TwoFold Interactive Company and Games reviews (INGAME FANFIC)

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#1

[size=10][i]DISCLAIMER! THE COMPANY NAME, GAME NAMES AND GAME-RELATED STORY-BASED, TECHNOLOGY-BASED OR DESIGN-BASED ELEMENTS AS WELL AS INGAME RIVALING COMPANY NAMES AND CONSOLE NAMES ARE ALL COMPLETELY FICTIONAL. PARTIAL OR FULL SIMILARITY TO REAL NAMES OR FACTS IS COMPLETELY COINCIDENTIAL AND UNINTENTIONAL. THIS FORUM POST IS CONSIDERED FAN FICTION OF “GAME DEV TYCOON”, THIS WORK OF FICTION CONTAINS NO SECTIONS THAT MAY BE PLAGIARISM OR COPYRIGHT INFRINGING TO REAL WORLD GAMES, GAME COMPANIES OR GAMING CONSOLES. GREENHEART GAMES HOLDS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR PARTS OF THIS FANFIC THAT ARE CONTRARY TO THE AFOREMENTIONED DISCLAIMED ELEMENTS. CREDIT OR PUNISHMENT OF THIS FANFIC GOES TO THE AUTHOR IN ITS ENTIRETY. “GAME DEV TYCOON” IS COPYRIGHTED TO GREENHEART GAMES, 2013.[/i][/size]

Hey everyone.

I had to post a law disclaimer just to save my bacon, because devs and copyright spooks are sensitive when it comes to what I am about to do. Like others, I’ve made my own game company in the game we all love and know, Game Dev Tycoon. I really went OCD on the ideas, so to say, and so I’d like to share the history and the achievements of the company that I’ve made, TwoFold Interactive.

The history of TwoFold Interactive is quite well-known. Ryan Mandelin, Greenheart Tech University graduate and ex-employee of GIBM Software made a living of being a BOSS programmer in BASE and G++. In a small office (not a garage for simplicity’s sake) he began to develop his own G+±coded, 8-bit games. After making a few smash hits along its competitors, Ryan’s company grew and was housed in the Greenheart Industrial District. He employed the help of many to fuel his efforts of being a video game genius. Although he grew up on the G64 mainly, his company has turned into a prominent PC developer as well as a certified Ninvendo developer company.

Today, his staff of sixty-three people (I know, you can only have a staff of 5 max., but I’m making it realistic) develops awesome, smash hit games in the Historic Action, Fantasy Platforming and Post-Apocalyptic RPG genres with some Strategy and FPS gems added in for flavor. TwoFold has been the best company at G3 for seven years in a row and has won many awards over the course of its 40+ year history. As time flies, new gems may arise from this company, but this thread seeks to make a map of the plethora of TwoFold’s Franchises, as well as mentioning the bad blunders of the aspiring company. With over fifty games, only the most memorable (be it good or bad) efforts will be mentioned here, but all of them are unique and direly innovative.

TwoFold has always boasted excellent graphics and ground-breaking storytelling powered by extremely polished software. Although other parts of its development may be lackluster, Ryan and his team never cease to amaze the audience with its outstanding IPs. TwoFold may not be a AAA company, but its large-to-mid scale games could easily compete in that regard. As a matter of fact, the company has three award-winning IPs that will bewilder you as well! Game Hero has cited TwoFold as being “the one company that will show CapeCom and Big Blue who’s boss”.

In terms of public relations, TwoFold is more or less courteous to its fanbase of 500,000+ gamers, but has been known to stir the hive with bad decisions. The gaming company publishes most of its games through Game Hero’s distribution market and via Galve Software’s online distribution platform, HotAir. Ryan has also remained loyal to bigger companies such as the now-defunct TRQ, Vonny and Ninvendo. Its biggest rivals would include Big Blue Visionaries (once Big Blue and Active Visionaries), VioliSoft Entertainment and CapeCom and Cube Onix combined.

Follow this topic and find out why TwoFold Interactive deserves the position of “Most Lore-Oozing Company”.

