AMERK'S PROFILE

The game downloads okay, but won't extract.

post=201701
Who cares, I said I'm not taking credit. It's for fun, so yeah. people use the graphics I make all the time as well.

There's nothing wrong with borrowing resources from another non-profit game, as long as you are not implying they are your own and giving credit to those who customized them. So if you borrowed from Great Escape and credited the designer, then no problem.

But if you took those resources and didn't credit them, that is a problem.

Who cares? Well, I haven't been with this site terribly long (5 or 6 months at most), but I've been a part of a lot of other communities and the general consensus is, when it comes to stealing resources without offering credit... everybody cares. People take the community of these sites, the designers, the work that goes into maintaining these sites, and the effort required for people to spend their hard-earned time to provide decent freeware titles very seriously. And if you don't care, well, there are plenty of other sites you can go to.

Also, the attitude of "I don't care" will only make people bash your game and not provide any insight, if they even bother downloading your game at all. Positive feedback? Feedback is feedback, regardless if positive or negative. It's not suppose to be biased or closed-minded. It's supposed to be able to offer helpful criticism (albeit, sometimes the criticism can be harsh), and tell you what you did right and what you need to fix. Unfortunately, there are times that the feedback is all negative, and that can't be helped. But telling somebody you don't care implies that you really don't want to be here, and I have to wonder why bother posting your game to begin with?

Finally, I can't speak for the mods, but from reading other forums, if you did rip the resources off another game and didn't give credit, that's a sure-fire way to get yourself banned. And whether or not you are claiming credit for resources you did not design is a moot point if you are not providing proper credit to everybody else. If you rip from another game, put them into your game and do not credit those resources, it's the same thing as implying you made them yourselves, regardless if you are claiming credit or not.

Clicking on the download link pulls up a "Forbidden 403" screen.

Aye, sadly I have to disagree with the review, so I'll post my own. Thanks for necroposting by the way, as it's allowed me the ability to make my own post in answer to your review. Also, you may want to avoid telling me about how to get illegal copies (via cracks) as I'm pretty sure it's not allowed.

Before I played Dawn's Light, I played it's spiritual sequel "Dawn's Light: A Christmas Tale". I call it a "spiritual sequel" since it more or less uses the same characters and carries similar puzzle themes, but it's not a true sequel to the actual game. Heck, it's not even based in the same universe. In DL: ACT John Wizard must save Christmas in an odd off-beat comical version of the Grinch, and in order to do so must first dive into the game of his creation (the original Dawn's Light) and retrieve DL's heroes in order to stop the grinch-like John Naught. Everything about this game was great. So naturally I decided I wanted to see how the heroes ended up together in the original tale.

Alas, everything about DL: ACT was just a gimmick to get people to spend money on the original DL by providing a code that shaved off $5 on the purchase price. Good gimmick, yes, but unfortunately, DL is not worth the money to spend it on. At best, it's a good attempt at creating an RM game that, while severely flawed, may prove to be enjoyable to some degree. At worst, well, it's the worst commercial game I've played and its glaring flaws prove to me that it was rushed out way too fast without any care on the final look. If anything, I think DL: ACT is far more deserving of going commercial over this, and its creators could probably garner respect if he were to start offering DL as a free download, perhaps with the purchase of one of his newer titles.

In any case, you are presented with a typical cliche story of two brothers who get separated, a blood-thirsty villain bent on world domination, and the hero who gets caught up in the conflict while trying to seek revenge against the one that destroyed the orphanage he spent a good chunk of his life at. You start the game doing a couple of fetch quests before the story gets rolling. The main purpose of the game is to seal portals the villain is using to bring out demons. There are 8 portals in all, guarded by a demon boss. There are a ton (and I mean a ton) of sidequests to embark on to extend the time you play this game, and the worldmap is more of a placeholder. You move on the worldmap from one place to another, but you don't necessarily explore the worldmap. It's just there to move from one town or dungeon to another. And there are 5 sections of the ocean to travel, but each section can only be accessed via a teleport. The music is decent, the characters gain decent skills, and it's nice to not have to level grind. Enemies are not random, and once they are fought and destroyed they are gone forever. Since beginning enemies can be rough, this makes it nice to be able to go back to a town, restore, buy some healing items, return to where you left off, and not have to worry about having to fight your way back to where you were.

However, the big problem that I had with this game wasn't the RTP. I personally like VX's RTP package if used right, although some people will have a problem purchasing a game made with just the RTP. My problem was in the story, it's execution of the story, the writing, and the overall gameplay. In several instances, there were mapping issues where your character could litterally pass through a wall he shouldn't have, climbed a ceiling tile, or otherwise access an area that should not have been passable. Early on in the game, you get a map for a snowy region/town (can't recall the name). You also get access to your second main character Vera. However, if you get the map to the snowy area and go there first (without getting Vera), the cutscene in this snowy area will assume Vera is in your party, even though she's not. This is a problem, of course, with the switches not being used correctly, but little things like that occur throughout the game. And for anybody that's seen the screenshot, the horrible use of sbs where your battlers look like they are floating. Now, I don't know if it's legal or not to use battlebacks from other RM engines and apply them into VX and then sell it as your own commercial title. In similar regards, I don't even know if it's legal to make a commercial game using scripts he pulled from other scripters unless prior arrangements were made.

However, to use these battlebacks and scripts and not make the necessary adjustments so your battlers looked like they were standing on solid ground, at the very least, would put a sour taste in my mouth even if this had been freeware, which it is not.

Finally, the story and writing: the creator couldn't seem to make up his mind which type of a story to tell. He seemed to want to make a dark, comical tale, but oftentimes the game was too serious or not serious at all. It's attempt at humor was very dry (unlike the very funny spiritual sequel I mentioned above), and trying to go back and forth between humor and serious just didn't seem to work very well. If a proper balance cannot be established, he should have gone one way or another. But aside from that, the writing was just plain horrible. In the beginning, it was okay, but hardly half way through the glaring misspellings and grammar errors crept up, and they just kept coming, until the end of the game where almost every other line being spoken seemed to have issues. In fact, I felt he had gotten bored by the end of the game and was trying to speed through it, to the point that he didn't care about how anything was spelled.

But what more do you expect from a story where you are just going from one portal to another? If it had not been for the sidequests, this game would have been complete drab. The sidequests will probably end up taking half of your time, because there are so many, that I felt the sidequests were simply added as a way to try and beef up the game and hide some of the other glaring flaws.

This does not mean that I don't believe in commercial RM games in any way, and there were some redeeming qualities in DL, as stated above. I also believe DL's creator has a lot of potential. However, I don't believe DL is the game to showcase his talents, nor do I believe it's worth the asking price.

Agreed. I downloaded it, and when I go to play, I get an error stating: "The file red_future cannot be opened."