It’s been 580 days since I started Indie Gamer Chick. In that time, I’ve reviewed 352 games, 327 of which are for Xbox Live Indie Games. My participation in the XBLIG community has been nothing short of life changing for me. Sometimes my reviews aren’t exactly nice, so being embraced by developers was not something that I expected. I feel like I’ve been adopted by a loving, nurturing family. Yea, Xbox Live Indie Games don’t always produce the highest quality of titles, but that’s the price you pay for having an open platform. For all the bitching people (including myself) do about some truly abysmal games that were intended to be bad from the get-go, it’s all worth it. It created a place where talented, enthusiastic dreamers could create and market their very own video games.
Proof that XBLIG isn’t dead: there’s some very exciting looking titles still on the horizon. This is Ring Runner, coming this Summer. Check out their YouTube channel by clicking the picture.
Unfortunately, word from Microsoft leaked this week that XNA, which is the sole development language of Xbox Live Indie Games, has begun to be phased out. While not discontinued, XNA is now classified as “no longer under development.” Along with this, all current XNA MVPs will be relieved of their duties on April 1, 2014. This has caused widespread mourning among the XBLIG community. Mind you, we’re over a year away from the date that MVPs are being let go. Still, the future of Xbox Live Indie Games, which was always shaky at best, now seems downright bleak.
To clear-up some misconceptions for those non-hardcore XBLIG fans that read me, Xbox Live Indie Games are, to the best of my knowledge, not being removed from the Xbox 360 Marketplace at this time. In fact, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be around for at least another year. If the time comes where membership to the App Hub is stopped, then you can feel free to panic. However, there’s no question that XBLIGs as we know them today will cease to exist sometime in the future. Hopefully some questions will be answered with the next generation Xbox is unveiled in the coming months.
Another reason to stay excited about Xbox Live Indie Games: DLC Quest has a sequel on the way. It’s called Live Freemium or Die and it’s coming “very soon” says creator Ben Kane. Okay, so I’m the one and only person who begged him to NOT do a sequel, but if anyone can prove me wrong, it’s him. Click the picture for the trailer.
The end of XNA is not the end of Xbox Live Indie Games. Indies will factor into the next generation Xbox. Not because Xbox Live Indie Games was a rousing success, because it wasn’t. It’s because the game industry is trending this way. iPhone has become one of the most successful gaming consoles in history. Sony has created its own open-to-anyone platform. This is the direction the industry is heading. Microsoft won’t keep indies around because they’re trendy or because they’re artists. They’ll do so because it’s sound business sense.
In the meantime, my fans on Twitter want to know what this means for Indie Gamer Chick. Well, since Xbox Live Indie Games aren’t going anywhere in the immediate future, I’m not going anywhere either. Yea, I suffered from a bit of burnout earlier this month, but then a couple of games came along that reminded me why I’ve stuck by this platform for the last eighteen months. Of course, I can’t say what the future holds once XBLIGs begin to roll out on the next generation platform. Whether they remain the focus of my site will depend on how open the platform is and the volume of games released on it. If it sees the same amount of games as PlayStation Mobile, I obviously wouldn’t be able to center my site around it. Thankfully, my name is Indie Gamer Chick, and thus I’m not tied down to anything.
Escape Goat 2 might not come to Xbox Live Indie Games, which is exactly why I need to start paying more attention to other avenues of indie gaming. You can head to the developer’s website by clicking the picture and threaten bodily harm if he doesn’t release on XBLIG. Or, you know, ask politely.
I am announcing that I’m going to include more coverage of non-XBLIG platforms. Until recently, reviews of games on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, iOS, and Wii U eShop were rare here. That’s going to change. Xbox Live Indie Games will remain the primary focus of my site until Xbox Live Indie Games cease to be. But I’ll also make a good effort to have one non-XBLIG review weekly. Along with this, you can also expect features like Indies in Due Time (returning soon) and Tales from the Dev Side to look outside of Xbox Live Indie Games. In fact, the MonoGame Team will be doing an editorial sometime in the near future. There might also be changes in the Leaderboard in July in time for my second year anniversary, so that it includes iOS and PlayStation Mobile titles. I’ll keep those elitist PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade games off it. Snooty bastards. And don’t even get me started on Wii U’s eShop. It seems to have suffered some kind of gaming version of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
I hate reviewing local-only multiplayer games. First, you have to round-up players. Then you have to tell them what we’re playing. Then they leave, because they thought they were coming over to play something they’ve heard of, and you have to round-up more players. Writing these reviews makes me sound like a broken record, because there’s only so many ways to say “it’s tough to sell non-indie fanatics on playing these games.” Even when they turn out to be exceptional, like Hidden in Plain Sight, the real challenge is finding interested parties to play. I think I would have an easier time finding people who want to watch a video of me having my appendix removed.
Squadron Scramble ups the ante by offering eight player local support. Uh huh. Excuse me for one second.
Seriously, I even don’t know eight people by name. There’s Brian, Mommy, Daddy, and everyone else is Whatshisface. And this is one of those games where you get eight players by sharing controllers, with one person using the left stick and trigger and the other person using the right one. It’s the gaming version of a three-legged race. Finding three other competent players would be tough enough, but seven more? Tee-hee, right. Plus, I’m quitting smoking right now and nobody wants to be within assault-and-battery distance from me, let alone sitting right next to me, getting their hand-sweat all over MY controller.
Thus, I only found three other suckers to play Squadron Scramble with, and surprise, we had a damn good time playing it. Actually, it’s not that surprising. As long as the game is fast-paced, user-friendly, and not broken, any four player experience is bound to be jolly-good entertainment. Such as the case here, where you have 2D dog fights with all actions reduced to one stick and one button. Anyone can pick it up and play it. Whether they play it well is really irrelevant to the amount of fun you can have. That’s the mark of a good multiplayer game. At first, Squadron Scramble does that. It just doesn’t last.
The first thing you have to do in Squadron Scramble is move a little dude into a hanger. Once you enter the hanger, you take off in a fighter jet. Each player gets a team of four dudes. You get a point for every plane you shoot down. If you’re in the sky and get shot, your dude parachutes down. You have two options from this point: you can return the dude to the hanger, or you can switch him out for another dude. Since points are tied to dudes that are alive, switching out is meant to add an element of strategy to the game. Switching out dudes “banks” whatever points are made and protects them, since you lose all points scored with a dude if he dies. Sounds like a good idea, but actually this was a game crippler for my session.
The game goes by rounds, with the person who has the most points winning each round. You need three rounds to win. Here’s the problem: points carry over between rounds. So if one player builds an insurmountable lead, they can spend the next couple rounds stalling, with their highest-scoring guys grounded, and never worry about losing. It’s an utterly brain-dead decision and it ruined more than one session of Squadron Scramble, because it was too easy to protect a lead.
