Zombie Strippers Stole My Heart Then Ate My Brains sounds like a joke. And it is. Just not a very funny one. This is one of the most glitchy, broken games on XBLIG. But it has the word “Strippers” in it, so it will get attention. It’s transparent and shameful, but that’s how the market works. I played it for about thirty minutes and noticed the following things.
No matter how centered a zombie is in your cross-hairs, bullets can and will completely miss their targets. Even from a distance of two inches away from you, with your gun centered completely on the enemy, bullets might miss. It seems completely random. This includes times when I shot zombies I wasn’t pointing at. That happened a few times as well. As in, I shot at a zombie that was two inches away from me, and the bullet hit a zombie twenty feet behind me and three feet to the right.
Assuming you get lucky and manage to shoot a lot of zombies, you still have to deal with limited ammo. It does respawn, but not fast enough. When your bullets only work by random chance, being conservative with your ammo isn’t helpful.
All the guns that look like they might be fun to play with are locked, leaving you with a weak starting pistol that hits a target maybe one in four times.
I didn’t put much time into this one, but it doesn’t seem the developer did either. Zombie Strippers Stole My Heart Then Ate My Brains is the worst first person shooter on XBLIG (and, thanks to the option menu, the worst third-person shooter as well) and the guys behind this should hang their heads in collective shame. There are no excuses for making games this bad.
80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend who, in a state of confusion, resented being called a Zombie Stripper when I told him the title of this game in the making of this review.
Hey, there’s this game on XBLIG and it looks kind of neat and the demo was okay but I’m not sure if its worth the money. Would you review it?
Sure! Anything for my fans. What game is it?
It’s called Bleed.
Just Bleed?
Just Bleed.
Huh. No funny accents on the letters?
What do you mean?
Well, I mean they could call it BleƐd with a Latin style E. You know, to add a touch of class? Or perhaps Bl€€D with two Euro signs. You know, just to change things up?
Um, no. It’s just Bleed.
Oh. Okay. Seems like a generic name that’s about as memorable as a cup of instant soup, but whatever. I’m duty bound to review games when fans request them and OH SWEET JESUS it cost 400 Microsoft Points?
Yea.
Seriously?
Hey, why do you think we want you to review it?
And that’s where the conversation was left off at. I can see why so many of my readers were requesting a review of this one. The opening level, which I’m sure is as far as the demo goes, is a bit on the generic side. And although the game seems like it could be pretty good, there’s enough unanswered questions that Bleed really is a bit of a high-risk investment, at least as far as XBLIGs go. I mean, for the price of it you could get all five of the top games on my Leaderboard. Survey any number of people and ask them if they’re willing to buy a new product one-for-the-price-of-five with the five being the top five competing products in whatever field. People would look at you like your eyeballs just grew their own noses. They would bill you for the seven seconds of their life you just wasted. And if they’re going to do that, those seven seconds ought to be spent coming up with a better name for your fucking game, especially since you didn’t take seven whole seconds to think it through.
In short, the name sucks and the price sucks harder. Are we clear on that? Good.
Bleed is fucking awesome.
Update, November 20, 2018: Remember, context is everything. In 2012, Bleed was on Xbox Live Indie Games, where 90% of games were 80 Microsoft Points, or $1 each. Games that cost more, unless they were Minecraft clones, didn’t do well. I advocated for a universal $1 price for XBLIGs so as to complete with Xbox Live Arcade games and drive attention to the platform. My position on this has greatly evolved since 2012.
I almost didn’t get to play it. The lightning effects in the opening stage nearly put the kibosh on this review. Thankfully they weren’t as bad as Fez.
Seriously, this is one of the best Xbox Live Indie Games of the year. I didn’t get that vibe out of it at first. The opening stage is, maybe not exactly dull, but it’s not awe-inspiring either. The corny (but delightfully well-written) story centers around Wryn, a spunky pink-haired chick with dreams of being the biggest hero in gaming history. She decides the best way to go about becoming this is to go around killing all the previous top heroes. It’s funny, but it’s not as cool as it sounds. Obviously the guys at Bootdisk Revolution couldn’t use all the real biggest stars in gaming, nor did they even try to make close facsimiles. So you won’t see Wryn bust a cap in a fat Italian plumber named Angelo, or an elfish adventurer named Lenk. The actual bosses seem more like run-of-the-mill bosses that you would expect to encounter in a 2D platformer. It’s a bit disappointing, like hearing about an epic sounding movie and getting all excited only to find out it’s being broadcast on Syfy and starring Billy Zane or Tim Curry.
The first thing you notice about Bleed is movement is smooth and responsive, and that the jumping is going to be a bitch. It’s mapped to the right trigger, because shooting is done TwickS-style and thus having A jump would be impossible. Still, I kind of wish it had been mapped to the less bulky, more analog right-bumper. But what really is awkward about it is how double jumping works. Instead of just flinging yourself in the air a little higher, the character launches like a jet. You can do this twice before landing. It reminded me of Pikachu’s return-attack in Smash Bros. I could never do that fucking thing right either. It’s certainly not a deal breaker, as evidenced by the blow-job I’m about to bestow upon Bleed, but it never felt quite right at any point during the 90 minute main quest.
