Human Subject

August 18, 2012 by 8 Comments

♫Oobie doobie do, I want to be like you.  I want to walk like you, talk like you too!♫

That’s from Disney’s Jungle Book, where King Louie sings to Mowgli about wanting to be like him.  I was reminded of that song when I played Human Subject.  Why?  Because it wants to be like Portal so bad that it feels like it could break out into that song at any given time.  The idea is you’re a dude who is kidnapped by Aliens and is being tested by them to see how easy the planet would be to conquer.  Maybe.  Or if the incredibly stupid twist-ending is to be believed, it’s something else.  The game is narrated by a computerized female voice that sounds just like GLaDOS in every way except the being funny part.  There are fourteen levels, and each level has an opening joke and a “you died, here’s a joke about that” joke.  So 28 jokes total.  Of those, I laughed at exactly one line in the game.  That’s a 3.57% success rate.  Probably better than Everybody Loves Raymond, but still not funny.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Portal has destroyed a generation creatively.  Before Portal, people had original ideas.  Now, any sci-fi themed game that aims to be humorous has to follow Portal’s lead like it’s playing Simon Says, and Human Subject does so with particular gusto.  It’s like they took Portal and broke it off into a checklist.  Sterile environment?  Check.  Silent protagonist is a test subject?  Check.  Dead-pan, off-screen, computerized female antagonist?  Check.  Portals?  Check.  Joke about a cake?  Sigh.  Check.

That fucking cake joke.  Guys, it wasn’t really that funny in Portal.  And it hasn’t been funny even once since Portal came out.  Not in any game.  Not in any web comic.  Not on any tee-shirt.  This is the third XBLIG I’ve played where I accurately predicted that there would be a cake joke.  That doesn’t make me a psychic.  You guys are just that predictable.  STOP WITH THE FUCKING CAKE JOKES!

And to ensure that you comply with this, I’ve hired Ving Rhames to enforce this rule.  If you make a cake joke in your game, Portal clone or otherwise, Ving will show up at your door and kneecap your mother with a pistol.  If you do not have a mother, IndieGamerChick.com offers its sincere condolences, and will kneecap someone else’s mother for your convenience.

By the way, none of this plot stuff leads anywhere.  The “twist” means dick shit and there is NO ENDING at all.  When you beat the last level, you’re immediately dumped to the title screen.  And the last level has nothing climatic about it.  It’s just another level.  It’s not even the hardest one in the game.  I’m not saying they were in the wrong by trying to have some kind of story, but don’t start one, completely change it three-quarters of the way through the game, and then end the game without any closure.  That’s pretty lousy storytelling.  Imagine if the Wizard of Oz ended with Dorothy killing the witch, and then the Tin Man turning to the camera and saying “Don’t worry, this is actually just a dream” followed by “THE END”.  Without the iconic “and you were there, and you were there” ending scene, that movie doesn’t go down as one of the all-time classics.  It just doesn’t.

So what is the actual game like?  You run, you jump, and you occasionally hit a switch.  That’s it.  No ducking, no sliding, no wall-jumping, or any acrobatics at all.  Levels are mostly of the walk left until you reach the exit variety.  Occasionally, something will teleport you somewhere else, but that typically means the exit is somewhere else, restoring the status quo.  The hook is you can’t die.  Instead, you might hit an energy beam which teleports you backwards to various points in the stage.  Otherwise known as dying if this was any other game, but that’s Human Subject’s gimmick so I’ll roll with it.

Human Subject is not bad.  A lot of people would be thrilled to hear those words from me, but in this game’s case, it really could have been so much more.  Every good thing the game does is sunk by something incredibly stupid it does.  Level design is centered around precision platforming, not punishing platforming.  And then there are levels where you have to randomly guess which switches to hit, or which lasers to walk through that will help you progress instead of regress.  I just played a game that made a similar design mistake.  I don’t understand it.  Why would you take the time to map out so many well designed levels, and then throw in sections where you have to rely on just stupid luck?  You did everything smart up to that point.  Let’s put it this way: let’s say you’re using a Sat-Nav system, which 90% of the time tells you exactly what you want.  However, the other 10% of the time, the machine outright giggles at you and says “maybe it’s to the left, or maybe it’s to the right, or maybe it’s straight forward.  Good luck!”  You would rip the fucking box out of your car and back over it.  Human Subject was not a trial and error game, so why turn it into one?  Just a fucking dumb idea.

