Universal News
Tales of interest
by Nathan Grayson (November 18th, 2010 at 6:24 am)
Normally “free” and “not shit” are enough to warrant a bark and a point from us, your trusty App Store hounds at Podgamer, but today I’ve decided to mix things up. See, while Brutal Fantasy-Prologue is definitely free and also gleefully slashy (though generically so) enough to cross the rickety bridge out of Shitsville and into Mediocrity Zone, it’s also – dare I say it – profound. Actually, I don’t dare say it, because it’s really not. But it is profound’s plainer, lose-the-glasses-and-we-might-have-something sister, “interesting.”
See, in a slight twist on the normal App Store release formula, the full version of Brutal Fantasy won’t be out for another month, and this free Prologue – as you might expect – sports the beginnings of its storyline. What is that storyline, you ask? Uh, I think there was an evil knight or something like that. I didn’t really pay attention, but seeing as there are about three fantasy plots in existence, I’ve got a decent shot at being on the money. Point is, even if Brutal Fantasy-Prologue’s story physically spurted chopped liver out of my iPhone speaker, I wouldn’t have minded. It’s not important. What is important is the delivery of that story.
It’s a pre-release appetizer for the full game – not just a normal free demo. That is to say it’s a separate title – not unlike the wildly successful Dead Rising: Case Zero over in Console Land – that functions to whet your whistle for the game while also painting a more complete picture of its universe. Does Brutal Fantasy-Prologue use the technique in any particularly outstanding fashion? No, not really, but it’s still something for us all to don our long, gray costume beards and stroke them at. For instance, in the notoriously fast-moving App Store, do buyers even have the attention span to care about a game that’s metered out over a longer period of time? Hell, is story – no matter how thin – even a factor for those buyers?
So yeah, gray beards and thinking caps on. Hah, now you look like Dumbledore. This amuses the Podgamer collective greatly. Even the News Robot, and he’s incapable of emotion. Or at least, that’s how he was programmed. Hey, now he’s smiling! And he’s got a knife. Wonder what that’s about. Maybe he baked me a cake!
I played this. It was shit. The graphics are pretty neat but playing it is painful, dull, boring, and not something I really fancy doing again.
The iAd blocks the button to advance to comic page. Unplayable for me in its current form.