Being coordinated is not among my attributes, so being able to play games at all is something of a small miracle. But some stuff is simply off-limits to me. Dancing games, for example. I once fell off the platform playing Dance Dance Revolution at a bowling alley and ended up with a small break in my ankle. On the XBLIG side of things, I could barely get through NYAN-TECH, which asked gamers to perform finger-yoga while playing a platformer. It’s something my brain is not wired for. I didn’t think a game could get any more demanding than that, but having just played Divided, I stand corrected.
I could have sworn I did this puzzle last month when I played Gateways. Not sure which way was the least intuitive.
Divided is part puzzler, part platformer, and part road sobriety test from hell. You play as a little blue blob of goo that has to get from point A to point B. The hook is at times you have to split apart your goo and control each bit independently. You move one with the left stick and jump it with the left bumper, while moving the other with the right stick and jumping with the right bumper. It might as well ask me to jump rope while playing the piano, because I’m not capable of it. I don’t know if it’s because of my autism or a natural lack of dexterity, but I have difficulty walking and breathing at the same time.
I can’t really fault Divided for my own personal hangups. When I would play and have to move the right-stick blob, I would inevitably fuck it up and instinctively try to move using the left stick. I couldn’t help it, even after hours I would do it again and again. I was quite embarrassed. Brian was laughing his ass off. My dog walked out of the room and got into the garbage. Probably not related, but it happened while I was playing Divided, so it seemed worth mentioning.
Where I can fault Divided is it’s just not a very well made game. Ignoring the pat-your-head-and-rub-your-belly design, the controls are unresponsive. Some areas of the game require precision platforming, but movement is loose, jumping feels lethargic, and the camera often doesn’t pull back far enough for you to get a clear picture of everything you’re required to do. Those are three major issues that have nothing to do with my own inability to play the game. On top of that, the level design is cruel, often requiring you to make timing-based precision jumps using two characters controlled by different sticks. What kind of freak would be good at this game? If you have the hand-eye coordination that Divided requires and you’re wasting it playing Divided instead of being a world champion athlete, you’re just a silly poop face. Yes, I can be childish.
I didn’t make it very far in Divided. I suppose I could have practiced at it, but I would have hated myself for doing so.
Co-op doesn’t work so hot either, because all the control and camera problems I talked about earlier. Sometimes the game wants you to make a jump, but requires one character to be too far away from the other. Because of the camera, that often turns into a blind jump. Otherwise, most of the problems come down to the controls being too fickle. Using the chains for climbing especially, which caused a lot of slippage. Ultimately, even if I had been capable of playing Divided the way it’s intended to be played, I don’t think I would have liked it. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Who knows, maybe I would be impressed if I saw someone who could maneuver both guys at the same time with total ease. I probably would give the person a round of applause, and then smack them upside the head for not using their super powers to fight crime or something more productive.
Winter is upon us, and with it comes a strange fixation with some members of the population to freeze their butts off and throw themselves down a mountain. It sounds like something primitives would do to virgins to appease their Gods, but no, it’s actually considered a recreational sport. Weirdly, it also translates well to video games. The first ever sporting game I played was 1080° Snowboarding on the Nintendo 64, and I was completely addicted to it for a while. Its Gamecube counterpart? Not so much. However, I never did get into SSX, and winter sports games haven’t sniffed my consoles in well over a decade. Can a couple of XBLIGs win me back?
No.
But one came close.
The guy on the right is demonstrating the position known as “about to get slaughtered by Indie Gamer Chick.”
Avatar Snowboarding is first, and it might be the worst Xbox Live Indie Game of the year. I’m having trouble deciding if being utterly pointless and boring is worse than being Sententia. At least Sententia has a goal and a plot. Avatar Snowboarding basically puts you in a randomly generated sandbox of a stage and says “okay, move around.” That’s it. Yea, stages have an “exit” but there’s no real reward for getting to it. There’s also no interesting scenery or outlandish things to jump off of. Just a sterile field of snow, a few trees, and invisible walls to brain yourself to death on. What’s really remarkable is the game allows you to fly through the air and gain speed using an infinite amount of turbo boost, and it’s STILL the most boring video game I’ve ever played in my entire life, and that’s not hyperbole. Games don’t NEED to have goals. Flight Adventure 2 had no point outside “here’s a plane, fly it, try not to crash!” But it still managed to be compelling. Avatar Snowboarding is dull to the point of being excruciating.
A Snowy Slalom is a much better experience. It’s still not quite Leaderboard material, but compared to Avatar Snowboarding, it’s game of the year material. Here, you traverse 32 pre-made hills, or enjoy randomly generated ones. The controls are more responsive, the gameplay is streamlined, and there’s an actual point to it. Plus, the sense of speed you generate at times is awesome.
