Trailer Park King 3DD

November 21, 2012 by 6 Comments

What can I say about the Trailer Park King games that I haven’t already said here, here, or here?  Nothing has changed for the third (or fourth) installment.  Horrible voice acting.  Ridiculous, nonsensical plot.  Lack of actual gameplay.  Humor so crude and forced that it would make Seth MacFarlane blush with shame.  By all rights, these are games I should hate.  So why do I keep coming back to them?  More importantly, why do I keep adding them to my Leaderboard?  Granted, not one game in the series is in the top 100, but still, shouldn’t I be lining them up against a wall and gunning them down like Al Capone?  These are bad games.  I’m known to clean and gut bad games and mount them on my wall.  So what the fuck, Cathy?

Doctor House would diagnose the nurse with explosive jug syndrome. Or it could be lupus.

I think part of it is how much Trailer Park King revels in its subject matter.  The characters are all so uncouth, shallow, and flat-out stupid that you can’t help but laugh at it.  Another part of it is developer Sean Doherty is Canadian and it strikes me as a potentially offensive look at how our neighbors to the north view the poor of our country.  It straddles the line between parody and socioeconomic bigotry, but it’s so damn absurd that nobody could possibly be offended.  It’s also one of those “raunchy” games that other developers burn in effigy.  I see where they’re coming from, but Trailer Park King doesn’t strike me as particularly sexy.  The characters here are so.. well.. trashy, that I can’t believe anyone could get off on this stuff.  If these were real people, you could probably get an STD just by thinking about them while jerking off.  Never mind that the characters are grossly malnourished and their tits are obviously fake.

It’s rare that games on XBLIG are so bad that they’re good, but that’s the best way to summarize the Trailer Park King series.  They’re guilty pleasures.  The series might be running out of steam though.  This time around, you have to prove that series antagonist Truck is not a zombie.  How do you do this?  Well, zombies can’t dance, can’t be hypnotized, eat brains, animals don’t like them, and most important, they can’t be anal probed.  So you run down those things like a checklist and see if Truck takes the bait on any of them.  It’s as dumb as it sounds, but it’s still funny in a self-aware “I’m playing a game where someone shoves a large anal prob up a dude’s ass to prove he’s not a zombie” sort of away.

The only minigame in Trailer Park King carries on the tradition of being needless and dull.

For the third (or fourth) episode in the series, there’s only one mini-game: a shooting gallery where you must fire on wanted posters that have descriptions like “skank” or “dumbass.”  Prior knowledge of the series is probably required, or you can just wait for dumbass to pop up and shoot the posters of Truck like I did.  It’s not the most well conceived, but it’s better than the sliding puzzle of Cherry Poke Prison.  Otherwise, the game seemed like the shortest of the series (it took me about thirty minutes to finish) and the jokes are starting to wear a bit thin.  I still enjoyed Trailer Park King 3, but I won’t be reviewing any more games in the series.  Quite frankly, I’m running out of stuff to say about them.  They are what they are.  You’ll either hate them on principle, or you’ll enjoy them for being utterly bad, yet oddly compelling pieces of shit.  And hey, white trash is totally an in thing right now.  If Ted Nugent is looking for someone to make a video game about her life, she should ring up Sean.

Trailer Park King 3DD was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points said watching Honey Boo Boo is now medically defined as self-harm in the making of this review.

Trailer Park King 3DD is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Check to see where it’s fapping at.

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Demon House: FPS

November 21, 2012 by 9 Comments

Writing about a really bad game is easy.  Writing about a really good game is easy.  When a game is middling, neither that good nor that bad, I struggle with my goal to write an entertaining review.  I’ve done a few first-person shooters on XBLIG.  Of them, two are on my leaderboard: Send in Jimmy and Devil Blood.  As of this writing, they occupy the very bottom two spots.  I’ll fully admit, those games are both atrocious and could (some would argue “should”) be exorcised from the board.  But at least they were playable and fun in a train-wreck sort of way.  Others have either been glitchy, poorly conceived, or just plain boring.  I previously noted that I was surprised at how few FPSs are on XBLIG, considering that the Xbox 360 is pretty much a dedicated shooter console for many of its owners.  Sadly, every XBLIG FPS plays like it arrived to the party about fifteen years too late to be enjoyable.  Demon House is not really different.  It’s not horrible, but it’s not exceptional enough to make this a fun review to write.  This will probably not be one of my better ones, so here’s a preemptive apology.  For what it’s worth, I’m doing Trailer Park King 3 next!

