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Starbound
Starbound is an original game released in 2013 on Early Access on Steam by indie developer Chucklefish. Funded by retards and furries, it made over four million dollars on a crowdfunding campaign on their website in a similar manner to Kickstarter and made enough to keep development going for 9 years according to the dev team leader Tiyuri. Throughout development, no one at Chucklefuck seemed to be able to decide what this game is actually about, with pretty much every patch making major changes to everything and adding little besides cosmetic items, but signs indicate that the story is really about the universe getting tentacle raped. The reputation of this game survives solely due to fantards who don’t understand that they’ve been scammed and retards who like LOLRANDUMB humor that you would expect from 13 year olds on deviantart and tumblr.
Plot
You play as a dirty space vagrant as one of seven unique and interesting races living in a barely functional intergalactic spaceship. After digging to the center of the starting planet to pad out game time, you fix your ship with a material so worthless that it’s never used or seen again for any reason. From that point each and every quest is expertly designed to just waste your time. The main story of the game takes place at the Ark, a location you can get to instantly from a portal that exists in every solar system. The entire story will take place at the Ark because fuck you. The quests of the main story consist of scanning absolutely every single god damn object in sight, then doing a dungeon with a boss fight at the end and this has to be done for each race.
Bosses each have their own origin stories which drop upon their death, each is nothing more than poorly written DeviantArt tier fanfictions.
The main questline is little more than a giant fetch quest in which you must collect the six Chaos Emeralds which were given to each of the races, except the Novakids because fuck them. Collecting them is the key to opening the door to the final boss, who can somehow still wreak havoc across the universe and supposedly poses an immediate threat despite being locked away in God's final act before getting tentacle raped to death.
Other quests that aren't part of the main story are nothing more than randomly generated time wasters, which have you go on exciting adventures such as rescuing generic NPCs, killing generic NPCs or exchanging generic items between a dozen different generic NPCs on the same planet. Each NPC that follows you back to the Ark from the main story also has quests, but they're just as pointless and boring.
Gameplay
This “dark and mature” game is nothing more than Terraria in Space, but somehow even worse. The developers at Chucklefuck allow their true talents to shine through as they crank the tedium up to 11 because everyone knows aimless mining for resources and pointless filler fetch quests is the best way to make a fun and entertaining game. Like the game it’s inspired by and often compared to, it’s a 2D sidescroller that builds off the same autism driven styles of Minecraft and Terraria. That is, you can mine and build shit and sometimes fight enemies.
Planets
There’s really little to say about the planets you can visit. The biggest variation to them is what color the dirt or stone will be. While there really are countless worlds to explore, it’s all pointless as they all begin to look the same after you’ve seen each biome. Dungeons, settlements, random lone buildings and notable landmarks are all copy/pasted and will look exactly the same on each planet you encounter them on with little variation. Parts of the planet may also fail to load if you're moving too fast in normal gameplay, which further proves how poorly made this entire game is. Each planet has a number of the randomly generated monsters as well as a few preset monsters that look like bootleg Pokémon.
Races
There are seven races in Starbound. Since it’s what Chucklefish does best, this is a purely cosmetic choice. Choosing a race will only affect the look of your character, ship, weapons and armor.
- Humans - The basic and default race, there’s really nothing to say besides no one took Japan seriously and Earth was destroyed by tentalce rape.
- Florans - A barely sentient race of savage plant people who speak like retards and kill everything for no reason. They're also the most primitive race in the game and shouldn't be able to fly spaceships when they still live in mud huts.
- Apex - Ironically not space niggers. Instead they’re super intelligent apes that live in an Orwellian society bordering on plagiarism.
- Hylotl - Three eyed Asian fish that can drown. Their spaceship looks like a fish. No seriously.
- Avians - Designed entirely for furry appeal and live in an overly religious society. When you play as one, you have no choice but to be a fedora tipping Atheist on the run from the bird gestapo. Like most furries they generally hide in the deep dark depths alone in their basements.
- Glitch - Super advanced sentient robots that live in castles and medieval villages. Another shining example of how the devs can’t help but fill their game with silly bullshit.
- Novakid - Somehow the remains of a dead star brought to life, for some reason their culture is based off the American wild west and their spaceship looks like a train. No seriously. Somehow they got their shit together and made novakid towns as for 1.1, but for how long? Nobody knows.
