The Facepalm Roundup

This is a new type of post that I will start writing intermittently. Its sole purpose is to expose and chronicle some of the shady, underhanded, or dishonest types that have begun to make headway in the industry.

The first member of our roundup is developer ImminentUprising. A part of Digital Homicide Studios (they're the same people from what I can tell), I've heard that they are a two person team, possibly brothers. Their release in October of this year, The Slaughtering Grounds, was not well received. It was universally panned by Steam user reviews, and Jim Sterling gave it a less than stellar review of his own. Overall, it is seen by the community as a lazy attempt to cash in on the zombie/wave survival genres of which everyone is so fond.

How did ImminentUprising respond? They took Jim Sterling's initial review video and put snarky, sarcastic text comments throughout the video. Very classy. As I understand it, the video feud continued on for weeks, with Jim Sterling and ImminentUprising making response videos to their response videos. In addition, ImminentUprising began removing any negative feedback on the Steam forums. The game's forums are a ghost town even now, because they burn down any threads that aren't complimentary. They also proposed a giveaway on their official forums in which they would give a free copy of the game to anyone that gave The Slaughtering Grounds a negative review. Instead of receiving a copy of the game, anyone that participated got banned. On top of all of that, several people noticed that The Slaughtering Grounds consisted mostly of premade assets that had been purchased, or in the case of the game's blood effects and concept art, stolen from a Google image search and an artist they do not know, respectively. In a moment of panic, ImminentUprising leveled a case of some form of copyright infringement at Sterling, which was utter bullshit. It predictably failed.

Wow. Just wow. This kind of behavior is that of a spoiled, ten year old brat. The "developer's" at ImminentUprising don't deserve to have access to development tools of any kind after a legacy of douche-baggery such as this. But wait, what's that? Its not over yet?

They are now working on a new game called Forsaken Uprising. It is basically a Rust clone, and from what I've seen, its faring a little better than The Slaughtering Grounds, but not by much. They seem to have an active presence on the game's Steam forums, and are at least trying a little bit harder with this one. The reviews are still mostly negative, but that's not what is bothering me. What is bothering me is the fact that they have lazily tried to distance themselves from The Slaughtering Grounds by creating a new Steam developer profile with a slightly different formatting of their Developer/Publisher name.

The Slaughtering Grounds format:
ImminentUprising
Digital Homicide Studios LLC

Forsaken Uprising format:
imminentuprising
Digital Homicide Studios LLC.

There you have it. Switching from uppercase to lowercase and adding a period. If you're going to try and improve your image, don't hide from your past mistakes. Don't try to continue to cover them up. Embrace them, apologize for them, learn something from them, and move on.

This was just the warmup round. Check back in the near future. I'll be doing another edition of The Facepalm Roundup.

Happy Birthday Doom

For Doom's 21st birthday, I played through its entire first episode, Knee Deep in The Dead. Enjoy.