Weapon design in Demon House ranges from inspired to predictable, and getting the really fun stuff takes too long for such a short game.

First off, yea, Demon House looks relatively good.  I mean, it still looks archaic.  It would have been just fine in 2000 as a Nintendo 64 or PlayStation title.  In 2012?  It falls into the dreaded “it looks good for an XBLIG” category.  And that’s where it also falls in other areas.  It’s designed well.  You know, for a FPS on XBLIG.  The controls are pretty good, at least for an FPS on XBLIG.  I accept that a first-person shooter is an incredibly hard game to design and the guys behind Demon House should be commended for creating one of the better ones on the platform.  But all I care about is how much fun I can have with a game, and fun is a fleeting commodity here.

It started good.  Really good in fact.  The game opens inside a haunted house.  This is your stereotypical amusement-park style ghost mansion, with all the clichés.    Piano playing itself?  Check.  Spooky shadows?  Check.  Lightning custom-designed to give me a seizure?  Grumble, check.  Baby carriage that rocks itself?  Check, and fucking creepy.  I wasn’t kidding about the amusement park feel of Demon House.  Considering that the enemies are all robotic devices, I kind of figured the concept here was supposed to be something like Westworld, where the animatronics had simply started to run amok.  That would be an interesting plot, but instead you’re dealing with a mad alchemist.  That’s lame, but at least the haunted house setting is.. oh.  Never mind, that’s only for the first half of the game.  The second half takes place in an utterly generic cathedral/catacombs place thingie that looks like it was lifted from Quake and/or any of a trillion Quake mods out there.  Good move Photonic Games.  I was almost interested for a bit.

The only thing Demon House: FPS had going for it that made it stand out was the legitimately creepy haunted house setting.  Once you’re removed from that and instead inserted into the boring, sterile, lifeless second act, the game becomes a chore.  Oddly enough, after about thirty minutes in that section, I was hoping the game would just end.  And then it did.  That was very kind of it.

It’s not THAT complex. I’m pretty sure enemies that stand back and shoot at you instead of charging at you has been around since I was at least old enough to ride the Haunted Mansion ride.

Let’s be clear here: I had fun with Demon House and it is going on the leaderboard.  I liked the opening act that much.  While playing it, I figured it could be a top-fifty game.  Despite dated gameplay, the shooting mechanics are fun, the enemy design is neat, and the floor layout with the multiple hidden nooks made this enjoyable.  And then you leave the house and suddenly you’re transported back to 1996, which is not where I wanted to be.  The placement of the game started to sink.  Not like a rock, which would have been quick and relatively painless.  It sinks more like a boat.  You know that scene in Titanic where they watch as the ship breaks apart and the lifeboats (some filled to half-capacity) look on in horror?  Yea, Demon House is the Titanic and you’re Kathy Bates watching on in horror.  Not me though.  I’m more like Kathy Bates from Misery, taking a sledge-hammer to the feet of Photonic Games.  Out of love of course.  🙂

Demon House: FPS was developed by Photonic Games

80 Microsoft Points DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!!! in the making of this review.

Demon House is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard, although I’m sure that will be of little consolation to its now crippled developers.  


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Hostile Hustle

November 16, 2012 by 2 Comments

Hostile Hustle combines a Space Invaders clone with a climber.  Sounds like it should work, and maybe it can, but not the way its done here.  The problem is gaming has kind of evolved past the original, slow-as-constipated-shit Space Invaders formula.  That’s why recent titles in the franchise feature insane amounts of power-ups and move at the speed of lightning.  Hostile Hustle slows things back to a crawl, resulting in a title that is exhausting in its tedium.  Most innovations in gaming these days come from combining one type of game with another to create an unholy hybrid.  In this regard, combing a climber with Space Invaders is like combing a rain forest with napalm.  Well, not really I guess, because that would at least be fun to watch.

Here’s the basic setup: a wave of baddies takes formation.  As you shoot at them, they disappear and platforms spawn.  Jump up the platforms, more baddies appear.  Shoot them and more platforms appear.  Eventually, an exit will appear.  Some traps might pop up, like spikes, stun-lock lasers, air compressors, or spiky balls, but otherwise it’s just you, shooting, and more shooting.  30 levels, good luck having fun.