There are a number of non-playable races such as Llamas, Frog people, a race of mushroom people which appear to be nothing more than one of the regular races with a cosmetic mushroom hat, shadow people, penguins and another furry bait race. None of them appear to have any real function aside from attempting to make the universe appear to be populated. Some frogs can be merchants with random items for sale and the silly, cutesy penguins are completely unavoidable as they're encountered during the main quest and appear in an animation when you repair your ship and every time you upgrade it.
Bosses
While most good games would try to make boss fights unique and interesting, the Chucklefish team didn't actually have anyone creative enough to actually do so. Either that, or they couldn't code anything more complex than what actually made it into the final game. Instead all these forgettable bosses are essentially bullet sponges with only a couple attacks each. Even the final boss only has a grand total of three attacks and remains stationary the whole time. Every single boss is also locked into a specially made world that you can't place or remove blocks at all and can only get to from your ship's computer. This was likely done because both the fact that an open world Sandbox game would have made the simplistic bosses even easier as well as the fact that Chucklefish can't code AI and all the bosses would break otherwise.
Rather than build up bosses to be an interesting encounter storywise by giving the player some information beforehand, you're simply dumped into an arena with the boss and given a book of lore after the fight explaining what it is you just killed. This includes a boss that doesn't take damage from weapons you have, but instead must be defeated by using a weapon built into the world, you only find that information out afterwards of course, through the lore book.
- Dreadwing The Pirate - A cutesy penguin in a cartoonishly stereotypical UFO that spawns penguins in military gear that drive tanks.
- Erchius Horror - A giant crystal with an eye that mutated the fuel miners on a moonbase. The entire point of this boss was to prove Chucklefish could make a boss that you didn't just smack with a sword until it died. The fight requires platforming to hit switches, but the engine is so poorly coded that it will probably stutter like it always does and fuck your jump up so you fall to your death.
- Fatal Circuit - A robot boss that the player needed to build, activate, then kill in order to progress to the next star system. This boss was removed because even Chucklefuck realized how retarded it was.
- Asra Nox - Chucklefuck felt their story wasn't interesting enough, so they added a villain character. She only appears three times, each in a boss fight and is entirely two dimensional and pointless like every other character. She's the leader of a cult that believes The Ruin will purge all non-human races from the universe despite the fact that it already destroyed Earth.
- Big Ape - A giant holographic ape head, supposed to be a direct rip off of Big Brother. Probably the longest and most tedious boss fight in the entire game, four projectors somehow enable a hologram to attack you and you must kill them one by one. Each time a projector is destroyed, the health bars reset on the others. This is likely so you have to sit through all the cool animations that it has in each stage. It's worth noting this is a hologram and not Big Ape himself, therefore the assault on the stronghold and defeating the boss is entirely pointless. How fitting.
- Bone Dragon - Like much of the additions to Starbound, this boss is completely out of place in a science fiction universe. Somehow it made it into the final game. Their excuse is slapping "It's a robot!" into the lore book. Chucklefish also couldn't be bothered to make a dungeon before this boss and simply spawns a thousand generic cultists to annoy you.
- Shockhopper - A giant robot penguin controlled by a smaller regular penguin. It really helps set the “dark and mature” tone the devs were going for.
- The Ruin - Final boss, a planet sized tentacle rape beast that killed god. Despite the fact this should be the most epic fight in the game, it's really as underwhelming as every other boss.
Enemies
Most of Shitbound’s enemies are procedurally genreated from a list of parts, by the time you make it to the second or third planet, you’ll start noticing parts getting reused and see the only real variety is on the same level as Pony Creator OCs. Aside from those enemies, there are living shit golems and blushing anime piles of shit. No seriously.
Aside from that, in the older versions of the game when it was nothing more than a tech demo with a “beta” label slapped on it, the monsters actually made animalistic sounds, but now they just do generic beeps as you might expect from any half-assed pixel game.
Development
Shitbound’s devlopment has been nothing short of a spectacular failure despite miraculously making it to the long awaited 1.0 release. Nearly the entire development team and site staff were openly hostile to their customers on a regular basis and the Chucklefuck Gestapo would hand out bans, suspensions and “warnings” at the drop of a hat with reasons as stupid as “being a jerk.”