This is one of those times where the developers lost track of the fact that not everyone who plays their game will be as highly knowledgeable or skilled as they are. They forget that they, you know, made the fucking thing and thus know how to play it best. It’s not exactly the same as making a punisher too hard and losing track of that, but it’s a common theme in multiplayer games. I’ve had five developers who make such games send me detailed instructions on how to best play their games to ensure maximum entertainment. The developers of Squadron Scramble did this too. Nice guys, mind you. And very patient, considering that I’ve delayed and delayed this review. I like their game. I’m putting it on the Leaderboard. But it’s time for a reality check, fellas: unless you’re going to personally contact every person who purchases your game and give them the same instructions, which obviously you can’t do, you should recognize that maybe your game has a problem. If you need to explain to people the best ways to make your game fun, you’ve screwed up somewhere along the line. The best multiplayer games are self-explanatory. Choppy Chomp-Chomp, the only multiplayer game to reach the top 10 on this site, requires no hand-holding. Squadron Scramble shouldn’t need to, but the developers wanted to hold my hand anyway. Personal space, guys. Don’t make me break out the pepper spray.
It’s still fun though. Very fun, in fact. It’s hugely satisfying to shoot down a guy on a scoring-streak, watch them parachute to the ground, and then Kamikaze your plane into them before they can duck into the hanger. The controls have only a slight learning curve. The action is incredibly fast-paced. I wouldn’t at all recommend trying eight players though. We played with four players and four AI planes, and the game became an unmanageable clusterfuck that nobody could follow. Also, there’s not a ton of depth here. While games like Hidden in Plain Sight might be dusted off from time to time, you’ll get one, maybe two, sessions out of Squadron Scramble and then mothball it for good. Not because it’s bad, but because it wears thin after an hour or two. Once a player emerges from the group as the unquestioned God of the session, the rules skew too much in their favor. This either leads to everyone ganging up on them, or the leader stalling, none of which produce exciting gameplay for anyone involved. Squadron Scramble’s first hour will be the best, and then it will all fall apart after that. That’s fine. That’s how every Will Smith movie plays out, and people still watch them.
Alright, so this is awkward, but I didn’t like escapeVektor on the Vita. Apparently I’m the only person in the entire world who didn’t, so I guess I should explain myself. Often, when I dislike a popular game, I’m asked “what did you expect?” As if I hold every game to such unreasonably high standards that nothing can possibly please me. My honest answer is “all I expect is to have fun.” If I don’t get that, I don’t give a game a pass because it looks good, plays well, and has a nifty concept. If a game bores me, I say so. And escapeVektor bored me to fucking tears.
This is one of those rare times I wish I had bought the 3DS version of a game. I bet it would have looked pretty cool in 3D.
Going off screenshots, I figured it would be similar to Qix. Watching it in motion, I figured it would be a little like Pac-Man. Once I started playing, I wished it had been closer to those games. At least they were fun. Here the idea is you have to guide an exceptionally slow-moving ship around a grid, filling in all the lines, opening up either an exit or more lines, which open up different exits. Along the way, a variety of enemies tries to kill you. There’s a storyline involved, but with any game like this, I wonder why they bother. Even with the admittedly pretty visuals, this is an old school maze game, straight out of the Pac-Man craze of the early 80s. It needed a story about as much as quail need bulls-eyes on their wings.
Oh, but it does have a storyline. One that pops up between levels and utterly refuses to shut up. You’ll get past a difficult stage, all full of enthusiasm for a job well done, anxious to kick the ass of the next stage, and then the story rears its ugly head. Some tripe about a guy stuck in a CPU. It’s not intriguing in the slightest, and its presence was about as well received by myself as a bout of standing-quadriplegia that hits the moment you answer the door to Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Seriously, please stop talking. I’m trying to play a game here.
After a while, the game does get faster. You get boosters that allow you to zip around stages and avoid enemies. And the game throws a few more twists at you, like tailgating enemies, electrified gateways, and more power-ups to fight back. But, for me at least, it never stopped being boring. Part of that is due to a moderately large design flaw. You know how pretty much every maze game ever made does this thing where if you die, you don’t have to start the level over from scratch? Like in Pac-Man, if you die with only two dots left in the stage, you get to replay the stage, with the board exactly how you left it? Probably so as to avoid tedium? Yeah, well escapeVektor doesn’t do that. Imagine going through a sprawling level, heel-toeing your way through a gauntlet of enemies, only to run out of bombs with five feet to go from the exit and getting caught by a random enemy, or a bullet from a turret. Guess what? You get to replay the whole level over again. I didn’t find Vektor’s breed of gameplay all that exciting to begin with. In some later levels, turning the game off entirely seemed like a better option towards rehabilitating my dull day.
There probably should be more reasons why I disliked escapeVektor, but I honestly can’t think of anything. I have to admit, as a critic, it’s kind of tough to say “I didn’t like a game and I’m not totally sure why.” I mean, I like these type of games. I liked the art style. I thought it controlled pretty smoothly. I guess I should like it. Everybody else does. It’s being thrown 8s out of 10s, 9s out of 10s, or 4s out of 5s by pretty much every other rinky dinky critic alive. I told a friend “I seem to be the only person who doesn’t like it.” He said “that doesn’t surprise me.” Typically, when I’m the one voice that says “meh” in a crowd of cheers, I get accused of trolling. I try to avoid trolling indies. It’s bad for the soul. In the case of escapeVektor, I genuinely thought it was boring. You might.. hell, likely will, disagree with me on that. But I assure you, my “meh” here is my authentic opinion. When I troll, I go after the easiest targets, like any self-respecting troll does. Like ancient Sega properties that actually do suck but their fans don’t realize it. Speaking of which, NiGHTS was $2.50 on PSN this week. Yep, that’ll do. That’s what I love about Sega. It’s like having the barreled fish hand you the gun.
escapeVektor was developed by Nnooo. Which is ironic, because that’s the sound I made every time the story crept up again.
$7.99 (normal price $9.99) wants neo-retro developers to seriously ponder whether or not Golden-Age coin-ops would be considered classics if players were interrupted between each stage by unskippable text or cut scenes in the making of this review.
James Petruzzi of Discord Games is an Indie Gamer Chick all-star. He has two games on the Leaderboard, the writer of the most popular Tales from the Dev Side editorial that’s been published here, and now he’s chosen to sponsor the new (and still unfinished due to laziness) XBLIG Developer Index, kicking in a whopping $200 towards Autism Speaks. He also happens to have a very interesting looking Metroidvania coming later in 2013. James is here to talk about his new title, called Chasm, and the trials and tribulations of making games for XBLIG.
Cathy: Chasm is not coming to XBLIG. Et tu, Brute?