Snowy Slalom comes from the developer of the Merball Tournament, a game that had a neat concept but felt more like an unfinished prototype. Unfortunately, Slalom retains that not-quite-done feel at times. Everything worked fine until around the 8th course, at which point making sharp turns routinely led to me getting stuck in the scenery and being forced to restart. Other times, I would just hit the walls and lose all my speed, causing time to run out. Often, there’s not strong enough indication of when you’re going to have to turn on a course, causing you to have to trial-and-error your way down a slope multiple times to get it right. This is reason #842 why video skiing is superior to real skiing. Because trial and error in real skiing means “see that tree with Sonny Bono’s blood all over it? Yea, try not to die on it.”
I’m having flashbacks to Cool Boarders. Which is weird, because that’s not a skiing game.
Ultimately, I’m not putting A Snowy Slalom on the leaderboard because it’s just not fun. It does represent a step in the right direction for a new developer who is easing his way into game development, but the ultimate goal of a video game is to be entertaining, and Slalom just isn’t. It’s dull to look at and not all that amusing to play. I certainly didn’t hate it, and at times I was blown away by how the game moved at lightning speed, but I wouldn’t want to play it again. I’m happy it exists, because it’s proof that developers can get better. I went back and tried Merball Tournament again, then played A Snowy Slalom. You can see progress being made. Manuel, don’t give up. Stick with it. And since I’m in such a loving mood, I’ll tell the Avatar Snowboarding team “hey, look on the bright side! You can’t possibly do worse!”
It might surprise you to hear that I actually quite enjoyed those old Game & Watch Gallery collections they put out on Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance back in the day. Most people perceive me as having some kind of bias against old school games. I don’t. I just don’t think they hold up today as well as many will claim. Game & Watches are kind of exempt from that, because even back in the day, they were probably only good for fifteen minutes before getting boring. Even those Game & Watch collections that I really enjoyed as a kid didn’t get a whole lot of playtime from me. Still, they had their place. As my buddy Cyril of Defunct Games said to me, “in a time before Game Boys and cell phones, they were the Fruit Ninja of their day.” You know, that guy is pretty smart when he’s not reviewing magazine covers.
Having said that, it’s really weird that someone would make an original G&W today, in 2012. I know nostalgia is trendy right now, but that’s a bizarre choice. You know how some stores started carrying turntables and vinyl records a few years ago to cash in on the long-faded memories of old people who smell like aspirin and bath salts? Yea, well this would be like someone cashing in on that craze by bringing back typewriters. Some people might genuinely long for them, but it’s probably not a viable commercial idea. Even if they work.
In a way, this is a picture of the Loch Ness Monster AND a zombie.
And Nessie, today’s attempt at bringing back Game & Watch, does work. As far as I can tell, it’s an original concept. You play as the Loch Ness Monster (last seen playing The Last Guardian with Jimmy Hoffa), and you score points by not being seen by a guy on a boat and a guy on shore with a telescope. As you play, your air supply starts to run out and you have to surface without being seen by either guy. It’s tricky, takes some getting used to, settles into a groove, provides a worthy challenge, and then gets dull all in the span of fifteen minutes. Not a bad fifteen minutes by any means. And it really does look and sound like a Game & Watch, so mission accomplished there. I got about as much playtime with it as I got with the Game & Watch: Ball replica I got from Club Nintendo by spending 1200 points, or the two Game & Watch collections on Nintendo DS that I paid 800 points for apiece. If my math is accurate, that’s about $8,942,104 I had to spend to get those. 80 Microsoft Points (roughly $256.31, although my calculator seems to be broken so disregard all dollar amounts in this review) is obviously a much better deal for a gaming’s version of the butterfly: fun to look at, but once you start interacting with it, it dies in about fifteen minutes.
Tiny Tim’s Tremendous Tank has sat on my to-do pile for a while. I’m not sure why it took me so long to review. It looked good. The trailer made it seem cool. Chalk it up to me being a scatterbrain, but it always slipped through the cracks. Well, yesterday I finally got around to playing it, because there had been a serious drought in new XBLIGs. The moment I finished the game about an hour later, I had three review requests. Today, I have seven total. It’s like a running gag with Indie Gamer Chick. The minute I start a game that was released over a year ago, the flood gates open and all the new releases hit. I’m onto you, XBLIG.
The graphics are nice. Almost Claymation-like.
The idea is you’re a tank that has to plow through a world, shooting enemies and innocent wildlife, rolling over things, and trying not to flip over. The game is physics based, and rolling over is the toughest thing you’ll have to deal with. The rolling over stuff is what got me killed the most. I rolled over more than a dead dog caught in a clothes dryer. If there was a hill, a crate, or a shell from the machine gun, you can bet I flipped the tank over trying to get past it. The physics and the terrain seem tailor-made for causing you to do your best beached-turtle impression. In fact, that seems to be the game’s sole goal, rather than be entertaining. I mentioned this to the developer, and he told me it was like Trials HD, only with a tank. I think he forgot the part where Trials HD is actually fun.