People out there wonder how other people can truly believe the Earth is only 4,000 years old. To which I say, look at how some people choose to ignore 30 years of gaming evolution in favor of recycling stale gameplay. It’s not that big a stretch.

Mechanically, Hostile Hustle mostly works.  The controls are adequate, but I spent most of the game wishing I had a double jump instead of the lame ass “push the enemies back and/or give yourself a seizure” wave thingie that happens when you press the A button mid-jump.  Never needed it once, thought it was the most worthless creation since the solar-powered toaster.  However, there are some design choices that are really mind bogglingly stupid, like having a bright-orange sun in the background.  Why is that annoying?  Because enemy projectiles are bright-orange fireballs.  It doesn’t seem like it was something done to make the game challenging either.  It just seems like a brain fart that made it all the way through production, which made me question whether anyone at Lethal Martini actually played their own fucking game.

Other hiccups include not having enough power-ups, and the ones you get not lasting long enough.  Sure, they might make the game too easy.  Quick survey though: who wants to play a game that is fun, fast-paced, and easy over a game that is slow, plodding, and only slightly less easy?  These are the choices you have to make, developers.  Remember, your goal is to give players a couple of hours of entertainment, not bore them into a coma.  Hostile Hustle’s lack of frills strikes me as done in that manner because that’s how games used to be.  Sure, because games used to be designed to rob you of money one-quarter at a time.  When your game is a one-time purchase of $1, your entire focus should be “make sure my game isn’t boring 99% of the time, so that anyone who plays it recommends it to others.”  Come on people, this shit should be self-explanatory.

After about 45 minutes, I wanted to throw the towel in with Hostile Hustle, but the only thing it was truly guilty of was being about as exciting as bread-flavored gum.  Then I fought the first boss, and once I picked apart all the little green blobs, the stage didn’t end.  Why?  Because some of the enemies were hanging out at the far left and right edges of the screen, not moving, not shakable with the silly solar-wave thingie.  There were also no platforms for which I could stand on to shoot them, because the level was designed by someone with no interest in actually playing the game, and thus I had to fall all the way to the bottom of the map just to be able to shoot the fuckers.

Hostile Hustle would have been way more interesting if it had been made up just of these types of fights. There’s only two, and one ended with my system crashing.

At this point, I had the excuse I needed to quit Hostile Hustle, because it had officially crossed the line from being bland to being bad.  Like an idiot, I pressed on because I held out hope that something could be salvaged from this piece of shit.  But no, just 14 more levels of agony followed by another shitty boss fight.  The only changes being more traps and seemingly shorter levels.  By level 25, I was seriously contemplating whether I wanted to play a game ever again, but there’s only five levels left, and how much worse could it get?  Then I beat the final boss, and the game promptly crashed.  Of course it did.  So nearly 90 minutes of my life burned to see the infamous Code 4 ending.  Do I recommend Hostile Hustle?  I would sooner recommend you drink an actual Lethal Martini.

Hostile Hustle was developed by Lethal Martini Games

80 Microsoft Points noted that hemlock taste just like parsley juice in the making of this review.

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Entropy (Second Chance with the Chick)

November 15, 2012 by 2 Comments

Entropy was part of the third Indie Games Uprising.  Like other members belonging to the second week of the event, it was one of the weaker games.  Graphically, it was head-and-shoulders above the rest, but the gameplay was clunky and boring.  The developers, even knowing that I wasn’t likely to upgrade the status of their creation to Chick Approved, still asked me to play around with it some more today to show the progress they’ve made.  Guess what?  They were right.  The game is improved, but my personal seal of quality is out of reach.

I would make a Jerry Lee Lewis joke, but there’s nothing great about Entropy. Not even the balls of fire.

Before going any further, you should probably check out my write-up on Entropy.  So what’s changed?  Well, thankfully I didn’t offer up my immortal soul for the ability to pick up the balls.  The guys at Autotivity Games added such a feature in.  It’s not perfect by any means.  In fact, the learning curve for it is almost as steep as figuring out the best way to slowly push the balls around using your body.  It’s still a step in the right direction, even if they got a little dog doo on their shoes.  They also cut out some of the more tedious bits in the opening section of the game.  Again, smart move.

Thankfully there’s no cake joke.