James: Right off the bat, I haven’t decided yet.
Cathy: Oh?
James: It runs on my Xbox 360 right now, and I’m planning on keeping it that way. But whether I release it or not, I’m not sure.
Cathy: Why not?
James: I’m not going to release it for a dollar.
Cathy: Oh.
James: My only option I feel is 400MSP, but whether people on that market would spring for it, I have no clue.
Cathy: So?
James: So? I hear you boil developers who release games at 400MSP in oil.
Cathy: As a point of order, I did place Bleed, a 400MSP game, in my Top 10.
James: Yea, but you also boiled them in oil after that. They’re still in bandages.
Cathy: Good game though.
James: Did the Bleed guy ever release numbers?
Cathy: Um yea, actually I just asked him. He told me it sold 900 units on XBLIG.
James: Those numbers show the problem with XBLIG.
Cathy: Net gross of about $3,150 for the developer. Sad thing is, can’t prove it, but I bet it would have sold a couple thousand copies at 240.
James: Either way it’s still terrible for a game that high quality.
The awesomely fun Take Arms was a critical hit, but about as well received by Xbox owners as a bagpipe simulator.
Cathy: What about PlayStation Mobile, where developers have huge flexibility on prices?
James: I haven’t really researched it to be honest, and I’m not sure whats all required to even get on there.
Cathy: It’s supposed to be a relatively open platform. I don’t know. Sony had said they would get back to me and never did.
James: So I’m just squarely focused on PC for now, I want to launch on Win/Mac/Linux and then go from there. But if it makes money, I’ll port it to everything under the sun with a D-pad.
Cathy: I’ll look forward to the NES, Master System, and 3DO releases.
James: Hahaha! Well, I’d consider PlayStation Network, Wii U, and maybe 3DS or Vita releases.
Cathy: Take Arms was pretty well received by critics, but it kind of flopped in sales. 48 Chambers was good, but again, didn’t really sell well. Is that why you’re trying to more traditional game with Chasm?
James: No, I’m actually just making it because it’s the game I’ve wanted to make since the beginning. If you watch the Evolution of Take Arms video we put on YouTube, you’ll see that started as a Castlevania type game. We were way too inexperienced though to deal with that much content, so we decided to make it a multiplayer game instead. Obviously something flopped with Take Arms that’s beyond the amount of content or anything.
Cathy: Maybe it was difficult to articulate that it was a multiplayer game. There’s obviously SOME interest for those on XBLIG, as seen in the success of Shark Attack Deathmatch. Maybe “Take Arms Deathmatch” sells 10,000 units and has a robust user base to keep it going?
James: Yea that’s definitely a possibility, but at the same time, I think you must have the right product at the right time.
Cathy: I think the big sticking point is the amount of people who play it daily. I reviewed Shark Attack Deathmatch in late December. I checked it last night, and there is still a wide variety of people playing. Then I tried Take Arms and found that nobody was playing.
James: If I would have kept up with content updates we probably could have grown a community or something around it. But that’s the hard part with multiplayer games, and why I will probably never do one again. With them, the community of people playing it is what gives the game value. If you take that away, it’s basically worthless.
Cathy: I would rank my play session with Take Arms against the other XBLIG critics as one of the best times I’ve had since starting Indie Gamer Chick. Do you think maybe some form of organized tournaments might have caused it to catch on?
James: We should have focused on organizing community play dates and doing more with it, but yeah, I guess we were just done after two years.
Only the most secure-in-their-manhood blacksmiths dared to use a pink anvil.
Cathy: Okay, onto Chasm. It looks really good. You originally intended Take Arms to be a Metroidvania, and now you’re finally doing one. What made you decide that now you’re ready?
James: Well, to be honest, it was a last-ditch effort. I quit my corporate job last May to focus on my next title full-time, Tim and I were talking again about doing something, which turned into this sci-fi Terraria-like called Solus. We worked on that through may and part of June, and Tim decided he wasn’t having fun anymore and was done. So we parted on good terms, but I was left with a big game to do by myself. In July I basically decided to scrap it, and started working on the original version of Chasm, which was basically going to be a cash in I guess for XBLIG. It was going to be a mining game like Miner Dig Deep, but with combat, weapons, some bosses and stuff to fight. I mean don’t get me wrong, I’ve wanted to do a mining game for a while, but I couldn’t really tell you what I liked about them, but I think I somehow managed to cut all the fun out of it. At some point by like September I had the engine pretty far along, but I was just hating it, I had completely forgotten why I started doing this stuff in the first place.
Cathy: What about the engine was off?
James: The engine was fine, I just couldn’t figure out a good formula for the game. Nothing ever felt right, like I was battling it constantly. And at some point I just began to resent it. All the fun was gone. That was definitely my lowest point in a long time. It was nervous-breakdown type levels for a while. So I scrapped it all.
Cathy: Do you know how many developers I’ve met since starting my site that I honestly feel would scrap something if they weren’t comfortable with it? Probably not a lot. I take it the current build you’re much more satisfied with?
James: Oh my God, yes! It was like the next day I made a new project, started coding shit all over, and man, I was like in love immediately.
The eyes have it!
Cathy: So how far along is Chasm now?
James: Very early. I started fresh October 25 or 26 I think. I’m shooting to have it done in a year from then.
Cathy: You guys are on Steam Greenlight. Most developers I’ve talked with who have listed their games on this have been, ahem, humbled by the, ahem, polite discourse on it. How has the feedback for Chasm been?
James: Well first let me tell you, I put Take Arms and 48 Chambers on there immediately when the service first went up. It was free for a while if you remember, so I was like why not? 48 chambers did incredibly poorly, as you can imagine. I finally took it off there last week after being up since launch and it was at like 23% I think. Almost every comment called it a mobile game and said it would be perfect on iPhone, which is funny since the entire game is designed around a thumb-stick, but okay.
Cathy: I do get their point, but yea, can’t imagine playing it with touch or tilt controls.
James: Take Arms did a bit better, but not very. At its highest point it was 52% to top 100, 48% when I pulled it off last week. Now that, on the other hand, was called a “flash game” in a snobbish way. Apparently there are a couple of flash games that are similar, so everyone on PC absolutely hated it. I think Alex Jordan got same kinda criticism about Cute Things Dying Violently.
James: Yea, so PC gamers are very weary of anything that looks like a flash game that they might have once saw.
Cathy: But then you put up Chasm, and it’s doing well to say the least.
James: I put it up just for the hell of it after we put up the new video on the 11th. It’s now in the top 100 on Steam Greenlight.
Cathy: Very nice!
James: That’s with no major media support whatsoever, its purely from Greenlighters.
Cathy: I’m not major media?
James: Were you pimping it?
Cathy: That’s what I’m doing now.