The controls are acceptable.  Mostly.  My biggest problem was the slightly unresponsive jumping.  My most common method of failure was running towards a ledge, hitting jump, and not having the guy jump fast enough and instead run off the platform to his doom.  Movement and jumping physics are fine, but that slight delay in jumping led to me swearing more than a sailor with his nutsack caught in a bear trap.  Also, on one level the frame rate dropped significantly, causing the game to stutter like it had just downed ten pots of black coffee.  It only happened once, but it was sure annoying when it was happening.

By far the most frustrating thing for me was the pace of the game is crippled by how slow the actual teleporting thing works.  When you miss a jump, or you intentionally hit a portal-beam-thingie as part of the level design, your dude doesn’t instantly reappear at the other side.  No, instead the game slowly crawls towards the respawn point.  This totally kills the pace of the game.  To Human Subject’s credit, the timer stops when this happens.  Oddly enough, the moving platforms don’t stop moving, which means the teleporting thing is happening in real-time.  This suggests that the aliens have perfected interstellar travel, but haven’t figured out how to send information electronically as fast as we’ve been doing since the 1830s.  They can fly thousands of light-years, but they can’t communicate faster than the speed of sound.  I’m suddenly not worried at all about being invaded by these things.  No matter what technology they have, if a two sentence phone call will take them five minutes to complete, I think we have the advantage.

The jumping thing, the slow-respawning thing, and the occasional random-chance thing really do sour the Human Subject experience.  Without them, it’s a pretty decent game.  I still mildly recommend it, but those three easily fixable hiccups really spoil it.  I don’t even care that the writing sucks and isn’t funny 96.43% of the time.  Good writing might make a game more memorable, but play mechanics are what make it worth your time.  If Portal was played straight, without the humor, it would have been as good a game as it turned out, but you might have forgotten it faster too.  The truth is, unless a game is centered around humor (like DLC Quest), writing is only icing on the.. cinnamon roll.  Back down, Ving.

EDIT: I feel this review failed to articulate that I did enjoy my time with Human Subject, flaws and all.  I issued an apology to Bryan Hendo and my readers here.

Human Subject was developed by Bryan Hendo

80 Microsoft Points said prefer their Brians to have an “I” in their name in the making of this review.

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

SPOILER! Highlight the invisible text:  So the aliens are not planning to blow up the world.  Instead, you’re part of an alien reality show.  Whatever.  The good news is the developer clearly put more thought into the game than into the writing, because if the game was as bad as the writing it would be unplayable. END OF SPOILER!

Gameplay courtesy of Aaron The Splazer, the official best source of non-bullshit trailery gameplay footage of Xbox Live Indie Games on YouTube.

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Dark Matter and Maze of Apes

August 14, 2012 by 8 Comments

Sorry that I haven’t been updating as frequently.  As it turns out, I have trouble getting motivated when my boyfriend is 2,398 miles away.  I blame his parents for choosing hurricanes over earthquakes.  It also doesn’t help that the last two XBLIGs I played are puzzlers, which I typically have difficulty writing about.  Logic puzzlers are niche enough without being put on a platform like XBLIG, where they’re only tolerated if they have a more actiony-bent to them, like Escape Goat.  Most of them probably don’t do well.  I don’t have sales figures, but I’m willing to bet a run-of-the-mill twin-stick zombie shooter sells a multiple of the copies that a really good logizzler like Alien Jelly does.  And yes, I just made up a word.  Logizzler.  I’ve almost gotten TwickS into the gaming lexicon, and I’m not stopping there.

Oh thank God, THANK GOD, that they used one of their screenshots on the marketplace to show off the title screen. And there it is, so elaborate and awe-inspiring. If not for it this, I don’t think I would have purchased the game.