Sadly, the choppy frame-rate is not only still intact, but it’s actually a bit skippier.  So now when you chase around the little pink ball of light designed to point you in the right direction to go, you might not even see where it’s going.  One step forward in dog poo, one step backwards into a bear trap.  It sucks because Entropy really did go all out with clever puzzles and beautiful scenery, but the biggest problem still remains: Entropy is boring.  I’m not encouraging the guys at Autotivity to call it quits.  But they need to stop mending this snoozer and start work on something that can capture people’s imaginations.  Start by giving it a name less depressing.  What is the opposite of Entropy?  I don’t know.  Euphoric Kangaroos Dancing the Polka?  Feel free to steal that one.  It has to be good enough to sell at least 100 copies.

Entropy was developed by Autotivity Games

80 Microsoft Points said “more like Entropoohey” in the making of this review.

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Ninja Crash

November 13, 2012 by 5 Comments

Note: this review originally said that Ninja Crash was 80MSP.  The actual price is 240MSP. Sorry for the mistake.

Being lazy, I prefer to sum up the Xbox Live Indie Game market by saying a game is just XBLIG’s version of an existing game.  It saves a lot of time.  So I can say Gateways is XBLIG’s version of Portal.  Doom & Destiny is XBLIG’s version of Final Fantasy.  Sushi Castle is XBLIG’s version of Binding of Isaac.  It’s easy!  Frees up my time to watch reruns of House with my boyfriend.

Today’s game is Ninja Crash, which I’ll call XBLIG’s version of Balloon Fight.  Which was Nintendo’s version of Joust.  Which was Williams’ version of mixing tequila and LSD and translating it to a video game.  To be perfectly honest, I never played Joust.  I’ve played Balloon Fight, because I got it for my birthday on Animal Crossing.  Played it for about fifteen minutes, thought it was okay, wish my gift had been bamboo flooring for my house instead.  Haven’t really thought much of it since.  Well, now it’s back as an XBLIG, only with more features, modern graphics, and somewhat shoddier gameplay.

I’ve shown this game to five people and they all said “wow, looks like Smash Bros.!” And then they see it in motion and are like “oh, it’s Balloon Fight.” And then they make a sad face.

One of the reasons why I never got into Balloon Fight was the slow, plodding controls combined with the unforgiving inertia that seemed designed to inspire new curse words being invented.  Sadly for me, those controls are faithfully recreated here.  It’s not that the game controls like shit.  It controls just like the 1984 Nintendo game it was inspired by.  My problem is, gaming has come far in the last 28 years.  All that progress is ignored in Ninja Crash.  Maybe that’s what fans of the original want.  When I tweeted that I was playing a Balloon Fight clone, I had several people do the Dance of Joy and demand that I release the name of the game I was playing to them.  Guess what?  I’m sure they’ll love it.

I didn’t though.  I might have, if their attempts at improving the formula didn’t fail.  But they did.  Here’s a common problem they tried to fix: enemies hanging out near the ceiling.  Happened in Balloon Fight.  As I just learned, happened in Joust too.  Unlike a lot of attempts at improving games, this is a real thing that did require improvement, so I applaud them for giving it a try.  It just didn’t work.  When you or enemies hover too close to the ceiling, a finger comes down from the sky and pushes you back towards the ground.  And I’ll be damned if it’s not the most annoying thing in gaming since Baby Mario’s cry in Yoshi’s Island.  It also pushes the enemies down, often right into you.  I appreciate the effort, but wouldn’t a better idea have been to line the ceiling with barbed wire or something?  Hell, they actually did do that in later levels, and it worked.  The finger thing is like trying to stop people from speeding by putting a brick wall up every five feet.

The other big problem is popping guys doesn’t result in their death.  It didn’t in Balloon Fight either, but at least if they landed on the ground, you had a few seconds to kick them off the edge before they inflated another balloon and took off.  You don’t even have a full second in Ninja Crash.  Once a dude lands, they immediately begin inflating a new balloon and take to the skies before you can even collect yourself.  And unlike Balloon Fight, simply touching them while they’re grounded does not defeat them.  You have to land on them again.  Because you don’t so much control your character as you do aim him and hope for the best, this feature serves to multiply the frustration factor.  Granted, they did make it so if you pop a dude and he falls too great a distance before hitting the floor, he dies (or crashes, if you will), but I almost never did kill a dude that way.  I either had to pop them above the water or hope like hell I could pop them close enough to land that I could double-tap them.  What was so wrong with the way it was done in Balloon Fight?