The jumping physics really are my only complaint. Everything else about Bleed is really astonishing. Levels are fast-paced, well designed, and full of twists and surprises. Retro-nerds will get their jollies from elements borrowed liberally from such games as Mega Man 2. The shooting really is so well done. You have unlimited ammo and no range-limits, giving your character full 360 degree control over firing upon enemies. The starting weapons, a pistol and a rocket launcher, are probably enough to finish the game with. However, you earn points in every level that you can spend in a shop to unlock alternative guns. For some reason, only two can be equipped at a time, which is lame. Also lame is the flame-thrower, which was the first weapon I bought. Go figure. It’s the only weapon of the lot that I found to be ineffectual. Everything else not only works, but experimenting with how to best use them is entertaining and rewarding. And there are just enough guns to unlock to stretch the play time without overly padding things out.
Ultimately, Bleed is a worthy purchase because it’s focused on generating fun. Levels never feel too long. Bosses never feel too spongy. Design never feels unfair. And there’s so many clever ideas at play here that it’s amazing they could keep them all so balanced. Even the writing is sharp, and the big plot twist towards the end was hilarious and awesome. Once you beat the game, extra play modes open that might squeeze more value for your 400MSP. I still think the price is a bit insane, but Bleed is unquestionably a cut above most XBLIGs. But seriously, what the fuck is up with that name? I could find no connection at all with the name and the game. Would it have been better if it had been called Adventures of Pink-Frizzy Haired Homicidal Crazy Chick? Yes, actually it would have. It’s sad that the awful name and prohibitive price will turn off most potential gamers who spot it on the marketplace. It’s enough to make you cry tears of blood.
Not being able to get a driver’s license of my own, I’m at the mercy of others when it comes to going places. In a way, it’s fun. Nobody ever says “hey Cathy, will you run these errands for me?” No, I get to do all the asking and none of the doing. And because of that, I shouldn’t be able to complain about the driving abilities or quirks of those I’m parasitic towards. And I don’t. At least while I’m in the car with them. Once I’m home, venting to my boyfriend, I can and do complain. I can’t help myself.
For example, my mother will drive around a parking lot for hours waiting to get a space that requires her to walk the fewest possible steps to get inside wherever we’re shopping at. If there’s a space open and it’s the fourth closest one to the entrance, she’ll cruise around for up to fifteen minutes (yes, I’ve timed it) waiting to find one that is the third closest one. Why? I have no clue. And you can’t explain to her that “it’s only an extra four steps.” There has to be some kind of diagnosis for what she has. Parking-lot-exercise-phobia?
Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry. Honestly, I thought you were illiterate.
And I’m sorry to my readers who were looking for a game review and read that nonsense above. But what else can I do with a game like 60 Seconds to Park? There’s almost no actual game here, so I have to fill the space with something. The game is exactly what it sounds like: find an empty parking space within 60 seconds. Every stage, the parking lot gets larger, but there’s only one space that is randomly selected to be empty. Find it, put your car in it. It’s that simple.
Here’s why the game sucks: because there is literally nothing else going on here. Find the empty space, and aim your car at it. There is no penalty for hitting other cars, so you don’t have to worry about parking cleanly. You don’t even have to park straight. A stage ends once your car crosses the threshold of the space, even if you’re coming in at an angle that could politely be described as not insurance company approved. There’s no high scores, local or otherwise, and no real reward for playing at all. I figured this could be a quirky single-minded objective game, the likes of which flood the iPhone market. Instead, 60 Seconds to Park feels like it was developed in 60 seconds.
80 Microsoft Points love their Mommy very much and don’t believe that she’s illiterate in the making of this review. There, happy Daddy? It’s not like she can read this anyway.
March to the Moon is a shooter with RPG-style leveling up and attribute upgrades. The whole shmup genre typically makes blood dribble out my ears. It’s just not my thing. On the other hand, the whole upgradable stats thing I usually have a lot of fun with at Indie Gamer Chick. That’s because my first instinct with any upgrade system is to try to abuse it. Pour all points into one stat, over power it, and see where it gets me. People say “that’s naughty of you, Catherine! You should play XBLIGs the same way you play non-indie games.” To which I say, this is how I play non-indies. It’s also probably why I finish about half the RPGs that I start.
All text is presented on the stage, with you walking over it. There’s not a lot, but what is there is sometimes funny, in a “listen to what that crazy drunk is saying” sort of way.
I suppose I see their point of view. When I’m just playing games on my own time, fine, abuse the shit out of them. Play Call of Duty with your feet. Play Uncharted underwater. Play Dishonored while listening to right-wing radio. Whatever floats my boat. But treating small, simple, single-manned XBLIGs that way is grossly unfair. To which I say this: boo hoo. If I can break the game and turn my character into an unkillable human panzer tank, not only is it my journalistic duty to do so, but I typically like those games more when I can do that.
And I could do that with March to the Moon. Oh lordy, could I. The concept here is you’re a dude who wants to get to the moon to, um, shoot pigs and cows and stuff. The plot is a completely incomprehensible mind-fuck that is so transparently weird just for the sake of being weird that it’s almost sad. However, I did often giggle at the absurdity of it all, which I’m guessing was the point. Mostly, it just serves to move along the 80s shooter that accompanies it. Level design is extremely straight forward. There’s four worlds, each with eight levels, all of which are just auto-scrolling shooters. Some of them last a minute or less. In theory, you could probably beat the whole thing in under an hour.