Along with bumpy hills, there are enemies. Guys who shoot guns at you, guys who shoot rockets at you, and landmines. To counter this, you have a minigun and the tank’s cannon. Neither of them are easy to line up and aim correctly, especially given how herky-jerky the physics are. Enemies also seem to fire at a rate faster than you, and are typically placed in a position where you’ll already have rolled over from trying to clear a hill with more divots in it than a driving range. Thankfully, they don’t respawn if you kill them and you die. I think. Honestly, I’m not sure if that’s true because I experienced one of the most pleasant glitches I’ve ever encountered in a game.
Check this out: I’m playing the game and I get a phone call. So I pause things and answer that. The phone call ends and I pick the controller back up and press A expecting to continue. Only I don’t, because for some brain fart of a reason, when you pause the game it doesn’t highlight “Continue.” It highlights “Restart.” There’s also no “are you sure?” confirmation screen. So I had to restart from the beginning. I handled this about as well as you would expect me to, IE I lost my shit. Screaming, cussing, declaring my intent to assassinate the last surviving Time Lord, blot out the sun, club a baby seal, and cast every first-born male into the Nile.
“If only I had access to some kind of weapon, perhaps vehicle-based, that I could terrorize people with! Bah, like such a thing exists!”
But, before I could turn off the Xbox, I was reminded that I would give every game at least an hour before doing a rage quit. Well fuck, said I. So I decided to eat shit and restart the game. Only this time, there were no enemies. None. Every single living thing, even the birds and rabbits that you could shoot just for shits and giggles, were gone. No landmines either. Just me, some bumpy hills, a few checkpoints, and a silly ending that teased a sequel. No, please don’t. I think you’ve said all that needs to be said with this one.
Of course, the professional thing to do would have been to restart the game and play it again with all the enemies. I didn’t do that, but it would have been. I had encountered enemies in my first run. I didn’t think it was well conceived how they were used over the course of the first twenty minutes of playtime, and I can’t imagine it would have been better for the last twenty. Really, the problem with Tiny Tim’s Tremendous Tank is it’s just not fun. The only way to clear some of the hills without flipping over is to inch up them, and what’s fun about that? Enemies are too easily able to double up on you, and with poor aiming mechanics it’s kind of hard to fight back. I think somewhere along the lines, the developers had the right idea for a decent game, but the final product is dull, frustrating, and glitchy as hell. Ignoring the no-enemies thing, I had one instance where I was driving off a hill, barely caught my bumper on the back of a hill and the whole thing fell apart. I was boggled by how exactly that kind of damage could happen, but soon afterwards my tank fell apart again. Only that time, I was rolling along a flat piece of terrain. I hadn’t hit anything, or gone over a hill. It just sort of crumbled. Since I have no logical explanation for that, I’ll chalk it up to my tank being driven by Chief Quimby and one of his messages to Inspector Gadget detonated prematurely. It’s bound to happen once in a while, right?
Warning: there will be some spoilers. The gist of this review is that Retro City Rampage is fun in spurts but the Grand Theft Auto stuff is the only parts that are good. Every classic gaming section is boring or worse, and most of the jokes are not funny. I don’t recommend it.
Retro City Rampage is a good game destroyed by a lack of restraint. It’s popular among older players because it hits all the right buttons that get their juices flowing. In other words, it references a lot of 80s gaming and pop culture, and that’s all you need to do to get most retro gamers happy. Sean Penn is statistically proven to be the most boring man in the world, but if he ever just blurted out “our princess is in another castle” you would have the entire gaming population over the age of 30 lining up to give him head. That’s the basis for all the humor in Retro City Rampage. If it’s 80s and pop culture, it’s here. Do you remember Metal Gear? Back to the Future? Battletoads? Bill & Ted? The dog from Duck Hunt? Married with Children? Saved by the Bell? Pitfall? Mega Man? Smash TV? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? The guy who made this certainly did.
So what’s the punchline? “Hey, it’s that thing I remember from my childhood!” Well that’s not funny. There has to be some kind of gag to go with it. When Retro City Rampage has an actual joke, with a beginning, middle, and end, it’s typically funny. Otherwise, it’s just painful. I never got how humor like this is supposed to work. You know how every Adam Sandler movie has a Col. Sanders look-alike in it? What exactly is funny about that? Someone please explain it to me. I’m hoping some context will make it funny in time for his next shitty flick.
This section looks like Contra. I think we’ll all agree that Contra is a pretty good game. The problem here is the game only looks like Contra. It doesn’t play like it, or more importantly, feel like it. It plays and feels like a bad ripoff of Contra that was lifted straight out of the 80s. I’m guessing that isn’t what the developer was aiming for.
When Retro City Rampage is good, it’s really good. That might sound like high praise, but the flip side of it is when Retro City Rampage is bad, it’s really, really bad. The sad thing is, the game does the old-school Grand Theft Auto better than the last two official 2D GTAs did. It controls reasonably well, there’s a fun variety of weapons, and the game keeps track of all the damage you’ve rang up. If the game had stuck to this stuff, it would have been sublime. But it doesn’t. Because it’s so married to the whole classic-gaming thing, it keeps doing “homages” to that era. And the material chosen here is head scratching. The dam stages from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES. I’ve never played it, but I know of its reputation and it’s not a good one. The same goes for the hoverbike sequence from Battletoads. I don’t know if it improves the mechanics (since I didn’t choose suicide over finishing the stage, I’m guessing it must have), but why include them in the first place?