The screenshots don’t do the game justice. It does look really good in motion.  Oh, and see those spears in the corner?  They kill you.

Team Devil Games had their heart in the right place with Ninja Crash, and some additions to the formula (environmental hazards, weapons) are a welcome change of pace.  But every step forward is followedby a bigger step backwards.  Ninja Crash has an audience out there that will enjoy its take on the classic Joust formula, but I didn’t like it at all and I can’t recommend it.  I also didn’t get a chance to give this a try in competitive four-player mode.  Sorry Team Devil Games, but you did sort of release right in the middle of the holiday gaming season.  Trying to tear my friends away from Borderlands 2, Halo 4, or Black Ops 2 is an act of futility not seen since the time I watched Brian attempt to break the world record for most live bees fit into a mouth.

Ninja Crash was developed by Team Devil Games

240 Microsoft Points said this game is further proof the judges of Dream-Build-Play don’t actually play video games in the making of this review.

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Slick (Second Chance with the Chick)

November 9, 2012 by 4 Comments

It’s been a while since I did one of these.  I really wish developers would take me up on the Second Chance with the Chick offer more often.  I know a lot of games I bust on here get patched up later, but developers are gun-shy about having me “go after” their games again.  Even if Second Chances are typically lighter and focus on the changes to the game, with less emphasis on smacking games down.  Or sometimes they patch the game and expect me to just Second Chance it on my own.  I don’t keep track of what games have been patched (XboxIndies.com has a sidebar that lets you know what games have been updated).  It’s up to developers to let me know.  And then just wait while I drag my feet to write the review.  Speaking of which, hi there Halcyon Softworks!  I didn’t forget you!

We’re in Hell already?

I reviewed Slick, a punisher with Game Boy-like visuals back in July and I hated it because I felt it was too brutal.  People say I have a bias against punishers, and I say “guilty as charged.”  I don’t understand the appeal in them.  I don’t understand why they keep getting made, especially when they consistently sell like shit on XBLIG (only 2 out of the top 100 best-selling XBLIGs are punishers).  The market as a whole doesn’t want them.  They’ll earn you fans among a very small niche of “retro” gamers, and they might even earn you fans among the development community if they are well designed and bear and uncanny resemblance to vintage games of yesteryear.  But if you are capable of doing a very well made, yet overly difficult platformer, you should be capable of making a game that everyone can enjoy.  Who knows?  It might even sell in greater numbers.

I think everyone agrees that the Apple Jack games are the pinnacle of design among punishers on XBLIG.  I don’t even like them, but I tip my hat to them for audio-visual design, play control, and charm.  Especially the sequel.  Among the closed-off XBLIG community, they’re highly regarded.  But when you get down to the cold, hard facts, the original Apple Jack isn’t one of the top 300 selling games.  Apple Jack 2 isn’t even in the top 900.  Mind you, Apple Jack 2 made the rounds on mainstream gaming sites, including full reviews at IGN and Kotaku.  And it’s already been passed on the top seller list by such recent fare as Lucky.  Fans of the game don’t understand it.  Hell, I don’t even totally understand it, but I’ll make a guess: punishers don’t lend themselves to word-of-mouth sales.  I’m guessing not many people say “this game is damn near impossible to play and makes me feel like an inadequate twat.  GO BUY IT!”

Where was I?

Slick.  So in my original review, I did a step-by-step diagram of why one of the stages didn’t work so well.  The game asked for perfect precision from players, while dealing with shaky controls and insanely unfair collision detection.  The guys behind it have tightened these issues up.  Collision detection more closely resembles the outlines of the enemies, and controls seem to be tightened, but that might be a perception thing.  I still don’t like the level design, or the art style.  Then again, I never owned an original Game Boy, so this does nothing to tickle my nostalgia rib.  I do actively question why anyone would do a Game Boyish game these days.  With the possible exception of Donkey Kong (aka Donkey Kong ’94), most of the games on that platform have aged with the grace and dignity of an unembalmed corpse.

Slick is either pretty or Joan Rivers-esq grotesque, depending on how old you are.

