The Mega Kickstarter Review Post, Part 2

We're tallying up my Kickstarter adventures. So far, I've backed 10 projects out of friendship or professional self-interest, and I've given 5 of them the 👍 seal of approval. Also, 8 of them actually delivered! In today's categories, I am backing as a pre-order. A down payment on stuff I want to get, own, have, and enjoy.

These categories here are responsible for my second era of kickstarting. After getting burned on some expensive and disappointing projects, I changed my habits to buying almost exclusively from proven professionals in their respective fields. I figured they would have a much better chance of actually knowing how to make their thing, and maybe that thing would be less likely to suck.

Music Projects

In almost every case below, I didn't end up liking the actual music that came from these Kickstarters as much as I liked the music they had already made, which was what convinced me to support their art in the first place. I have no regrets about choosing to help any of these people.

• Bess Rogers - This is a perfect example of the internet working. She made a fun promo video, which I saw, then I found some of her other albums on iTunes, and I liked them enough to want to help her make more. 👍
• An Evening with Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer - I got a digital download of the multi-disc release, which I have not listened to. Since this was a $1 pledge, it used to be in the Price is Right category, but I was donating to get stuff, so now it's here.
• Nataly Dawn - Half of the delightful YouTube-born band Pomplamoose. I'm 90% sure I actually listened to the album when it was released.
• No School Today - a children's album from the bassist of They Might Be Giants.

Games

This is actually two categories. Video games are a bad deal on Kickstarter. As a general rule, assuming the project doesn't fail, you're paying a premium as a backer. Especially if it's going to end up on Steam one day.

• Hadean Lands - this is a game of interactive fiction by a game designer I was previously aware of and whose work I enjoy, Andrew Plotkin. This was one of the first projects I ever backed, and it funded in December 2010. Despite regular monthly updates, it has yet to be completed.
• Zombies, Run! - A game that requires real-life running around with your phone to progress. Once they realized they couldn't actually deliver on their promises due to App Store limitations, they issued refunds. (So we could spend the money on them in the app store, was probably the theory.) 👎
• Double Fine Adventure - This project was huge. One of the first entries into crowdfunded gaming by a known developer, this project wasn't even for a specific game, just the idea that they'd come up with one, and make a documentary about how they did it. That game is Broken Age and it has been split into two pieces. The first half did a pretty good job of delivering on the flavor of the old-school point-and-click adventure they were promising. The second half has yet to be completed. I have not watched any of the documentary.
• FTL: Faster Than Light - this computer game "is a spaceship simulation roguelike-like. Its aim is to recreate the atmosphere of running a spaceship exploring the galaxy." And it does a great job. It's fun, and difficult, and delivered darn close to on time. 👍
• Shadowrun Returns - I loved Shadowrun as a kid. Particularly the games on the SNES and Genesis, so backing a new game was an easy sell. They delivered, and I have never made the time to play it. However, they seem to keep on releasing patches, overhauls, expansions, and now a forthcoming 'Director's Cut,' so I feel like I've made the right choice, because if I had played it immediately on release I probably would not have replayed again and again in each new form.
• LA Game Space - I live in LA. Why not a Game Space? The reward promised was 30 original indie games, and I have no idea if they delivered, or if they built a Game Space, or what happened with this one. Endless indie bundles have left me feeling somewhat dubious about the quality of 30 prototype games though. 👎 (What I should have backed was a GameHaüs!)
• Energy Hook - I will play any Spider-Man game. Even the Atari 2600 Spider-Man game is fun, because all I want in any Spider-Man game is to web swing around the city. And here's the guy who made the best web swinging system, making a game where the only thing that happens is you swing around, except with energy instead of copyrighted webs. Unfortunately, the game has yet to be completed because the developer decided to make another game instead. 👎 (But hopefully 👍 once I can actually play it. (Until then, Floating Point is a free game with almost nothing going on but swingin' around some blocks.))

I don't think I'm likely to back another video game project. I think Kickstarter shines as venue for creators who have created something, but need a financial push to make the leap from bits to atoms. It's awesome that everyone supported the very idea of Tim Schafer (and Zarf) making a new adventure game, and that seems to be turning out well, but backing digital goods that haven't progressed past the idea stage feels substantially riskier – and more importantly, less fun.

Board games, on the other hand, are expensive to physically produce and ship, and might be a pretty good value in pre-release.