James: Too late! I’m top 100 now. You get no credit.
Cathy: Awwwwwww.
James: I’m not sure where these votes are coming from, we’ve had 20k unique hits since then. I didn’t realize that many people even rated Greenlight games for the hell of it. So it’s a little surprising thinking I’m going to have to work my ass off to push traffic to it, when in reality i did nothing, just put a video on and answered people’s questions.
Cathy: I think now that it cost money to list your game, you’re seeing more dedicated, anxious fans, instead of haters and trolls.
James: Ya think?
Cathy: That’s my best guess.
James: So yea, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Which is crazy for something only two months into development.
Cathy: It’s a Metroidvania, but it’s also a Roguelike. Were you beat on as a child?
James: Before you jump to conclusions, the Roguelike influence is more from Diablo than anything.
Cathy: Oh good, so Roguelike for pussies. Noted.
James: I didn’t say that.
Cathy: The headline from this shall read “James Petruzzi, developer of upcoming game Chasm, calls all Diablo fans pussies.”
James: Are you trying to get me in trouble?
Cathy: Always.
James: I wouldn’t call it for-pussies! I think permadeath is pretty harsh punishment for failure.
Cathy: So when can we expect Chasm?
James: Hopefully late 2013.
Cathy: Come on, 400MSP XBLIG release?
James: Man I still like XBLIG, it’s a love/hate thing you know? I love it for being an open marketplace, but I hate it for being an open marketplace.
Seriously, James. You’ve got to come up with more exciting screens than these. This is your big moment!
Cathy: Hey, some neo-retro games are getting full XBLA releases. Spelunky for example. Why not try to secure a publisher?
James: Honestly, it’s really nice not having anyone to answer to. Only problem is always money, you know?
Cathy: Which I hear you’re thinking of solving by going through Kic..kic..kic..
James: Cathy, you okay?
Cathy: Excuse me, you’re thinking of going through Kic..kic..kic..
James: Kickstarter?
Cathy: Yea, that.
James: You seem to have a little bit of blood coming out of your nose.
Cathy: Yea, that happens whenever I hear or say that word.
James: I don’t think that’s healthy.
Cathy: Tell me about it. After writing that last editorial, my office looked like the Crazy 88s scene from Kill Bill.
James: Yea I’m thinking about Kickst.. that. I’m thinking about using that.
Cathy: Nice save. Gives me a chance to clot.
James: I’m also thinking about alpha funding, or even selling out to Microsoft. I’ve considered it all, and I’m still not sure what the best route is. We’re going to Game Developers Conference in March to show off Chasm, hopefully get some people interested.
Cathy: Might help to wear a tee-shirt that says “will sell my creative vision for food.”
James: I’m not THAT desperate yet!
Cathy: You’re thinking of using Kickstarter. You ARE that desperate.
James: Cathy, your nose.
Cathy: Well shit. Better wrap this up. I’ve got to go to the hospital again.
Did you know that when they tested the first atomic bomb, those involved took bets on what they thought might happen? Mostly it was about the amount of kilotons the explosion would be, but there were also side bets such as whether or not it would kill all present, cause the fault line to collapse, knock the Earth off its axis, or blow up the entire planet. I’m not sure how the winner would have collected if the last option had won out, but it’s true and well documented, and only some of those bets were tongue-in-cheek. Smart guys who, truth be told, had no fucking clue what would happen. With some experiments, you can’t know until you push the button.
Scribendus attempts to combine Scrabble and Tetris. I’m sure this has been attempted before (someone steered me in the direction of a Tetris-craze era title called Wordtris) but I’ve never played one. It’s a concept that seems like it should work, but in this case, it doesn’t. The idea is two letters at a time drop from the ceiling and you have to stack them in a way that forms a word. You can build a word (minimum four letters) diagonally, horizontally, or vertically. The problem of course, is being given two random letters at a time doesn’t leave you a whole lot of room for strategy or versatility. I consider myself pretty dang good at word games, but I couldn’t make Scribendus work for me. The only strategy that seemed to work was trying to build one decent sized (six letter or so) word across the bottom and stacking all other blocks on the side, but even this didn’t work. I got my best score by completely ignoring the letters all together and just stacking the blocks randomly, spacing the vowels apart from each other. Using this technique, I scored big points and multiple combos. And I don’t even know what words I made.
I can’t really slam Scribendus too much. It looks good, sounds good, and controls good. It feels to me like a worthy experiment that failed. That will happen in the land of indies. While my enthusiastic fans might want to me to shred every game that isn’t good, now might be a good time to remind readers that it’s okay to try something new and not have it succeed. Sometimes you can’t know if something will work until you create it and market it. Look at Lexiv, the Scrabble-meets-Sim City game. That could have just as well been a disaster too. I admire creator Dave Turka for giving it a try. His particular Manhattan Project simply failed to detonate, and now he become derp, destroyer of words.
80 Microsoft Points noted that a man named Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Trinity test betting pool with a guess of 18 kilotons (actual explosion was 18.6 kilotons) in the making of this review. His opponents overbid, allowing him to take both showcases.
Platformer from Hell comes from Hoosier Games, a group of academics from Indiana. I know, I know. Academics? In Indiana? I went “Hah!” too, but upon further research, they do have institutes of higher learning there. I’m not sure what is considered higher learning in Indiana. “Cow Tipping 101” or “Why you can’t pork your sister” I would imagine are on the agenda. I’m kidding of course. Actually, I’m quite friendly with project manager Derrick Fuchs (I hope that’s pronounced the way I think it is) and I ranked their previous effort, Warp Shooter, on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. It was flawed but functional and fun. I applauded their efforts and looked forward to their next game. Which is here. And it sucks. A lot.
Where’s Waldo? causes less squinting.
It’s a punisher, of course. But it’s one of those tedious, excruciating punishers where dying and restarting levels is more of a chore than an acceptable part of the gameplay. This is partially because levels are overly large and pathways to victory are sprawling, convoluted nightmares. A good punisher, if there is such a thing (there is) should be fast paced and frequent deaths need to be handled in a way that doesn’t make them feel like a chore. Well, Platformer from Hell feels like a chore, with me cast in the role of Cinderella and bad jumping physics and boring level design co-starring as the wicked step-sisters.
And then there’s the graphics. The characters and some of the traps in Platformer from Hell are practically microscopic. I have a TV large enough to double as King Kong’s monocle, and yet the star of the game is a teeny-tiny little spec of pixels that vaguely resembles a person. Although this does allow you to see more of the stage and plan out which routes you’ll take faster, the drawback is you’ll suffer eye-strain and end up needing a monocle yourself. Another problem with the graphics is sometimes the background is overly bloomy and it drowns out the ability to properly see the hazards, especially spikes. Ultimately, it’s a game that’s intent is to frustrate and anger players, not entertain. Derrick noted to me that any faults with the game are his fault, not his team of students. Duly noted. That’s why I’m teaching the next lesson, which will be “how to tar and feather a fellow human being.” Alright guys, we’ll need 5 old feather pillows and some tar, or honey if no tar can be found. Trust me, this will be fun.
