Editorial: Bup’s Top Three Steam Greenlight “Games”

As some of you may know, last month Valve, the creators of Steam, announced they have decided to replace Steam Greenlight with Stream Direct. For those new to this series of articles, Steam Greenlight is/was where game “developers” submitted their “games” to the community to vote on. The ones that received positive votes got published and released on Steam itself. I put developers and games in quotes because most of the time these thigns were absolute crap that could not be considered a real “game” in the first time. With Steam Direct, potential game developers now submit their games directly to Steam’s store, giving the larger Steam community a chance to review the game like normal. Steam will also make sure these games actually work before approving them for the store. Steam Direct will launch sometime in Spring 2017, but no exact date has been set.

Even though I officially ended this series last year, I wanted to give Greenlight one last goodbye. So here are my top three Steam Greenlight games of all time. And by “top three” I mean the three worst pieces of toilet garbage I have ever seen. Okay, and I will be honest: these are really just the first three games I saw while going through the archives that I thought stood out. I do not care enough to actually rank all the games I have “reviewed” in this series. Note: I have removed the links to the original Steam Greenlight pages for these games, as most of them have already been taken down.

Flappy Potato Salad

Ah, yes. The game that started it all. This is the game that gave me the idea for this series in the first place. This game was submitted to Greenlight back in July 2014 and perfectly captures what was going on at that time. This game combines two of my favorite “stories” from the internet: Flappy Bird and the potato salad Kickstarter. In case you do not remember, the game Flappy Bird was released on mobile devices and became an HUGE hit. The game was simple: tap the screen to make a bird fly between stolen Mario assets, like the warp pipes. The game got so big the guy who created it, Dong (lol) Nguyen, kind of had a mental breakdown and, after a series of tweets, removed the game from both the Android and iOS store. According to Nguyen he removed the game due to its addictive nature and he felt guilty making something like that. However, some think it was due to a legal issue because, you know, he basically stole sprites from Mario and threw them in the game. The game was so big that some took their phones that already had Flappy Bird installed and were selling them on Ebay for over $1,500 US. These listings were taken down though, because Ebay has a policy of restoring any mobile devices to factory settings before selling them, thus removing the game from the phone.

Then we have the potato salad part of this game. In July 2014 Zack Brown had a plan. Brown’s plan was to make potato salad for the first time. But how? Brown was not a professional chef, clearly the only people qualified to make such an exquisite dish. Brown went to the only thing he could think of, a website that promised to make his dreams come true, should enough people donate money to his cause: Kickstarter.com. Most of you probably know the basic details about Kickstarter. For those who do not, or those reading this in THE FUTURE, Kickstarter is/was a website where one could post a project and interested parties can donate money to help fund said project. Usually donating had some sort of incentive, usually some sort of feature or physical gift, but the catch is that the project had to reach its donation goal, as determined by the creator, within a time frame, or its donations would go right back to the donators. Zack Brown set a $10 US goal for his potato salad project on Thursday July 3rd. By Monday he had reached $8,000 US in donations. By the end of the donation period 30 days later, he made over $50,000 US in donations from people all over the world. Truely, Kickstarter made one man’s dreams a reality.

Then, just a few short days after the potato salad Kickstarter was getting famous, we get Flappy Potato Salad, some sort of bastard hybrid of these two internet “memes.” My favorite part of this game is that it basically stole its graphics from the original Flappy Bird, just replacing the titular bird with a potato. So, it stole its graphics from a game that originally stole its graphics in the first place. Is there such a things as “Double Thievery”? If not, I just coined that phrase, so give me all the royalty money when it comes on. When does the salad come into play? I have no clue, because I never actually played most of these games. I just judged them on their screenshots and summaries on Steam Greenlight. Most of which were written in very broken, poorly translated English. Look upon the attached screenshot and see how horrible this game looked. Heck, that “potato” looks more like some misshapen swiss cheese. And thus, our first entry is over.

BoxesWithGuns

Ohhhh, boy. Veteran readers of this series might remember this game, mainly because it was the first game in which the developer commented on my original post to tell me how wrong I was. But, joke’s on him: this game is still trash! Let me set the scene: Microsoft and Xbox released a game called Geometry Wars in which the player shoots at geometric figures that are coming after a spaceship. Or something like that. I never really played it, but I remember it being a huge hit with people. But that could also have been because the Xbox did not have a whole lot of noteworthy games around this time. Of course, like any decent game, some people took that idea and started to make clones of the game. Soon after, we had this “masterpiece” waiting for us on the Steam Greenlight store.

Wait, what was that? It was not soon after? It was about 11 years after Geometry Wars came out? Wow, what a surprise! So, not only did this guys create a clone of Geometry Wars, but he did it WAY after the original game came out. Did he think we would just forget about the original? Probably, considering there has not been a game in the Geometry Wars series since 2010. What really makes this game special is that the developer was so upset I called his game poop, he decided to comment on the post and refute all my criticisms. He also told me to try the game out and give it an actual review. I did. I could not get the game to start. It made me download some weird, third-party installer and then nothing loaded. So, I basically proved my point in the first article.

Chipsse Solid 3 : The Green Adventure ++

Wow, this one… I nearly forgot about this one. So, this guy apparently thought the first version of this game was SO good, he had to expand on it. And release a new version of the same crappy MS Paint game. According to the developer, this game is “artistic,” so if you do not understand it, it is your own fault and you are stupid. No, really. He replied to someone’s comment saying essentially this. Which is funny, because for someone who made an “artistic” game, he sure as heck does not understand art! Also, this game is apparently about finding a graphic designer for a different game? There are garbage games, and then there are GARBAGE games. This one is the latter. I also love how this is apparently the third in a series. For whatever reason this guy decided to not only make one terrible game, but two. And then decided to make a third. I guess technically a fourth too, since this is an expansion on the third game. Some people just cannot take the hint…