BiteFight - Gardening... for Satan!
May. 5th, 2006 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpI need those guys from Ghost in the Shell who kill crows with really big fire extinguishers, or whatever it is they were doing. The cheery robins need to be taught a lesson. A lesson in CYBORG FANSERVICE. I mean. In PAIN.
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Because KoL is not enough of a time sink to satisfy my lord Sal, God of Increasingly Absurd Finals Week Procrastination, a couple of days ago I started messing around with two other browser-based MMO's. The difference between these games and KoL is that these games are bad. Today I'm going to review them because I'm grumpy and require an absurd, helpless target to abuse.
Summary - BiteFight is a badly-designed game with a mysterious gardening fetish.
I'm going to excuse BiteFight's grammar because the dudes clearly aren't fluent in English, and anyway there's a lot else there to pick on. I'll go after the graphics first, that being easiest.
The game's action is mostly text-based, but because it's a game about vampires fighting werewolves, everything's got to be all atmospheric. Which means, as ever, a black background and red text with bad pseudo-gothic fantasy art. Up at the top of the front page there's an anatomically unbalanced gargoyle (even though there are no gargoyles in the game) and a highly-pixelated castle (I don't think there are any castles) and a guy with a sword. I think there's a guy attached to the sword, you can't really tell. And there are "seals" for vampires and werewolves that are kind of twisty metal devices with gore splattered on them that don't look very different - the werewolf one, weirdly, is the less gory of the two. I guess it would be logical for werewolves to have instinctive grooming behaviors that vampires don't, but it seems kind of uncharacteristic.
That's the stuff you can see on the main page without actually signing up. The in-game graphics are actually kind of worse, because at least the gargoyle and the metal bits and all have that whole dead-thing mood going on. The in-game "City" (link goes to a Photobucket image) is a boxy, 3D-rendered "medieval village." The signs for the shop and the graveyard are cheery and brightly-colored, and there's some random pointless mouseover effects.
Also, it's clearly mid-afternoon in the City.
Your "Hideout," also badly 3D-rendered, is a nicely-kept little cottage with a picket fence. It doesn't appear to be anywhere near an urban area, and definitely isn't in the City - the City's textures are kind of better. You can spend money to upgrade your picket fence to have metal on it (metal!), and your landscaping so that you have some shrubbery and a little path.
I am not being facetious. Having a little path is an actual goal within the game.
The point of all this is apparently that making your hideout all pretty makes it harder for other players to find you and attack you, and easier for you to find and attack them. Because a properly cared-for lawn quickens the reflexes and attunes the senses to the scent of blood, to the fear of mortal men.
It's daytime at your hideout, too.
You fight other players to gain experience and money. To get in a fight, you go to the "Raid" screen, where you can pay one gold piece to have the game search for a random opponent, who, when found, will have zero experience and be named "gorelord667."
Because the easy way to get experience is, apparently, to "bite" people - get them to visit the game's website using a link that has your username plugged in. (I haven't done that in any of the links above because it would be internet-dishonorable.) So - of course - some people just click on their own link over and over, making a bunch of characters they never use. The average intelligence of a player of this game can be measured by the fact that I was apparently the first person ever to think of naming their werewolf character "Bisclavaret" -
I'm sorry. French folklore is not as important as all that and no one's going to even get that reference and I'm just sorry. I'm sorry I'm an overeducated elitist dickhead. I can't help how I was born, all right? I - you guys who think the Vampire Hunter D dude made up that really awesome word "dampiel," just, you just will never understand me, all right? Just do not try until you can chronologically place Ivan Golik's encounter with the devil in a wedding dress among his other adventures. I don't want to talk about this stuff anymore.
...
The average intelligence of the players of this game can be measured by the fact that "this s gay" is not the least helpful thread title in the support forum.
The guys who run the game say they ban people who manipulate the linking system that way, but if they do, they don't erase the unused accounts. Sadly, the guys who run the game don't seem to have much passion for their work. Nothing works right. There actually is an option on the Raid page to search for only players at your level or above, but it doesn't discriminate at all, and most of the time you'll get someone fifteen times your level and have to back out.