Me? I had planned on just running through it as fast as I could. But then I got to the second world, which featured a variety of goblins that shoot at you. And I noticed something: the goblins gave off a very generous amount of experience when you killed them. “Ah-ha!” I exclaimed, “abuse ahoy!” An hour of grinding later, my character went from a low-ranking hunter to high-ranking hunter-slash-“spirit” that ate enemies for breakfast and shit bones for lunch, which it presumably then fed to the attack dogs I had acquired. I then finished the rest of the game in approximately thirty minutes.
And you know what? I had a good time doing it. Despite having an experience system that is very exploitable, March to the Moon is actually really fun. Like with Bird Assassin, the brief time I spent grinding my stats up was worth it just to plow through the game and enjoy being an invincible super hero. If there’s a problem here, it’s that March to the Moon is too basic for its own good. The levels have nothing to bother the player besides enemies, many of which you can take down with just a couple of shots. The variety of enemies is also a little lacking. A lot of the enemies don’t even move. They just sort of linger there, shooting straight ahead. Because I had upgraded my hunting skills to fire arrows in five directions, I was able to clear whole stages without moving my character. If the stages didn’t fly by so quickly, that might have gotten boring.
If they were aiming for graphics that pay tribute to truly ugly early 80s computer games, mission accomplished.
I never even died until the last level. When I got there, I was like “oh shit, maybe I should have built up my stats more evenly.” But then, it turns out that you can remove points from some attributes and reapply them towards stuff that’s more helpful. For example, I had put a lot of XP into useless attack dogs. They weren’t so helpful against the final onslaught of evil space pigs. So I completely sacked the dogs and re-applied them towards helper spirits that I could spawn faster than they blinked out of existence. With them, I had a bigger barnyard body-count than Outback Steakhouse, and the final boss (or bosses) were dead before they knew what hit them.
March to the Moon is shockingly shallow for a game with so many upgradable stats. Sure, there’s extra difficulty modes after you beat the game once, and some people might enjoy those. However, I was bummed that I couldn’t put more than 13 points into a stat. Actually, that’s probably a good thing. If I could have, my “human panzer tank” would have been firing the gaming equivalent of nuclear warheads and the game would have crossed the line from “too easy” to “you could beat it by taping down the fire button.” But, I still recommend it because fun is fun, and March to the Moon is unquestionably fun. I would also recommend that its developer send the game to PETA for free outrage marketing ethical approval.
Pro Tip: using “Z’s” in the title of your already tough-sale XBLIG is probably not a good idea. Especially when the visuals for your game look like they belong in an advertisement for sleep medication. Zomp 3 is the latest Lolo clone to hit the Xbox Live Indie Game scene. It’s the fourth one I’ve tackled here at Indie Gamer Chick. The previous three all rank in the top 30 on my Leaderboard as of this writing. It’s weird, because Lolo as a franchise has been dead for twenty years. Hell, Lolo can’t get any love from Nintendo these days, even though one of the main guys behind the series is now the fucking president of the company! Pretty shitty that they’ve blue balled fans of the, ahem, blue ball.
Why is everyone so sleepy? Even the trees are on Ambien here.
Zomp 3 gets the spirit of Lolo right. There’s 100 puzzles that are structured fairly similar. Instead of collecting hearts, you collect Z’s. Once you get all of the Z’s in a room, the door opens up. Enemies are similar to Lolo too. There’s guys who give chase, guys who pin you in, and guys that shoot and kill you if you cross in front of their line of sight. The only real twist to the enemies formula is little slug things that don’t kill you directly, but if you cross their slime trail you pass away. I don’t expect every game to tinker too much with the source material, but after Aesop’s Garden and Spy Leaks, this is a huge step backwards.
It’s still fun, and the puzzles are still clever, but it’s all bundled in a very ugly, very clunky package. I try to avoid talking about bad graphics as long as they’re not detrimental towards gameplay. Zomp 3 doesn’t fall into that category, but the graphics are pug-fuggly, to the point of being painful to look at. Everything is very rudimentary looking. On a platform like XBLIG, that is expected from time to time. Still, maybe I’m just a little too in love with some of the previous games that aped Lolo. Spyleaks looked amazing. Aesop’s Garden looked like an NES game. Even Crystal Hunters looked sort of cool. Zomp looks cheap, rushed, and unfinished. And some ideas that aimed to change-up the backdrops, like having stages underwater, just make it look like your TV blew a color tube.
This is one of the underwater levels I’m talking about. All it did was make an ugly game uglier. That’s like adding a garage to your house by driving your car through your living room.
There’s also an issue with the controls, as in, they suck. Every Lolo game has been a bit stiff on the controls, but Zomp 3 takes it to a new extreme. Imagine playing a game like Lolo if Lolo controlled like Frogger. It’s a comparison the developer reluctantly agreed with when I brought it up. It doesn’t break the game by any means, but it will lead to cheap deaths and many moments of repetition. XBLIG developers, you have got to work harder on controls. People won’t quit out of a demo of a game because the graphics suck, especially if they’ve gone that far into the sampling process. But if the controls are bad, they might. And once they have, you’ve lost them forever.