Instead of writing two reviews, I decided to merge recent XBLIG releases Dark Matter and Maze of Apes into a single piece.  It makes sense.  Both are grid-based puzzlers, or guzzlers as I call them.  And I somewhat enjoyed both, even thought I make no bones about it: they’re as dull as dish soap and will bore 90% of the gaming population to tears.  Hell, these type of games are up my alley and I was barely able to keep my eyelids open.

Part of that has to do with the fact that I played them all at once.  I’ve always had the most fun with these types of games when I play through them slowly.  Five or six levels at a whack, then a day or so break.  Since starting Indie Gamer Chick, games I plan on reviewing I typically try to get through as fast as I can, which might not be a good thing.  For puzzle games, that can be brutal, because it’s the same thing over and over again.  Some people like that.  Some people play through entire Sudoku books in a single sitting as well.  Weirdos for sure, but they’re out there.

Oh yea? Well WE can waste one of OUR screens on the title too. Right back at you, bitch!

I’ll start with Dark Matter.  Here, you’re a space ship that’s running out of fuel and oh my God you don’t really need a story for this, just shut up and get me to the puzzles.  Dark Matter is an “open the exit” puzzler.  You steer your ship around, hitting switches, pushing boxes, avoiding gaps in the floor, etc.  Control at first seems a bit floaty, but you can quickly get used to it.  Dark Matter also has a couple of puzzles where the control scheme gets reversed, with up going down and down going up, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.  I’ll admit, it’s a bit gimmicky, but it does help to somewhat freshen up an otherwise dull game.  And if that doesn’t work, a rage-inducing brain fart of game design by the jerks at Orbonis will.

Some of the “puzzles” involve multiple switches.  Some of the switches help you, while others make the puzzle unsolvable.  The problem is, there’s no way to know which does which unless you hit them.  I’m sorry, but that is not a puzzle.  That’s a dick move.  Let’s say you give someone two identical boxes, one of which has a cake and one of which has a spring-loaded jar of flesh-eating ants.  The only way the person can get the cake is by pure chance, but if they pick the box with the cake, you don’t congratulate them on their power of deduction.  You curse the heavens that they had the luck to pick the cake box and ruin your planned YouTube video.  And that really irked the shit out of me about Dark Matter.  Because it’s an otherwise smart puzzler, only one with a really stupid play mechanic in it.  Yea, it’s kind of boring and needed anything to pull out all the stops to combat that, but having a GOTCHA! style trap in it does not make it less boring.  It just adds to the tedium, which is exactly what the game didn’t need.

Dark Matter, which should have been called “I Don’t Give a Ship” instead.

Maze of Apes is even more minimalist and snore-inducing than Dark Matter, but by no means a bad game.  This is one of those “Pick-up insignificant shit scattered on flimsy floor” puzzlers.  Or “PISS OFF” for short.  This type of game has been done a hundred zillion quadrillion gillion times (give or take), but Maze of Apes does make some effort to spice things up.  Some of the puzzles feature controlling more than one ape.  The stick moves both at the same time, so you have to figure out a way to steer both guys without killing or trapping one of them in a way where you can’t pick everything up.  Sadly, a lot of the levels don’t use this hook, and that’s a shame because that’s all Maze of Apes has going for it.  While the puzzles can be clever, they still are likely to give you a case of déjà vu, because there’s no way anyone over the age of 18 who has gamed for most of their life has not played something like this already.

Maze of Apes. Personally, I would have called it “Labyrinth of Monkeys”

Despite both games being about as exciting as picking lint out of your umbilicus, they are well made and fun if you’re into this sort of thing.  I give the edge to Maze of Apes.  Dark Matter has better art, more complex stages, and a wider variety of puzzles.  Maze of Apes looks and plays like a Windows 3.0 freeware game.  But Maze of Apes doesn’t have that fake-switch thing going for it, and Dark Matter does, so Maze of Apes wins by virtue of not being an asshole.  Which is probably how Obama is going to win in November.  Zing.

Dark Matter was developed by Orbonis

Maze of Apes was developed by Blanc Game Studio

80 Microsoft Points apiece said “oh come on, it’s just a joke.  Us Microsoft Points think both candidates are assholes” in the making of this review.

Dark Matter and Maze of Apes are ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where they landed.  The Leaderboard is sponsored by Count to a Billion, out now on iPhone. 

