To the next delay!

Let's start blaming aliens for it, just in case.

Aliens as in illegal aliens, or as in extraterrestrials? I don't wanna go to the picket with the wrong placard.

Illegal extra-terrestrials. Better cover all the bases...

I'm sticking to what I've been saying since he put it on Greenlight - he WILL release it, but it will be an unfinishable buggy mess that no patches will ever be able to fix. Even though he knows better than anybody that it's irretrievably broken, he's going to wilfully and cynically scam people for as long as he can and for as much as he can because he wants to cash in on what he has. Cleve's a narcissist and a misanthrope, and he's been living in his own fantasy world for decades, so he has no qualms about ripping people off for their hard-earned money.

This is why he hasn't listed it as early access, because people would hold back their money until it was finished. This is why he's set that ridiculously high price, in order to make as much as possible before people realize what it is that he's selling. The 'finishing touches' he's been putting on the game for the last few weeks are actually desperate attempts to make it work for the first few hours to clear that refund window and to get maximum sales before everybody's games start falling apart.

Huh, that's odd.

The deadline came and went.

I am hoping that Jim Sterling takes notice and makes a Jimquisition on Grimoire and Clive. It would be...amusing. The episode would be called "Herald of the Lame Exemplar".

But wait...

GOLDEN ERA GAMES [developer] 24 minutes ago
SUBMITTED TO STEAM, AWAITING APPROVAL!! Reviewing game on Windows 10 laptop, totally different from my development machine. Game looks so beautiful it is difficult to believe it inhabits the same reality as we do. The actual world looks washed out and gray in comparison. The INSTANT I get permission from Steam to go live it is going up!

surely it will actually be up in the next few days...

So let me get this straight: he fixed all the nanoissues, announced the release date and then waited until release day to actually submit the game? How long until a new femtoissue pops up that prevents the release? I'm just glad I don't have a horse in this race. I don't want to even know what the source code for this mess that has been accumulating over the course of two decades looks like, it must be the worst case of spaghetti code in the history of ever.

Time is cyclical, what has happened before will surely happen again.

In the world of Cleveland Mark Blakemore, discovering bugs in your game means that the game must be re-coded from scratch. AKA paper tape programming.

I firmly believe that Cleve Blakemore has a design document for Grimoire, similar to his mythical then confrmed 9 page resignation letter to Sirtech that popped up on ebay a few years ago. An actual Grimoire: the RPG computer program that isn't based on the Wizardry game engine?
That is more unlikely.


Best case: Grimoire does come out, and it fails to match up to the world-building or gameplay of Jeff Vogel's original Exile 1, or even Strife the doom engine RPG.

Is this the only gAme in Steam which needs Valves approval before it is released?

I was under impression that games are just uploaded by the devs when they got the game page (which he had for awhile...) And Valve keeps hands off unless the game is reported.

Remember that Cleve is, first and foremost, a fraudster. He's taken money for a game, and has promised its release almost monthly since 2012. Don't assume that there's a game and somehow he's encountering hurdles via Valve. These new issues and procedural difficulties are just the newest reasons to promise and then not deliver.

If you absolutely must bring more attention to this guy, please do so by reminding people that on the store page for every game in Steam, there's a flag icon that lets you report it - or the developer - for fraud, abuse, etc. If you have to wonder about his delays, do so while pointing out his sock puppets, private accounts with no other activity than desperate approval-seeking. Yeah, you should probably feel badly for him, since he's the butt of a joke he doesn't even seem to know is being told, but that's no reason to disregard that he's a fraudster, and all this is just more drama for his vast appetite for attention.

Whilst I agree the Cleve is a fraudster, I think this game does exist and I think it will be released by Steam shortly. People perpetuating a fraud generally don't paint themselves into a corner the way Cleve would be doing so if this was untrue. If there was no game, he would be saying things that would be moving the release date back further, or opening up the possibility of other excuses. He isn't doing that here.

He also appears to have spent 1.9 hours playing the game itself:

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198003430316

I think he will release the game, it will be pretty buggy and not very good but it will represent hundreds of hours of work from a crazy person.

You'd think so, but weirder shit happens. The only solid piece of evidence in favor of Cleve is that the superdemo exists; that's how we know he's a serial procrastinator instead of a total fraud.

God damn. "Gypsy Rose has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and is serving a 10-year sentence; her boyfriend is awaiting trial on a first-degree murder charge." If I were in the jury I'd've voted to acquit on all charges.