Anyway so after much hemming and hawing I broke down and picked up Polytron's puzzle platformer. Yes I have seen Indie Game: The Movie, so I know the creator Phil Fish is a drama queen and an egomaniac. However I decided to let the highly praised indie game a go because I'm on a kick to give Indie games a try.
So Fez is a game about a little pixel man named Gomez who has to put the world back after this evil cube thing comes to the world and turns a 2d world 3d. Gomez needs to change the perspective of the world around to be able to platform up this new 3d world where we have now 4 persepctives instead of one, to gather golden cubes so that the evil cube can be restored and he can save his world.
Now I was impressed by the atmosphere of Fez, its very calming and happy. Its got the bright happy colors you expect from games like Mario but without any of the challenges of battling enemies. I am perfectly happy with this. There are times where I really just want to go into a world and not have to dodge baddies, if anything really I prefer this in a platformer. I'm pretty terrible at puzzles and platforming so its nice to not have to deal with enemies for once while I try to get through the game.
Now what about the 3d world switching dynamic? It works pretty damn well. I enjoy being able to swtich up the world to get to the higher parts of the level. So I guess in short I enjoyed the game for the low stress happy atmospher and the fun world shaking dynamic. On that alone I would say that if your not bothered by droppind ten dollars on a game then its worth the purchase.
So why do I have mixed feelings if I just thought that on the merrits of the game that its worth buying? Well it falls to the bull shit that Phil Fish the creator keeps on spouting. He released a patch last summer for Fez that had a glitch that would delete less than one percent of all users save files. According to Fish MS charges around 40k for any patch after the first one which is free and its too expensive to fix the game so he would leave the game unpatched.
Mind you MS did make a statement that they were willing to work on the price of the patch so that they could fix the game. Fish has not fixed the game as of yet. Now that's just dickish on Fish. MS has high prices on patches but that's to cover the costs of implementing the patch which apparently costs money and to encourage relatively bug free games on launch. Fish signed a contract with MS and the price for patches was all up front. He shouldn't try to make himself the victim because the cost of operating your business is high.
Now I believe in developers giving us relatively functional products and to not bitch if they have to fix something because hey its your product it should work, I get that you cant find all the bugs but hey its the cost of doing business. I work a retail job and there are times where I have to give into my customers so that I keep them happy even if it costs me money. Thats just how it works Phil Fish get over it. Phil you make good games so just do it and take this as a learning experience.
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