Revolution 60 is live! Brianna Wu's all-female action game

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/08/revolution-60-is-live-brianna.html

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With the exception of a technical issue I had with the final boss fight, this was pretty good fun, and worth the wait (I backed it on Kickstarter and had almost given up hope!)
It’s very much a visual novel with gaming interludes, but it’s certainly none the worse for that - the story and characters held my interest throughout (even during the exposition sequences) and there was a definite sense of branching that means I look forward to replaying it to go down one of the other routes to find out how else the story might end.
Technically, it was a bit frustrating - the walking pace of the character combined with a lack of real exploration options made it feel much more slow-paced than it should have been, especially when the odd times that you were allowed to look around didn’t really have much of a payoff other than to appreciate the fairly well designed environments. I enjoyed the shifting control systems though, especially the fast-typing bit.

I don’t understand some comments I have read about the portrayal of the central characters - as with the Ghostbusters remake, this was just a story in which the core cast all happened to be female; there was absolutely no “agenda” here that I could see, other than perhaps the novelty factor, which, of course, shouldn’t be a novelty. They were just a bunch of characters involved in a story, and their gender was pretty much wholly irrelevant throughout. I can sort of see an argument that they were all approximately the same body shapes, but that seems pretty weak to me. I certainly didn’t think they were being portrayed in a particularly sexualised fashion but maybe other people are more obsessed by that sort of thing than me.

(On a side point, it’s almost worth venturing into the hell of the Steam comment forums to see the batshit insanity that is going on there, especially from folk who think they are being funny. On second thoughts, just don’t go there. It’s not worth it.)

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Why do they feel compelled to exclude poor underrepresented men? Why? Is this Lysistrata? Get out your sock puppets, guys, let’s get us some justice!

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Nice try, Steam Lucifer! ;)

It’s not my cup of tea either—especially the color choices. They really went all-or-nothing with the chroma, everywhere.

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I’ll give it a miss, I like not wanting to gouge out my eyes so I don’t see the stupid.

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Congratulations to Ms. Wu on the go-live! The game doesn’t really look like my cuppa in its visual style or gameplay but I hope it finds it’s audience.

I’ll give her detractors the time of day when they start dropping games developed on their own that possess any more appeal. 'Til then they can get bent.

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To be fair, I did say almost :slight_smile: But you’re quite right. I thought the hate for Godus was bad*, but this is a whole different level of nastiness.

*and hey, I liked Godus as well. Maybe I just have no critical faculties.

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As usual, you need to filter by hours played. Steam reviews are just group-think popularity contests then, a lot of the time either determined by marketing cash, streamers, or memesters.

Unfortunately, even the positive reviews bring up issues with the PC port not working well on some GPUs and the keyboard interface issues. It might be best to play on a mobile platform - where it’s also lower cost.

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I’ve never been one to give a hoot about the graphics of a game. I just care about how fun it is. I had plenty of fun with Asteroids and Star Castle. I also never pay attention to a games gender politics, though I am told I should. I just care about how fun it is. Visual novels just aren’t my thing, neither are slow paced games.
Maybe we could get a review by someone who likes slow paced visual novels.

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This game is going to be defined by the conversation around it, and not the gameplay.

It’s an exercise for the reader if that is a positive or negative.

You don’t need to be a professional chef to know if the food stinks, so why do you assume that people must be game developers to know if a game is bad?

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Games can stop being fun fast if they have shit politics. I don’t want to play MRA2016 or SCUM Manifesto: The Game (Not that anyone is pushing for that second one to be made).

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I’m seriously wondering what this game would be like, actually. Do you shoot Andy Warhol at any point?

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I imagine it to be like Postal. I got that game in a bundle, decided to give it a chance and bounced off it hard.

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What’s postal like? Is is a first person shooter of some kind?

Keep in mind that my level of gaming is like playing one of the mario games when I hang out with my nieces who have a WII! Also, Pixel Dungeon on my phone…

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It’s a overhead shooter that was very controversial in the late 90s

I wanted to see if there was actually a good game behind the unpleasant plot. There wasn’t, but it taught me a lot about what I don’t want in a game.

Somehow it got a sequel and several remakes.

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Wow! Had never heard of it! What the actually fuck? Someone thought that would be a fun game to play? I can only guess they designers imagined that they were being deep and edgy here…

And of course Uwe Boll wanted to make a movie of it, because why not!

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