Slick really is no better or worse than your average hateful platform.  With the corrections made to it, Slick can now stand on its own and be reviewed on the merit of level design.  In that regard, it’s a total bastard that hates you and all things sunny and innocent.  If this is what you’re looking for in a game, you’ll enjoy it.  It’s not what I’m looking for, so I didn’t.  Hopefully the skilled dudes at Halcyon Softworks can apply their talent towards something with more mass-market appeal next time.  You guys proved you can blow up a bullfrog with a firecracker.  Now show me you can take that frog and make delicious frog legs with it.

Slick was developed by Halcyon Softworks

80 Microsoft points actually hate frog legs in the making of this review.

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Alien Siege

November 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

Alien Siege is a clone of the 1980 Atari classic Missile Command, a game that predates my birth by almost a decade.  Yet, it’s one of those rare games from that time frame that I can actually enjoy today.  It’s frantic, scoring driven, and a lot of fun.  And that’s coming from someone who never has had the privilege of playing a proper game of it using the trackball.  I’ve played lots of clones of iconic arcade classics on XBLIG, and most of them are honestly not that good.  Alien Siege is one of those rare exceptions.  It’s a lot of fun!  No, really!  What, I can’t enjoy knock-offs of ancient games just because I’m me?  Hey, I can if they don’t suck.

My latest XBLIG review or the Republican reaction to the recent election?

So what can you do with a modern take on a classic game that appeals to fans of the original while appeasing people of my generation that don’t give two squirts about nostalgia?  Well, improving the formula is a good place to start.  Alien Siege does that, by giving you upgrade points you can spend to improve the launch speed of your rockets, the firing rate of them, or to improve your gun.  Instead of just intercepting missiles, you also have to fire on UFOs and meteors.  Missiles don’t work on them, so you have to split your time between intercepting enemy missiles with one button and fighting everything else with another button.  It sounds like it would be too much to juggle, and it is.  But in a good, old-time arcadey way.

There’s even a co-op mode, and I had enough fun playing it by myself that I actually wanted to play it as more than an afterthought.  Now sure, I could use Brian.  He’s 29 and thus the right age to have played something similar to this as a kid.  But Brian was one of those odd kids who never owned a console and played outside like a savage.  What I need to test this thing is someone old enough to have played the original but decrepit enough that they’ll barely remember it.

Ohhhhh Dadddddddyyyyyyy!!

Thirty Minutes Later

Ugh, so here’s where things like my killjoy label come from.  Daddy thought it was okay, but liked the original better because of the trackball.  Seems to be a common theme.  I showed this to the oldest, most GET OFF MY LAWNish gamer I know, and he responded with “no shoes, no shirt, no track ball, no service.”  Exact quote, which I think was a joke, but it also shows that games like this start with more ground to make up.  It seems almost unfair that something that’s mostly well made, like Alien Siege, could be the victim of its own legacy.  But it happens.  For the record, it controls better than any console version of Missile Command I’ve seen, but that won’t be enough to win over your average geriatric gamer.

And I’m not giving Alien Siege a free pass either.  No online scoreboards, bad sound design, mediocre graphics, and backgrounds that often unintentionally hide missiles.  Check out this screen:

Notice how the color of the missiles matches the color of the mountains.  Annoying?  Oh yea.  But that’s the only major complaint that have, because all the other stuff takes a backseat to gameplay.  Alien Siege is a lot of fun, and worth your time and money.  It’s a great example of taking something old and making it new and fresh again.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit Craigslist and find a vintage Missile Command coin-op for my Daddy.  It’s either that or super glue his mouth shut.

Alien Siege was developed by Lost World Creations

80 Microsoft Points want to know why aliens were firing ICBMs at cities.  They’re fucking ALIENS!!  Shouldn’t they have better technology?  I know they had to stick with the theme, but the guys at Lost World Creations should have come up with something else and I’ll shut up now in the making of this review. 

Alien Siege is Chick Approved and ranks pretty high on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Perhaps the developers should cue up some Myra before checking it.

No trailer, no game footage.  Sorry 🙁

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Halloween Scream

October 30, 2012 by 4 Comments

Halloween Scream is a text-based adventure where you play as a young man who inherits a haunted house. Yea, these things always end well. I’ve done text-based games before on here and they usually leave me wanting to lop off my wrists and replace my hands with sabres to stab myself with. But, every game I play starts off with a clean slate, so I plugged my nose and dove in. Then I forgot that being a text-based adventure, this would be a bit shallow and I brained myself on the cement bottom. Smooth, Cathy.