I want to stress that I still really enjoyed Zomp. It’s not easy on the eyes and it handles like shit, but there’s still a well designed game here. It’s probably the easiest of the Lolo clones on XBLIG, and veterans of the series should be able to breeze past the 100 stages in a couple of hours. But, it’s still a smart game. The puzzles here are actually more accessible than some of the stuff I’ve dealt with on Indie Gamer Chick. Some of the ones in Spy Leaks made me sit back and say “what kind of fucking egghead decided to make this instead of spending their time curing cancer?” And puzzles in Gateways made me weep for the Nobel Prize that was lost by its creator. No doubt something involving dimensional string theories. That’s what I like about Zomp 3. It has puzzles that anyone can solve without getting a headache, but still get a feeling of accomplishment. For all its problems, talent is on display here. I feel like I should take some kind of role as an XBLIG development match maker. Pair the Zomp 3 guy with someone who can make better graphics, and hopefully the game will sell. No, not one of the XBLIG boobie game guys. I’m looking for a smart puzzler, not Titris.
I’m often surprised by an XBLIG that seems like it should be bad, but turns out to be decent or better. Moments like those are what have made Indie Gamer Chick worthwhile. On the flip side of that, there have been plenty of good-looking games that turn out to be pretty bad. Surprisingly, the truly rare moments are those that involve games that look bad, but turn out even worse than I could have anticipated. When I play a game and it seems like the concept of fun has completely drained out of the entire world, leaving an impenetrable void of unhappiness in its wake. When I’m unsure if gaming will ever be the same to me. When I honestly question whether or not I want to keep going with this Indie Gamer Chick stuff, or take up a less painful hobby, like self-mutilation.
Aah, Halloween Pie! is one of those rare games. It looks bad. But it’s even worse when you sit down and play it. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the worst game I’ve ever played in my entire life. Worse than Sententia. It’s not even close.
I’ve seen Barbies more life-like.
I guess the idea with Ahh, Halloween Pie! was to make a boob version of Ghosts ‘N Goblins. The game starts with a cut scene that lasts over a minute if you don’t mash the A-button. f you do mash the A button, it will still take you a little over 30 seconds. It’s unskippable, and you have to watch it every time you start a new game. Immediately upon spawning, you’ll take damage from a skeleton that pops up. Once you take damage, your top flies off and you’re reduced to walking around in your underwear. I’m not sure if this cheap hit was done on purpose to get the motors revving of the horndog squad. Probably. Although I can’t believe anyone would find the character models here to be erotic. Unless of course you have a wax-museum fetish. I’m sure such a thing exists, but I refuse to Google it, for fear that I would have to bleach my brain again.
So you walk around, shooting projectiles at skeletons and crows. The movement physics are stiff. Probably not as stiff as this game’s target demographic, but pretty stiff. Enemies are placed in ways designed to cause you to die quickly and cheaply. If you shoot at a skeleton while it rises up from the ground, the bullet passes straight through it. Annoying, but at least you can just wait for it to spawn all the way. Unless, of course, the skeleton is too close to you. At which point, the bullet will pass straight through it. Grumble. So decent collision detection was not exactly priority #1 during Halloween Pie’s development, but who cares? BOOBS!
There’s no actual objective to Halloween Pie until you enter the house of a witch. She asks you to fetch five pumpkins from which she will build a pie. Upon exiting her house, you are almost guaranteed to take damage from a skeleton, since two skeletons spawn on both sides of you. Since entering her house is necessary towards making progress, this was quite the dick move. If you enter the house while just in your underoos, you’re pretty much dead. Lose three lives, and you get to start over, watching that unskippable cut-scene again.
Assuming you get out of the witch’s house alive, you have to go gather five pumpkins that are scattered around a stage. If you get these and return them to the witch, she fucks up the pie and you get to start over. Only this time, you need to find seven pumpkins. You leave her house again (another near-guaranteed hit against you), and now you have to deal with skeletons that throw bones at you. Find these seven and.. honestly I don’t know. By this point, I had dealt with numerous cheap deaths, unskippable cut-scenes, shoddy collision detection, and overall shoddiness. After a while, you get sick of taking damage from enemies that are a full length away from you, neither touching you nor facing you. Like in Ghosts ‘N Goblins, you can find clothes to put back on. Except here, when you put it on, you’re frozen in place so the chick can get whistled at. Stay classy, game.
Anyone unfortunate enough to have played the NES game Barbie will find the movement physics familiar. This is not a good thing.
I guess in theory you could finish this, if you wanted to take the time to get good at it. But who in their right mind would? This game is a pile of shit. And not even good shit, the kind you use to plant fields and feed people. This is the kind that turns white, petrified, and makes you dry-heave when you attempt to clean it up. And what makes it really shameful is it not only looks bad, plays bad, and sounds bad, but it’s also one of those games whose sole purpose is to lure in the horny loser demographic that thrives on XBLIG. It’s as if the developer knew that no effort would be needed. As long the game had a pair of tits on the cover art, and screenshots of a woman walking around in underwear, the bruised-pecker brigade would show up in droves. Proof that when it comes to digital knockers, if you build it, they will come.
80 Microsoft Points noted that judging by the top selling charts, it would seem that Ingenious Fun should reconsider whether there’s a market for horrible games with ugly, waxy looking women in the making of this review.
Please note: the developer requested I do this review. I wouldn’t have touched this shit with a ten-foot pole otherwise.
Sometimes a game comes along that really surprises me. I thought nothing of Space Crüesader. The generic name coupled with the tired twin-stick shooter genre seemed to doom the game before I even booted it up. Imagine my surprise when I discovered its one of the better games to come out in months. I feel ashamed that I could be so prejudice. I swear, I’m not really like that. In fact, some of my best friends are twin-stick shooters!