The levels don't mean much, either. Your level determines your HP, but your other stats - the ones that actually make a difference during combat - you for some reason buy using gold. Two people at level three might have completely different stats, making the level-based search system even more useless. Also, your level determines what weapons and potions you can buy, and the potions are a mess. A level-2 character will always have 105 HP. A level-2 character can buy a Medium Potion. A Medium Potion heals 125 HP. Beep, WRONG.
And then there's the graveyard, which is apparently always hiring part-time help - you're eligible for better jobs as your level goes up. At level three you can become a graveyard gardener (of course!), and at level six, a "corpse preparator." This being an occupation that I'd completely trust a vampire or werewolf with. You can set your character to work in the graveyard for up to eight hours real-time and earn X gold per hour, with X increasing as you get better jobs. You also get experience when you work in the graveyard - specifically, you get 1 experience point every time you sign your character up for a shift. That's whether it's for one hour or eight.
As far as I can tell so far (my werewolf is but a humble gardener), this doesn't change as you level up. Do the designers want to reward people for coming back to the computer every hour to set their werewolf to work preparating corpses, or is it just incompetence? Let's say both.
I cannot say that I recommend this game to people I like. However, I am, as previously stated, very grumpy, and I think I'm going to keep messing with it for a while longer. This is because I hate the people who play "BiteFight" and want to hurt them.
I want to injure the guy who wrote an incredibly long tutorial for the game, which contained zero useful information and many statements like "but you are a creature of the night, and you’re hungry." I want to damage the self-esteem of the girl whose profile says "a nice young girl who was turned into a vampire by her best friend but you would be scaried right well some how she feels better off now she feels as if she could finally live up to her full extent she wants to fine someone who will love her," in a video game about killing people and eating them. I want to tell the "this s gay" guy to go be heterosexual someplace. I need to level up, first.
I've figured out why people keep playing MMO's even after they've realized they hate them. It's because they hate their peers even more.
Edit: And... I forgot about the second one. I'll deal with that later, I'm tired.
-
...and if you want to encourage my present self-destructive behavior, here is my link. If you click on it, I will bite you. (In the game.) I will gain valuable experience points and gold from your click, and you will be forced to become an Interweb-Werewolf! I am cunning. This game is stupid.
-
Because KoL is not enough of a time sink to satisfy my lord Sal, God of Increasingly Absurd Finals Week Procrastination, a couple of days ago I started messing around with two other browser-based MMO's. The difference between these games and KoL is that these games are bad. Today I'm going to review them because I'm grumpy and require an absurd, helpless target to abuse.
Summary - BiteFight is a badly-designed game with a mysterious gardening fetish.
I'm going to excuse BiteFight's grammar because the dudes clearly aren't fluent in English, and anyway there's a lot else there to pick on. I'll go after the graphics first, that being easiest.
The game's action is mostly text-based, but because it's a game about vampires fighting werewolves, everything's got to be all atmospheric. Which means, as ever, a black background and red text with bad pseudo-gothic fantasy art. Up at the top of the front page there's an anatomically unbalanced gargoyle (even though there are no gargoyles in the game) and a highly-pixelated castle (I don't think there are any castles) and a guy with a sword. I think there's a guy attached to the sword, you can't really tell. And there are "seals" for vampires and werewolves that are kind of twisty metal devices with gore splattered on them that don't look very different - the werewolf one, weirdly, is the less gory of the two. I guess it would be logical for werewolves to have instinctive grooming behaviors that vampires don't, but it seems kind of uncharacteristic.
That's the stuff you can see on the main page without actually signing up. The in-game graphics are actually kind of worse, because at least the gargoyle and the metal bits and all have that whole dead-thing mood going on. The in-game "City" (link goes to a Photobucket image) is a boxy, 3D-rendered "medieval village." The signs for the shop and the graveyard are cheery and brightly-colored, and there's some random pointless mouseover effects.
Also, it's clearly mid-afternoon in the City.
Your "Hideout," also badly 3D-rendered, is a nicely-kept little cottage with a picket fence. It doesn't appear to be anywhere near an urban area, and definitely isn't in the City - the City's textures are kind of better. You can spend money to upgrade your picket fence to have metal on it (metal!), and your landscaping so that you have some shrubbery and a little path.
