qrth-phyl

September 10, 2012 by 15 Comments

Last year’s Uprising started with Raventhorne.  It took me about fifteen minutes to realize that the promotion was in trouble.  When I played qrth-phyl, I took an instant dislike to it and thought “oh shit, here we go again.”  But, while the reality of Raventhorne’s badness slowly sunk in, I didn’t even begin process how entertained I was by qrth-phyl.  I’m not sure how many hours passed before I realized it was good.  It was probably around the time that I told my dog “oh just go on the carpet!  Can’t you see I’m busy here?”

Speaking of dogs, doesn’t this look like an advertisement for worm medication?

qrth-phyl does a lot of things right.  Not the name though.  I’m not even sure how to pronounce it.  Probably just by clearing your throat.  No really though, come on.  qrth-phyl?  What is that?  Mr. Mxyzptlk’s pet snake?  Sure, it obeys the Google Rule in a major way.  But it doesn’t exactly lend itself to word-of-mouth advertising.  I could picture the following conversation taking place:

Gamer A: I just found this really cool version of Snake on Xbox Live Indie Games.  It’s in 3D and it has some of the most bizarrely hypnotic gameplay I’ve ever seen.

Gamer B: Really?  What’s it called?

Game A: It’s called, um, qarrrrr.. qerrrrrrth.. fuck it, have you ever heard of Dead Pixels?

It’s such a pretentious name, to the point of distraction.  I get flak for calling artsy games as such, but what else can you say about it?  If you give your game an unpronounceable name that doesn’t seem to connect to the actual gameplay at all, you probably smell like stale vaginal run-off on account of being a douchebag.

But, enough about the name.  Let’s talk about why qrth-phyl has set the perfect tone for the Uprising.  First off, the concept sounds ludicrous: Snake in 3D.  Insanity I tells ya.  Unless you account for the roughly six million (give or take) versions of Snake already on XBLIG.  Suddenly, a 3D, single-player version seems like the perfect way to say “see, we can be different” that the community so desperately needs.  Of course, that point would be lost if qrth-phyl sucked.  Thankfully, that’s not the case at all.  In fact, it’s pretty dang good.

Remember in the late 90s to early 2000s, back when every classic was getting a bastardized modern remake?  I had them all, from Robotron 64 to Centipede to Defender.  Well, qrth-phyl is probably better than any of those.  However, it’s not as strong as the reigning champion of retro classic re-imagination on XBLIG: Orbitron.  What qrth-phyl does right is the atmosphere.  The bright, colorful, trippy graphics and electric soundtrack make this feel like what someone in 1976 imagined games of the future would be like.

But gameplay is king, and qrth-phyl does this well too.  It reminded Brian of Rattler Race, a game that anyone who had early Windows computers probably wasted a little bit of time with.  Gameplay starts on flat playing surfaces set on a cube or rectangle, but shifts to a fully 3D environment once you meet certain scoring benchmarks.  You’ll continuously bounce between the two play styles, with the transition between the two typically a little rough around the edges.  Disorientation was the main problem I had with qrth-phyl, especially in the 3D environments.  The levels seem randomly generated, including the color schemes.  Depending on the layout, I couldn’t get a good feel for things like depth or scale.  Even playing on a TV large enough to double as the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man’s iPad, I was constantly braining on walls without realizing that I was close to them.

Raise your hands if this picture reminded you of Cubixx HD.

I’ve never been super comfortable endorsing any game where I can say “the controls take getting used to” and literally mean “it takes more than a couple of hours to really get the hang of them.”  However, in qrth-phyl’s case, it almost seems appropriate.  I went from being constantly frustrated to not even noticing that I was making hairpin turns and squeezing between tight spaces with honest-to-goodness ease.  I almost wish I had never realized I was doing it.  Once it stuck me that “hey, I’m doing bad ass at this!” my mojo went the way of the dodo and I could barely press start without losing a life.  I wish I was kidding.  I never did beat that cunt Hurley’s score either. 

Yea, I busted the developer’s ass for being a fart-sniffer, but I don’t deny that he’s created something very special here.  It’s not perfect, but qrth-phyl outranks all but one of the games from last year’s Uprising on my leaderboard.  I would say that’s a hell of a start to the promotion.  I don’t know if qrth-phyl will be the type of game you go back to.  Still, I got over three hours of playtime with qrth-phyl and was totally hypnotized by it.  It’s a perfect time waster, especially if you’re waiting for the carpet cleaners to come clean up the mess the, ahem, dog made on the carpet.  Yes, that was the dog.  I wouldn’t, say, just take a dump right on the floor because I’m too absorbed in a game to walk ten feet to the bathroom.  Come on now, I’m totally civilized.

qrth-phyl was developed by FUCK YOUR ACCUSING EYES, IT WAS THE DOG!  BAD DOG!  BAD BAD DOG!