With the market over-saturated with TwickS, anyone attempting one needs a solid hook. Looking at the cover art for Space Crüesader, I figured the hook was “same old shit, only this one has a mock Atari 2600 box art.” Wrong. The hook is actually rescuing stranded ships. There are six “zones” in the game, which is fancy talk for stages. In each stage, you have X amount of time to rescue X amount of ships. To rescue a ship, you have to park on top of it and let a meter fill up. You have unlimited lives, but if you don’t save all the ships in the time limit, it’s game over. To the best of my knowledge, it’s an original idea. Even better: it’s an original idea that makes a mundane genre exciting and fun again. So many bright ideas end up being video game polio, crippling an otherwise decent title. Not this time.
TwickS are a common theme in XBLIG because, from what I hear, they’re relatively easy to design. I haven’t really played any that are horrible. Even the sperm game. It sucked because the idea that you were shooting sperm was the only hook to the game. But as boring as it was, it played well, with good control and clear visuals. So saying Space Crüesader has good control isn’t unique to it. By the way, Space Crüesader has nearly perfect control.
You’ll need it too, because the screen is often completely spammed with so much shit that you can barely move. Most of this comes in the form of asteroids, but there’s also comets, enemy ships, some of which fire heat-seeking missiles at you. Soon, different enemy ships come in that fly fast, shoot faster, and go after you like they’re on a suicide mission. While this is going on, the amount of asteroids on the screen grows to absurd levels.
Yea, it’s a mess. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look that bad in motion.
Oh, and there’s a needless background that absolutely wrecks the game sometimes because you can’t fucking see what’s going on. At best, the options allow you to dull it. You can’t completely turn it off though, and that sucks because the colors typically match objects such as items, enemy fire, and even some of the smaller asteroids. There’s no good reason for this. If it was done for artistic reasons, it’s a bad move, because graphics should never get in the way of gameplay. Ever. If it was to increase the challenge, again, bad move. Challenge is fine, as long as it’s fair. Making enemy bullets hard, or possibly impossible to spot isn’t fair. It’s frustrating. Ultimately, the game would have been more fun without the backgrounds. If you’re developing for XBLIG, the first question you should ask when adding stuff to make a game challenging is “does this make the game less fun?” If it does, don’t do it. Yea, it really is that simple.
There’s a few other problems. Sometimes the rescue ships are fairly close to the edge of the screen. Because asteroids fly in randomly, it’s sometimes absolutely impossible to defend yourself against them. By the time you’re on the third stage, the level is almost completely caked in enemies and asteroids, so it’s bad enough without having stuff fly at you where you don’t have the time or ability to not die from it. I kind of wish it did things Asteroid-style, where you fly off the edge of one screen and come out the other. And where the FUCK is hyperspace? Nobody puts hyperspace in their games anymore. It’s just faded away, like Steven Seagal.
One final complaint I have is upgrades come too slowly. You get them by picking up tiny little crystals that scatter around when you shoot asteroids. The problem is it takes a metric fuck-ton of them before you actually get a boost. Also, stuff like shields or the plasma canisters don’t spawn enough. The shield might spawn more and I simply couldn’t see it on the grounds that it blends in too much with the background (that happens), but it really does seem random. Of course, once you die, you’ve lost all your upgrades. On later stages, you might as well restart once you die because your standard weapon is way too slow even think about tackling a screen where there’s barely a centimeter of free space on the board. And there’s no possible way you can hope to collect enough crap to get it back up to full strength. I’m not exaggerating when I say the screen is completely suffocated with enemies.
See what I mean about the background? It renders even the screenshots incomprehensible. You know, Asteroids didn’t need that shit. If you couldn’t see what you were doing in Asteroids, would it have been one of the biggest games ever? I think the answer is no.
It sounds like I hated the game, but actually, I loved it. For all the problems it has, and some of those problems are huge, Space Crüesader is one of the best XBLIGs of the year. I’m disappointed in it because it should have been a top 10 game. It had all the tools to be such. An awesome hook, decent graphics, great play control, global leaderboards (though they were as fickle as always on XBLIG thanks to requiring a shitty peer-to-peer system, we really need to picket Microsoft to get them to change this), and a fun co-op mode. The classy developer even put in an option to remove flashing effects for those with a similar form of epilepsy to my own. So don’t let any of the bitching above turn you away from this. Space Crüesader is one of the best titles on Xbox Live Indie Games. In a just world, it would be a top seller. Alas, I think the name is too generic to get your average person to click it. If it was called Boob Boobsader and featured a pair of boobs shooting other boobs, it would be the top trending game on my site and the #1 seller on the marketplace. Feel free to steal that idea for the sequel.
I dig the Atari 2600 box art, but wouldn’t it be more fitting in a game that has Atari 2600 style visuals?
80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend that said “bad comparison, because people are happy that Steven Seagal faded away” in the making of this review. He has a point I suppose.
Once upon a time, I had friends who did XBLIG reviews right alongside me. There was Two Fedoras, Gear-Fish, and Armless Octopus. Then my friends all left writing game reviews to making games, leaving me all alone to fend off titles about sperm by myself. Well, now their games have all hit. First was Dave’s horrid Pong clone, a game so bad it has now taken a place on the Wong-Baker pain scale.
“I don’t know doctor. This pick axe lodged in my skull hurts a lot, but I don’t think its quite as bad as Piz-ong.”
