Flick Home Run

January 7, 2012 by 2 Comments

So I go to work the other day and everyone at the office is talking about what their score is on some silly iPhone game called Flick Home Run.  The age range of people playing this game was kind of impressive.  My father, who is what I would call a causal gamer, is 63.  Along with him, two of my partners, Chris and Kevin were playing as well.  Chris is 43 and I think he has a console or two.  On the other hand, Kevin is 66 and in my four years working with him I’ve never heard him once talk about doing anything for recreation.  Side note: remind me to look into what brand of stick he has up his ass, so that I can invest in it.  It works well.

Yea! Fuck home run! Oh..

I’m not exactly a baseball fan, but I decided to give it a try.  As it turns out, Flick Home Run ! isn’t really about baseball.  It’s a casual game where a ball is pitched to you and you try to hit it out of the park.  Okay, that sounds exactly like a baseball game.  But there’s no base running, fielding, or any of that boring garbage.  I guess it’s like home run derby.  You put your finger on the left side of the screen and the ball gets pitched.  You then slide your finger at the ball in way you think will hit a homer.  You get points for every foot the ball travels, plus bonus points if it hits any balloons.  Instead of a set number of pitches, you have a lifebar that decreases with every pitch.  You get life back based on the distance you hit each ball.  You lose extra health if you swing and miss, or hit a foul ball, perhaps in tribute of the North Korean Olympic baseball team.

Each different kind of pitch is represented by a cutely drawn face.  You don’t know what kind of pitch is coming until it crosses a line on the screen.  Well actually, that’s not entirely true, but I think that’s what they were trying for.  Anyway, if you hit the ball before it crosses that line, it’s an automatic out and you lose health.  You can use a power-up to sneak a peek at the kind of pitch coming.  There are also special multiplier balls that get thrown at you randomly, which double or triple the value of your swing.

I had fun at first Flick Home Run, because it’s a very likable pick-up-and-play casual game.  But then little annoyances started to irk me.  As you play, you earn experience points.  When you level up, you can upgrade one of three things.  Naturally the game does not explain any of these three things in the slightest.  I hate it when games do that.  Flick Home Run actually has a pretty decent help screen that explains the various rules of the game in detail, except what each of the upgrades do.  The first one is power.  I guess that’s self-explanatory.  Muscle up and hit the balls further.  Which is fine, except the very first pitch I got the very first time I played the game, I knocked the ball out of the stadium and into the parking lot.  That’s actually not as far as you can hit it, but still, it seems like my finger was strong enough as it was.

The second upgrade purports to effect the bat’s accuracy.  I did upgrade this several times and noticed zero improvement in accuracy.  Actually, it kind of got worse.  I hardly ever hit a foul ball before I started upgrading this.  But then I noticed that the more I leveled accuracy up, the more foul balls I hit.  I found out that my father and Chris experienced the same thing, and apparently several others online have as well.  I think this officially makes this the worst upgrade in the history of gaming.

The third one makes more sense.  You get more peeks at the upcoming pitches.  You start with three, but you can get more.  It’s still not all that useful.  After you’ve played the game for a while you can tell what kind of pitch is coming at you by the way it starts and react accordingly.  Since your finger has to start in the same spot, there’s not a lot you can do.  After an hour or so I never needed to use the peek again.

I suspected early on that the game had more to do with luck than skill.  There seemed to be no solid method I could use to hit a home run.  I would slide my finger and whatever happened rarely seemed relevant to the placement of my finger on the screen or what angle I hit the ball on.  The only thing that seemed to change was leveling up slowed to a crawl.  As I already pointed out, that didn’t bug me too much because my upgrades either made no difference or made the game worse.  So I guess it’s fitting that the developer is charging people outrageous price of 99 cents to upgrade any one stat, or $9.99 to upgrade all three by five levels.  Out-fucking-rageous.  Overall, Flick Home Run was fun for a few minutes, but it quickly grew boring.  I can’t believe this game is currently sitting high on the best-sellers list.  Not that those are barometers for quality.  I mean, there’s a Transformers movie and two Pirates of the Caribbean movies on the all time highest grossing films list.  It’s enough to make you cry tears of blood, and I don’t think Kotex makes anything to help with that.

Flick Home Run was developed by Infinity Pocket

99 cents were busted for using finger steroids in the making of this review.