*cough*

qrth-phyl was developed by Hermit Games

80 Microsoft Points ztkpty jqwbcv psld in the making of this review.

qrth-phyl is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

Check out these other qrth-phyl reviews from The Indie Ocean, Clearance Bin Review, The Indie Mine, TheXBLIG.com and Indie Theory.

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Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 4

September 7, 2012 by 3 Comments

And that’s a wrap on Oozi.  One game.  Four chapters.  $4 spent.  Four boss fights that made me question the existence of evil on this Earth.  Zero attempts at originality.  But is the overall experience worth it?  Kind of.  Let’s start by recapping the previous chapters.

Part One: AGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!  Well, that sucked.

Part Two: AGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!! Oh hey, wait a second, it stopped sucking.

Part Three: Not bad.

Part Four: Still not bad.  Oh wait, I have to feed this thing fruit?  AGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!  This is boring.

Best as I can see, this fucking thing has legs, so why do I have to feed him? I think this is what the Republicans have been warning us about.

Oozi’s problem is and always has been how unambitious it is.  It does the graphics thing really well, but does everything else so much by the book that the book is now claiming royalties on the series.  Oozi is the poster child for generic 90s platforming mascot.  Like Serpentor, its creators borrowed the DNA from such soulless, design-by-committee, me-too cash-ins as Aero the Acro-Bat, Bubsy the Bobcat, or Crash Bandicoot.  I was going keep that going all the way to Z, but I figured you guys would hire ninjas to insert burrowing cockroaches into my ear canal after I listed Donkey Kong Country and Earthworm Jim as soulless.  Which they are, but I probably shouldn’t say it.  Fans of those games take it too personal.

I’ll grant Oozi this: it’s not original, but it does what it does well.  Paint-by-numbers levels, almost too easy platforming, hop-on-heads cruelty to animals, double jumps, butt stomps, and every other stand-by of the genre.  If the subject is anything but sound effects, Oozi is decent.  Not spectacular.  Not memorable.  Not something you’ll enthusiastically tell your friends to try.  Just a good solid waste of 90 minutes per chapter.  All four chapters are more or less the same, with the same scaling of difficulty, same principles of level design, and a hugely tedious boss fight to cap it off.

That’s probably the thing that pisses me off the most about Oozi: so many of the tasks of the game are busy work.  In chapter four, there’s a couple of sections where you have to feed fruit to a monster.  To get the fruit, you have to butt-stomp the ground by the fruit.  Then, you have to carry the fruit, tossing it between enemies, over gaps, and up platforms.  You move slow when carrying the fruit, and you can’t jump.  If anything touches the fruit, you get to start over.  It’s sooooooo boring, not at all difficult, and takes way too long to accomplish.  But, and this is the thing that almost drove me towards taking up genocide, these sections don’t immediately place checkpoints after completing them.  So let’s say you spend ten minutes getting this entitled mother fucking critter its food.  Then, a random volcano spits up a fire-ball and you die.  Guess what you get to do?  That’s right, start all the way fucking over.  And that happened to me.  Twice.  After the first time, I almost rage quit.  The second time, I seriously wanted to personally strangle a species into extinction.  I don’t care which one, but something fluffy and adorable would have been swell.

“So my agent says to me “Bob, baby, we have a part for you in the next Simpsons Halloween Special.”  But nooooooo, I have to take the starring villain role in some dry ass independent video game.  Way to go, Bob!”

Oozi did end on a bright note: the very final boss was probably the least annoying of the series.  As a result, Oozi 4 finds a spot on the leaderboard.  It’s not as good as parts two or three, but it’s way better than part one.  Then again, so is gonorrhea, so that’s not saying much.  Ultimately though, if Oozi is remembered for anything, it will be for being the ultimate uncanny valley of XBLIGs.  Oozi is a game you’ll swear you played on your SNES back in the day.  Depending on your level of gibbering nostalgia, that might be a better thing than I experienced.  As a child of a different era, I would like to put out this challenge to Awesome Games Studio: you guys are better than this and you know it.  You created a series that is amazing to look at, but when it came to gameplay you settled for functional.  I’ve seen artwork made out of feces that is more inspired.  So next time, try something new and weird.  Think of every fucked up thing you ever thought of doing with a platform game and give it a shot.  The best case is you’ll have a game that people talk about as something other than a lifeless 90s platforming clone.  The worst case is, well, you end up with a pile of shit.  But hey, your mascot already looks like the bastard offspring of the Great Mighty Poo, so the status quo remains intact!