The shitty thing is the guy who made this obviously knew sections of the game were not fun, because the game outright tells you such. When you have a mission where you have to tail a car without being spotted and also refilling on coffee every ten feet, the game outright tells you that it’s “one of those boring missions.” Which would be funny if it somehow took the piss out of the genre, but it doesn’t. When it turns out the mission really is boring, it crosses a line from being cute to being to being obnoxious. When you do the Ninja Turtles dam sequence, it moans “oh no, not another water stage!” And then it proceeds to be slow, boring, and not fun at all. I acknowledge that I’m probably not Retro City Rampage’s target audience, but with all the great stuff in gaming history, why pay tribute to the crappy stuff? Even worse, why keep it crappy? If you know what’s wrong with something, why not fix it? If I have a leaky sink, I don’t build a fucking shrine to it. I fix the damn thing. Retro City Rampage decided to go with the shrine, and as a result this tribute to bad games itself becomes a bad game.
The Paperboy section, which feels like a bad clone of the real thing.
Whenever it deviates from the Grand Theft Auto stuff, the game sucks. Sadly, the game keeps forcing you to do these “classic gaming” sections like you’re being dragged by a choke chain. With no exceptions, I found those fell into two categories: boring, or long and boring. A section based on Paperboy? Boring. And bad, because the engine isn’t suited for Paperboy. A section based on Contra? Boring. An extended section based on ‘Splosion Man? Long and boring. And again, the engine isn’t suited for it. Nor is it suited for a boring Smash TV section, or especially a long and boring Smash TV section. Yep, there’s two. Or a portion of the game based on Tapper. There’s an extended boss fight with Dr. Robotnik (or Buttnik as the game calls him) that is long, boring, and has no check points. For a game that I was so overjoyed when I started it, and even after several hours, I couldn’t believe how horrible it had become by about eight hours in. I had just beaten the Robotnik boss, and suddenly the game decided to pay tribute to some 3D motorcycle racing thing. The good news is they actually used a different engine for this part. The bad news is this is where I finally said “you know what? All the fun I’ve had in this game has long since been drowned out by shit like this.” Exact quote. I made Brian write it down. This was somewhere near the end of the game. After three stages with a motorcycle, you end up in a time-traveling DeLorean, fighting a boss. I spent an hour with this thing, fighting spotty collision detection, unfair enemy placement, and tedium on a level I didn’t think was possible in something I had previous had a lot of fun with. Finally, after getting close to the end of its lifebar, something happened and I went from having all three of my hit-points left to having none. I’m not sure what happened. I think I should have taken one point of damage from getting hit, but my health was instantly all gone and it was time to restart for the 35th time. Fuck. That.
If Retro City Rampage had stuck to gameplay like this, I wouldn’t be calling it Retro Shitty Rampage to Brian right now.
For those of you who will love this game no matter how flawed it is, go ahead and tell yourselves that I only disliked it because I grew up with a PlayStation instead of an NES. Yea, I probably didn’t get all the references (or “jokes” as they are being passed off as), but if that’s all you really want in a game, you need to get your head examined. Why punish yourself with a game that sometimes brags about being boring (and it’s not a joke, it really is boring in those sections) just so you can see a reference to Mr. Belding or the raccoon suit from Super Mario 3? Retro City Rampage can be fun, but it’s so bad in so many sections that you’ll never really reach that apex of satisfaction. I was practically floating two hours into it, before the game lost me forever by rubbing in the fact that a section designed to be boring had been placed in the game. That really soured the mood, and it never recovered. There were still fleeting moments of greatness, but the threat that the game might decide to intentionally be bad again tainted it all. It also brought to light some stuff I might have missed if I had remained in a blissful state. Stuff like close-quarters combat being shitty, club-based weapons being useless, and having too much recoil from getting hit. And then the game would have more sections of intentional badness. Sigh. Who could possibly think being bad is a good thing? Nobody likes things that suck on purpose, unless it involves a mouth and genitals.
$14.99 killed more dogs than hip dysplasia in the making of this review.
Cathy was assisted in gameplay while playing Retro City Rampage to help her avoid having a seizure due to epilepsy. The bulk of the game was played by her. All opinions in this review are her’s alone.
Hell Yeah! comes to us from Arkedo, the guys who did the Arkedo Series of XBLIGs. As a quick recap of what I thought of those, they’re pretty games that were boring as hell, and vastly overrated by the community at large. All style, no substance. So let it be said to all aspiring developers: style must be all you need. That’s because Arkedo’s latest game just landed on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade and is being published by none other than Sega. So what does this mean? Well, obviously with a company that puts such a high premium of quality as Sega does, we can expect plenty of substance to go with the style here. Heh. Hehehe. Right. Oh, and being on PSN and XBLA bumps the sticker up on it to $15. Joy.
