UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +18, ABOUT THE STEAM & BLAEO PROBLEM.
So Steam really fucked things up again with its genius “learning about this game” feature. An utterly useless thing that no one asked for, that does absolutely no good and doesn’t help anybody in any way. It hurts legit less-known developers by burying their game under the heaps of garbage that still fill the store, it denies players legitimately earned achievements by not counting towards their profile stats and it messes up with sites that track your library, like BLAEO. It’s pissing me off. For the record, 3 of these 8 games aren’t tracked on this site:
🕒 ~4 hours
⭐ 13/13
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: Well, it’s a HOG. I like those, so I enojyed the gameplay.
❌ DISLIKED: The story was lame even by HOG standards and some of the in-game notes were really badly written.
🕒 ~215 hours
⭐ 21/55
⁉️ STATUS: In progress/Endless
✔️ LIKED: I found myself a new clicker. Yay! I like the change of pace that this clicker offers. Rather than buying new units, you play as a single character and upgrade him/her. You start as an apprentice, then you kind of specialize by choosing a magic school to focus on… it’s really quite unique :)
❌ DISLIKED: I found myself a new clicker… oh no! The first run is honestly quite dull and boring.
🕒 ~3 hours
⭐ 13/13
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: Again, I liked the game overall because I enjoy playing HOGs. They also had a couple of really interesting hidden object puzzles where instead of a list of objects, you had a list of emotions and traits (like “deception”, “greed”, “bravery”…) and needed to find the objects that represent those emotions/traits.
❌ DISLIKED: No bonus chapter to follow up the ending that was very clearly designed with a bonus chapter in mind.
🕒 ~2 hours
⭐ 18/18
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: A light-hearted, mildly amusing adventure with beautiful visuals.
❌ DISLIKED: Nothing. Honestly, I see nothing to complain about. The game is qiute short, but that’s not really a bad thing in my opinion.
🕒 ~21 hours
⭐ 27/29
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten, but new content added
✔️ LIKED: This game’s a pleasant surprise. A very enjoyable bullet hell rogue-lite featuring mildly silly mechs and alien technology. Developers are actively working on updates and bug fixes.
❌ DISLIKED: It’s a bit on the difficult side of things. By no means a hardcore game and by no means an unfair one, but I’m not sure I can experience the new levels, let alone the new boss, having beaten the preivous “final” boss just twice out of the many attempts.
🕒 ~1 hour
⭐ 3/3
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: You know Sokoban, right? A nice, relaxing puzzle game where you push boxes out of your way to reach the end of a level? Well, that’s Mushroom Quest.
❌ DISLIKED: The game could really use an “undo” button for when you accidentally push a box in the wrong direction while walking around it. It features “only” 60 levels, so it might seem too short to some, but personally I prefer shorter games so I don’t consider that a downside.
🕒 ~3 hours
⭐ 20/20
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: And once again, I enjoyed playing Noir Chronicles because it’s a HOG and I like HOGs.
❌ DISLIKED: The faces! The awful, horrible faces in this game. Seriously, don’t attempt to put real-life faces on your character models, it’s not necessary and more often than not, it looks bloody hideous.
🕒 ~68 hours
⭐ 19/31
⁉️ STATUS: “Beaten” (kinda-sorta endless)
✔️ LIKED: The core game is a competently made shared-world rogue-like.
❌ DISLIKED: Everything that isn’t the “core game” is a blatant, shameless cash grab. Seriously, the monetization in this bloody thing stops just short of reaching EA levels of bullshit. I personally also very much dislike the way they handle events. New players or people without super-strong gear can rarely participate in anything, that’s simply disappointing.
So Steam really fucked things up again with its genius “learning about this game” feature. An utterly useless thing that no one asked for, that does absolutely no good and doesn’t help anybody in any way. It hurts legit less-known developers by burying their game under the heaps of garbage that still fill the store, it denies players legitimately earned achievements by not counting towards their profile stats and it messes up with sites that track your library, like BLAEO.
Yeah, that’s really a shame. I also feel like the feature was not implemented very well. Which happens, but normally you would hope that it gets some sort of fix after some time. With other stores like Discord (or even Epic…) popping up, I hope Valve step up their game a bit. Because Steam is great in many aspects otherwise…
Yeah, Steam’s the best as far as gaming clients go, but it seriously need some actual solution, not some automated, half-assed system that only pretends like it’s doing something.
Honestly, I don’t mind this new feature. I think it’s a small price for trying to get rid of all those useless asset-flip games that have been polluting Steam with 1000+ achievements as a selling point. It’s definitely not the best option, but it’s something. It’s unfortunate that Valve has to keep trying to catch up with these shitty devs because they always find a new way to exploit Steam. First trading cards, then 1000+ achievements and now hentai games. However, it’s sad that some smaller, legit devs are caught in the cross-fire :/
There wouldn’t have to be any price to pay if Valve just implemented some actual quality control. I know it’s hard with so many games, but it was Valve itself who allowed that many games on their storefront with no real rules in place.
Steam direct was their biggest mistake. Even greenlight was a bit better and it was still terrible.
Agreed. As far as I’m aware, games that were deemed “incompatible with Greenlight” had no problem getting through Steam direct. Speaks for itself :/
Actually, I think I can do something about the “still learning” stuff. Still in a proof of concept state though, and I didn’t find the time to do some proper tests yet. And maybe it will not be perfect. But it will definitely better than the current situation. … well, I’ll probably be as surprised as anyone else :|
Didn’t know Idle Wizard was on Steam now. I may try to import my save … Or maybe I won’t, because I don’t want another one of those monstrosities to mess up the stats? … But maybe I will.
That would be quite something. Good luck with it :)
I don’t think any of the bigger tracker sites has found a solution yet, did they?
That would be really helpful, good luck! Doesn’t need to be perfect, anything will be great as long as it lets me track those new games here on BLAEO.
Edit: just in case I made it sound like that, I’m not angry at you guys managing this website. You’re doing great ;)
Yes, go for it! You know you want it! :D