Oozi: Earth Adventure Episode 4 was developed by Awesome Games Studio

80 Microsoft Points don’t really think the final chapter takes place on Earth in the making of this review.  Well, maybe in Oakland.

Three out of four games in the Oozi series are ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Where do they fall? 

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Volley

September 5, 2012 by 4 Comments

Xbox Live Indie games release in streaks.  Whole weeks will go by with nothing coming out.  Then Zeus will declare “unleash the Crapan!” and a flood of sewage-saturated indies will hit.  Honestly, it’s not that bad.  It’s just always a little overwhelming in a “where do I begin?” sort of way.  Starting with a game like Volley seems like a good warm-up act, until I remember that well-meaning, not at all horrible games that have little in the way of gameplay can be just as soul-crushing for me to write about as a terrible game is to play.

Volley is the second game I’ve played this week that was created by students, only these ones come from Munich.  Smart people they have in Munich.  They all speak German fluently.  Crazy impressive, huh?  Volley is similar to a previous XBLIG I encountered: Bug Ball, a game that both myself and Brian really enjoyed.  Volley tries to play like an evolved version of it.  There’s more power-ups and you’re given more control over the ball.  So how come I didn’t like it as much as Bug Ball?  Perhaps the games are too similar.  Both are 2D, arcade-oriented versions of volleyball.  Both are pretty heavy on the glitchy side.  Both can be played with up to four-players, although Volley skimps on online play in favor of not having online play.

What makes Volley different is you play as a circle that grows a bulge in it when you fiddle with the stick.  And I just realized that did not come out right.  I meant to say that if you tug on the right stick, it grows an erect extension that can be used for smacking the balls that come at it.  I mean, you know what?  Fuck it, here’s the trailer.

Okay, see what I’m talking about?  It does that.  But honestly, that appendage thing isn’t that big a deal, as most of the time we just jumped up and bopped the ball without swinging at it.  You can use it to create  a power shot, but none of us could quite get the hang of it.  The physics of using the bulge seem to be lacking a bit of oomph.  Speaking of oomphless stuff, the power-ups are mostly worthless.  All one of them does is turn the lights out, which might make a difference if all the players and the ball didn’t suddenly light up like they were dipped in plutonium.  Other times, it will put up little water-fall blocks that you have to hit the ball over or under.  Or it will put a bomb on the table.  No clue what the point of that is, since it never once detonated anywhere near a player.  Finally, it will sometimes drop multiple balls onto the table.  This is fine for 2 v 2 play, but one-on-one it’s simply a dick move because you can’t possibly keep both balls alive.

Even with all the problems, Volley is perfectly decent waste of a one dollar, provided you haven’t already played Bug Ball.  Volley did make me wonder if I would have liked it more if I hadn’t already played such a similar game.  Nah, I don’t think that’s the case.  Bug Ball was also slightly more fast paced, had a bigger variety of courts, and the grab-mechanics were more fun than the appendage thing that Volley has.  Yea, this is really unfair.  Volley is a pretty fun and should be rated on its own.  But I can’t.  This is like trying to decide if Zack or Cody is hotter.  An absurd debate, by the way.  It’s clearly Cody.

Volley was developed by Glassbox Games

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points sprained their wrist twice trying to play volleyball in the making of this review. 

Volley is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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Warp Shooter

September 3, 2012 by 6 Comments

To make a game that is a local-only four player top-down 2D arena shooter on a market like Xbox Live Indie Games takes guts.  That’s because you’re making a game with the full knowledge that it will be a tougher sell than a steak house in the middle of Mumbai.  I’ve played a few multiplayer-only games on XBLIG and they tend to range from solid hit to complete miss.  Nothing so far has really found the middle ground.  Well that’s over with, because Warp Shooter stubbornly refuses to be either awesome or horrible.

Warp Shooter is the product of a group of students from Indiana.  Their story is a fascinating one that will be told in an upcoming edition of Tales from the Dev Side.  This is the third student project I’ve reviewed, following Mr. Gravity and Heroes of Hat, both out of the University of Utah.  The relatively simple puzzler Mr. Gravity, despite becoming impossibly difficult in later stages, was good enough to make the leaderboard.  Heroes of Hat, a more ambitious title, was plagued with various technical glitches, unfair level design, and bad control.  Obviously simpler works better for students.

