Update: The correct version of the game is now on Steam. I've just tested it, and it's working much better. Original story below.
I was excited to try out Tembo The Badass Elephant this morning—a 2D sidescroller from the Pokémon developers is something I want to see, and the console version is getting some good reviews—but instead I've been giggling at how botched the Steam launch is. It's so botched that, the humor of it aside, I feel bad for Game Freak more than annoyed. The good news is that the problems might be easily fixed.
Here's what happened: After installing Tembo on Steam, I got a 'missing executable' error, so I went to the forums to see if I was the only one. Nope. A poster in this thread discovered that the executable installed is named 'Trumbo.exe'—it turns out the game used to be called Trumbo. Maybe Sega changed it after outfielder Mark Trumbo was traded to the Nintendo-owned Seattle Mariners? That's gotta be it.
Anyway, the helpful forum poster fixed the problem by renaming the executable "Tembo The Badass Elephant.exe" and renaming the data folder "Tembo The Badass Elephant_Data."
It worked! I later contacted Sega, who directed me to the official fix instructions, which are the same. So now I can launch Tembo (aka Trumbo) from Steam—nice. When I do launch it, however, things don't get better. I get the typical Unity engine launch screen, where I select the resolution and quality, but it launches in a window regardless of what I select, and that window is named "Trumbo," and it features the default Unity logo. And this:
Moving forward, I manage to change the resolution in the options menu (which has no mouse support, by the way), and hit Escape to back out to the main menu. The game closes. I try again, but no matter what I do, Escape closes the game, and I can't find another way to back out of the options menu. So, I guess I'm not changing the resolution.
I go back to the forums to try to figure out what's going on, where I see a few threads saying that the game only includes the first two levels. It all starts to make sense: a few Steam users have suggested that Sega may have accidentally released an old demo build, hence the old name. This wouldn't be the first time it's happened: the wrong version of Dead Island also ended up on Steam when it first launched.
If that's really the problem—and I don't know for sure—it shouldn't be any big thing to swap in the right files, I'd expect. It's a bit early in Japan at the time of writing, but Game Freak can hopefully sort out the mistake soon. In the meantime, I guess I'll be playing Trumbo.
