By Nelson Schneider - 10/27/13 at 07:16 PM CT
Back in August, I took a look at several upcoming PC games that have been pinging my radar since they were announced, yet hadn’t managed to make their way onto Steam Greenlight, the community-based approval system. After getting positive confirmation from the developers of several of these games that they would indeed be coming to Greenlight, currently none of them have.
However, those 5 games don’t exist in a vacuum, and they have been joined on my radar by other games I’ve either only recently learned of or that were recently released on other platforms. In every case, none of them appear on Steam Greenlight, and I can’t understand why. Do these developers not want to invest a minimal $100 donation to Child’s Play for the opportunity to get their game in front of hundreds of thousands of gamers?
1-3. “Beggar Prince,” “Legend of Wukong,” and “Star Odyssey”
These three games form what is called the “RPG Trifecta” by their developer, Super Fighter Team. These games have all been around for a while… but in the completely unorthodox form of modern-day Genesis cartridges, much like “Pier Solar.” Who knew the Genesis was still alive and well and getting so many new RPGs? The Genesis was always the laughing stock second banana for RPGs when it was current and competing with the SNES… Regardless, Super Fighter Team has put together three intriguing-looking 16-bit games and has made them available for download for Windows or Mac OS. While allowing gamers to buy these games directly from their website is an improvement over forcing gamers to download ROMs from pirates (who have not yet been able to successfully dump any of Super Fighter Team’s games), putting them up on Steam would drastically increase their visibility to their target audience.
4. “Reaper”
What would happen if someone took the basic gameplay mechanics of “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” but somehow managed to remove all of the suckage from it? It would be a game that closely resembles “Reaper,” which I played as a free demo on my OUYA. Thinking that I had finally discovered an OUYA exclusive worth buying, I was dumbfounded when I fired up my Windows 8 tablet and discovered “Reaper” in the Windows Store. What the Hell? Who puts PC games exclusively in the Windows Store besides Microsoft? “Reaper” is a fun little game and it deserves a chance to be seen by more people that those poor souls who regularly browse the Windows Store for new apps.
5. “Dragon Fantasy Books 1 & 2”
“Dragon Fantasy” was originally an iOS game that was ported to Windows, Mac OS, and Android. In this original form, “Dragon Fantasy” looks like a decent little 8-bit throwback. Yet it was not made available through Steam, but instead through that other PC gaming nexus, Desura. To add insult to injury, the game’s developer, The Muteki Corporation, seems to have sold-out to Sony and has released an upgraded 16-bit version of “Dragon Fantasy” exclusively on Sony’s devices (the PS3 and Vita). Not only that, but the original “Dragon Fantasy” seems to have been expanded with enough content to break it into two separate episodes (or books). Nothing about the differences between the Desura version of “Dragon Fantasy” and the Sony exclusive versions is clear – especially the decision to not retroactively update the PC version of the game to the new version. Perhaps, now that Muteki has had the opportunity to work with a big, evil publisher in the form of Sony, they will consider working with another big, not-so-evil publisher in the form of Valve? With the backward compatibility and ownership crises involved with any console digital distribution platform, I can’t in good conscience buy “Dragon Fantasy Book 1” or “Dragon Fantasy Book 2” on PS3, no matter how much I’d like to play them.