And now we have Aeternum, designed by Brooks Bishop of Two Fedoras, with an assist in writing from Nate Graves of Gear-Fish. What is Aeternum? Why, it’s a bullet hell! See though, there’s a difference between this game and the Pong game that Dave made. That difference is this is the type of game Brooks has always wanted to make. My gut tells me that Dave never dreamed of making a Pong game. As a kid, he probably did imagine making a game with rocking Genesis box art, but I’m sure his vision probably involved Mega Man fighting Saddam Hussein or something.
Personally, I hate bullet hells. I know I’ve said that I don’t have any biases against any particular genres, but that was what can politely be described as a fib. I just don’t get the damn things. A challenge is one thing, but bullet hells typically cross the line over into digital self-mutilation. Part of my disdain for them comes from the fact that I totally missed the 2D shooter era. I didn’t grow up with Gradius, R-Type, or Raiden. Maybe if I had spent my formative years hunkering down on those, I would have the skills necessary to make it more than five minutes in a bullet hell. Alas, no. I did have Ikaruga for the GameCube, but its a soul-crushing bastard that I barely spent enough time with to form an opinion at all. Then I developed epilepsy at sixteen and had an excuse to never touch a bullet hell ever again, proof that every cloud has a silver lining.
So here’s the awkward moment: Nate and Brooks are my friends. Nate and me have shared many amazing, emotional conversations. Brooks designed my Sweetie character, a variation of which now graces a few games on the marketplace as my Seal of Approval. I don’t necessarily want to hurt their feelings. Then again, they wanted to hurt my pride and make me question my skills as a gamer. How else do you explain them making a bullet hell? Besides, I was so pissed at Dave for Piz-ong that I sent him to his room to think about what he had done. And that was just for a bad Pong clone. For a bullet hell, I think I’m legally entitled to water-board Nate & Brooks.
The dialog by Nate Graves is, um, hey look, a kitty!
Aeternum (Latin for “Eternal”, the amount of torment one can expect from this fucker) is a loving tribute to evil games with badly translated Japanese. You play as some anime thing that has to shoot bullets at other anime things, such as things that look like strawberry milkshakes, or giant squids that go by names like Archibald the Cat Wrangler. It’s quirky! It’s Japanese! It’s.. fucking impossible. I’m sorry, but I put two separate one-hour sessions into this and I couldn’t get past the first stage. I could get as far as a fight with some other flying anime chick thing, but she spams the screen with fast-moving bullets. I’m going to be the laughing-stock of hardcore gamers everywhere, but I couldn’t make any progress at all. And this was the normal difficulty! But then again, I couldn’t even past her on practice mode. I’m just not wired for this shit.
Here’s what I did observe: the controls seem responsive. The graphics are well done. And every screen-wide spamming is allegedly survivable. I’m not personally willing to put in the time to learn how to survive them, but if you’re into this sort of thing, enjoy. It’s not friendly towards people who don’t like the genre, and I outright didn’t get things like the focus mode, which slows you down but not the bullets. I went through the tutorial a couple of times trying to figure out what benefit there was to it, or to grazing bullets, but the game fails to properly articulate it.
What I’m depressed about is there are now two games out by my former colleagues and I hated them both. They’re my friends, you know? I want them to do well. When we talk about their games, I want to be able to do so lovingly, without having to change the conversation to a more pleasant subject. Like whether or not they think this mole growing on the back of my hand is cancerous or not.
This is as far as I could make it. Shameful? Um, hey look, a puppy!
Props to them though. I couldn’t make a game. Nor am I likely to, say, hypothetically pay someone to make a game for me. A broken one, designed to test how much effort is put into the peer-testing system. A game that has at least one crash, one major play control issue, one major collision detection issue, two other evil checklist violations, and various spelling and grammar errors, which I would then submit for peer review just to see how much you dipshits actually try to find this stuff. Yea, I wouldn’t even consider doing that. See this —> 🙂 That’s a smiley face. And it would not lie to you.
Oh, and Aeternum can put a gun to its own temple and send itself to bullet hell Hell. Which I imagine is where bad bullets go, like the one that killed Bambi’s mother.
In sports, Knicks beat the Warriors 103 to 95. Or possibly 99 to 93. In fact, we’re not even sure if the Knicks won. Carmelo Anthony had 31 points off 27 for 27 shooting from the field. That statistic is actually impossible, but we can only report on the numbers as they are given to us.
Thankfully, real life sports statistics tend to be fairly accurate, unlike the post-game stats that Null Battles spits out. Talking about the type of game it is (arena shooter), how it plays (kind of fun, kind of sloppy), and what makes it unique (strange gravity effects) is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I find that knowing who wins or loses arena shooters is a pretty big deal to most gamers. I’m the type of person who meticulously studies my post-game stats when I play Halo or Gears of War or Call of Duty. If those games reported different scores and stats to each player, who would want to play them? I wouldn’t.
I tried reviewing Null Battles back in early September and this problem came up. When I took on my amigo Bryce online, this is the score that showed on their screen.
And this is what showed up on mine.
Same game, vastly different stats. My policy with online games is to give developers a chance to fix the problems before I post the proper review. I got notice that the game was finally ready a few weeks ago, but I got caught up in the latest batch of new releases and forgot to go back to Null Battles. As it turns out, there was no reason to rush. Again, here are the results from Bryce’s side of things.
And here are the results from mine.