Actually, a better lesson could probably be learned from Little Acorns Deluxe by Team Pesky. It’s a platformer that does ramp up in challenge, but in a natural way that gives players room to grow instead of throwing them straight into the deep end on their first day of swimming lessons. Here you play as the patriarch of a family of chipmunks. No, not Dave Seville. An actual chipmunk, who must go through stages collecting acorns for winter stock-up. At first, Little Acorns might seem a tad bit on the easy side. Enemies don’t really kill you. They just turn you green and slow you down. The only way to die is to drown in water, but that doesn’t show up too often. The real challenge is the time limit in each stage, but it’s fairly generous. As you go along, you’re given new abilities like a rope to swing on special platforms or crash through bricks with. It’s alright. I guess.
It’s never really too difficult. I never had to repeat a stage more than once. Part of that is Little Acorns got its start as a Windows Phone game. You can’t really ramp up difficulty too much in a phone game, where players have to spend the majority of the time fighting the crappy digital-controls. With a proper controller, the game plays relatively smoothly. I found the rope physics to be somewhat goofy, but not a deal breaker.
Why I’m having a hard time getting excited is Little Acorns is a little on the dull side. Whether you’re gathering acorns or rounding up your children, the game never really feels original or engaging. There’s no real original hook to sink you into the experience, and no storyline or big twists in the gameplay to keep you going once you’ve started. Not that games need such devices, but they go a long way on the indie scene. Little Acorns is not outstanding on the grounds that it does not stand out. It is a decent, solid game that will give you four to six hours of platforming that you’ll be satisfied with once it’s over and forget all about in a day or two. The reason I reviewed it here is because the contrast between it and Platformer from Hell couldn’t be more jarring. One game gathers up all the nuts and isolates them in a cold, hollow place. The other is a game about chipmunks.
Kickstarter is not venture capital. It’s not angel investing. Pledgers are not looking for a monetary return on their investment. I do understand this. And yet, I’m still not a supporter of Kickstarter, because I think it sends the wrong message to potential developers: money is easy to come by. I believe it’s irresponsible to teach young entrepreneurs that money should be given to them based on a concept and raw enthusiasm. Funding should only be given on the grounds of actual ability, a proven track record of completed, competent projects, and the willingness to personally sacrifice for the benefit of your project. It’s shocking to me how people fund games from people who meet none of that criteria. I’m even more shocked when a developer reaches their Kickstarter goal, gets the money, and within weeks has another ask posted for even more funding.. and gets it.
I’ve already offered advice to would-be developers who wish to use Kickstarter to fund their projects. I’m not against the idea of start-up developers seeking funding, and I have no problem with an established developer (indie or otherwise) using Kickstarter. But I’ve also made it pretty clear that my blog doesn’t exist to plug Kickstarters. In April of last year, shortly after Double Fine’s then record-breaking Kickstarter got huge publicity, I received over fifty requests to pledge and plug the Kickstarters from developers of all skills and backgrounds. It got to the point where I added “Kickstarter” to my spam filter. It doesn’t always work. Last week, someone with no history in game design at all who read my blog sent me a request asking me to look at their concept art. They beat my spam filter by spelling Kickstarter “I < ickstarter.” The ask was in the five-figure range. Grotesquely appalling to say the least.
I do not want to discourage dreamers from attempting to create their own games. Far from it. I encourage everyone who’s ever considered making a game of their own to give it a shot. But there’s many options to make your games without spending thousands of dollars of other people’s money to do so. Xbox Live Indie Games, for example. For $100, give or take, you not only get the tools needed to develop a game, but you’re guaranteed to have your game be available commercially on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Well not 100% guaranteed. There are rules against games with sexual, racist, drug, or Nazi themes to them. So if your dream game was “Smoke a Blunt with that Homo Kraut Hitler” you’re shit out of luck.
More importantly: if you decide game development isn’t for you, or if you run out of time to do it, or any of the hundreds of things that could possibly go wrong, you’re only out $100 and nobody else is out anything. I went back to look and see what progress has been made on some of those fifty Kickstarters I got requests for back in April. Of the seven I checked that got their funding (amounts between $600 and $3,500), exactly zero actually put the games out. Three of the seven blogs haven’t updated in months, and one other no longer has a website. One of the developers that hasn’t updated in months also had a second Kickstarter that didn’t meet its goal. I’m not saying those projects will never come out, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Sadly, many people did bet on it.
The game that started the Kickstarter plague. I’m actually excited to play it, even if my spam inbox is quite bloated from it. I legitimately have more Kickstarter pitches in it currently than offers for boner pills or Nigerian princes.
Besides the things I noted in my previous Kickstarter piece, there are lots of things that people do wrong. It’s stuff you also see in legitimate investing too. Like promising stuff you can’t really promise. I’ve taken pitches from software developers who believe if they receive funding, they will get a contract from a company to adapt their software. As if the mere presence of a backer will push them through regardless of the quality of the final product. The old “it’s about who you know” adage that isn’t as true as most people believe. Obviously things don’t work that way. If it were true, there would be no room for start-ups in this world. For start-ups, it’s almost always about the talent on display and the quality of the product.
The Kickstarter version of that is games from start-ups who say they are aiming for, or outright guarantee, a release on platforms like Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, or Steam. All those platforms are pretty exclusive and extremely difficult to get listings on. A pitcher can no more promise that than a theologian can claim to prove the existence of God. It’s okay to aim high, but be realistic about it. Your chances of getting listed on a platform like XBLA is slim to none.
Another common problem is having a pitcher use their attempt at receiving funding to prove if there’s interest in a product. The idea being that if someone is willing to invest money in something, obviously it’s a good idea and will catch on, sell well, and make all involved wealthy. On the flip side, if nobody bites, obviously there’s not interest in it and it’s not something worth doing. For some businesses, this is actually valid. Some. Not all. For gaming, I don’t believe it is, and here’s why: not every concept sounds like a winner on paper. I would think a game like Shadow of the Colossus would be a tough sell on most consumers, at least on the drawing board stage. On the other hand, a game like NeverDead sounds fun and quirky on paper, looks good from screenshots, and seems downright fun when you watch the trailer for it. The game itself was an unplayable piece of shit. If I had taken a pitch for Shadow of the Colossus, I would have passed. An experimental game formula, from a developer with a history of production delays and heavy employment turnover, whose only previous title underperformed in sales? It would have been an easy pass.