Filed under iPhone and iPad Reviews Tagged with

Trailer Park King Episode 2

January 6, 2012 by 6 Comments

It’s no secret that the most read review I’ve had so far was for Trailer Park King.  Which is kind of shitty because it’s not one of my better ones.  Hopefully I do better this time.  Then again, hopefully the game is better.  Not that Trailer Park King was awful.  It wasn’t.  It was alright.  It was probably the best point and click adventure game I’ve played so far on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Which isn’t saying much.  It would be like saying having your pinky toe removed was the best amputation you’ve had yet.

It was the most searched game on my site because it has boobies on the cover and if you play the demo the game teases that there is porn in it.  Don’t believe me?  14 of the top 30 search terms linking to my site have centered around Trailer Park King.  Including “Trailer Park King Porn” and “Trailer Park King Nudity.”  Of course, there is no porn or nudity in the game, because Microsoft doesn’t allow it.  I know the average Xbox Live player’s IQ is on par with some forms of kelp, but don’t you think if that kind of shit was allowed, it would have been right up Rockstar’s alley?  It certainly would have made the whole “Niko Bellic watches TV” shit less boring in GTA IV.  Or don’t you think some other XBLIG developer would have made a game called “Oh Fuck It” where you go around sexing-up ATM machines or border collies or something?

There will be a FAQ for Trailer Park King Episode 2 at the bottom of this review.  But as spoiler, there are no boobies, nudity, or porn in this game.  If you actually expected that, congratulations, you now have full confirmation that you will die a virgin.  This frees you to do other things with your time.  I hear croquet is quite relaxing.

To the game.  It picks off right where the original left off.  Well, kind of.  The ending sort of teased some nefarious plot twist, but that doesn’t actually happen.  King’s rival, Truck, wasn’t dead.  But now he’s dead again.  Or for the first time.  Maybe.  The game starts with everyone preparing for his funeral.  Only he’s not dead, but everyone thinks he’s a zombie.  Didn’t Red vs. Blue already do this whole thing?

From there, you get the usual assortment of white trash jokes, potty humor, and sexual innuendos.  I admit, I laughed a few times.  But it was never because I found something to be genuinely funny.  It was uncomfortable laughter, the type you might experience yourself if your deranged uncle stood up at Mass and declared that Moses was a closet homo.

The actual game is pretty much the same.  There’s not a whole lot to point at or click on in this point and click adventure.  You’ll never hold more than one trinket at a time and once you’ve clicked on something useless that doesn’t move the plot forward, you can’t click on it again.  That’s actually a pretty useful feature.  There are a couple of minigames this time around.  One of them is a shooting range with a shitty aiming system.  Thankfully you only have to play it once and it seems to make no difference in the story.  The second is Tic Tac Toe.  Oh well, it beats playing Raventhorne I suppose.

The storyline is so completely surreal and absurd that I’m convinced Sean Doherty could sell it as an animated series to Adult Swim and make himself a millionaire.  Yes, the writing is dumb and the voice acting is horrible, but I actually kind of like the characters, and I look forward to seeing what other stupid shit they’ll get themselves into.  Hopefully I don’t have to wait long.  It took me well under an hour to beat Episode 2.  Sean isn’t sure how he’s going to handle the progression of the series.  He had to break this episode up to keep the price at 80MSP and avoid the deadly 240MSP price tag.  And then, as soon as his game got approved for publishing, Microsoft changed their policies.  Now he’s not sure if he’s going to release the rest of the game as patched DLC or if he’s going to sell it in another episode.

I’m frugal, so the consumer in me says “just patch the game!”  But I’m also a business person, and that side of me says “you’re a God damned fucking idiot if you don’t release it as another episode.”  We’re talking about a game whose review is more popular here than all other articles I’ve done combined.  Well, that is if you exclude Temple of Dogolrak.  You know, I’ve come to the sad realization that someone is going to create the ultimate Xbox Live Indie Game.  It will combine risqué themes with a Minecraft clone and the end result will be someone at Microsoft having their head explode when they see how big of a royalty check they have to write for a game called Boobcraft.

Trailer Park King Episode 2 was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points are just as guilty as everyone else for doing this review at 2:00AM on Friday just to have the first review of this game in the making of this review. 


Psssh, they’re totally fake.

Trailer Park King Episode 2 Walkthrough FAQ Thingie

Just because I know everyone is going to want it.  Below is a list of things you’ll have to do in the game.  Highlight the space following them for the answers.  I try to keep things relatively spoiler free, because someone actually bitched at me for spoiling the game for them last time while they were looking up answers to the game’s puzzles in the fucking walkthrough.

