Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy!

Choose your own adventure games are like being blindfolded and set loose in a pasture full of cows with irritable bowel syndrome.  Getting through one from start to finish without stepping in a pile of shit is going to require more luck than anything else.  I made five attempts at finishing Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! and I don’t think I lasted more than ten minutes in any of them.  I’ve also pretty much given up on further attempts.  As it stands, my feet are already so caked in manure that everywhere I’ve stepped in the past couple hours is properly fertilized for the next planting season.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In DDD,D! you play as an introverted virgin on his first day of college.  You’re bound and determined to lose the big V before the year is up.  It took me all of a minute to determine what the guy’s problem was up to this point: he’s a completely unlikable twit.  The first option the game gives you is whether you want to go to the bathroom, use the computer, or go watch TV.  I put myself in the mindset of a girl that’s possibly being courted by this guy and figured that it wouldn’t be very productive to be introduced to a guy who’s busting for a piss, so I sent him to the bathroom.  It was here that the guy stopped to flex for a mirror and do a few push-ups.  Oh my, a narcissistic freshman on a quest to bust his man-cherry.  What a catch.

I was determined to help steer the annoying virgin towards the promise land, but the luck of the draw was not on my side.  Like every other version of this kind of game I’ve played for IndieGamerChick, it’s just too fucking easy to “die.”  Here, death means you reach your 30th birthday as a virgin and thus become a wizard.  You know, if that were actually true, I think teenagers across the country would be way more receptive towards abstinence-only education.  Here, being a wizard is a bad thing for some reason.  I would think if the reward was actual magical powers, waiting until you’re 30 just to get laid would be worth it.  Once the magic starts flowing, you would be able to magically order up more pussy than unsuspecting customers than Soylent Blue: made 100% of street cats.

And how did I die?  Well, my first mistake was leaning in too close to talk to a girl.  Apparently I invaded her space and offended her.  How was I to know?  She was dressed like she had forgotten to do her laundry and the only thing clean was the shower curtain.

This girl’s digital restraining order against my digital annoying virgin is still pending.

When you make a mistake, it’s time to start over.  Unless you save.  But saving kind of was an issue for me, in that I couldn’t be bothered to do it.  There are no save prompts, so if you get caught up in the storyline (hey, it’s possible!) and step on one of those wrong choice cowpats, you get to relive the entire fucking story from the very beginning.  I hate it when games do this.  Saving isn’t always worth it, either.  The interface to do it with is slow and clunky.  A quick-save option would have been preferrable but the game couldn’t be bothered.

So I went through the agonizing story starring the most unlikable fictional creation since those little CGI nail fungus thingies from those one ads (shudder) and kept dying.  I died when I got beat up by some catty bitch’s boyfriend.  I died when I forgot that one of the chicks I was playing the field with didn’t like tennis.  I died right at the start when I chose “use the computer” trying to boost my intelligence level.  The game has a point system that gives you points in intelligence, charisma, and strength.  I decided since I liked the brainy girl more than shower-curtain wearing slut, I should try to make myself smarter and choosing “use computer” as the very first option was as good a start as any.  So I chose it and promptly died because my guy wanted to play Warcraft instead.  Hmmmph.

I never did figure out what the whole scoring system does.  My inability to go more than two minutes without failing to step right in line with the writer’s logic led to me starting over from scratch again and again.  I would like to remind the developer of this and every other game like Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! that video games are made to entertain people.  If you forced someone to read a book by reading one paragraph and then starting over at the beginning, go one paragraph further and then start over again, you would be subject to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.

Never got this far. Don’t know what this girl’s deal is. I would probably die a half-dozen times trying to figure it out, so fuck it.  Besides, with tits like that I’m sure she’ll have major back problems that I’ll hear bitching about day in and day out.  Who needs that?  My hand never whines like that so I got the better deal already!

So, shocker of shocks, I can’t recommend Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy!  I will admit that the writing is slightly less painful than most games like this I’ve played on XBLIG.  Even if does annoyingly censor ****ing swear words.  This was probably done with the knowledge that it’s target audience have parents who frown on games with  gigantic anime boobies in them, but if the cussing is bleeped out they can hope for just one week of being grounded instead of two.  Still, I’m sure it won’t matter.  This game will sell because the aforementioned gigantic anime boobies.  And thus it’s owners will in fact reach the age of 30 with their virginity still intact.  No, they won’t become wizards.  But if they hold out another forty years, they might become Pope!

Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! was developed by “cupholder”

240 Microsoft Points would rather see a game about a prudish puritan who actively avoids trying to get laid, just to change things up in the making of this review.  

I couldn’t find anything about the developer or a trailer for this game.  Sorry.

Remember Orbitron: Revolution?  The game that I said does for Defender what Pac-Man Championship Edition does for Pac-Man?  Well, if you buy the game on Friday or Saturday, the proceeds from it will go to the BC Cancer Foundation.  How often can you play a (future) Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard game and fight cancer at the same time?  You can’t.  Well, unless you play Dead Pixels while actively getting chemotherapy.  This way sounds more fun.  For more information, click here. 

