Recent reviews by Juniper & Friends

It's Dwarf Fortress, babe! Where have you been!? This game is amazing.

Iconic game. Absolute blast to play. This game is an experience of lifetime, of a generation, and I recommend it to all. To miss it would be criminal.

Do not use this game to get into Touhou. It's a sorta-fun game ruined by really creepy sh*t and dead memes that should have been left in 2007. This game is clearly aimed at the kind of toads who save their c*m in a jar and put their figures in it, and I kid you not, at least one of these freaks is going to read this review and go "FINALLY! A GAME FOR ME!" Anyone else would be embarrassed to show their parents what's in this game, and their parents would be embarrassed if they found out they spent money on this. I certainly wish I hadn't forgotten I could get a refund before 4 hours was up. It's really not fun enough to be worth pushing through the rest if any of it would bother you. I kept trying and it just wasn't worth it.

Even without the poor translation, the dialog is extremely cringy and feels like you've gone back in time to a much worse age of the fandom, even though there's stuff in it from TH17, at the time of writing the most recent canon game. There's even an extremely annoying loading screen tip that does the "Yukarin is definitely a 17 years old girl~" joke, and you will see this a million times. In fact, it seems to be doing this SOLELY for a pointless "guess the character's age" mini game, and since none of the characters have canon ages, it's all headcanon and not something you can know unless you abide by the game's BS.

Also, despite the fact that she's been drinking since at least SSiB, it seems to think Reimu is under 17, which probably means it considers most of the characters to be minors. Extremely concerning considering the game has unlockable photos that you can create from Negatives every time you defeat Aya, and when you unlock them, the gallery shows you the ripped-clothes almost-naked underwear-shot version on the wall by default. You also see these at the end of every boss fight, so these are unavoidable. They're the kinds of pictures you'd expect to see on a creepy nerd's dakimakura.

The "Aya is a pervert" meme. Damn, it's like it's checking these off a list. In fact, if you encounter the characters one by one, if they have a flanderized meme associated with them, they will act out the meme, be criticized by the game for the thing the game made them do, and then disappear. It's like this game is for people who only come for the decades-old memes that weren't funny then, because every single character is annoying and not done justice.

And despite all the weird crap it gives in the loading screen tips, IT DOES NOT EVEN DO ANY VERSION OF THE "GIRLS ARE PREPARING" LOADING SCREEN MEME, WHICH THE ACTUAL CANON DOES! This isn't a game about Touhou, it's a game about the dark age of the fandom trying to claw its way back into relevance.

You can also find one of the programmer's comments in the game without any unlocks and they make it seem like he openly sexually assaults women and underaged girls and is proud of it. Gee, is it any wonder the game is like this?

One of the common enemies in the game is not even from any Touhou work at all, it's a meme enemy called the "Sin Sack," and while its ingame description seems benign enough, the meme is that everything turns him on, even killing him, and their only behavior is to run straight at you, which means even one of the enemies in this game is outright attempting sexual assault, and we've established, the game considers many of the playable characters to be minors. It's not even a mechanically necessary enemy, as there are other enemies that share this behavior. It could be removed and its absence would not be felt aside from having one less enemy coin to collect (which does nothing anyway since you trade them in for generic coins when you use them).

Speaking of which, Sunny Milk's outfit is also in the game and its description tells you "if you smell it, you can get the refreshing taste of sun [sic]" and once I understood what it was alluding to I almost puked in my mouth. It feels like it's endorsing sexual assault.

All the creepy stuff in this game could be edited out or just pallette swapped with Not Creepy Versions of it and it would be the exact same game. None of the cringy crap it does is plot-critical or mechanically necessary. It does these things because the target audience is clearly the kind of blackpilled incels that literally nobody in this fandom likes, most of whom moved on way back when Kantai Collection wooed them away by doing the same exact crap as official art.

It's such a cute little board game, a Mario Party clone that doesn't take 8 hours per game because instead of mini games there's little rounds of combat once in a while. Not pay-to-win at all, you can win just fine with base game stuff, and even if people show up with stuff you have to pay to get, it goes into the card draw pool for EVERYONE to use, so you can use cool stuff even if you're up against someone with DLC. You can unlock quite a few characters just playing offline, but online play does help you get more. I like it a lot.

A game from the people who brought us RCT3, and the RCT2 expansions. This is the Roller Coaster Tycoon sequel I've been waiting for. It's perfect. The mascots they added are wonderfully emotive and full of personality. Makes me almost glad they had to re-brand to make this game.