So many options, I don’t know what to do with myself.

There’s no play control to talk about, or graphics, or sound, or level design, or anything remotely resembling a game. That leaves me to just talk about the writing, which I have a major problem with. It’s the tone. It’s all over the place. The game sets a dark and somber mood, but then will randomly spit out lines or gags that break the atmosphere with more ease than NASA. For example, you’ll be examining the servant’s quarters and come across a magazine titled “Repressed Servants Monthly.” Huh, well that’s both not funny and grossly against the tone I thought they were going for here. There are lots of moments like that, but the overall story never goes the humor route. Then again, it doesn’t go the scary route, or the Halloween route either. I kind of figured a game named “Halloween Scream” would either be scary, be themed around Halloween activities, or both. Here you get a story involving vampires and it takes place on Halloween, but otherwise, nothing. What’s the scary thing? “They brought an awful, long forgotten genre back from the dead!! AHHHHHHHHH!”

Writing isn’t the only problem. The game has another consistency problem, this time involving back-tracking. Being an adventure game, you’ll occasionally pick up trinkets that you’ll need to use along the way. Sometimes, the game lets you pick up stuff that you have no idea what you’ll be using it for. Other times, the game will have a “wait, didn’t you see something like this earlier? Maybe you should go back and get it” moment. It’s saddest attempt at padding I’ve seen since I stuffed my bra with water balloons at age 12.

My maps were way better. Sure, they were practically illegible, but.. never mind.

Halloween Scream has its moments, like a couple of maze-sections that required me to draw my own maps. I wish the game had stuck to these, because the writing and exploration are dull, and the false-ending only aggravated me because at that point I was ready for the game to be over with. Shockingly, I didn’t outright hate Halloween Scream, but I didn’t like it either. What would be really cool is if someone could do a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark type of game along the lines of this. Something genuinely spooky, with morbid artwork and a haunting soundtrack. Otherwise, this genre remains dead. I’m not sure if that technically makes this a zombie game or not.

Halloween Scream was developed by Bandana Games

80 Microsoft Points forgot to fill the balloons with water in the making of this review. I told you it was sad.

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Hypotenuse

October 28, 2012 by 3 Comments

Hypotenuse is a geometry term meaning quack quack quack moooooooooooooo.  I lost all my readers four words into this review, so I might as well have fun.  But bringing math terms into a video game?  Not such a good idea.  Imagine if the recent apple of my eye Dishonored had been called “Spleen ÷ Sword = Corpse”.  I don’t think I could have gotten behind it.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I suppose the popularity of Geometry Wars proves me wrong.  Quick though, show of hands: how many people heard that name and pictured JFK calling up Khrushchev and yelling “A square has an area of sixteen square centimeters. What is the length of each of its sides?” into the phone?

Just me huh?

Awkward.

It almost looks like a Salvador Dalí painting, does it not?

By the way, the above paragraph was a total waste of time.  Hypotenuse is just a hack & slasher where waves of katana-brandishing baddies run at you and try to perform subtraction on your body, with the apparent hook being that everything is a rectangle.  Enemies run at you, swing at you or throw a ninja star.  The animation is smooth, the play control is good, and overall Hypotenuse is a well made game.

So why can’t I recommend it to you?  Because there’s just nothing to it.  Enemies run at you.  You kill them, and then more come at you.  I have no problems with games being repetitive if they’re fun.  Most golden age arcade games do only one thing over and over again until you die or get bored.  The difference is when the gameplay is so fun that you don’t notice it.  It’s not always clear what makes one game rise above the curse of repetition while others don’t.  I can’t tell you why I like Ms. Pac-Man but don’t give a shit about Lock ‘n’ Chase, or why I can lose myself in a game of Galaga but would rather be suffocated by Ralphie May’s ass than spend a minute playing Phoenix.  I guess in Hypotenuse’s case, it just never shakes the feeling of being a tech demo.  If this had been something thrown together to show off the hardware of, say, the original Xbox in 2001, maybe I would have walked away from it with fond memories of the slashy rectangle game.  But it’s not that.  It gets boring quickly, and has nothing to keep you going.  There’s no variety of enemies, no variety in combat, and no variety in weapons.  There’s only one play mode.  There’s no multiplayer.  There’s no hook at all.  Hell, the game’s entire point is to see how many dudes you can kill, but there’s no online or even local leaderboards to give you a reason to try.