This is what happens when George Lucas runs out of ideas: Rainbow Brite joins the Rebel Alliance.

I guess that’s why it’s weird to see a relatively simple concept turned so overly complex.  Warp Shooter plays like a modernized version of Combat.  I gathered three amigos (sadly not THE Three Amigos, although I hear Martin Short is insatiable) and asked them kindly to help me with my latest review.  When they refused to do it out of kindness, I offered to bribe them.  Finally, I had my goons take their families hostage.  Hey, I have a duty here, and they were fucking with it.

Things got off to a slow start when nobody could figure out how to move.  There’s no tutorial, so the four of us fumbled around, doing our best to pretend like we knew what we were doing.  Most firing was done from a stationary position, until Chevy figured out that movement was done by pressing the right trigger while pointing the right stick in the direction you want to go.  Mind you, the right stick also controls your firing.  Thrust is limited, so you’re never in full control of your vehicle.  You do have the ability to aim a little dot thingy that causes damage to an opponent if it touches them, or you can warp to the spot the dot is on.  It’s supposed to provide an alternate means of movement, but it’s slow and clunky and it doesn’t provide the element of being unpredictable that other movement means has.  You can see where the person is warping to.  It’s like drawing a diagram for your enemies.  “I’ll be moving here.  Take aim and fire at your leisure.”  It would be like the army replacing fatigues with tee shirts supplied by Target.

The best party games tend to be self-explanatory.  Warp Shooter is regrettably missing that.  We never did get the hang of it, but after about twenty to thirty minutes, it did provide moderate fun.  The absurd amount of options provided assures that you would have to be actively trying to not have fun to, well, not have fun.  When we turned on three asteroids and death rays, we were whooping and laughing and high-fiving each other, even though we could barely move.  It was like watching the Narcoleptic Olympics.  I can barely squeeze out something resembling a recommendation for Warp Shooter, but chances are when it only makes the Leaderboard on the grounds that “well, it’s playable!” that’s a sign that maybe some aspects of the game should be rethought.  Starting with the movement controls.  I can’t imagine anything that is more awkward or dangerous to use.  Maybe a B-52 which has their weapons mapped to their intercom button.

Warp Shooter was developed by Hoosier Games

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points reserve the right to murder the next person from Indiana who uses a lame “Hoosier Daddy” joke in the making of this review.  I’m looking at you, Kenneth.

Warp Shooter is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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AvatAAAH!!!

September 1, 2012 by 5 Comments

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how a game like AvatAAAH!!! comes into being.  It’s one of those games where the concept is too simplistic.  Don’t get me wrong: simplistic is good for gaming on a commercial scale.  It’s why Tetris was an international mega-hit the likes of which may never be seen again on this Earth, while Yoshi’s Cookie is all but forgotten.  My theory is the most successful games require the fewest words to explain.  Tetris can be summed up with “use blocks to build lines.”  Pong can be explained fully as “video table tennis.”  Angry Birds can be explained as “Knock over buildings to crush pigs.”

Get it?  Good.  Now watch as I burn down this theory and piss on its ashes.  AvatAAAH!!! can be explained as “let go of rope, land on platform.”  That fully explains the game, rules, and plot, and why the game sucks so hard that it could reverse the flow the of the tides with its sucking power.  You play as your avatar, you swing off a rope.  The rope sways back and forth without needing you to control it.  At the opportune time, you press A to let go of the rope in an attempt to land in the center of a stump below you.  Do this a few dozen times and that’s the game.

Really, a review of this is redundant. All you need is this screenshot and the trailer below to learn enough to know this game isn’t worth $1.

To be fair, AvatAAAH!!! throws twists at you in the form of altering the gravity physics or changing the size of the stump you’re landing on.  However, it doesn’t really make the game all that harder.  I was able to make it pretty dang far into the game and land a decent spot on the online leaderboard just by letting go of the rope at the very end of its swing.  I didn’t even need to wiggle the control stick to get “good” or “perfect” landings.  That’s really the problem here: AvatAAH!!! doesn’t ask enough of players.

