EXS1～EthnologySister：Cultural functionalism

还是比较满意的

EXS1～EthnologySister：Cultural functionalism is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This Choose-Your-Own-Adventure disaster is possibly one of the worst E-books on Steam. Thanks China, thanks so much. As usual we have an e-book from a high school anime club dropout, and as usual it's a basic fan-fiction about the developers various imaginary girlfriends, one of whom is a nun, but she'll forget all about that because of the swoony author. So yeah the cringe here is so hard you're almost guaranteed to throw up in your mouth a bit before you finish the first chapter. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent readers, and now there's basically nobody reading it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. And no up-front cost doesn't make this free... the author has his hand out for $5 USD worth of donations... digital panhandling. Imagine paying money for this cringe. While this E-book is "free", you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. [quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The author has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says: [quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote] The authors response comes across as somewhat delusional, or, worse, a deliberate attempt to distort the facts. The author claims this is their first time trying to make a game. If I went to a restaurant, got sick from eating bad food, and got told "The chef is new and has never cooked food before", would that make it okay? No, it wouldn't. The author supplied a very valid reason why this should never have been put up for sale on Steam in the first place. The author admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game. The author whines that despite having no proper experience, talent, or basic competency in game development they deserve the same accolades and successes as actual real game developers. The author demands that it is incorrect to determine how popular something is by measuring how many people used it or liked it. That's exactly what popularity is! The developers response here is some weird, delusional cope. SteamDB very clearly shows [b]nobody[/b] bothered to read this garbage. There's 12 million gamers on Steam. What percentage of them wasted any time with this garbage? Statistically, ZERO. Even I'm deep in the margin of error here. The developer demands that this fact, this fundamental truth, isn't proof of exactly what it is. It's just bizarre to deny facts like this, but I guess this guy comes from a place where the regime told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. So yeah, you can see why this guy has a distorted perception of reality and rejects the truth. In my opinion, Tianenmen square, Hong Kong, Tibet. Let's see what happens to our social credit score now. Anyway. In an attempt to discredit the facts and validity of my review the author seems to think that the e-book must be read in its entirety before determining any objective facts about it. Apparently, before deciding a carton of rancid milk has gone sour, the author thinks we must drink the whole carton before we're allowed to tell anyone the milk has gone off. What rubbish. [b]Reading a bad e-book for longer will not make the writing better, or make it stop being a book and become an actually interactive video game with meaningful game loops.[/b] So why insist the e-book needs to be read all the way through (most people who bothered with this didn't read the whole thing)? This is simply psychological denial on the part of the author. If they can attack the review, they can pretend their e-book doesn't suffer from the defects this review highlights. This is outright delusion, unfortunately. [b]It does not take very long for the defects in this e-book to become apparent. Reading the book for longer will not change them.[/b] The author complains, after their put their game up on the exact same platform as professionally and competently developed games by real developers, that this product has been compared to actually successful products. The author is outraged by... well... their own failure, apparently. If the author did not want their awful product to be compared to other products on the same platform, [i]they shouldn't have put it on that platform![/i] But this shows clearly the author never considered the needs of you, the gamer, and your experiences and options on the Steam Store, they only thought about themselves. They're angry that you have better choices. What arrogance. Nothing in the authors pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this e-book to anyone.