An Open Letter to Spicy Horse

Subject: An Open Letter to Spicy Horse
From: Rawr
Date: 25 May 2015

Dear Spicy Horse (麻辣马),

As a cult fan of American McGee’s psychological and philosophical dark fantasy games, I am largely disappointed in his company’s latest attempt to crossover into the CCG genre.

A theme set in Hell where your guide is Charon and you cross over four elements… with another layer of a pseudo Hell-Human world. Such a plot initially thought to be awesome ended up to be disappointing. Sure, the theme of Hell is a dark joke of the game’s repetitive and endless grind of false hope, depravity, and torture. But even Big Head Bash has a joke that represented conceited idiots who repeatedly “noob” each other in a 2D setting. This Hell-themed opportunity that had great potential for development was wasted.

Not just the theme, but game mechanics as well. This game tremendously lacks in originality, despite its innovation in an MMORPG-stylistic user interface (i.e. crossing over World of Warcraft which may or may not line up copyright violation notices on your doorstep). There is nothing wrong with a Chinese company that creates American-style games. But this is not an American-style game. This is a Chinese-style game. How many more games do we need out there that is a smorgasbord of all the latest features in the most popular games? Let’s be honest here: this game was made by Chinese people for Chinese people.

If you guys want to start being compared with R2Games, Changyou, and Boyojoy (all Chinese gaming companies not afraid to flaunt their greed by taking advantage of idiots), please continue with the dull plots and mechanic clones. Otherwise, please spend more time thinking about how to integrate insightful plots and themes with more originality before releasing another counterfeit knockoff that is difficult to be distinguished from the hundreds of other Chinese games out there.

If for whatever reason American McGee has partied too hardy in China over the past few years, which I have little doubt that he has not done so, I would be glad to help continue his legacy and differentiate your Chinese-style games to American-style games. Before anyone shouts racism, let me save you the trouble and tell you that I am a Chinese American. I know both sides of the picture that is fact over belief.

Sincerely,
Rawr

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