Don’t worry. Walking on this fire won’t burn you. Some fires in this game will, but this one won’t. Good luck keeping track of that!
You’re a rabbit that is the brutal ruler of Hell. And then he gets caught corn-holing a rubber ducky in his bathtub, photos of it circulate, and it ruins his reputation, thus forcing him to extract revenge. No, really. That’s the plot. Did I mention this game is Japanese? No? Well, it’s not. It’s French. That somehow makes it worse. You know how everyone has someone in their life that will do an obnoxiously racist impression of a Japanese person? Imagine if that person were French. Go ahead and do it. I’ll wait.
Cringe worthy, huh?
The bizarre story is complemented by some of the most painfully unfunny dialog and gags I’ve encountered in a game. Lots of cussing, lots of call backs to other games, and lots of random weirdness. All of which can be funny if it has a punchline, or some semblance of context. There is none of that in Hell Yeah.
At first glance, Hell Yeah looks like a typical platformer, only with some run-and-spray shooting mechanics thrown in. But there is a hook, and it could have been a neat one. There are several “large” enemies throughout the game that you have to track down and kill. This is done by draining their health bar, which then activates a Wario Ware-like quick-time event. If you complete the event successfully, the enemy is defeated in a spectacularly over-the-top pseudo cut scene. It sounds great, and at first it kept me slogging through the game, even though the amount of fun I was having would have to be measured in nano-fractions. For a while, every character died uniquely. After about three hours (or 30 odd creatures) in, that stopped. In a fire stage, I beat one enemy and a dude shaped like a piece of toast shouted “ROASTIE!” Ohhhhh, I get it. Like that guy in Mortal Kombat. The thing is, that joke is so over-played that it hasn’t been funny since long before I was even playing games. I felt bad for Arkedo, but then the very next guy I killed, the Roastie guy popped up again to do the same exact joke. Suddenly, I didn’t feel bad for them anymore. This is the equivalent of a drunk at a party telling a lame joke and then saying “get it?” You want to tell them with all sincerity and concern, “no really, you should stop.” But they’re still laughing at themselves, nodding their head and saying “no, GET IT?” Sigh. Yes, I get it. It just isn’t funny. And Hell Yeah is not funny at all. Not once. Not even on accident.
Boss fights are multi-staged events that take too long and have no check points. Are we having fun yet?
Meanwhile, the gameplay seems like it should be better than it is. The controls are mostly adequate. Your dude walks around, picking up an absurd amount of weapons, shooting things, wall jumping, double jumping, and cutting through enemies using a saw-blade/jetpack thing that you pick up right off the bat. With all this firepower, you would think it would be really fun to just run around and kill things. But it never is. And sometimes those adequate controls go off their meds and become unreasonable. Aiming is done with the right stick, but all movement is handled by the left stick, with no option for the directional pad. It makes it really awkward when an enemy’s only weak spot can be hit by jumping, aiming downwards and firing. I couldn’t help but take damage every time this was required. A dash attack later on gets mapped to the left trigger, at which point the controls officially cross the line from decent to cumbersome. Plus, you have too many weapons to juggle (and you get more as you go along), so sections of the game where everything is taken from you actually come as a startling relief. Oddly enough, those are the only parts of the game that I almost had a little bit of fun. Almost.
Hell Yeah is just a bad game. A directionless hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that often don’t work the way they should. The QTEs required to beat enemies don’t always offer enough time to set yourself and figure out what you’re supposed to do. If you fail one, you take damage and the enemy gets some of its life back. I would be shocked if a person was capable of doing most of these on their first try. It turns Hell Yeah into a serious of “gotcha” moments. Even worse is the checkpoint system. There’s quite a few checkpoints, but they’re not marked clearly enough. But the real crappy part is if you die and respawn, you come back with the same amount of life you had when you hit the check point. Imagine going into a difficult, bullet-hellish section with only a tiny fraction of health left. It forces you to backtrack to the last health refill station, which you can bet your ass is on the other side of the level, without taking damage. It also doesn’t help that the levels are sprawling and BORING. Even having beautiful graphics isn’t all that helpful. If you got lost wandering the Louvre for hours on end, you’re not going to finally walk out of the place saying “well, at least it was a good sight-seeing tour.”
The “each guy gets a gruesome death” stuff was good, until they started repeating themselves.
Arkedo continues to have the style-over-substance problem. This is the fourth game I’ve played of theirs and the fourth one that I decided to quit before the game was finished. I know people say that’s not very professional conduct. Thankfully, I’ve never claimed to be a professional, so I can stick out my tongue and blow a raspberry at them. I put about five hours into Hell Yeah! and was bored stiff by horrible level design, droning boss fights, and controls that started okay but got progressive worse as the game kept changing directions. It sure is pretty to look at, but that doesn’t take the edge off the tedium. I wouldn’t have liked Hell Yeah if it had been a $1 XBLIG. At $15, I’m pretty sure I’m now going to hell for murdering money. Ironically, once there I’ll probably be stuck playing Hell Yeah.
Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit was developed by Arkedo
$14.99 heard that Judas chose being chewed on by Satan over playing Sententiain the making of this review.
Ovary Overload is a twin-stick shooter where you take the role of an unfertilized egg that tries to defend itself from being inseminated. By sperm. I wish there was some wacky gameplay hook to go with this, but no, it really is just shooting slow-moving sperm with an unfertilized egg. Sure, the sperm comes in multiple colors, suggesting that the chick this egg belongs to got jiggy with the entire cast of Power Rangers, but that’s it. Shoot sperm. There’s a few weapons upgrades and large sperm boss (that presumably comes from Megazord), but there is nothing here that hasn’t been done so much better a million times before. When the entire hook of your game is “a slower, crappier version of Robotron, only you shoot sperm” you probably need to go back to the drawing board. Sorry for the short review, but there is nothing else to talk about.
Ovary Overload. Conception has never been this boring.
Wait, there’s another sperm-based XBLIG? Are you fucking kidding me?
Oh hey, actually this one isn’t bad at all. It’s called Spermatozoon. Here, you play as the sperm, shooting them at the egg. Surrounding the egg is a series of rotating walls, or “contraceptives.” The walls typically have gaps in them. While it begs the question as to who the fuck makes contraceptives with holes in them (probably diaper companies, the shady pricks), it actually makes for a really fun, old-time arcadey shooter. The hook is, you can’t actually move the sperms around yourself, nor select which one you want to fire. They surround the egg, and you fire them one-at-a-time. You only need one shot to get to the egg to win, while any shots that hit the walls punch a hole in them. Does sperm really do that? How come used condoms don’t look like they were attacked by millions of little termites every time someone finishes with one?
The gimmick is absurd, but the game is fun. There’s 53 levels, all with different twists to the formula. Sometimes the walls are unbreakable. Sometimes the sperm has to slowly pass through a wall of water. Sometimes the water carries it around the board. Another question: where the hell are these people having sex at where they’re getting destructible condoms with preexisting holes in them that have water spinning around in them? A spa? A hurricane? I thought for a second this might not be human sperm, but it makes a distinctive “YEE HAW!” when it penetrates the egg, so obviously we’re talking about Texan sperm here. I’m not sure what in Texas would encompass all the above. A semi-aquatic Swiss-cheese themed rodeo?
I have an alternate name for Spermatozoon: Hardon Collider.
Spermatozoon is certainly worth a look, but it’s got some pretty nasty flaws too. Difficulty doesn’t scale properly. Over the course of fifty-three levels, I had at least three instances where I would get stuck on a stage, go through multiple rounds of failure, then immediately finish the next stage or two in one single shot. Later in the game, the walls rotate so fast and are so dense that there’s no room for strategy or aiming. You just mash the buttons and wait for the miracle of life to play out. That’s disappointing, because the concept is so good, it should lend itself to more levels that allow you to carefully, patiently wait for the perfect shot. I also didn’t find the multiplayer very compelling. It’s the same game, only the sperm are divided up between two to four players. It didn’t really feel competitive or cooperative. It was just sort of there. I had more fun just playing by myself. I’m not sure if that counts as masturbation with a game like this. I probably should do a couple rosaries just in case.
Either way, Spermatozoon is really fun and I totally recommend it. Personally, it has got to be one of the biggest surprises I’ve come across on XBLIG. Even with a stupid, immature theme designed to appeal to the kind of twits that giggle when someone says “erect”, it’s a good game, and that’s all I’ve ever cared about. It could be a game themed around removing lint from the crack of a hippopotamus’ ass, and I’ll still recommend it if it’s a good game. By the way, I hear their next game involves removing lint from the crack of a hippopotamus’ ass. I’m really excited for it.
Ignore the above name. Thanks to “retro” Atari 2600 style graphics, you can’t really see that you’re tossing adorable animals that explode on contact at your enemies. It actually looks more like Spider-Man throwing dried out dog turds at Lego figures. But, since that comes dangerously close to infringing on the plans for Traveller’s Tales next licensed schlock, Bungee Ferret Tossing it is!
One of my pet peeves is retro-looking games that only do it part-way. Bungee Ferret Tossing looks like an early 80s console game, but it doesn’t sound like one. At all. There’s full voice narration, a generic soundtrack that should have been chiptuned, and the most annoying sound effects in recorded history. I can’t stress enough how bad they are. Imagine a marching band made of bag-pipers and Fran Drecher operating a jackhammer. Actually, don’t. I don’t want that on my conscience. Just, trust me on this. It’s bad.
Ninjas are well-known for the ability to jump forty feet in the air.