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The 4th Wall

August 10, 2012 by 8 Comments

I don’t really know where to begin with The 4th Wall by GZ Storm.  I guess I should start by saying that I apparently was enjoying their previous game, The Vidiot Game, until it knocked me out with a seizure.  Just to be clear, I have epilepsy so such results will not be typical, but I honestly don’t remember playing the game at all.  Brian says I seemed to be having fun with it, which is weird because I don’t think there has been a single positive review of it.  Then again, I’m a sucker for Wario Ware style games.  It’s a shame, because I might have been able to figure out what to write about that game.  With GZ’s latest title, The 4th Wall, I’m truly stumped.

What can you say about this game?  It’s a first-person, exploration-based “adventure” thing.  It’s surreal.  It’s disorienting.  It features a thirty-foot long penis that hangs from the ceiling and seems to be dripping blood.

That only took over twenty takes to get right.

Is it fun?  Not really.  I was too busy being weirded out to have fun.  There is no plot or context for The 4th Wall.   You’re placed on a field that has a white wall, another wall made of static, and arrows on the floor that point you towards a room.  In that room, there’s a terrible high-pitched hum that made my dog walk out of the room.  You walk through a door that leads to an all-black room with various eyeballs looking around.  You see a white tunnel.  You head towards it.  Then you fall back to the starting field, which now features the aforementioned bleeding dick, plus an invisible black wall.  It took me a good half-hour of wandering around to figure out that the static wall now had a hidden door in it.  You walk through that, go through a maze, and then get dumped again back into the starting field.  You stand by the white wall and it causes the field to turn black-and-white.  You chase down a ball that’s bouncing around, touch it, and get dumped back to the starting field.  Then you let the dick bleed on you and the game is over.

You can’t see him, but presumably the person you play as has “ASSHOLE ASSHOLE ASSHOLE” written all over him.

What the FUCK was this supposed to be?  Not since I played Linger in Shadows on PlayStation Network has a game left me this perplexed.  I guess the fancy term would be “post-modern” which Moe Szyslak taught me means “weird for the sake of being weird.”  No matter what you call it, I can’t recommend The 4th Wall, the gaming version of walking into the middle of a storage park, then licking a toad and trying to find  your way out.  Enjoy.

The 4th Wall was developed by GZ Storm

80 Microsoft Points are not totally sure if this was a real game I played or if someone spiked my coffee while I was playing Sound Shapes in the making of this review.

Yes, I’ve told developers to “be weird.”  I guess I should have been more specific and added “but still coherent” to that. 

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Face Slapper

August 5, 2012 by 4 Comments

Just by hearing the description of Face Slapper, you’ll know it’s on the wrong platform.  The idea is a bunch of faces will appear on a play field.  Using the analog stick, you line up a cursor over a face and press a button to slap it.  You get points for smacking dude and lose points for hitting chicks or animals.  Yea, this was without question a game designed with a touch-screen interface in mind.  Face Slapper is also out on Windows Phone, which is likely an okay fit.  I would personally prefer a bigger screen like iPad, but WP is easier to program for, even if it has a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the users.

On the Xbox?  Meh.  Face Slapper is actually pretty dumbed down.  The slapper is made to be pretty generous, smacking only the things that give you points, so if a bunch of faces are together, feel free to get button-stabby.  In fact, I theorized that you could chuck effort out the window and just button-mash while wiggling the controller all over the screen.  My previous, “pretend like I give a shit” efforts resulted in scores ranging from like 5,000 points to 8,000 points.  My “don’t give a shit” button-spammer approach netted me over 12,000, and I only stopped because my thumb got tired.  That, my friends, is broken game design.

Oddly enough, I did have an extremely limited amount of fun with Face Slapper, but that was had trying to unlock all the fake achievements in the game, which are pretty clever.  The real challenging one was trying to finish the game with a score of exactly negative one point.  I never actually accomplished it, but for a total of ten minutes I actually did want to.  Then the feeling passed.  It was like a bout of gaming constipation.

