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46 out of 51 people found this review helpful
5 stars
Version: RPG Maker XP 1.02a
"Incredible For Creative, Casual Users And Old-School RPG Fans"
Pros: This program really hits home with casual home users with programming interests and game interests who've always wanted to make their own game. If you like programming, you get a programming language, but most of the time you can save yourself a lot of coding by setting things up in the GUI. Although there aren't much for asset sites yet where you can get new resources, you could easily make your first game off of just the built-in stuff, and there's a decent amount of it. This program could and probably will save you a lot of time in putting your ideas to paper. With this, though, you get more than a program, you get a new hobby, as bringing your ideas to life often becomes a very time-consuming (and often fun) endeavor. Try it at least, if you like it, you'll probably love it when you see how much work this program can save you when compared to starting from scratch.
Cons: No Soundfont support! =-O They really did a great job dressing up the Microsoft Synthesizer for this program (I've never heard that Roland Sound Set sound this good), but they should at least have left the option open for Audigy users like myself to at least allow soundfont usage during development.
Another gaping oversight is there's no world map tileset. Come on now, what SNES-era RPG didn't have some kind of World Map, unless it was like Secret of Mana or something? That's easily fixed via a quick Google search. There's a comprehensive original world map tileset on a fan site that's not too hard to find.
Some of the general programmer's problems show up while using this program as well, like the classic thing where your workload increases exponentially as you desire to add in new features because with computers you have to cover ALL the bases since they can't assume anything. One of the drawbacks of a program giving you this much choice is that "this much choice" (as opposed to the more hindered game level creators and game level editors that ship with most PC games) often translates into "this much work" because of how making programs and stuff usually goes, and there's no doubt in my mind that casual users will probably have their enjoyment of this program hindered a bit by those issues as they use it, especially when they start getting an idea of the work it'll take to make something good without putting together a team. These are but minor cons though compared to this program's MANY pros.
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