How do I free Truck’s body from the ice?  Go to the limo and get a lighter from Vikki.  Go to your bedroom and a sheep will be waiting there.  Now go to Truck’s body and weep as gaming culture is set back at least ten years.

Where did “Zombie” Truck go?  First, you have to go to the outhouse where Truck’s body was on ice.  Then, you have to go to the bar.  The lady inside will tell you that someone locked themselves inside the strip club.  The magic store will now be open.  Go there to get the key from Dozer.  Go back to the strip club and viola!

I’m hopelessly retarded.  Please just tell me how to beat the game from here on out.  Sigh.  Okay, go talk to Truck in his jail cell thingie.  Then go talk to the spacey alien chick.  Go to the bar, then the strip club and talk to Skinny.  Go back to the jail and talk to Vikki.  Now take Truck to the strip club.  Take the book to the top outhouse.  Congratulations, “you” just beat the game. 

Seriously, no nudity?  No.

No porn either?  I fucking hate you.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Name of the Game is “Google Search Friendly”

January 5, 2012 by 6 Comments

This started out as my Second Chance with the Chick review of Inferno!  But then I went off on a bit of a tangent and decided to split it up into two articles.  Here, I would like to address something that has always been a pet peeve of mine since I started this site: the generic name.

I had a little experiment I wanted to perform.  One of the few things Mr. Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus and myself agree with is that Xbox Live Indie Game developers should come up with a name that sticks out in a Google search.  Inferno! has perhaps the most generic name of any game I’ve reviewed thus far at my site, and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do this experiment for quite a while.  So here’s how it will work.  I’ll search for the game once based just on its name.  Then, once with Xbox added to the search.  Finally, once with Xbox Indie in the search.  I want to see how buried the first result that brings you to anything related to the actual game is.  Let’s begin!

Inferno!

  • Just the name: Not within the first 100 results.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 16 results down.  Most results point to Dante’s Inferno by EA.  First actual hit points to marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: 3rd video down is a gameplay video.  Third actual link points to my review.   Most results point to Radiant Games’ Inferno.

Obviously Inferno! was not a very wise choice of a game name.  It’s not an effective tool at landing eyeballs via a Google search.  It’s also not really catchy.  What it sounds like is a name that the developer put zero thought into.  It’s not reflective of the game’s quality of course, but it gives off the impression that it could be.  I mean, if they spent that little time thinking of the name, they probably didn’t spend that much time making a good game.  Inferno! is actually a perfectly fine game, but with a name like Inferno! who will remember it tomorrow?

Now let’s look at the Top 3 Google Searched games on my site.

Trailer Park King

  • Just the name: 1st result is a direct hit to my own review of the game.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: Same as above.  The very first result takes you to the Indie Gamer Chick review
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: The exact same.

Temple of Dogolrak

  • Just the name: 1st result is a direct hit to my own review of the game.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 1st result takes you to the marketplace page of the game.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: #2 link is a direct link to my review of the game.  The 1st link is the link to the main page of my site.

Wizorb

  • Just the name: 1st result is a direct hit to their official website.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 1st result is a direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: 1st result is to a Destructoid article on the game.

The name of your game is your first and possibly only chance at successfully marketing your game.  A good name will pull up some kind of article related to the game when entered into Google. The more generic a name is, the more likely it is to be buried.  Surprisingly, many of the Google searches that lead to my site do not contain terms like “Xbox” or “Indie” anywhere in them.  Now let’s look at two games that use common words as creative puns.

Escape Goat

  • Just the name: third result down, which links you to the official website for the game.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 1st result is a direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: Same as above.

Dead Pixels

  • Just the name: eighth in the list, links to the marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: direct hit to the game’s review at GamingTruth.com

As we all know, Dead Pixels way outsold Escape Goat, so maybe my concept isn’t entirely reflective on a game’s sales potential.  Of course, literal dead pixels are more common than literal escaped goats.  At least I hope so.

Now let’s look at games that all sound kind of the same, but are not.

Blocky

  • Just the name: 14th result down (I’m fucking shocked at that too), links to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: Direct hit on the game’s trailer. First non-video link points to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: Same as above, except the first non-video link points to my review of the game.

Blockt

  • Just the name: sixth result down, which links to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: Direct hit to my review of the game.