But while the single player is minimalist, the multiplayer is just lazy.  All players swing at the same time, with the closest person to the bullseye getting points.  The only problem is it doesn’t really measure who is closest to the bullseye.  It just measures by zones.  Perfect, Good, OK, and Phew if you barely land on the stump are the only four scores.  That’s sooooo seven years ago.  The player who does the best gets a point, while the player who does the worst loses a point.  At least that’s how I think it goes.  But let’s say all players hit the large section that scores as “OK.”  And let’s say one player is clearly much more OK than everyone else on account of being closer to the center.  It doesn’t matter, because nobody gets a point.  Somehow, that just strikes me as lame.  It can also make games drag on and on, especially once players get the hang of the physics.  Even novice gamers can hit Good or Perfect with absurd consistency.  For what it’s worth, Brian didn’t have a problem with the scoring.  Brian also thinks Chronicles of Riddick was a good movie, so it shows how low his standards are.  Well, this is my obscure gaming blog and so I say that AvatAAAH! would have been better if it scored based on who actually got the closest to the bullseye, and that the game can feel free to tie the rope around its neck and swing away.

AvatAAAH! was developed by Milkstone Studios

80 Microsoft Points thought AvatAAAH! was the sound George Lucas made when he saw how much money Avatar grossed at the box office in the making of this review.

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Drinkards Beer Pong

August 29, 2012 by Leave a comment

I’m not a drinker, and thus I’ve never indulged in the frat house pastime known as Beer Pong.  It’s a relatively uncomplicated game: all you need is some plastic cups, a ping-pong ball, and alcohol.  Total cost is, what, $5 + booze?  An 80MSP digital version of it might be more cost efficient, but isn’t something lost in translation when you take such a simple concept and convert it to a video game format?  I touched base on this in my review of Kick’n It, which was digital hacky sack.  Some things just don’t need to be video games.  I figured beer pong would be one of them.  Still, the extremely friendly developers of Drinkards Beer Pong assured me of two things.  First, unfamiliarity with the sport of beer pong wouldn’t be a problem because the game is pretty self-explanatory.  Second, you don’t have to be a drinker to enjoy beer pong.  Maybe that’s true, but I’m guessing you would have to be completely shit-faced to enjoy Drinkards Beer Pong because the game sucks.

To the developer’s credit, they loaded this version of beer pong down with plenty of options and house rules.  However, this is wasted on really fidgety aiming mechanics.  It’s hard to get a good perspective on depth and angles, even with a cursor that shows the entire trajectory of the ball.  This is hammered home by the fact that I was often throwing what looked like a perfect shot into one of the cups, only to watch the ball miss the cups completely and fly off the table.  The aiming rocks back and forth, but honestly the whole physics of it seem slightly tipsy.

Well, thank God that they gave us this shot of the menu. It’s good to know this isn’t one of those non-menu having games.

I was unable to try Drinkards Beer Pong online, which is probably fine seeing how the game outright warns you that many of its features won’t work on Xbox Live.  Instead, I arranged to try this using the local four player co-op.  The teams would be two people who have never played beer pong versus two beer pong veterans.  Representing the non-beer-pongers, my father and I.  Representing the veterans, two of our newest interns: Dustin and Ryan.  Hi guys!  I told you I was Indie Gamer Chick!

With the multitude of options the game offers, we left it to the vets to decide what rules would make for the most fun experience.  We played with six cups, unlimited re-racks, and a lot of other stuff that I’m still not clear on.  Despite what the developers insisted, their game is not going to be highly accessible to non-pongies.  Not that it matters, because why on Earth would someone that’s not a fan of it even want to play a digital version?  But we pressed on, and many shots were missed.  Even after almost an hour, nobody could get the hang of the aiming mechanics.  Sure, we made a shot or two, but as Dustin pointed out, you would actually have enough time to sober up between shots.  Which defeats the whole purpose of a game that’s designed to get you good and blitzed.

All four of us agreed that better, clearer aiming mechanics would greatly improve the game.  Also, we all agreed, and I can’t fucking believe I’m saying this,  that Drinkards Beer Pong is one of those extremely rare games that would be more fun to play with Wii-style motion controls.  But, my intensive review was not complete.  Like I did with Kick’n It, I wanted to compare the video game to the real thing.  So we actually played a couple of rounds of “real” beer pong.  Only without alcohol.  My excuse is I literally can’t drink, thanks to my seizure medications.  Also, we used Styrofoam cups instead of plastic, because that’s all we had handy.  I guess plastic is supposed to work better, but you have to make due with what you have.

Even our ghettoized, using water instead of alcohol and the wrong kind of cups brand of beer pong was so much more fun than the video game version.  I could see how this could be so popular among the college-going population.  And I don’t think anyone would choose the fake digital version over the real thing.  It’s something so fundamentally simple to set up that it doesn’t get the benefit of being more convenient to play on a console.  Even if Drinkards Beer Pong was absolutely perfect, it wouldn’t be better than the real thing.