Lots of Guns

I’m so over these climber games that are saturating the market.  Maybe they fit in better on phones where they serve to kill five minutes while you’re waiting for a bank teller or the test results on if that really was blood in your stool or red dye from Christmas cookies.  But on a console?  They feel out-of-place.  Granted, most of the ones I’ve played for Indie Gamer Chick have each been successful in its own way.  There was Who Is God, which successfully married the genre to techno-style graphics and addictive online leaderboards.  There was Meep 2, which successfully made a child-friendly version of the genre for console players.  Finally, there was Niji, which was so bad that it successfully helps control the pet population by causing any puppies in the nearby vicinity to fall down dead.

I think the major problem with them is they have a very short shelf life.  Even when they have online leaderboards, I’m not really compelled to go back and replay these titles.  But they’re fun for a day if nothing else, and Lots of Guns is no exception to that.  The gimmick here is that every 30 seconds, give or take, you reach a barrier that switches the type of gun you have.  As the title implies, there is a wide variety weapons, all with varying degrees of usefulness.  The guns are used to attack a large assortment of baddies who rain down from the top of the screen.  The actual tower you’re climbing is pretty straight forward: ledge in the middle, then two ledges on the side, then repeat.  There’s no variation on this, which is a bit of a downer because it quickens the game’s progression towards staleness even faster than what is normal for a climber.  It’s like the game has that disease from the movie Jack, only it’s funnier because Robin Williams isn’t in it.

Believe it or not, the pivoting camera actually does not distract from the game play at all.

There’s three modes here.  The first is climb as high as you can get.  The second is climb as high as you can get.  The third is climb as high as you can get.  Okay, so the second mode is the same as the first, only it’s called Auto-Scroll and the screen scrolls up automatically.  Which it actually does in the first mode too.  Yes, the game is faster in the second mode, but so what?  Why couldn’t mode one be called “easy” or “normal” and mode two be called “hard?”  This is an annoying trait I’ve noticed with indie developers of all walks.  They have to get cute when it comes to naming their game modes.  Don’t do this.  For every person who gets a very mild laugh out of it, there will be two players who never bother playing past the demo.  I get that your average indie developer prides himself on being a non-conforming, pretentious ass, but just think of how much non-conforming you can do in your day-to-day life if your game actually makes money.  Money does buy a lot of non-conformity.  I hear the FortressCraft guys don’t even need to shower anymore.

Oh, and the third mode is zombie mode.  Because, by fucking God almighty, every Xbox Live Indie Game has got to have zombies in it.  Zombie mode has nothing at all to do with zombies.  Here, you get no guns and only one life.  It’s the same assortment of enemies as before and the same sterile tower to climb.  I actually did have fun with this mode as well, but I had already tried the “no shooting” thing in the previous game.  Sometimes you’ll go stretches where the guns it gives you at random are not so useful.  After this happened to me a few times, I declared to Brian that I wouldn’t shoot the guns anymore because all they did was distract me.  This was followed about two seconds later by me saying “oooh, minigun” and abandoning that strategy.

Overall, Lots of Guns is fun while it lasts.  It’s got charming retro graphics and smooth play control.  However, it is lacking things that would extend it’s shelf life.  There’s no online leaderboards, no multiplayer options, and no incentive to keep playing after more than an hour.  I could see a reason to go on if the game guaranteed that you would only get the “fun” guns after having climbed so many feet, but that’s not the case.  When you reach the point where you switch guns, there’s always two options of which gun you will trade.  Sometimes it’s tough to choose, like picking between the awesome firecrackers or an automatic rocket launcher.  Other times, the game pulls a dick move by having one side be the wimpy handgun and the other side be the utterly useless landmines.  There is a third option: kill yourself and then respawn above the gun stations with whatever weapon you were carrying still in your possession.

Replace the generic king with the Burger King king and this could have been a horror game.

Maybe Stegersaurus thought the game would too easy if you got nothing but useful weapons late in the game.  My response would be this: who cares?  With no leaderboards or competitive multiplayer experience, it’s of no consequence to anyone if your character gets overpowered.  The game will stop being fun in about an hour anyway.  Loading a player up with power weapons might have extended that by an hour or two.  In the end, Lots of Guns is like a video game porno: you use it for ten minutes, have a lot of fun, and then regret spending your money on it immediately afterwards.

Absolutely horrible box art. It looks like someone crossed Rambo with Mr. Potato Head.

Lots of Guns was developed by Stegersaurus Games

80 Microsoft Points worked that porno reference in there just to annoy Steg in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of AarontheSplazer

Orbitron: Revolution (Second Chance with the Chick)

I enjoyed Orbitron: Revolution quite a bit when I played it last month.  I don’t really have a ton of things to talk about in this Second Chance with the Chick, because they really didn’t have all that much to fix.  My main issue was it was difficult to see some enemies because of over-reliance on bloom effects.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, those are some pretty graphics.

They’re gone now.  You can see everything much more clearly.  A good game is now better.  Orbitron is now officially a leaderboard contender.  It will still continue to have crappy sales figures because 240MSP is too much for this game and most people won’t pay it.  End of story.

Why can’t every review be this easy?

Even the box art had bloom.

Orbitron: Revolution was developed by Firebase Industries

240 Microsoft Points burned the land and boiled the sea, you can’t take the sky from me in the making of this review.