I am not being facetious. Having a little path is an actual goal within the game.
The point of all this is apparently that making your hideout all pretty makes it harder for other players to find you and attack you, and easier for you to find and attack them. Because a properly cared-for lawn quickens the reflexes and attunes the senses to the scent of blood, to the fear of mortal men.
It's daytime at your hideout, too.
You fight other players to gain experience and money. To get in a fight, you go to the "Raid" screen, where you can pay one gold piece to have the game search for a random opponent, who, when found, will have zero experience and be named "gorelord667."
Because the easy way to get experience is, apparently, to "bite" people - get them to visit the game's website using a link that has your username plugged in. (I haven't done that in any of the links above because it would be internet-dishonorable.) So - of course - some people just click on their own link over and over, making a bunch of characters they never use. The average intelligence of a player of this game can be measured by the fact that I was apparently the first person ever to think of naming their werewolf character "Bisclavaret" -
I'm sorry. French folklore is not as important as all that and no one's going to even get that reference and I'm just sorry. I'm sorry I'm an overeducated elitist dickhead. I can't help how I was born, all right? I - you guys who think the Vampire Hunter D dude made up that really awesome word "dampiel," just, you just will never understand me, all right? Just do not try until you can chronologically place Ivan Golik's encounter with the devil in a wedding dress among his other adventures. I don't want to talk about this stuff anymore.
...
The average intelligence of the players of this game can be measured by the fact that "this s gay" is not the least helpful thread title in the support forum.
The guys who run the game say they ban people who manipulate the linking system that way, but if they do, they don't erase the unused accounts. Sadly, the guys who run the game don't seem to have much passion for their work. Nothing works right. There actually is an option on the Raid page to search for only players at your level or above, but it doesn't discriminate at all, and most of the time you'll get someone fifteen times your level and have to back out.
The levels don't mean much, either. Your level determines your HP, but your other stats - the ones that actually make a difference during combat - you for some reason buy using gold. Two people at level three might have completely different stats, making the level-based search system even more useless. Also, your level determines what weapons and potions you can buy, and the potions are a mess. A level-2 character will always have 105 HP. A level-2 character can buy a Medium Potion. A Medium Potion heals 125 HP. Beep, WRONG.
And then there's the graveyard, which is apparently always hiring part-time help - you're eligible for better jobs as your level goes up. At level three you can become a graveyard gardener (of course!), and at level six, a "corpse preparator." This being an occupation that I'd completely trust a vampire or werewolf with. You can set your character to work in the graveyard for up to eight hours real-time and earn X gold per hour, with X increasing as you get better jobs. You also get experience when you work in the graveyard - specifically, you get 1 experience point every time you sign your character up for a shift. That's whether it's for one hour or eight.
As far as I can tell so far (my werewolf is but a humble gardener), this doesn't change as you level up. Do the designers want to reward people for coming back to the computer every hour to set their werewolf to work preparating corpses, or is it just incompetence? Let's say both.
I cannot say that I recommend this game to people I like. However, I am, as previously stated, very grumpy, and I think I'm going to keep messing with it for a while longer. This is because I hate the people who play "BiteFight" and want to hurt them.
I want to injure the guy who wrote an incredibly long tutorial for the game, which contained zero useful information and many statements like "but you are a creature of the night, and you’re hungry." I want to damage the self-esteem of the girl whose profile says "a nice young girl who was turned into a vampire by her best friend but you would be scaried right well some how she feels better off now she feels as if she could finally live up to her full extent she wants to fine someone who will love her," in a video game about killing people and eating them. I want to tell the "this s gay" guy to go be heterosexual someplace. I need to level up, first.
I've figured out why people keep playing MMO's even after they've realized they hate them. It's because they hate their peers even more.
Edit: And... I forgot about the second one. I'll deal with that later, I'm tired.
-
...and if you want to encourage my present self-destructive behavior, here is my link. If you click on it, I will bite you. (In the game.) I will gain valuable experience points and gold from your click, and you will be forced to become an Interweb-Werewolf! I am cunning. This game is stupid.