This is the best Game Dev game I've ever played, and it's not even done yet. It's got a ton of features, and the devs update it just about every week, and they're big updates, so just when I think it couldn't get better, it does.

There's so many possible playstyles that it never gets old. You can do solo-dev runs, ZUN style, or you can become the evil mega-corp that buys up all the studios, EA style. You can make your own consoles from the get-go if you want, or you can never touch Consoles at all. You can be a publisher who doesn't even develop the games, instead funding other devs and then producing their games for them in your factories. You can even be a company that does nothing but make and sell Engines. That's not even everything you can do!

But it's best not to take it too seriously. The animations in this game are VERY goofy, and much of the random dialog can be extremely corny (you can turn it off though). The English localization is also somewhat weak, and you'll spot some Engrish here and there. Thankfully, you can optionally turn off just about everything in the game, so if you find something annoying, you're not stuck with it.

Unlike with Game Dev Tycoon, there's no "story" to speak of. As of this writing, there's no newspapers that pop up and talk about you or your company if you do something amazing, there's no fan letters (that you can read), it mostly just leaves you to your own devices and then gives you a pop-up saying "your fans are pleased with this game" or somesuch. I personally find this somewhat disappointing, since you felt like you were being acknowledged by _a person_ for your good work in Game Dev Tycoon, even if it wasn't real. Here, you get a good-scoring game and your numbers go up. The "human" element is lacking. The game tells you THAT fans are happy, but you never get to see a hypothetical person go "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this guy is doing all this in a garage!?" the way Game Dev Tycoon does.

That said, while I think Game Dev Tycoon is better narratively, Mad Games Tycoon squashes ALL the competition flat when it comes to features, game feel, and overall fun. I can't even bring myself to play Game Dev Tycoon anymore because it's missing so many features that Mad Games Tycoon has and lets you use from the get-go (if you want). And it's not even finished yet! That, more than anything, is why I have to recommend this game. Even in its current state, it's fun as hell.

This is the successor I've been waiting for all these years. By God, they've done it. Id's classic has a worthy successor at last. The single player is full of so many shout-outs to the original, and it does what Doom's supposed to: be fast, be awesome, be gory as hell. I'm satisfied.

This game is incredible. A masterpiece of turn-based strategy that makes this a worthy successor even to the phenomenal XCOM: Enemy Within. Best of all, it does so without invalidating a lot of what the original XCOM does, it has its own flavor and style that lets both games coexist happily. Truly Game of the Year material.

...when it works.

Unfortunately, even though I've got pretty great hardware, such that the game automatically pegs my hardware as being good enough for max settings, I get massive framerate drops. I'll be flying along at 60 FPS, and then the camera moves two inches and I'm chugging along at 5 FPS for several seconds. Worse yet, the in-engine cutscenes all drop to 20 FPS even with settings at minimum. Worst of all, sometimes the game locks my whole computer so bad that CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't even work. The weird thing is, it's not consistent. Sometimes, the soldier select screen will drop to 30 FPS as soon as the soldiers are loaded, but if you turn away from it to add a mod to one of their weapons and come back, the same exact scene is now 75 FPS, even though there's MORE on the screen than before.

I still recommend it because a patch to fix performance is in the works, and since it's turn-based, it's merely annoying rather than game-breaking. If you're willing to put up with the performance issues, by all means, it's worth it.

It's been a long journey, and now it's finally ready. If only you knew half of what this game went through in the beta. The devs really kicked butt and got a mountain of good work done in the month before release.

Just as with GalCiv 2 before it, the spaceship designer is the best part about this game - like playing with a customizeable box of Legos, you can take pieces from anything in the game at all, resize them, stretch them, double them along both lines of symmetry, move the lines of symmetry to wherever you want, and animate anything. That's not to say the default designs aren't amazing -- heck, they're so good, you could go the whole game using just the default designs and never feel bad about it, but the personal touch you get from designing your own ship will make you excited to play future games, where you know exactly what techs you need to start making those ships (the designs stay with you until you delete them).

Obviously, this isn't just a spaceship designer, it's a space 4x, and it is a deserving successor of the GalCiv franchise. Everything is bigger, better, and with more room for expansion. The move up to 64 bit allowed the devs to go nuts with features, and even more stuff is on the way. Best of all, GalCiv 3 is easy to mod, and mod support is better than ever. Don't like the default balance? Changing it is as easy as opening an XML and changing a few numbers. Once it gets integrated into the Steam Workshop, the floodgates will open. Make an awesome ship design and want to share it with the world? Do it.

I honestly didn't think this game would be ready in time when I saw the release date. The devs done went and proved me wrong, and I couldn't be happier.