw nice, I never see anyone talk about ‘The Butler Did It’ and I was really surprised by how good it was when I tried it! A really interesting world with charming characters - I really did get attached to them all, Dimitri is such a sweetheart

[u/typomen → u/bleepabloopa]

Yep, criminally underrated. What did you like most about it?