Again, same game. We’re in agreement of the following things: #1, Bryce did NOT have 100% headshot percentage, and I didn’t have anywhere close to 70%. #2, none of the scores seemed to lineup with what was happening in the game, except the fact that I lost. #3, not knowing does negate the amount of fun you have leading up to it. Sorry, it just plain does. Maybe not for some (Brian for example) as much as it did so for me. But this is my blog and I have to say this problem renders Null Battles appeal null and void.
80 Microsoft Points have absolutely no interest in playing split-screen multiplayer in this day and age in the making of this review.
A review copy was provided by Techno Hermit Games for this review. The copy played by Indie Gamer Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points. The opinions of this review are her’s alone.
They still have a Second Chance with the Chick. If the scores were accurate, this game would have made the Leaderboard.
Well, this has never been done before. A review of a game done while simultaneously interviewing the developer. I almost didn’t review Three Dead Zed, which sponsors my review index. Sponsorship on my site is done by donating to charities (either Autism Speaks or the Epilepsy Foundation), so I don’t personally gain anything from it. Well, unless the $50 minimum that is contributed to the Epilepsy Foundation is exactly what they need at that very moment to cure epilepsy forever. And you never know, that might happen! Still, I didn’t want to be accused of a conflict of interest. If the game sucked, that’s fine. Nobody would accuse me of slamming a game because it sponsored my site. But, what if the game was good? What if it was the best XBLIG I’ve ever played? People would question whether it was legitimate or not.
Thankfully for me (and not so thankfully for the guys at Gentleman Squid), I don’t have to worry about it. Three Dead Zed is atrocious. The idea is you control three zombies, switching between them to make your way across platforms, shoving boxes, avoiding lasers, and killing people. The game looks great, but the controls are never responsive. The standard, default zombie feels sluggish and slow, and the jumping physics feel too heavy. This is the only zombie that can climb ladders or hit switches. On the flip side of this, there’s a quadrupedal that moves way too fast, jumps way too high, too far, and is a nightmare to control. It can’t climb ladders, operate switches, or do anything but jumping and wall jumping. Finally, there’s a giant, angry she-zombie that you use to break down walls and move heavy objects. This one is slower than death by starvation, can’t jump, and its attacks don’t feel like they have any oomph to them.
Basically, I didn’t like Three Dead Zed at all. Since I was due to interview developer Fabian Florez, I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and do the interview at the same time, and see what he had to say about some of the issues I had. All things considered, he was a good sport about it!
Cathy: Before I get to brow-beating you for the ungodly piece of shit that is the game you made, can you give me a little background on your team and how you guys came together?
Fabian Florez: Heh. Well we all work in the same main company. We normally make interactive training for things like online courses for schools or other technical related subjects. Well, the main business was getting slow, and rather than let us all go, I proposed that we take a crack at making games. We had all the primary people needed for a team right there: Artists, programmers, lover of games. So they took a chance on us. Now, with my review coming up, I think “Why would you make this piece of shit” might hurt my chances of a good review.
Cathy: If your job security was depended upon how likely your supervisor is able to hit one of the light switches in the game, would you just immediately start packing your desk?
Fabian: NEXT QUESTION PLEASE!
Cathy: Do you know pink slips typically aren’t pink? The ones I use are white. Even the rubber stamp isn’t pink. More like a crimson.
Fabian: I don’t even think they give slips at all. They just coral you into a room and just say, “Yea it’s been nice but you got to go.”
Cathy: Okay, okay, in all seriousness, why are the controls in Three Dead Zed so all over the place?
Fabian: We drink a lot. OK, *I* drink a lot. It seemed to make sense to me when I was playtesting…that one night…before release. Can you help clarify a specific point?
Cathy: I’ll start with the speedy dude that runs on all fours. It’s too easy to overshoot everything. He moves too fast, he jumps too far, and it’s too loose so it’s easy to over jump stuff. But the controls are also so loose that if you try self-correct mid-air, you’re just as likely to under-jump.
Fabian: He’s very debatable. Some people don’t mind him and adapt quickly. Others hate him outright. I do think it’s a bit of a failure on our part for tutorials and stage layout. For example, on the second tutorial stage after you unlock him, some people don’t just jump straight up. I’ve seen people play this on YouTube, streams, and in person. They always want to jump in a direction first. He jumps higher and you can have a control fall if you do that first. Or jump higher to stick to a higher part of the wall. Sometimes I’ve seen people always want to jump with him everywhere. Some of the jumping puzzles were meant to be played with the classic zombie, not the jumper, but it’s not obvious enough. That’s just a failure on us.
I could go more into it, but ultimately, a game should just be played without a “guide” so I think that’s why we get hot/cold responses.
Cathy: I get a lot of developers who want to send me a detailed analysis of how to play their game when they request a review. Always pisses me off and gets things off on the wrong foot. Doesn’t mean I am certain to hate a game (Hidden in Plain Sight’s developer did it and I ranked it), but it feels like developers know from the get-go there are problems and still release anyway. Do you think if you had held off on release you could have addressed these issues, or did the game pass the point of no return for salvation?
Fabian: That’s a great question. We initially released the game earlier in the year for Windows and we though we addressed a lot of those initial issues. Our tutorial section for example is longer and added things to what we though might be “second nature” had to be added. Like the area showing you how to drop down from floors. So unfortunately, it’s just that developer trap of “I think we got everything! Release it. OH NO not again!” Tried to touch all bases, but I think it’s really difficult.
