Please note: My original comments were not about whether the game sucked or not. It's a homebrew game, so of course it's not going to be as well done as a professionally made game. That does not excuse their attempts to market it as being 'professionally produced'.
I'm with Arkhan on this. My whole problem is not the game - it's the non-professional way the Watermelon team does things. If they want to be thought of as professional, they should act like professionals. Their mis-statements and abrupt reversals reflect badly on -all- homebrew developers.
In the eyes of Joe Public (who paid his hard earned cash for a new game): If Piers Solar is sub-par, and it's the best the homebrew scene can do (Hey, they're "pros", they even say so), then any homebrew game that gets produced must suck. Never mind that there are a lot of really good homebrew games. This is the one that is being hyped. If you are going to do that, you have an obligation (to the other homebrew devs, and the people who helped you get where you are) to produce a quality game. No broken extras, no 'little' bugs, etc.
If they didn't make enough money to cover their costs, I have no problem with a re-release to help. The problem comes in when you say the second edition is the only re-print, and it's to help cover the costs. And then you do a 3rd edition. And a 4th. All while saying "This is the last one".
Again, we see this same kind of behavior in their kickstarter. Think about it for just a minute: You contribute, and you get to decide what kind of game they write. As my mother used to say, you can't please everyone - so someone isn't going to get the game they wanted. In fact, the little investors are going to get screwed over when someone with more money than brains ( Like EBay resellers) comes in with a wad of cash just so he can have bragging rights and be able to say "That's my game". And it's unavoidable. Another unkeepable promise.
As for porting Piers Solar to other systems? Even 20 years ago, there were cpu to cpu translators. The bulk of the game should be easy to move. Well, assuming they wrote it in any kind of modular fashion. Will that happen? Of course not - they will re-write the game from scratch (probably taking another 8 years). Wasting time when they could be doing something with the things they (should have) learned. And whining because they underestimated the costs - again.
In short, my problem is with people who want to be 'professionals', but don't act like it. They act like children who have to be the center of attention all the time. If they want to be professionals, fine. Let them act like it. Produce a high-quality game.
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FWIW: We could do Insanity on the dreamcast. It's mostly in a c-like language, so it wouldn't be that hard. And Yes, I have done Dreamcast programming before - If Arkhan ever finds me a broad-band adapter, I may do more (buring and re-burning cd's got to be too expensive)
We could do Insanity on the ps1 or ps2. I've done dev work there, too. But there's the problem of making it a bootable disc there. No one wants to jump through those hoops just to play a homebrew game.
The real question, though, is why would I want to? There are other things I would rather be doing besides re-doing yet another version of the same old game. I guess that's where my real problem with them is. I just can't / don't understand why they want to keep doing the same thing, poorly.