EDIT: By the way, you can comment on the reviews and the company itself if you like, just try to stay within context and act like you’ve played the games mentioned in the review. :slight_smile:

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#2

Game name: Renaissance
Platform: Govodore G64
Genre: Medieval strategy
Release date: Y1 M4 W1
Reviewer score: 4.25
Personal score: 5.5

So… what came first? Big Blue’s Craft of War: Dorks and Humanz? Or TwoFold’s Renaissance? Actually, it was Renaissance… but it was Craft of War that got the critical reception, not this game. The reason for that is because firstly, TwoFold was nowhere on the map. This was Ryan’s first game that he made by himself. All by himself. And Big Blue had a significantly bigger staff, more QA and more funds. But Renaissance is just as good! Read below to find out why this spurred the wrath of the monolithic company that is Big Blue.

Funnily enough, there is a text-based story with minor decision elements in Renaissance, and the story-telling is much like in Eastwood Entertainment’s Varrakis. You are a landlord that has to fend off a horde of barbaric invaders. The way you do this depends on where you build your bases and on what paths you decide to take back your destroyed homeland. Do you use a huge army backed with catapults and assault the bulwark? Or do you go on a stealth mission, where you only take a handful of men to destroy the backwater fortifications through tricky tactics? By today’s standards, it could be dubbed as a generic storyline, and it was so back then as well. But the way the story was portrayed with good-looking 8-bit picture cutscenes and narration… it made it authentic! Well… except that it wasn’t in color like Craft of War, but whatever. The AI complements the tactical nature of the game. You need to think, hard! The enemy doesn’t just come at you straight ahead with massive forces. The game is surprisingly scripted in places and has several ambush events, which really spiced up the gameplay.

Okay, so I mentioned that this was a first attempt. Well? Apart from the good storyline and revolutionary AI? The graphics are sometimes choppy, the units are not as varied like in Craft of War, the maps lack a bit of variation, and the added map editor doesn’t work. At all. TwoFold probably had so much trouble making a decent code with everything else that it broke the game. It’s not really bugs that we are talking about here… the game just doesn’t work at times. I can’t click on elements of the UI, even! Or sometimes units just don’t respond to my clicks!

Oh yeah, and no multiplayer. But who needs that for a G64? You’re all alone when you sit in front of it, right?

A couple of guys, like me, took Renaissance to their hearts. It got me started in the strategy genre. And now, in the PS4/neXt era, where there are little to no strategy games out there, what do we get? A reboot! Sure, it took half a century for it to come out, when TwoFold actually know how to better the game, and does it show? Hell yea!

Game name: New Renaissance
Platform: PC
Genre: Medieval strategy/simulation
Release date: Y34 M11 W4
Reviewer score: 6.25
Personal score: 8

What’s new in this game? Well… it’s a proper HD remake, for starters (I’m looking at you, Active Visionaries…), it fixes the graphics, the broken code, the mechanics are fleshed out, the AI remains just as clever and is not as scripted anymore, the battles are unpredictable and are always different every time you load up the game. The setting becomes totally medieval like it used to be; no magicks, no fancy spells, no nothing! It is the same Renaissance universe we have come to love in the beginning! Heck, there are even bonus campaigns and new skirmish maps as DLC. The story is the same, which may seem boring, but the storytelling has become deeper! More enthralling! It envelops you and makes you the center of this whole campaign. If you make a bad decision or attack the wrong outpost, you could very well get into a situation where you cannot undo what you destroyed, ultimately leading to the Bad Ending. Yep, the game is not linear anymore. Given your choices, there are up to seven different endings, which add tons of replayability. Does this sound more like an open RPG? The story progression could be deemed as such, since it is so good, but the mechanics complement a true strategy game. You can even go to towns and experience the life itself now, watch how the peasants go about, lumbering and hurt from recent barbarian attacks… or look at the nobles how they scoff at them or attend to their own troubles. This is all presented by awesome animations and textures, beautiful scenery and oh wow that render distance is as far as the horizon! It’s Craft of War IV in a straight medieval setting and in proper 3D, except Craft of War IV never came out, thanks to the franchise getting stuck at an MMO that ruins lives with its addictions.

Contrary to Big Blue’s past decisions, TwoFold made the right choice to stick to this vanilla IP, and people love it to boot. New Renaissance did good in a world without strategy games for the PC, and that’s why Big Blue is totally jelly. The reason why the score isn’t so high is because THERE IS STILL NO MULTIPLAYER! Come on, guys! Every game has multiplayer! You’re telling me that I couldn’t use HotAir to play with my friends? It has a built-in client for inviting friends to games. It could even lend you dedicated servers! The PC is no G64, and TwoFold seemed to have forgotten that. I would have even liked a co-op option for the campaign, minimum! But no, none of that. Renaissance in its new form remains a solo experience, which kinda saddens me.