For those of you looking to get drunk using this thing, I recommend moonshine. Anything lighter than that will result in not-getting drunk on account of it taking so many tries just to make one simple shot.

It’s not absolutely perfect though.  Even with pretty dang decent graphics, the sound effects are repetitive, the voice overs are annoying and repeat themselves too often, and the shooting mechanics are really brutal to get the hang of.  There is obvious talent on display here, but I would advise the developers to give up their plans on refining what they’ve built and move onto something else.  And that something else better be something that can only be done in a video game.  If you guys turn around and make Video Tetherball I’m going to saw your heads off and re-purpose them as jack-o’-lanterns.

Dude, two hands? How fucking big is this ping-pong ball? Or how fucking small is the guy playing?

Drinkards Beer Pong was developed by The Unallied

80 Microsoft Points have just been informed that there are versions of beer pong for Wii and that they are absolute shit in the making of this review.  Well, there goes that theory. 

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Merger

August 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

Just a quickie review here, as I don’t really have a ton to say about Merger.  It’s a grid-based puzzler where you have to merge slimeballs (that’s balls of slime, not lawyers) until only one remains.  The set-up is somewhat awkward and it takes a while to get the hang of what moves are allowed and what moves are not.  Some kind of visual tutorial would have gone a long ways towards fixing that, but instead all instructions are text-based.  This resulted in me not knowing whether or not to admit that, even after an hour of playing, I still wasn’t fully sure what the rules are.  But I decided not to admit that, because that would be embarrassing.

So, despite the fact that I fully had a grasp of the play mechanics, I wasn’t too excited by Merger.  I probably would like it more if I had, um, even better understanding of the mechanics.  Yea, that works.  But I didn’t.  Have a better grasp.  And yet I still managed to finish almost all of the 60 preset puzzles and play a couple 10,000+ point rounds of “endless” mode (which is just a few randomly generated puzzles that you tick off one at a time).

I can’t fully recommend Merger.  A better tutorial would help, but at best Merger could hope to be a somewhat dull puzzler that you’ll forget about as soon as you turn it off.   It’s crazy to say it, but the bar for what an XBLIG puzzler is capable of being is set pretty damn high.  Any new game on the platform will have to draw comparison to stuff like Escape Goat, Spyleaks, or even Asphalt Jungle 2.  By comparison to them, Merger is as boring as the World Series of Hopscotch.

Merger was developed by Fenrir Games

80 Microsoft Points said “it’s still a more successful merger than AOL and Time Warner” in the making of this review.

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Imaginary

August 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

I guess Imaginary is supposed to be a representation of a child’s vivid imagination.  And so I must ask, where the fuck do the children who imagined this shit come from?  Crystal Lake?  You’re fighting giant spiders, disembodied legs (I think), and a giant fan/tornado monster thing.  Yeesh.  When I was a kid, I used to imagine being a Power Ranger, not what it was like to drop acid.  Then again, a giant/tornado monster thing sounds like exactly the type of thing the Rangers would fight, rendering my whole argument faulty.  Move along.

Nothing fixes a platform game with severe pacing issues like making the enemies slugs. Slugs: nature’s road runners. Well, unless you count real road runners I guess.

Imaginary is a platformer starring a little kid that had his brains removed and replaced with helium.  That’s the only way I can explain the ultra-floaty jumping physics, or the fact that he flies back the length of a football field if he takes damage.  Honestly, the controls are kind of crap but it never gets in the way of gameplay.  The deal breaker for Imaginary is it’s just not fun to play.  The only real hook is the ability to turn invisible if enemies are approaching.  I guess that means the developer was a big fan of the Tanooki Suit from Super Mario 3, only without the cool flying stuff.  Most of the game revolves around finding switches to open doors to collect keys.  To beat each stage, you must find all four keys hidden in it.  The alternate challenge is trying to stay awake.

I had a conversation the other day with the guy who created Super Amazing Wagon Adventure.  He asked me if there was any game that I wouldn’t review.  The answer is no.  He wanted to know if it was obviously a harmless one-man project that never had a chance of being good, if I would still be willing to say the game was no good.  Yes.  I bring that up because Imaginary strikes me as just that.  And while it’s not as terrible as some of the stuff I’ve played, it’s really just as boring as a game can possibly be.  The possible exception to that are the boss fights, but even they can drag on.  Like the Tornado/Fan thingie that I mentioned earlier.  You have to wait for it to hover next to one of two devices that you can activate to shock it.  However, the recharge rate for being able to fire those things is brutally slow, making the fight drag on a lot longer than it should.