Blocks That Matter

  • Just the name: direct hit to the game’s official website.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: same as above.

The more complex a name gets, the more likely it is to score one of those “direct hits” that do seem to make a huge difference in the amount of people who have awareness of your product.  Of course, when a game’s name is too simple, it can be a disaster, like I already demonstrated with Inferno!  If that’s not proof enough for you, check out these games.

OTO

Plague

  • Just the name: not within the first 100 results.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: direct hit to the game’s official website.

Here’s something that I’ve noticed since starting my site: most of my search results do not include the words “Xbox” or “Indie” in the search results.  People mostly search just for the game’s name.  The games that have the less complex names simply do not get as many search results.  To hammer this home, if someone is looking for a review of the game, they in general just put the name of the game and “review” in it.  If someone does that, here is what happens with all the games that have been listed above.

  • Inferno! Review: no matches within the first 100 links.  Same with if you add “Xbox” to the search, where instead you get 100 reviews of Dante’s Inferno.
  • Trailer Park King Review: 1st result takes you to my review.
  • Temple of Dogolrak Review: 1st result takes you to the XNA Round-Up review.
  • Wizorb Review: 1st result takes you to Game Critics’ review of it.
  • Escape Goat Review: 1st result takes you to Horrible Night’s review of it.
  • Dead Pixels Review: 3rd result takes you to N4G’s linked review.  First two results are for a start-up game review website called Dead Pixels.
  • Blocky Review: 1st result takes you to an N4G linked review.
  • Blockt Review: 1st result takes you to Xbox Hornet’s review.
  • Blocks That Matter Review: takes you to the IGN review of the PC version.
  • OTO Review: 16th link down takes you to the same 1up or Poison review listed above.
  • Plague Review: 64th link down takes you to an N4G linked review.

It’s said you only get one chance to make a good first impression.  Your game’s name could be that one chance.  If a game like Plague was called Captain Shooty’s Shooting Shooter, it probably would have sold better.  It certainly would have been more likely to catch your eye.  If Inferno! had been called the Adventures of the Lava Sucking Robocoaster, you might have laughed at the absurdity of the name, but you wouldn’t have forgotten it any time soon.  So when the time comes to pick a name out, don’t just put down the first thing that comes to mind.  That’s how Sarah Palin named her kids, and you’re better than that.

Filed under Editorials Tagged with , ,

Microsoft Announces Changes for Xbox Live Indie Games

January 4, 2012 by 13 Comments

I normally don’t post news items here at Indie Gamer Chick, but today Microsoft announced three major changes to Xbox Live Indie Game development policy.  They are as follows.

  • Xbox Live Indie Games can now be 500MB in size.
  • The minimum price of 240MSP now applies to games 150MB in size or higher.  Games at under 150MB can (AND PROBABLY SHOULD!!) be priced at 80MSP.
  • Developers can now publish twenty games a year.

As people know from my previous article about pricing, I have no patience or tolerance for developers that over price their games.  It’s not reflection of quality.  It’s how the market works.  Microsoft made this move so developers could be more competitive.  And for the record, this is not a race to the bottom.  Your games are only worth what consumers are willing to pay for them.  If you price higher without being forced to on some misguided principle, you’re just being silly.

Any developers who wish to use my site as a forum to announce you’ve dropped the prices of your games, you got it.  Tweet me the title of your game and I’ll note it in a daily update every day for the rest of the month.  The guys at Zeboyd Games have already done so with Cthulhu Saves the World, which is now priced at 80MSP.

I’m also interested to hear what you developers plan to do with all the added space you now have at your disposal.  You can e-mail me or let me know in the comments section of this post, and I’ll include it in those daily updates.  I applaud Microsoft for this decision in helping developers compete better with wireless gaming apps and against their own Xbox Live Arcade platform.  Well done chaps.  Now stop being assholes and get games a better place in the dashboard.

UPDATE: Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard member Antipole is now also 80MSP, down from its original price of 400MSP.  Outstanding move.  You absolutely have got to get this game right now.

Filed under Editorials Tagged with , ,

World Wars II

January 2, 2012 by 4 Comments

It was two months ago that I first played World Wars II.  I was really looking forward to it.  It seemed more like a real-time version of Nintendo’s Advanced Wars series that I was so fond of a few years ago.  It also featured eight-person online play and multiple game types.  I was sent a couple of review copies to make sure I could experience this game at it’s finest.  Brian and I were seriously hyped.