A large-scale developer, like Double Fine, can legitimately use Kickstarter to find out if there’s interest a game. They did, there was, and they’re making it. But a small-time indie developer? If I heard from one of them that they were only interested in making a game if people pledged money, I would assume they don’t have the type of passion I require to invest in someone. Indies should make the games they want to play, not the games others want to play. As much as I bust on punishers (as I will in my next review), if that’s where someone’s passion lies, that is what they should be developing. Period. End of story.
Here’s a question that is almost never asked, but it really ought to be: “have you ever had this much money?” It’s a question that can appear to be condescending or invasive, but it’s actually a very important question to ask to anyone seeking any form of investment. Does this person have the ability to manage money wisely? Money spends quickly. Typically it’s a lot quicker than anyone asking for funding realizes. When a person receives the payment, it feels so large at first, like it will never run out. Before you know it, it’s gone, and you haven’t accomplished any of the goals the money was obtained for. Given the amount of developers who post additional asks, it shows that a lot of them aren’t good with money.
In my previous Kickstarter piece, I said that pitchers should get price quotes and state exactly what the money is being spent on. Believe it or not, this point was the most contested of the entire feature. But the reason I included it is because not having those quotes can come back to bite you in the ass. Let’s say you ask for $10,000, with 25% of that being put towards hiring an artist. You get a rough quote from the artist before the Kickstarter for $2,500, so you think you’re set. But once you have the money and you sit down to hire them, they find out the project requires much more time, and thus their fee goes up. You shop around and find similar prices from other talented artists. Now you’re forced into either paying a talented artist more, or hiring an inferior artist, which goes against the principle of the pitch you used to get the funding in the first place. Most start-ups are horrified to discover how little they get for what seems like an extravagant amount of money. Small-time game developers are no different.
This is a great example of using Kickstarter right. The guys behind The Pinball Arcade asked for exactly what they needed to acquire the license for Twilight Zone and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The rewards they offered were good rewards. Most importantly, they had a track record of making very good conversions of classic pinball machines. Follow their lead.
If you’ve never made a game before, don’t use Kickstarter. Visualizing a game, drawing concept art, and planning it out are the easy parts. Once you receive funding, you actually have to make the game. It’s a slow, tedious process that is anything but smooth. Even if you have artistic gifts, making a game that looks good is complex. Making the game play well is even tougher. Assuming you don’t just want to rush the game out, having a game that is playable and fun requires fine tuning, concessions on your vision, and many hours of frustration. Almost any independent developer will tell you that their final products never come out exactly how they planned. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Others get so discouraged by the whole process that they quit. Why do you think so many people start games that they never finish. I promise you one thing: for most, it’s not because they run out of money.
Finish a project. Finish multiple projects. Learn to compromise. Learn to take feedback. More importantly, find out what you are capable of doing as a developer. Find your strengths and your weaknesses. And finally, be ready to admit if you don’t have the level of talent that someone asking for donations from strangers should have. Not everyone has the talent to make a good game. No amount of money will change that. You either have talent or you don’t, and this isn’t one of those deals where you can inject talent to get ahead.
And for God’s sake, don’t open a Kickstarter with the intent of using it to quit your job to develop games. People who have never attempted to make a game do this. There’s no nice way of saying it: if you try that, you are a jumbo-sized stupid fucking moron. It would be like someone who has never picked up a golf club deciding to leave their job to join the PGA tour. You wouldn’t give them money. You would call for the nice guys with the straight jackets to come take him to the, ahem, country club.
I had never seen Storage Wars on A&E before I picked up Storage Warfare on XBLIG yesterday. I got it because the concept seemed weird and different. When I tweeted that this was the next game up for review, I had a few people ask questions like “is there an annoying guy who screams “YEAAAAAH” when he bids?” Mostly people just bitched about how this was obviously a lazy attempt to capitalize on a semi-popular, semi-obscure cable-based reality television show. Obviously schlock like Storage Warfare will usher in the fall of gaming as we know it, rendering all previous games obsolete, and burying your Zeldas, Metal Gears, and Skyrims under a mountain of games based on Dog the Bounty Hunter or Honey Boo Boo.
I guess that means the guys behind Storage Warfare must be especially diabolical, seeing how it’s been on iPhone and Android long before it’s XBLIG release yesterday. Not content to toil in obscurity on iPhone, they had to port to XBLIG, where their title is certain to sell at least 73 copies. Greedy bastards.
Who in their right mind would keep a safe with stacks of cash in a storage locker? Wouldn’t that cash have been put to better use by, I dunno, using the cash to pay off the debt to the facility so that they didn’t auction off your shit?
In all seriousness, who gives a shit what the game is based on? Is it fun should be the big question, which oddly enough, only one person out of twenty asked. Everyone else moaned in disappointment like they just got done having fellatio performed on them by a dust buster with a broken motor. Shouldn’t the “is it fun?” question trump all? I’m open to a game based on pretty much any TV show, as long as it’s fun. Dead serious. It could be a game based on PBS’s Charlie Rose Show and I would slap my seal of approval on it if I had fun playing it. So is Storage Warfare fun? Kinda.
The concept is you have one year to make as great a profit as possible by bidding on storage lockers. You start with $1,500 in seed money. Every month, there’s three auctions, each with three lockers to bid on, and each has a different level of wealth associated with it. The first auction every month is a skid row style storage unit, the second is the middle class one, and the third is the ritzy one. You don’t actually get to inspect the items beforehand. Instead, you see a graphical representation of what is found in each unit. You bid on the whole locker, not individual items. If you win, you get to see what you’ve won, and it tallies whether you turned a profit or lost money. After you’ve completed one full year (36 auctions, 108 total lockers to bid on) the amount of money you have left is ranked on a local-only leaderboard. That’s the whole game.
I like the idea and I had fun here, but the concept certainly doesn’t go as far as it should. Among other problems, there’s not a huge variety in items. Barely halfway through the “year” and I had seen off all but two or three items on the checklist. Of course, the phone version has had a couplestand-alone expansions, which I’m sure will make their way to XBLIG sooner or later. A bigger problem is how much luck factors into things. I tried to play the game smart and cool, passing on some auctions that I felt were getting bid-up by the AI too much. I finished the year with a profit of about $20,000. And then I fetched my dear mommy, a fan of the source material, to let her have a go at it. Unlike me, she bid on EVERY SINGLE LOCKER. And she won. She beat me by about $5,000, even though she employed nothing remotely resembling strategy or skill. I hate that bitch.
It kind of turns Storage Warfare into a video scratch-off ticket. No skill needed, success is totally based on chance. The best strategy seems to be figuring out what the average bid the AI opponents will top out at and trying to hit just under that mark on your first bid. But even then, you’re at the mercy of dumb luck. Plus, the gameplay is shallow and the replay value is too limited. Not to mention they missed out on an obvious local-only multiplayer mode where friends and family bid against each-other. Even my Mom questioned why they didn’t include that. It’s such a no-brainer that someone without a brain couldn’t understand why such a mode is not included.