No, this is not the same picture. When a game is this limited, so are the options for getting screens of it.

Hypotenuse is not terrible, but it’s not fun.  Again, all the props in the world to the developer for making a game that has few (if any) technical flaws.  Plus, he put in the option to turn off flashing effects, and I’m always sincerely grateful for that.  Games that offer less than Hypotenuse does have been amazing, and games that offer much more have been horrible.  It’s not about the amount of content, and it never has been.  It’s about the quality of that content and how much entertainment you get from it.  I can’t imagine anyone getting more out of the full copy than they do from the demo, and that’s why I say nay to purchasing Hypotenuse.  Perhaps a sequel with more options would go over well.  Maybe one where you fight rectangles AND circles.  Variety!

Hypotenuse was developed by Iamrece

80 Microsoft Points said the game should have thrown in trapezoids just to really flex its developmental chops in the making of this review.

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Lucky

October 25, 2012 by 4 Comments

Lucky comes to us from the developers of Bureau: Shattered Slipper.  That was an odd game that I wasn’t in love with, but enjoyed it enough to allow it to chum the bottom of the Leaderboard.  Well, they’re back with a game that exists outside of their Bureau series.  Here, you play as a stock broker who has a one night stand with a random chick.  The next morning, he wakes up and she predicts doom and gloom for him.  No, she didn’t secretly video tape the whole deal so that she can sell it to TMZ.  No, she doesn’t have a STD.  No, she wasn’t lying about being on the pill.  Her oddly specific prediction is that he will die while jogging less than an hour later of a brain aneurysm.   He shrugs it off, then immediately goes jogging.  Seems like it’s tempting the fates a little.  If someone came up to me and said “Cathy, you’ll die later today after getting mauled by an albino tiger” believe me, I’m cancelling that reservation to see Siegfried & Roy.

“What, you’ve never heard of hyper-super-syphilis? Well, you better Google it fast, because you’ve got it.”

Actually, the chick is your guide through the afterlife.  Thus, you begin a quest of personal self-discovery.  One that involves a lot of pointing, clicking, and being lectured on how rich people only got there by being lucky.  The moral message is pretty heavy-handed and often disagreeable, but the overall game isn’t so bad.  Think of it as a sweary, sexy After School Special with an utterly bullshit lesson to be learned.  Lucky can be finished in less than an hour and starting your average pull-cord lawnmower will provide you more difficulty.  But while the story is a bit on a the ultra-liberal side for my tastes and the dialog is clumsy, Lucky has charm about it.

I don’t really have a lot to say about Lucky.  There’s not a whole lot of objectives to it.  There’s only one real puzzle, and I’m not even sure how I solved it.  It involved lining up rows of numbers and hitting a button to spin them around.  I fumbled around with it for a bit and it seemed to have solved itself.  After that, you have to answer moral questions.  The first ones deal with how your father got his wealth.  Unless I missed a clue or something, it never actually tells you.  Don’t worry, the penalty for missing is watching a quick cut-scene of the dude dying, then you just go back to the choice.  Later, you’re placed in a giant maze to get further lectured on how lucky you are and how you’re not as smart as you think you are and OH FUCKING COME ON!  Look, I know that hating rich people is the flavor of the month, but not all rich people are evil, stupid, and lucky.  Some of them corrupt too!

♫ Dance Magic Dance Magic Dance Magic ♫

Anyway, after being punked out by a “spot the pattern” quiz that isn’t really a spot the pattern quiz, and being told to choose whether people with talent got rich via skill or luck, you’re freed from the afterlife and presumably go to heaven, which is full of self-loathing fat-cats and poor people, or so this game will have you believe.  So why did I like it?  Because it’s short, it’s silly, and I actually cared about how the story would play out.  That counts for something in my book.  I just wish we would leave politics out of gaming.  Gaming is my escape from politics.  My place where I don’t have to get hammered over the head by two groups of people talking about foreign policy, gun violence, the auto industry, and so forth.  Can’t a girl just mow down Russians while driving a stolen car and shooting hookers in peace?

I mean in a game.

Lucky was developed by Twist-EdGames

80 Microsoft Points told the lead character to go fuck himself, but wasn’t expecting THAT in the making of this review.

Lucky is Chick Approved.  Barely.  Check out the Leaderboard to see how many asses it’s sniffing. 

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