• Super Showdown! - I don't know what possessed me to back this game. The good news is that when it arrived, they accidentally sent me two copies. The bad news is that it isn't all that much fun.
• Z-Ward: A Parsely Game - I really like this project. A Parsely game is an interactive fiction game, or text adventure, but instead of being played with a computer one player acts as the interpreter, following the printed materials with regard to the map, items, actions, etc. I got their whole collection, and my dream for these is to play them with a crowd before or during a comedy show, but I haven't really gotten to play them at all yet, and I don't want to read ahead and ruin them! Still, they seem awesome. 👍
• Call of Cthulhu: 7th Edition - This is the project that sucked me in the most. It makes up almost a third of all my kickstarter spending. As their campaign revealed stretch goal after stretch goal featuring new books and items, and even let me buy the adventure from the previous year's kickstarter campaign that I missed out on, the Horror on the Orient Express at half of list price, I kept on bumping up my pledge. The crate of stuff from this project, when it finally arrives, promises to be immense. Of course, all those new books and things now have to be written, so the project has yet to be completed. The hope is that it won't be much more than 1 year late.
• Chaosmos - This is a board game closely inspired by a book I found in the school library in 7th grade, Interstellar Pig. When I bought my first hobby board game, Cosmic Encounter, it was because I thought it would be this game. Aliens are chasing after an artifact, hiding it from one another, and each alien race has a rule-breaking power. I got to playtest this game once, and had a nice time, but the project has yet to be completed.

That's another 16 projects. Of those, only 9 are complete, and of those, only 3 got a 👍.
Total score to date: 26 projects. 17 completed, 8 that I'm glad I backed.

Next week we'll actually get to some of those disappointing tech projects, a category that's an even worse deal than video games, and maybe a list of projects I backed that didn't fund.

The Mega Kickstarter Review Post, Part 1

Kickstarter is a source of almost endless fascination for me. I performed on a comedy show at SF Sketchfest this year that challenged each performer to write a new set on the topic of obsession, and so I got to say a bunch of things about Kickstarter to a paying audience. Click above to see how that went. Click below to read brief reviews of the Kickstarter projects I have backed as I attempt to establish my own Kickstarter Happiness Index!

The Kickstarter Happiness Index

The Kickstarter Happiness Index, or KHI, or KkrHppdx, is derived through a simple formula: it is the ratio of projects I still happy I backed by the time they were over (denoted by the thumbs-up symbol, or 👍) to the total number of projects I backed (denoted by a number, like 51).

Yes indeed, I've backed quite a lot of things on kickstarter. I daresay it's become my number one use of irresponsibly spent discretionary income. I don't buy a lot of movies or games these days, but sometimes I buy one that doesn't exist yet for too much money. In order to simplify this process a bit, we're going to look at these projects in categories. What's more, because we're both such busy people, we're going to spread these categories over a few posts this month.

Projects I Worked On

As a general rule, I don't feel comfortable contributing to projects I am scheduled to work on. There's some kind of conflict of interest there, and anyway, I think it's weird to buy myself a job. One of these was the award-winning short film Broken Things. Others, I have sometimes given a donation of $1, just to lend moral support or get the backer updates. These include:

• Underground Comedy - a documentary about improv comedy in Los Angeles. I am, at times, an editor and a consultant on this project, which just funded a couple months ago, and is not yet complete or delivered.
• Diani and Devine Meet The Apocalypse - I originally pledged a ton of money on the first day to help them appear to have momentum on their huge $100,000 ask, then shamefully backed down towards the end to simply the DVD level. I got the last film we made together in a clearance sale at a Blockbuster Video, but I can't count on that working again. The film has been shot, is currently in post-production, and has yet to deliver. 👍 (Although this project is far from complete, I stand by my 👍. I openly suspect this movie of becoming the best feature film I've ever worked on.)
• Help The Selling get a Theatrical Release - This was that previous film. We had a lovely screening at the Egyptian in Hollywood. 👍
• Jim Bruce: I'm Dying as Fast as I Can - a stand-up comedy special. I don't have an official DVD of this yet, even though I created it and they were delivered. I did attend the taping, do a whole bunch of post production work, and get an official poem by the artist. 👍
• A Show with Ze Frank - I didn't actually work on this, but I wanted to, and I thought I ought to be a backer in order to seem like more than a mere opportunist.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Robotic Edition - Another project from the DDMTA / Selling team of Diani & Devine. I backed this out of friendship, but ended up making their book trailer. 👍

Other Projects I Backed out of Friendship

This hasn't happened nearly as much as I might have thought it would. As a big kickstarter user, and a guy who lives in LA and mainly knows people who seem to be struggling to make things, I don't know how I've gotten off so lightly.

• Relatively Prime - An audio documentary series about math(s) by my friend Sam. Not only did this project deliver, but a campaign for a second series is underway right now!

That's it.

The Price is Right Projects

These aren't so much excellent deals as they are situations in which I bid $1, usually for moral support or just to keep tabs on how they turned out.

• Penny Arcade Sells Out - this was somewhat controversial at the time, and I wanted to follow the updates. Except, there really weren't any, and I stopped reading their site a long time ago. 👎
• Renovate the Brattle Theater - I've never been to this reperatory theater in Boston, but a friend used to be a regular, and I'd like for such things to exist. 👍
• Code Hero - A game about programming. They update sometimes, and might even mean well, but this project is widely regarded as being somewhere between a black hole of ineptitude or an outright scam. (To be fair, if I'd seen it in time, I probably would have been duped by the lockpicks too.) 👎

Today's score: 10 projects backed. With 5 happy returns, I'm going to guess that my ratio so far is better than the final score will be, but maybe that's because a lot of these projects gave some of their money to me.