So the “throwing explosive ferrets at enemies” gimmick is ruined because it doesn’t look like you’re doing that. That means the game has to stand on its own. Does it? Maybe a little bit. B.F.T. plays out like a wave shooter. You sway back and forth from a helicopter (hence the bungee part) lobbing grenades at enemies. If the enemies shoot you, or if a bird flies into your chopper, you lose health. Your health auto-refills, while the chopper has limited damage. Also, enemy fire causes you to swing more erratically, making it more difficult to aim your shots. Allegedly, at least. I could never quite get the hang of aiming while Spider-Man was swinging at a normal rate. The throwing physics don’t seem to line up with the laws of physics. At best, I could land a “ferret” somewhere in the general vicinity of an enemy and hope the generous blast radius would kill them. Generally it would, but then the game would pull a dick move by having me throw out timed grenades that seemed to only work if they stuck to a baddie. The really fun grenades, like ones that spread out or heat-seek enemies, don’t come until later on, and they’re so rare they might as well not be there. Once again, I found myself wishing that someone would follow Bird Assassin‘s lead and give you all the fun stuff early on, let you abuse the shit out of it, and have a good time for your dollar.
Don’t let this discourage you from getting Bungee Ferret Tossing. I actually did have fun with it. It’s a perfectly good waste of a half-hour. I just wish it did more. There’s a Survival mode that’s dull as dishwater, and a time-attack mode that basically makes a mess of the whole game. The enemies shoot at you non-stop, and even with “blinking” you have no chance of survival once you’re tagged. On top of that, the controls for that particular mode feel like they were dipped in road tar and then mummified. Why are the controls so stiff in it? I don’t know. Neurosyphilis perhaps, although that’s probably giving the developer way too much extracurricular credit. I keed.
Pictured: a black gentleman hanging from the end of a rope while a bunch of white guys fire guns into the air. This game will be HUGE in Alabama.
So here’s the deal: Bungee Ferret Tossing is stupid stupid stupid. Some of the modes don’t work. It’s a bit too repetitive and doesn’t offer enough variety of enemies or weapons. BUT, it’s a little fun. That’s what counts in my book. Strip away the bullshit premise, hit mute on the TV, and remove the gore and it would be exactly like an old school Atari 2600 game. One of oddball titles that doesn’t suck to play nearly forty years later. Of course, like the best games from that era, playing it today is only good for about twenty minutes to an hour, and you’ll forget completely about it as soon you turn it off. Hey, that’s good enough for me. It’s like watching a Dukes of Hazzard rerun.
People who pride themselves on being “hardcore gamers” befuddle me, and the reason for that is because they like to segregate games like they’re dorky versions of George Wallace. They spend so much time trying to identify what is a game and what is a game that it bleeds into their dreams. And what have they established? As far as I can tell, Demon’s Souls is a game. Bejeweled is a game. Skyrim is a game but Peggle is a game. It’s confusing to me, because last time I played Peggle, it seemed kind of gamish to me. But then it gets really confusing when stuff like Madden or Call of Duty falls into the a game category, apparently on account of them being played by people who spend less than two hours a week on their consoles and occasionally insert their genitalia into the orifice of a member of the opposite sex, as opposed to just telling people they do. I think what it really comes down to is gamers don’t want to share their hobby with others. They don’t mind if something is popular, as long as it’s only popular with their inner circle. The moment it becomes something that the football quarterback, the librarian, or their mother starts to play, it’s not just theirs anymore. It becomes the embodiment of everything wrong with gaming. It becomes, gasp, a casual game. THUNDER CLASP!
The Angry Birds series has gotten a ton of scorn from guys who claim to be hardcore gamers. I say claim, because I am of the opinion that you can’t be a hardcore gamer if you exclude a series just because it’s popular and your grandmother can play it just as well as you can. Some people think Angry Birds (ironically) represents the canary in the coalmine. The tinfoil hat wearing gamer crowd says that games like Angry Birds will destroy their precious “hardcore” games, because why make something only they like when they can make something everyone likes and make more money. Soon, stuff like Portal or Skyrim will cease to exist just because one series has banked nearly a billion dollars. Of course, in reality things don’t work that way. My Big Fat Greek Wedding made $400,000,000 off a $5,000,000 budget. If the logic of the sky-is-falling gaming crowd were to believed, Hollywood would have phased out big-budget blockbusters in favor of “casual” fare such as Greek Wedding. They didn’t. And Angry Birds is not going to stop your Skyrim sequels from being made.
Rovio made a series so well received that they were able to make nearly a billion dollars in revenue from the game and all related merchandise, spawn off a successful spin-off, and break down mainstream barriers. The fucking nerve of them, am I right?
I don’t care if you have a beef with a game based on how it plays. If you genuinely don’t like Angry Birds because you don’t find it to be a fun game, great. If you say you hate Angry Birds and will never play it because it’s a casual game and ruining the industry, to paraphrase Sarah Silverman: maybe you’re not a hardcore gamer? Maybe you’re a cunt? And the same goes for Madden, and Call of Duty, and 99 cent iPhone games, and Peggle, and every other successful franchise that is too successful for uptight game nerds. Why is it okay for you to love Shadow of the Colossus but not okay for a 65-year-old grandmother to like Wii Sports Bowling? The answer is it is okay for you both, and you’re just being a little bit of a douche.