I guess comic/guitar/samurai sword/Rembrandt collectors have trouble paying their bills.
For all those reasons, I should have probably hated Storage Warfare. But I didn’t. It takes about a half-hour or so to run through an entire year and I had fun with it. Once it was done, I wouldn’t want to play it again, but I don’t feel I wasted my dollar. What’s here is limited, but undeniable enjoyable. They probably could go a lot further. My mother noted that the show (which has an official game on Facebook) is more about conflicts and possibly artificial drama than the actual auctions, none of which is really present here. Maybe they could make a deeper, character-driven RPG-like experience, but they didn’t. Storage Warfare is the perfect poster-child for casual gaming: a shallow, stupid time sink that you’ll ultimately ask others to join you with, like some kind of cult indoctrination.
Something that I never realized until I started Indie Gamer Chick and started reading people on Twitter and Facebook and shit is, get this, video games can be sexist or misogynistic at times.
The hell you say!
Although, to the game industry’s credit, you could probably get more teenagers interested in history if you told them Joan of Arc dressed like this.
I generally try to stay out of gaming politics, because you really can’t win. It’s just like real politics. If I was to go on here and say that I think Barack Obama is a socialist twat, I’ll have liberals mad as hornets. If I say I think Barack Obama is a moderate pussy with no backbone, it will piss off the moderates, who would then go so far as to rip their own backbones out of their body and raise them up triumphantly to say “see, we’re not like Obama, we have backbones.” And then they would die because you can’t live without a backbone, the fucking idiots. And if I say I support Comrade Obama and his socialist paradise, the conservatives would lock and load and ask me to present my birth certificate to prove I’m not a Cuban socialist who plans to enslave mankind with such evil acts as health care and healthy food. Like I said, you can’t win with this shit.
There’s been a few “games are anti-XX chromosome” controversies in the short time I’ve been writing this shit. One involved a girl who got some threats because she wanted to do a Kickstarter to raise funds to do a study on how women are portrayed in a sexist way in games or some such thing. People asked for my opinion on the matter. I honestly didn’t have one, except “you needed money to study this.. why?” She could have accomplished the same thing by being blindfolded, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey style, turned loose in a Gamestop, and then have her pick any random game off the wall.
Oh sure, the one female character is a pig!
Here’s a thought: list every person you know that owns, say, a dedicated gaming console that belongs to them and nobody else, and has at least five games for it. Alright, how many of them are men? Write it down.
Now, how many of those people are women?
No, you don’t really know her. Has she ever said more than five words to you? No? Then don’t list her.
Hey you, I said gaming console, not cell phones.
Yea, I guess you can count PCs, but NO expansion packs. If she played the Sims for 10 years and only bought expansions for it, that’s one game, not 30.
Okay, got a number? Now subtract that from the number of men you know who fit the same category. Pretty big number, huh? And that is why gaming caters to men. It’s just smart business. Me? Not only am I very much a minority as far as gaming goes, but I don’t even feel I represent a demographic with the potential to own more than a 20% market share within the next ten years. (Edit: According to the ESA, 40% of all gamers are female. Doesn’t really sound right. I’m more curious how many of those are console gamers, but I’ll give that point up). I’m not looking to change the world here. All the economic and social studies show that gaming is a man’s world. That’s not very women’s lib, but it is reality.
The most successful “girl games” are really fairly gender-neutral stuff, while games that I would think cater 99.9% to guys do whatever is necessary to get sales, and often do get said sales. Not every idea is a winner, such as today’s Big Bullshit Outrage of the Day: a pair of plastic tits. Oh thank God, you mean guys are no longer okay with fake boobs? Well that’s a good thi.. oh. Oh this.
Seriously? This is what’s causing guys to flip the fuck out? And it typically is guys, because you know, the gaming industry caters to men as we previously established and thus girls are busy doing other things like, I dunno, watching awful romantic comedies starring Katherine Heigl or something and thus aren’t checking game sites for the latest Big Bullshit Outrage of the Day.
I don’t get it. I don’t get why anyone would want to own that God-awful piece of shit. I’m talking about Dead Island, not the bust, though I don’t know why anyone would want to own that either. Then again, I’m not really into having gaming clutter piling up. Some people are. Some people collect the shit. But, I also don’t get the outrage. What else are you going to have represent a game like Dead Island? The most fitting thing I could think of is a colostomy bag on account of it being a steaming slurry of liquified turd. But then people would probably be outraged at how anti-geriatric games have gotten.
So while it’s not my personal taste, I could see how a developer could figure that most gamers wouldn’t be offended by it. Look at what gamers are into. What are the three most popular shows among gamers? Well, going off the 700 or so people I follow on Twitter, 99.9% of which are men who play a shit load of games:
-Walking Dead. While my non-horror loving boyfriend was on vacation, his non-zombie loving girlfriend finally broke down and watched the pilot of the show. It was alright, but I would like to point out that the first thing that happens in the first five minutes of the first episode of the series is a little girl (can’t be older than 10) gets her head shot off by a police officer. Oh, but that doesn’t count, because she’s a zombie now. Well, whose to say that the chick in the torso wasn’t a zombie too? Or maybe the girl wasn’t a zombie, but just in really bad need of dental work. Ever been to the UK? That little girl would have blended in just fine there.
This is the picture you show children that are scared to get braces.
-Wrestling. Every fucking day with the wrestling on Twitter. And wrestling typically includes scantily clad women who stage play fights for the amusement of men. Where are the positive female role models there? What message does this send to young girls? You get ahead in life if you paint hand-prints on your tits and strut out naked in front of fifty thousand live people and millions watching at home?
-Mad Men. I’ve never seen it, but a critic from the Los Angeles Times wrote that, exact quote here, “the sexism, in particular, is almost suffocating, and not in the least fun to watch.” Again, never seen it, don’t really think it would be my thing, have nothing against it at all, but it’s a very popular series among gamers. How come this form of sexism for entertainment is alright but gaming sexism for entertainment isn’t?
And that’s not counting other ultra-violent, blood and guts movies and television series. Because I have no life, I went through some of the twitter feeds of those who are bizarrely outraged by a plastic bust of a pair of boobs and saw fanboy gushing for such properties as Dexter, Saw, or gaming properties like Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat, where you can actively do this to a woman:
Jesus fucking Christ dude!! I mean, holy shit, that’s awful! Where was the outrage for that shit? Not that I was personally offended. I wasn’t. I wasn’t offended by that, or by the bust, or by Walking Dead, or by wrestling, or by Mad Men, or by Dexter, or by any other thing that people could be outraged by. I wasn’t even offended by the E3 footage of Lara Croft getting the full torture-porn treatment. Was it a little unnerving? Yea. Actually a lot unnerving. I’m not really sure I want to play that game. But I honestly don’t see the difference between that and a slasher movie. I don’t know what that says about me or society, that we’re that desensitized, but I’m not going to fake outrage that I don’t personally feel.