Next time I'm going to cover some projects I backed without personally knowing anyone involved, and maybe how I totally use Kickstarter as a store, even though they explicitly say not to do that.

Media Monday

- Hoplite - ★★★★☆
Technically, I have won this game, but there's a lot of challenges and achievements and stuff so it doesn't feel beaten. It will live on in my iPad. I'm pretty sure this isn't "roguelike." Which is good. For me.

- Star Wars: Cantina - ★★☆☆☆
I've been cleaning out my phone, cluttered with unused and unloved apps. This was a little diner dash-type game with Star Wars-themed patrons. The whole thing's like half an hour long, and hasn't yet been updated for iOS 6. Anyway, it's been deleted now.

- Tomb Raider - ★★★★☆
My first Tomb Raider game ever, thanks to PS+. This one is basically Uncharted. Often I have this joke (or not-joke) where I feel like maybe I'm not the good guy in a game where I'm slaughtering a film crew's worth of people, but Lara seemed like a total maniac in this thing. If you play it for stealth, she's killing possibly helpful people without ever talking to them, but since she appeared to me as a bloodthirsty monster, and maybe an unreliable narrator, I took no opportunity for stealth. 87% collection.

Media Monday: Project Giant Robot, Picross, and EVOLand

Let's talk video games this week:

- The Unfinished Swan - ★★☆☆☆
A neat concept that I generally found to be kind of a chore to work through. Gilliam's cameo was a nice touch.

- Project: Guard, Project: Giant Robot, & Splattoon Demos - ★★★★☆
These were all demos I played during downtime (re: hour-long gameplay segments of Smash Bros) while working in the Nintendo booth at E3. Guard was pretty fun, and involved a crowd shouting out when they saw robots sneaking up on me. In Giant Robot, I was knocked down once or twice by the evil robots, but I always took 'em down with me. In Splattoon, my army of squidgirls (Orange) triumphed over the other, lesser team (Purple). The motion controls were tricky, but I was determined to play it as intended. (One little extra thing about these that must have been reported on somewhere by now: Mr. Miyamoto was revealed to be working on a new Star Fox game at E3 this year. Also, the two 'Project' games are Miyamoto creations. There are Star Fox-related logos visible in the Project: Guard scenery...)

- EVOLand - ★★★☆☆
I've had my eye on it for a while, and bit during the Steam summer event. Generally pretty fun, but by the second half the gimmicks have mostly faded away into actually being the kind of game they're joking about. My time was split almost evenly between getting up to the last boss, and then running around collecting everything before taking him out. Finished with 100% completion.

- Picross e4 - ★★★☆☆
This is, I think, the third picross game I've played on a DS. Back to 2D this time. I liked that you get bonus puzzles for being a loyal franchise buyer. Blasted through this one really quick though, in about a month.

- Picross e3 - ★★★☆☆
And having finished that one, I then went and wrapped up the last few puzzles from last year's installment. None of these are as much fun and addictive as Picross DS was though. Maybe because then it was a novelty. It also had the fun Nintendo themed level, which never re-appeared.

- AC-130 Air Gunship - ★★☆☆☆
It's like that level in that AAA shooting game, except a lot less fun! …I still played all 15 levels…

Media Monday: Castle of Illusion

- Dig Hard - ★★★★☆
This is a great little game jam game co-created by a schoolmate of mine. Brief, but a lot of fun while it lasted. Also, the power went out in my building just as I won, which was a little unsettling.

- Make it Rain - ★☆☆☆☆
Maybe the worst of these incremental clicky games I've played. This one's for iPhone, and spits an awful lot of ads at the player. I did not collect all the things, but I did get to the 'YOU WIN' screen that forces you to stop playing.

- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - ★★★★☆
Very nicely done short story. Explores the options and mechanics of controlling two characters at once in a lot of fun ways. Would have been fun in co-op, but I get how that sort of defeats the purpose. Pleasantly twisty narrative, lots of places to sit in-game, surprising finale.

- Pixeljunk Shooter - ★★★☆☆
Replay while watching some videos. Still mostly fun, still reminds me of Solar Jetman, but I think what I really wanted to (re)play was Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

- Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse - ★★★★★
An unexpected gem. I've been trying a bunch of offerings from PS+ and I didn't think I'd stick with what appears to be Mickey 64, but the level design is fantastic in this. In the early levels, I was impressed with how you always end up visiting and exploring the interesting scenery in the deep background. In the later levels, I was impressed by how time is truly of the essence. I ended up nearly 100 diamonds short and don't plan to go looking for them, but the way that the levels kind of reminded me of rides at Disneyland in terms of tone, or space economy, or delight, or something, was a real treat.