The Tornado/Fan thing I was talking about. Brian thinks it looks more like a milkshake.

Ignoring the floaty physics, the biggest issue I have with Imaginary is the way you activate switches.  You do so by shooting little balls of light at objects.  Aiming these is almost impossible, so the only way to make sure they hit their target is to be right on top of it when you fire.  But, get this, if you use your ability to activate switches too much, too quickly, you die.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe because that made the game suck more and this feature was implemented while the developer was observing opposites day.

So it’s not as if you can just say the game is a victim of bland design and bad physics.  A lot of the ideas here are just not good ones when your goal should be “make a fun product.”  I gave up twelve levels into Imaginary.  The level design became more tedious, the stages started to center around hard-to-use trampoline-ball-things, and I had to admit that the previous hour and change had been among the worst I’ve had since starting this site.  I guess that means I can’t recommend spending your money, real or imaginary, on Imaginary.  Emphasis on imaginary.  I’m looking at you, Microsoft Points.

Imaginary was developed by Randomly Generated Games

80 Microsoft Points resent being called imaginary in the making of this review.  We are most certainly not imaginary.  We’re simply beings that are created by taking your cash and converting it into currency with no cash value.  What of it, bitch? 

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Spyleaks

August 21, 2012 by 15 Comments

Spyleaks is part Loloish puzzler, part space shooter.  Notice I didn’t say “a cross between” or “a mix of” because it’s not.  In each of the five worlds in the game, you play five puzzle stages, then a space shooter, and then finally a timed “run the gauntlet” puzzle.  It’s weird.  I like weird, but this is a different kind of weird.  Like someone making a peanut butter and cloves sandwich, where you wonder who in their right mind would see the potential in that combination.

I’ll ignore the storyline about the exploits of the greatest spy ever known.  Spies typically being people who can blend in.  The dude in this game has buck teeth that would draw the attention of Stevie Wonder, but he makes up for it with the ability to push safes as tall as he is with minimal effort.  Not only that, but he’s so stealthy about it that he can push a safe right in front of a guy who has his eyes wide open and go completely undetected.  Dude, you’re good.  James Bond bows at your feet.  Sigh.  Obviously I did anything but ignore the story.

Of course there are zombies.  If your game doesn’t include them, you have to pay the zombie tax.  Yep, there’s a zombie tax.

As far as gameplay, Spyleaks is very similar to the Adventures of Lolo, which is as of yet the only Virtual Console game I’ve reviewed here.  And the only reason I did so was because I played two XBLIG titles that were tributes to the series: Aesop’s Garden and Crystal Hunters.  For an obscure franchise that’s gotten pretty much no love from its developer in two decades, Lolo sure has spawned some amazing games on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Aesop’s Hunters and Crystal Gardens both made my big one-year anniversary Top 25 feature.  With credentials like that, there’s no way Spyleaks could be better than Aesop’s Crystal or Garden Hunters, right?

Wrong.  Spyleaks is the best of the bunch.  I’ll get to the incredibly out-of-place shooter sections later and focus on the 25 standard puzzles presented here.  Although the game closely reminded me of the three titles I spoke of above, Spyleaks changes the formula a lot.  Sure, you still shove crates, stun-lock enemies to use as crates, and ultimately try to open up an exit.  Where Spyleaks changes things up is with its button and gate system.  Levels typically have one or more different colored switches or buttons that you have to activate to proceed.  Those switches will activate corresponding gates.  It’s not an original feature by any means, but it adds to the complexity of the puzzles in the game.  If Aesop’s Garden was too hard for you, don’t even bother trying Spyleaks unless you want your head to explode.

Oh, and if your head is in danger of exploding but you think you ought to try the game anyway, be a chum and make sure you live stream it.  What can I say?  I’m a fan of spectacles.

Stealth also factors in.  Some of the enemies are situated like guards who only give chase if you cross in front of them.  Whoever you’re spying on must be the most charitable mother fucker alive because he only seems to hire guards with severe visual impairments.  That’s mighty noble of him, and yet I would think a donation to the Schepens Eye Research Institute would probably be smarter, what with the fact that I can walk directly next to a guard and he won’t see me.  Now if you walk right in front of them, they start to give chase.  This mechanic is the basis for several of the timed “finale” puzzles that close each of the five game worlds.  I really enjoyed all of Spyleaks’ mind benders, but I really liked these ones.  They could have been the basis of an entire game on their own.