But, I think there was also some confusion on our part because a lot of those comments did come from people playing with a keyboard. We did get feedback from people saying switching to a controller made things easier. So, porting to Xbox seemed like it would alleviate that since you can only play with a controller.
Cathy: There’s a lot of niggling control issues. Jumping off ladders with the default zombie, hitting switches, and some problems with collision detection. We’ll start with the switches first. I’m personally having problems lining up and pushing them correctly. Brian isn’t. His IQ is about 50 points lower than mine, so if your target audience is dumbass pseudo-gingers, mission accomplished, but wouldn’t larger area-detections be a no-brainer?
Fabian: Switches: It’s a pretty sizable hit detection. It was increased from the Windows to the Xbox build. The reason why it’s not even bigger, if I remember correctly, is because we didn’t want you activating things behind a wall on the other side on some scenarios. We’ll take a look at it again though.
Ladders is the new one that I did witness in our Peer Review. Never heard that until we ported it. It’s another one of those, “Probably include it in the tutorials?” Push left or right and jump. I saw Ryan (aka MasterBlud of VVGTV) playing the game and he was stating how he hated the ladders also. The problem there is we have areas where you are going to want to jump from ladder to ladder. If you just push left or right and he drops, you wont be able to jump to the ladder. Minus the actual jumping from ladder to ladder, this is very similar to Mega Man’s approach. Except once you push jump, Mega Man would drop.
Cathy: I get that you guys were trying to go for a Trine feel, but one of the other problems was the game couldn’t seem to decide what it should focus on: platforming or puzzling. Some games comfortably blend both, but this one seemed to jump from one to the other and it was jarring and killed the pace. I don’t really know how to word that into a question for you. First off, I assume Trine was inspiration for Three Dead Zed?
Fabian: We get Trine a lot and I swear, that was not our intent! It was one of those things that just happened that way. Although I owned it, I still haven’t played it. 3DZ was inspired by a mix of the C64 game Goonies and NES Batman (hence the wall cling). If you never played The Goonies, you controlled two people who need to do something to unlock a door. Tough as nails. Anyway, along the way, we dropped that because, hey, we’re new devs and that was biting off more than we can chew. So we combined them all together to be one “super zombie” and made it more of a traditional puzzle platformer. Nothing too crazy in the way of puzzles though simple things for the most part. The NES Batman was also a heavy influence on why the fast zombie sprints forward so quickly. Some like it. Some hate it. It was meant more for moving from wall to wall and that was it. “You are going this direction!”
(While this interview is going on, Bryce and my boyfriend Brian are playing through Three Dead Zed, enjoying it way more than I did, and start busting up laughing from chasing an old lady into a saw blade).
Cathy: Brian and Bryce just chased an old lady into a saw blade.
Fabian: Brian and Bryce, you are AWESOME. We wanted people to scare “innocents” into the hazards. We think it’s funny too. We almost had an award for scaring old ladies into buzz-saws but then pulled it.
Cathy: I guess this moves us into the art. It’s pretty good. It reminded me of the stuff by Behemoth (Castle Crashers, Alien Hominid). I find a lot of games on XBLIG that put a premium on audio-visuals tend to be mediocre or worse. You just became the poster child for that. Yay?
Fabian: *laughing* Well we tried! We thought, “Man if we could just make something so beautiful, it’ll be like a Greek Siren to Indie Gamer Chick and she’ll give us glowing reviews!”
Cathy: Good graphics do get my attention when it comes time to review a game, but once I start playing, gameplay is all that matters. However, your game does have appeal in other areas. The voice overs are great. Who did them?
Fabian: Awesome to hear! Get it?! Hear?
Cathy: ..
Fabian: Ahem.. Actually our star voice actor would love to read that. The two main voices you hear the most (intercom and shadowy figure) are actually the same guy. The intercom is inspired by Rick Moranis/Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. The Shadowy voice is…shadowy? The other voices are various people including the team. He also does the voice in the cut scene changing from zombie to zombie. He actually does professional voice over work, and he offered to help us out for free.
Cathy: Do you have any future plans for game development?
Fabian: After your review? No. Closing shop. Taking our ball home and doing lots of crying.
Cathy: Hang on one second, I need to add another check mark to my gun.
Fabian: Actually, yes. We’re working on another game. It’ll be our first multiplayer game. You can put the chisel down.
Cathy: Awwww.
Fabian: Hey, you killed our joy. Only fair we kill yours.
Cathy: Touché. What lessons did you learn from making Three Dead Zed that you’re going to apply to the development of.. what the fuck is it called anyway?
Fabian: It’s called 2012. Better late than never? Actually we have no name yet. Basically: Playtest, playtest, and playtest. You really can’t do enough. We did quite a bit for Three Dead Zed (Both online and in person) but you just really need to do more than you think. A BIG sample definitely helps you find trouble areas.
Cathy: Have anything to say in closing?
Fabian: I do thank you for trying out our game regardless! You’re tough as nails, we’ll hopefully win you over with the next game.
I hope so too. I would like to thank Fabian for being cool about this admittedly awkward situation. He’s a good guy, and he should be proud of his efforts. I still can’t recommend Three Dead Zed though. Great graphics, great concept, and its heart was in the right place. It’s just not beating.
Zombie Strippers Stole My Heart Then Ate My Brains was developed by Strange Games
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