GYSO Reviews Part 19 - 99 Problems, Part 3: 1000 Papercuts; Part 2: Progress Quest is the greatest game ever made and you can’t convince me otherwise unless you have a really good argument for Terraria

Published: 2023-07-30

Thor: Hold my blorgo, I’m watching my Eel Man “exterminating the Cub Scouts”. Whatever that means.

The Good

Tim: Today I decided to play a game called Progress Quest. Even though I’ll never catch up to the insane people who spent fucking 20 years with their laptops in the corner doing nothing but running this program. It’ll still be fun yay! If you must know I’m a half halfling lowling called Droopy, and Thor is Goopy. I forgot what he is.

Thor: When I was a young boy, on our home Windows XP home computer, I ran some sort of Panda Monk character for quite a while. Took me a couple hours to figure out that I couldn’t interact with the game or do anything to influence it. Then I went back to playing Anti-Idle: The Game and running Folding @ Home for that crown hat in Platform Racing II. Today, I’m playing as Goopy, an Eel Man Puma Burgular.

Tim: Anyways. Progress Quest is a parody game that some people take too seriously. (Thor: Hey what did you just call me?!) It’s basically the granddaddy of things like cookie clicker and your fucking gatcha games that you spend $5k on because you have no control over your life. Progress Quest was there first you fuck and I’ll appreciate you respecting your elders.

Although I am pissed that the dev decided to do a damn web version. I’m even more pissed that it’s the version I’m playing.

The Bad

Thor: This damn game is why I need a small home server. Also, Platform Racing 3 was a disappointment, this I know because some people on the Internet told me so when I was a young boy.

Tim: There’s a ton of flash games out there that just died like a dead thing when flash died. Like a bunch of bacteria in your belly getting the fuk when you kick it. There’s some good projects out there to get flash games working on anything sane whatsoever, but nobody can get this shitty system to work the way it is ‘supposed’ to work because flash is the devil and I can’t believe we all fell for it. I blame you, Kongregate, you devil scum providing me with a bunch of fun when I was like 11 years old, how fucking dare you.

Thor: But in a Scandevillian turn of events, the only epic JRPG Battle Fantasy RPG Game I’ve played is Epic Battle Fantasy 4. Which turned into a really funny scenario where I, as a child, thought “wow, I hope other game developers pick up this format!” and proceeded to never play any typical JRPG ever. Anyways, Progress Quest gives me anxiety because I can’t speed it up and the things is just random damn luck, and whoever end up on the top either lets the game run forever, or they get there faster by being luckier.

Which is, to the part of me that’s very scared, very scary.

Tim: When I play this game I fell like I want to make a better version of it. More relevent stats besides strength, more spells that do things, more quests, better logs and statistics, more interesting systems, etc etc. Of course it would still be zero intereaction after making your character, but it would still be more to look at and track!

The biggest change I would make is having most of the systems be linear in time. That is, if it takes 30 mins to go from level 1 to 2, it would take 30 mins to go from level 99 to 100. That way you always feel like you’re making progress, instead of it having to be somem shitty titty three year wait between levels and other relevant things. Or maybe I would make the increase linear, so it gets like 5 mins longer per level instead of n^x mins longer, or something. I don’t know I’d have to test it.

The fact that I feel thisi way about nearly every game I play is concerning, but not surprising. There’s things wrong with everything I play, and I want to fix them, but I can’t because I don’t have the time. Bleh.

The Everything Else

Thor: I’ve got a whole thing in my life set up to play some of the classic video games I’ve always wanted to play. The Final Fantasy, Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, etc. games. Problem is it takes too much damn time to sit down and enjoy a video game. When I think about it, sure I can sit down occassionally for an hour to experience a fun game world. Something closer to the actual problem is that there’s this effort to engage with all these unique game systems. Buttons that do things, shop systems that work different, unique items in a bunch of dungeons, story details, hidden bonuses in the corners of every other Restoration Altar. Secrets! Damn secrets. It all adds up to a high level of detail, and to give a game the required attention is an effort that takes… well, effort.

Not to mention the world map, any skill based movement, remembering that White Mage Lady does healing magic in game one but Big Panda Man does healing magic in game two. Their respective implementations of the “attack” stat works completely different, of course. Oh, and there’s always a trash class that you end up picking because it looks cool as shit but it’s implemented as frozen shit.

Tim: This is another one of those games that makes me want to have a game that’s perfect for grinding. Remember my rant about the mincraft/terraria thing? Yeah, like that. I want a game where I can play as a single character for years and still have things to progress on in a meaningful way. Not just in the ‘oh you get 1 extra stat point in Bitch if you work for another hour at this unlikely thing’, but actual meaningful progress. I’m not even sure how you would do that, except by something like linear or (maybe) logaritmic or (maybe) quadratic growth, instead of the standard exponental growth.

But the extra issue comes with how humans percieve growth in general. There’s a reason why decibals are logararitmic, after all. So how do you make things meaningful without making them arduous, while also making that meaningful progress progress for thousands and thousands of hours on the same character? It’s a hard problem.

I guess the solution most devs have is feature creep. And not the fun kind, but the ‘why is my linoone from Gen 3 so much shittier than the equivlant from gen 9?’ kind. I don’t want that, obviously, since it makes the game less fun.

Why can’t I just be satisfied by games like cookie clicker forever? God damn it.

Thor: I try cataloging the video games I play, just to keep track of my personal library of completion. It’s hard, though. Too many items. Too many consoles. Too many series. Too many games. Rayman for the DS was complete trash though.

The Conclusions

Thor: You can send your ideas for the next GYSO post to your nearest political representative. They’ll call us. Then we will run from the nice people in lab coats trying to keep us in a safe room.

Holy shit my Eel Man just got a succubus bra.

Tim: If you send your ideas for the next GYSO post ot your nearest political representative, I’ll break your fucking arm.