I’m not sure if the “!” symbol here indicates you’ve been spotted or if the guard broke wind.

Before this review turns into too much of a love-letter, I have some bones to pick with Spyleaks.  Stun-locking enemies is done by picking up tranquilizer darts (or anti-robot-shock-things if you’re shooting machines).  All movement in the game is done one full square at a time.  If you shoot an enemy while he’s moving into the square next to you, even if you shoot before he touches you, you die.  That’s bullshit.  Isn’t the time-honored tradition in these situations “tie goes to the runner”?  Thankfully, death here is treated with the dignity that typically befalls it, meaning your character does cartwheels in place and then shakes his head before flat-lining.  Same thing happened to my great-great-great-great grandfather right before he died of old age.  Cart-wheeled right on his death-bed did he.

Thankfully, that’s the only complaint I have about Spyleaks. . . . . is what I would be saying if not for the space shooter stuff.  Allow me to brow-beat the developer for a few seconds: WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE?  It’s not that these sections play poorly.  They control fine, they’re handled well enough.  They’re not particularly exciting though, and if I want something to give me a break from the puzzles, I’ll take a break from the fucking game!  

I get it.  Puzzle games are a particularly tough sell on XBLIG, and not everyone wants them.  Let’s talk about a fictional, hypothetical XBLIG customer so as to not single anyone in particular out.  I’ll call him, oh, Dave Voyles.  Now let’s say Dave has rotted his brain out with too many rounds of Mega Man, coupled with all the head trauma he received as a young man banging his head into a wall when he had online games of NBA 2K1 all sewn up only to have the pathetic little shit he was playing against rage quit the game with 0:03 remaining on the clock, destroying is 35 point lead.  Remember, purely hypothetical.  So Dave’s fragile brain is no longer capable of doing puzzle games.  Yet, he’s fine with shooters.

Perhaps this was put in to prevent anyone from gaining intelligence through Spyleaks. Well, don’t worry. Any IQ points accumulated will quickly be vaporized by this shit.

Dave is NOT going to buy this puzzle game on the basis that it occasionally takes a break to play a two-minute long shooter.  He’s just not.  It’s a novel attempt at luring him in, but it’s not going to sell him.  Especially when there is no way he can experience the shooting sections in the eight minutes that is allotted for demos on XBLIG.

I’m not busting the developer’s chops for this, nor am I down-ranking his game in any way.  Spyleaks is amazing.  It’s one of 2012’s best Xbox Live Indie Games.  So intelligent, so beautifully crafted, and so infectious.  It’s also the perfect length (25 single-screen puzzles, 5 “beat the clock” puzzles, 5 brief shooting sections, and a finale) and doesn’t overstay its welcome.  Will it be accessible to people who hate the genre?  Probably not.  And no, the space stuff isn’t worth playing the puzzles to get to.  Sorry, I can’t get over it.  How is it possible that the first game to crack the Top 25 on my brand new leaderboard since its inception could have such a weird design choice in it?  I don’t get it.  Breaking up an original, highly intelligent puzzler with random bits of a shooter is like breaking up the monotony of life on the International Space Station by occasionally opening up the cabin doors.

Spyleaks was developed by HeartBit Interactive

80 Microsoft Points didn’t realize until just this very moment that this game was by the guys who did Doom & Destiny in the making of this review.  Not sure why they don’t have their own dedicated website though.

Spyleaks is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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A Quick Apology from Indie Gamer Chick

August 20, 2012 by 3 Comments

I would like to apologize to my readers and to Bryan Hendo, developer of Human Subject.  I think my job at Indie Gamer Chick is to properly articulate my feelings on a game, and I think my review Human Subject failed to meet that goal.  I think the review was too negative.  Mind you, every one of my critiques was valid and my true and honest opinion.  However, I don’t believe I focused enough on what I liked about the game.  Its clever level design, which I felt mostly focused on good, twitchy platforming.  I thought saying “I still mildly recommend the game” and placing it on my leaderboard would be enough.  However, most readers took away from my review that I hated Human Subject.  I didn’t.  And that’s a failure on my part.  So, to be clear, Human Subject is deeply flawed, but it’s still worth your 80 Points.  I don’t put anything on my leaderboard that isn’t fun, and I had fun with it.  That’s why I ranked it.  I had a similar problem with my review of Wizorb.  Perhaps in the future I need to reevaluate my reviews more carefully before I publish them.  I’m not proud of either review.  They were hatchet jobs, plain and simple, and that’s not what I’m here to do.

-Catherine

 

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