All-in-all, no matter what anyone says, Renaissance pioneered the medieval strategy genre and then brought it back for the modern generation to adore. Do you like it? Do you hate the fact that there is no multiplayer? Do you wish for a Craft of War IV instead?

Let me know in the comments!

#3

After being a loyal follower of Two-Fold since the beginning and having played the first game, my heart actually sank when I heard no multiplayer was planned for the sequel to the cult-classic “Renaissance”.
I still purchased the game and had hours of fun with it, but it just wasn’t the same playing with AI instead of real players. My only wish is that one-day Two-Fold will release a patch to include multiplayer.

-A loyal fan since the beginning

#4

Hey, thanks for replying! I am glad you liked the Renaissance series. Word is, though, that TwoFold is possibly canning the series after the HD remake in exchange for newer IPs - which means no multiplayer patch. Their forums were actually full of flames and upset fans… go figure. Here’s hoping they release more strategy games that actually have Multiplayer.

Meanwhile, speaking of other games…

Game name: Rota Kart
Platform: Govodore G64
Genre: Racing
Release date: Y1 M8 W1
Reviewer score: 7.5
Personal score: 7

Game name: Rota Hurricane
Platform: PC
Genre: Racing
Release date: Y7 M1 W3
Reviewer score: 6.5
Personal score: 7

Oh, why am I reviewing two games simultaneously? Well… because it’s the same game, the second one is simply a PC port, which was made roughly around the time when the G64 started to lose market share rapidly. This game came was TwoFold’s second game and came way before smash hits like Ninvendo’s Marryo Kart and Psignowsis’ wipE’back (Wipeout) came along. It had basic digital controls, and even in the PC port, they couldn’t add steering wheel support to this game, which is a crying shame because the controls were immensely responsive and the handling of the racing Karts were superb.

So what exactly is this game? Well, possibly one of the very first non-arcade racing games. It includes you building and driving your go-kart in varied courses and tracks as you become the Rota Kart champion. Even though there’s not much story in this game and the progression through tournaments is very linear, you get up to 25 tracks and 100+ races in the main game mode. And the tracks aren’t all copypasta either. Some of them are meant to sprint through, while others have long hairpins into even more turns and bumps. The variance in challenge is pretty cool and you need to tune your Kart according to the track.

Tuning includes stuff like special tires, modifying your engine, your chassis as well as your brakes and exhaust system. There is a detailed tuning system and it shows you how much you’ve changed on the stat percentage-wise. Again, this was way ahead of its time, and unfortunately, they didn’t have the code to implement it properly. TwoFold have pretty good ideas, but the G64 doesn’t have the technical frame to always properly implement the changes you’ve made to your Kart. Furthermore, the PC version is no different; it sometimes cancels the changes you’ve made, or your Kart runs way worse! This is buggy game design as far as I’m concerned.

Racing games are more often than not shallow, and the common audience (even back then) didn’t have much interest regarding games such as these. But those that just love go-kart racing will like the game a lot, because it is authentic. There are no power-ups, no hidden tricks or whatever, but rather vanilla gameplay and pure racing. There are no physics in the game but collisions and acceleration at slopes works how you would expect. The AI is competent and will block you if you try to pass them or they will force you into the wall if you’re too close to the inner walls of a hairpin. Nice and dirty. In the PC version there is also local multiplayer and gamepad support. They didn’t polish the graphics or fix the tuning mechanics much, but they did add some more tracks and different Kart parts. The PC version is a bit more in-depth instead of being polished and mostly the people that couldn’t afford a G64 actually bought the game. The old-timers were probably like “meh I’ve played this before”, and they’re completely right.

If you want to have a look at an oldschool racing game with a decent skill requirement, get this game. Good Ol’ Gamz has Rota Hurricane for very cheap!

Regarding, which racing game of all time did you guys like to play? Do you prefer the Codemeisters-style Collin McRay rally racing with only raw skill needed or the new and stylized Lust for Fast series from EMP, where it’s all about bling?

#5

I prefer a mixture between the two, where I can make my cars look awesome but can still race without some ridiculous AI holding my hand - When game developers learn that hand-holding is not needed it shall be a great day.