I started playing games when I was seven years old, but I only started writing about games within the last two years. And to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever truly been offended by a game. Alright, maybe the Houchi Play, which was a game where you played as a horny Japanese guy trying stalk and goose unsuspecting women. That was creepy and extraordinarily fucked up, and I truly believe anyone who could find it fun is probably a giant-sized creeper with a microscopic pecker.
I can’t explain why that makes my skin crawl, yet I don’t wince at the thought of guys laughing their asses off at blowing away hookers in Grand Theft Auto. I would like to say that, yea, it’s kind of disappointing that there aren’t more positive female characters in games, but you can’t say that the industry doesn’t cater to the right (IE profitable) demographics. Grand Theft Auto sells boatloads. So does Mortal Kombat. That next Tomb Raider game is going to make so much money they could build a fifty-foot tall statue of Lara getting impaled on a wooden post out of the stacks of cash it will earn. I’m not even interested in it (seriously Crystal Dynamics, that video was pretty fucked up), but I’m not offended by it. Do you know what offends me? It’s always guys who squeal the loudest and rush out to defend womankind when the Big Bullshit Outrage of the Day happens. As if we can’t speak for ourselves. That is so sexist.
Indie gaming fans keep asking me to look outside of Xbox Live Indie Games for material to do my reviews on. However, my loyalty remains with XBLIG, so I only hit up other platforms when I’m suffering from complete and total burnout of XBLIG due to the endless mountain of shit that populates the platform. That’s the only time I look elsewhere.
So um..
Let’s see what’s on PlayStation Mobile this week, shall we? What have we here? A Super Meat Boy-esq punisher with the hook being you’re a pixel who journeys through gaming history? Interesting. Of course, I’ve already played a game where you journey through game history, and if that one had been any bigger a disaster they would have to scrub the Titanic from history books just to make room for it. However, as a concept, a stroll through gaming history is not only sound, but enticing. That’s why I chose to pick up Life of Pixel, even though it’s one of those godforsaken punishers.
Looks Atarishi, I guess.
I want to start by saying that artistically, Life of Pixel is mostly a triumph. The eight worlds presented authentically capture the look of each era they pay tribute to. I’m guessing at least. Some of the platforms covered are vintage UK-only PCs such as the Spectrum or the 2X81, along with such American relics as the Commodore 64. As an American born in 1989, I have never touched those platforms, nor do I plan on it. But, comparing screenshots to games from those devices, they look spot-on. However, no effort at all was made for the games to sound like their respective platforms. There’s a single awful chip-tune that plays no matter which era you’re in, and all stages make the same bleeps and bloops. Why go so far to look authentic but not sound authentic? It makes no sense at all. It would be like having the most accurate-looking Elvis impersonator on the planet performing hip-hop.
Where the game falls apart completely is level design. There is cheap design, and then there is Life of Pixel. Every bad possible design choice is given center-stage here. Leap of faith platforming, blind jumps, no checkpoints in slow-paced large levels, erratic enemy movement, and an overall sense that the game really wants you to not have a good time playing it. It ultimately comes across like a poor Super Meat Boy clone. The main character even looks like Super Meat Boy. But this is yet another case of a developer not grasping why that game was so popular. Nothing in Super Meat Boy was unfair. It required little to no guess-work from the player. And dying wasn’t so bad because levels were fast paced and respawning was quick. Plus, death was sort of rewarded by the fact that you got to see a replay of all your failures play out simultaneously at the end of each stage. The only reward in Life of Pixel is seeing a new graphics style when you open a new world. A novelty that wears off on average in about 11.3 seconds each time you get a new world.
Actually, this looks slightly different from the Spectrum ports I’ve seen on XBLIG, so I’m not sure how close this is to the real thing.
I can’t even complain about the controls really. They’re mostly accurate, and offer non-slippery controls and decent jumping physics. 100% of Life of Pixel’s problems are level-design related. The game is cheaper than a dime store whore and seems to revel in that fact. There are one or two other design flaws. Early stages are single-screen affairs, and during these the game is quite fun. But once you get to the Spectrum era, the game does that thing where you have to walk to the edge of the screen to scroll the level over, and it scrolls a full screen at a time. The game doesn’t pause while it does that scroll thing, and so if you have to jump to a platform, it’s a forced blind jump that often will result in your death. It’s something that is horrible and cheap for the sake of being horrible and cheap. Later stages avoid the “scroll a full screen at a time” design in favor of smoother scrolling, but the level design never strays away from “be as cheap as possible.”
There’s also spikes that retract into the walls only to pop out again. These are weird because you can walk over them as long as they are like 75% buried in the ground. It makes getting the timing down of when you can make a run for it nearly impossible. I’m not sure why they didn’t just have the spikes retract and pop up faster than they did, except again, because it’s aggravation just for the sake of being aggravating. Finally, sometimes dying is a slow process. In the best punishers, death and respawning happen quickly. Here, if you land in water (or quicksand), you slowly sink down and have to wait for your character to reach the bottom, linger for a bit, and then blink out of existence. It’s absolutely amazing that a game that so clearly wants to be Super Meat Boy could end up getting wrong every single thing that made Super Meat Boy the beloved cult hit that it is. Bad level design, lack of rewarding gameplay, blind jumps, slow deaths, and boring, sprawling levels.
Don’t worry. Nothing about Life of Pixel gets me wet.
Yea, maybe trial-and-error platforming was a big deal thirty years ago, but we’re in 2013 now. 100% authenticity was obviously not a priority for Life of Pixel, as evidenced by the half-assed sound, so why make the game so cheaply frustrating? I’m so pissed off because these guys obviously had talent. There’s no way they could make a game that looks this good and controls this acceptably just by sheer fucking luck. So what happened guys? Why did you choose to make your game so unfair and unlikable that it’s almost certain to never catch on by word of mouth? The amount of potential squandered here makes me want to cry. And by the way, my friends are disappointed that there’s no Life of Pi reference here, but I disagree, because this game proves there is no God.
$1.99 searched for a Life of Pixel trailer on YouTube and instead found a video series about a little girl named Pixel in the making of this review. Who the hell would name their daughter Pixel? I look forward to meeting her siblings, Polygon and Bit-Mapping.
In all seriousness, I couldn’t find any gameplay footage of this on YouTube. If someone finds some, give me a heads up.
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