I’m just as capable of veering off into the hateful “but gaming is my thing” category too. My mother plays Angry Birds now. My mother, who has never played a non-Wii console before. And, get this, she has more achievements and more stars in Angry Birds than I do. My mother, who can’t do math on paper because she can’t grasp the concept of carrying the one, is officially better than me at Angry Birds. When she showed me that she had three-starred an entire section of Angry Birds Seasons, I had two thoughts simultaneously pop into my head. Without exaggeration, there was a tiny voice in my head yelling “Wow, go Mom!” that was being shouted down by another, angrier voice screaming “THAT BITCH!” But, then came the really shameful moment. The one where I was absolutely stuck playing Angry Birds Space, and.. can’t believe I’m admitting this.. my mother beat the level for me. On her first try. And the look of pride on her face was so adorable that I couldn’t even concentrate on trying to figure out where the best place in the house to hang myself from was at.
Madden, a series that provably drives console sales and generates profits that go towards funding such new IPs as Mirror’s Edge, is bad for gaming. Because someone who doesn’t have an Xbox Live Gold account might enjoy it. I don’t get gaming culture sometimes.
That above story? It’s absolutely true. It happened. And it wouldn’t have happened if not for “casual games.” Yea, it’s an embarrassing story, but it’s a great one too. It’s seriously cracking up my boyfriend as we speak. And I am happy that something that is so important to me is now, in whatever small way, part of my mother’s life too. And it’s made her curious what she’s missed in the gaming realm up to this point. She’s 43-years-old, and never once while I was growing up asked to play Banjo Kazooie or Spyro the Dragon with me. So the other day, imagine my surprise when she strolled in and asked what I, as Indie Gamer Chick, was playing next. The fact that she was even curious, or that she called me Indie Gamer Chick, was in all honesty one of the coolest moments of my life. And then I showed her the game about sperm that I’m reviewing this week, and she bolted for the door.
I guess the point of this rant is gaming is a big tent. There’s room for everybody. If someone makes a game that everyone likes, it doesn’t mean games that only you will like will cease to be. I think it’s awesome that we live in era where a game like Angry Birds is enjoyed by 5-year-old girls or 75-year-old retired construction workers. I think it’s awesome that a “casual” platform like the Wii is sitting in the White House right now, occasionally being played by the fucking President of the United States. So when a company like Rovio scores a major hit with Angry Birds, tip your hat to them. They’re bringing people to our big tent, and there’s still plenty of room. And if they can make money by flooding big box stores with so much junk merchandise that it could knock the planet off its orbit, good for them on being able to capitalize on their success. Just because they have toys, t-shirts, and a television series in the works, don’t call them sellouts. I mean, it’s not like they’re George Lucas or anything. Now THAT guy is a sellout. I seriously doubt Rovio would ever, say, join forces with him and create an Angry Birds-Star Wars tie-in game and line of merchandise to complement it.
I’m a pretty big fan of falling block puzzlers, with my preferences of which ones to play going in the following order: Puyo Puyo, Lumines, and Super Puzzle Fighter. My least favorite? Probably Columns, along with all its sequels and clones. Oddly enough, Columns is probably the smarter of the four games listed above. Setting up combos in it requires a level of focus and cognitive thinking that most of the games in its family don’t require. Personally, I would rather play the faster-paced stupid people stuff than the slow and boring smart people stuff. Besides, playing the smart people stuff doesn’t make me feel smarter. It makes me feel stupider for not spending my free time having fun like a smart person does.
Wait, I think that means Columns is in fact the stupid person game. Or the smart game for idiots. Which means Puyo Puyo is the stupid game for smart people. Ugh, I hate it when I do this. I have to get off this train of thought before my nose starts bleeding again.
Snore.
I was going somewhere with the above mess. Senoka is the smart idiot’s smart in a stupid way game. Excuse me, nose bleed.
Okay, so Senoka is like Columns, only instead of clearing colored blocks by matching them together, you clear them by matching them to the color in the background. God, that just sounds like the most boring thing since the World Championships of Coloring Books, and at least that had the drama of young Timmy Johnson being unable to stay in the lines due to a hand cramp. Senoka’s pace is snail-slow, and despite featuring a combo-based scoring system, doesn’t have the ease of actually setting up combos. Without that, the potential for addiction that a great falling blocks game needs is not there.
It’s not that Senoka is badly made. It works, at least when you figure out what you’re doing. There’s no tutorial, or any form of an explanation screen. I would call this a rookie mistake, since Senoka comes from a first-time developer, but come on! This is the type of mistake from someone who has never played games before. You’re thrown into the deep end right from the start. And that deep end is filled with sharks, because the AI is way over balanced. Even on easy mode, AI opponents move and think faster than you and are almost unbeatable. The demoralizing AI and the boring concept make for a game that is almost numbing in its dullness. Senoka is the boring game for boring people.
Divided was developed by Angler Games
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