When this steaming pile of shit was first released to the masses on early access, it came with the promise of “thick and fast” updates. The retards who bought the game were then left months on end without any actual update, going nearly a full year before Chucklefish realized they could still squeeze some money out of Starbound’s bloated corpse. Instead of actually listening to customer feedback, which is the entire point of Early Access in the first place, they just did whatever they wanted to the game, which was usually making it even more boring than the last time they decided to fuck with it. Each update turned everything you knew from the previous version on it’s head.
Chucklefish also started doing “nightly” updates at one point, which were nearly all completely unplayable because their coder never properly learned how to code and had to ask Reddit for help. The only reason they did the nightlies was to prove they were actually still working on the game.
Initially promising to offer refunds for anyone who was dissatisfied with the game, they went back on their promise the very moment they realized that they’re all talentless hacks and would never be able to deliver the game they promised. Instead, they’ve turned their attention to placating the retards who still praise Chucklefuck while publishing other games such as the indie hit Halfway or trying to sell the perpetual beta game and merchandise to children at conventions.
All the delays and failure to update the game “thick and fast” follows a trend of Chucklefish being completely incompetent in hitting deadlines. Even the release date was set for 2012 and has supposed to release every year since then until it finally reached 1.0 in 2016. They also had a roadmap of progress which was a lie from the start, being inconsistent and outright lying about how much progress had been completed. It also never updated despite constant blog posts about how they were totally working on the game.
The team was also highly disorganized through development to the point that it appeared these people never communicated at all. One team member claimed the game was 1.0 ready when it had none of the promised content, which had the rest of the team trying to cover up this fuck up. Key rebinding, a highly requested function that nearly all modern games have was coded, but had no UI made for it for some reason.
Following with the theme of Chucklefish being autistic children, each update to the beta didn't have a standard naming convention, such as 0.5.1. Instead they opted to name each update random shit like "Enraged Koala" or "Upbeat Giraffe." This is more likely intended to confuse people trying to look at the history of the games updates.
The Dev team and site Staff
- Tiyuri - Mastermind behind this halfassed abortion of a game. He’s an idea guy who has no good ideas.
- OmnipotentEntitiy - Chucklefuck’s coder, ranks in at the same level as baby slapping its hands against the keyboard. Has to recode everything with every update, which is one of the many reasons the game took so long to make. Thought it was ready for full 1.0 release when the game barely had any of the promised content, none of the stretch goals finished, was horribly unbalanced and somehow more generic and boring than it is in its current state.
- Molly - Rumoured to have fucked a dog. Chucklefuck’s PR person who has no idea how to deal with the public or make Chucklefish look good in any way and has even lost her shit at another company for treating her the way Chucklefuck has treated its own customers. “PR is hard! Game development is hard!” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Everyone else - There’s more people on the team, but none of them are worth mentioning.
Starbound’s Success
The success of this game comes entirely from riding the coattails of the more popular and successful Terraria, which still updates long after the devs said they would no longer update the game. Being pitched as Terraria in Space, Chucklefuck managed to get autists around the world hyped to empty their wallets into their crowdfunding campaign raising over 4 million dollars and later selling countless copies on Steam.
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The Fandom
Starbound’s fandom is mostly furries, autists who haven’t realized they’ve been scammed, autists who don’t care that they’ve been scammed, sometimes a combination of the three and people who just want their refund. Many of Starbounds fans will defend the game to the death, claiming that it’s great and entertaining, even in its formerly unfinished and horribly broken state. Any time someone who doesn’t like the game is encountered, the fantards go to argument is that you shouldn’t be complaining under the retarded claim that you’ve gotten your money’s worth if you’ve got more than two hours in the game, which conveniently absolves Chucklefuck from ever having to finish the content they’ve promised.
Modders also think the game can be saved by adding their own content or simply adding the content Chucklefuck has promised but failed to deliver themselves, further enticing Chucklefuck to not do any work as the modders will just finish the game for them while still getting all the praise for making the game in the first place. It’s the same situation that causes Bethesda to pump out shittier and shittier games and still get praised as gods of video games. A large portion of features in the 1.0 release of the game appear to be lifted from mods as well. Though if that doesn’t satisfy your craving for content in this game, you can always download mods that add Dragon Dildos to the game.
Gallery
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Chucklefish goes back on their promise
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Retard defends Chucklefuck not finishing their game
See Also
External links
Starbound is part of a series on Visit the Gaming Portal for complete coverage. |