And then we played it.  Although it wasn’t bad by any means, it’s so underwhelming that it almost seems worse than it is.

In World Wars II, you’re given a squad of various troops and vehicles to command.  The problems with the game start right away with unwieldy tutorial.  I had to replay through it a few times and I still couldn’t get a feel for the controls or the gameplay.  Everything about it seems overly complex.  Steering, turning, rotating the turrets on tanks, etc.  Nothing here is intuitive or user-friendly, making the game about as inviting as the welcome mat at Majdanek.  It doesn’t help that it’s not possible to complete the tutorial in the eight minutes a player would be allotted to demo the game.

This is the only game play picture chosen by the developers to represent their game on the marketplace.

It also doesn’t help that the best way to learn nearly any game is to play single-player.  That option is here, but for the life of me I couldn’t even complete the first mission in campaign mode.  Even on the easiest difficulty setting, the enemies are absolutely flawless marksmen that will accurately fire every single shot.  You, on the other hand, are just a person who has to deal with the clunking aiming and slow response time of your character.  I tried.  God knows I tried, but I couldn’t get past the first enemies I encounter on the first stage on the easiest setting possible.

I’ve had my skills as a gamer brought into question more than once since starting this site.  And while it’s true that I’m not exactly proficient in the art of throwing a dragon punch, I would still consider myself as having pretty decent gaming ability.  After my performance in  World Wars II, I seriously started to question my own skills.

And then Brian couldn’t beat it.  Huh.

Brian called his friend Cameron over and they tried it co-op.  Nope, still couldn’t beat it.

I was sent a second review code so I gave it to my buddy Alan C with the Tea, who operates his own XBLIG blog.  Guess what?  HE COULDN’T BEAT IT EITHER!

Now, I’m not going to pick on this subject too much, because even most mainstream shooting games (coughFARCRYcough) can’t get proper AI done.  But the first level, and the first baddies?  Yikes.  That’s some shitty AI coding.

So I used multiplayer to learn the mechanics of the game.  I played several games online with Brian, and it was comically awful on both of our parts.  Nothing made sense, the controls were bad, and switching between characters was a fucking nightmare.

A few days later, we played again and the results started pretty much the same way.  But then things did start to click and we kind of had fun with the game.  It wasn’t perfect by any means.  Even after putting several hours into the game, the aiming is slow and clunky.  In a game where you primarily are trying to shoot other people, that can get a bit annoying.  And while you’re fighting with these mechanics, you’re also having to juggle other factors.  You have to watch your gas tank on each car.  You have dozens of troops to position and shuffle to.  At this point, World Wars II feels more like a boring desk job than a game.

Swissplayers Game Studios helpfully included two screenshots of World Wars II’s menus on their marketplace page. Yes indeed, this does confirm the game features menus. Awesome.

We spent most of the time playing capture the flag.  The name is very misleading.  It’s actually a territorial-control game where you find a base and squat on it until your flag gets raised.  Whoever gets all the flags first wins.  There’s also a game that is more close to capture the flag.  A pile of gold is hidden inside a base.  You have to blow up the base, expose the gold, get it, and take it back to your base.  I actually found this particular game type to be boring.  But the territorial control stuff was alright.

Honestly, I can’t recommend World Wars II because it just takes too much time and effort to enjoy the whole thing.  It’s probably a lot more fun with a full roster of eight people, but so is throwing yourself out of an airplane.  The aiming system just blows.  It would probably played better as a twin-stick shooter.  The unbeatable AI cripples the single player experience.  Online multiplayer is the only way to have fun, but it won’t be possible unless every player has put in the required time to actually get good at it.  Somewhere in here was the trapping of a good game, but the final product doesn’t live up to its potential.

Oh, and one last gripe.  The four pictures selected by the developers to represent this game on the marketplace were fucking pitiful.  Only one is a screenshot of game play.  Another is a screen of someone looking at the map.  The other two pictures are of menus.  Fucking menus!  Jesus Christ, guys!  These are the pictures that you’re trying to use to sell your game.  At least try to be more picky about them than the DMV is.

World Wars II was developed by Swissplayers Game Studios

240 Microsoft Points pointed at a box of the board game Risk and declared that your online indie multiplayer strategy game should not be more complicated than that in the making of this review. 

Review copies of World Wars II were provided by Swissplayers Game Studios to IndieGamerChick.com in this review.  The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review copies was given to friends with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer.  Those people had no feedback in this article.  For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

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