I can’t go out and recommend Face Slapper, just because it really is on the wrong platform.  This is a game designed with the precision of a touch screen in mind.  I can’t blame them for at least attempting to port it over the XBLIG, because as lightweight as the platform is, it’s unquestionably more viable than Windows Phone.  But Face Slapper’s problems extend beyond its control scheme.  The graphics aren’t distinctive enough, the background images can be disorienting, and I don’t feel there’s enough variety in gameplay.  If you have a Windows Phone, it might be worth a look at.  Also, ha ha, you own a Windows Phone!

Face Slapper was developed by Highbrow Games

80 Microsoft Points came this close to putting a game on the leaderboard designed by the guys who made Avatar Planking in the making of this review.

 

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Cuddle Bear (Second Chance with the Chick)

August 3, 2012 by 2 Comments

I played Cuddle Bear back in May, and it was an honest and true contender for, at best, the worst game I’ve ever played in my life. Horrible button layout. Terrible level design. Abysmal graphics.  Annoying sound effects.  Thinking of all the games I’ve played this year, I don’t think I can think of a better game that fits the “worst game of the year” description. But, to their credit, the developers read my review and responded with good humor and a vow to do better. On one hand, it’s nice to have one of those rare developers who actually intend to invoke their Second Chance with the Chick. I created the policy figuring I would be doing these types of reviews on a weekly basis, instead of the bi-monthly rate I have going right now. On the other hand, I have to admit that the thought of playing Cuddle Bear again almost drove me to take a razor to my wrists. I almost did it too, but then Brian reminded me that suicide is a mortal sin and if I bled myself out I would go to Hell and get stuck playing Cuddle Bear anyway. Well fuck, he has a point I guess.

“Cuddles, I’m impressed that you pissed the word “Redrum” in blood on my wall. BUT, I don’t think pissing blood is ever a good thing. Have you ever heard of prostate cancer?”

You know what? Happy Sock.. Christ, that sounds like something teenagers jerk off into.. actually did fix the game. They eliminated most of the leap-of-faith gameplay and dick move enemy placement that made Cuddles such a brutal chore of a game to play. Levels can actually be completed without having to trial-and-error your way through them. All other problems are still firmly present, but hey, baby steps!

♫ She’s a Barbie girl, in a shitty world. Crapped and spastic. It’s shitastic! ♫

Did that one change make Cuddle Bear more fun? A little. The problem is the enemies are still fast-moving, annoying sounding bullet sponges that gang bang you if they get close. The enemies tend to “bounce” when they hit you, turning you into one of those ball-on-a-paddle things. If you’re near a ledge when this happens, things really get fun. And getting items is still painfully slow. Yea, the developers stuck cheat codes in, but who outside of those who read the comments on this site would know about those?  I must say, once I had the one shot (or two, but who’s counting?) sniper rifle, the pace of Cuddle Bear quickened and it actually went into consideration for making the leaderboard. Then I got to the fifth stage of the Chinese themed levels, which apparently missed the “don’t do leap-of-faith platforming with enemies dickishly placed on the platforms that cause you to recoil like you just got a whiff of Roseanne Barr’s body odor” memo, and I decided to quit again. Sorry guys, you have a long ways to go. Is it a vastly improved experience? Yes. But, at the end of the day, a polished turd is still a turd.

Cuddle Bear was developed by Happy Sock Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points laughed at Indie Gamer Chick for originally spending 240 points on this piece of shit in the making of this review.

Happy Sock, I saved you the time of cherry-picking my words for the misquoted review blurb. Just copy the words in bold. Hopefully the time I just saved you can be applied towards making your next game suck significantly less. 

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Edgeland

August 3, 2012 by 4 Comments

Edgeland is a punisher starring a cute little blue ball.  This is roughly the one-millionth punisher I’ve played on XBLIG (give or take) and I have to say, the whole juxtaposition between cute graphics and sadistic gameplay has officially become stale.  As have punishers where the only thing that makes them difficult is having horrendous play control.  In that sense, Edgeland is past the point of being stale and has moved onto decomposition.

Pictured to the left in this picture: the fossilized remains of the last truly sublime game from this genre.

Like 99.9% of all platformers (give or take), Edgeland simply asks players to get from point A to point B, which generally means moving right until the game says you win, or if they want to get really ballsy, moving left until the game says you win.  Edgeland really changes things up by hiding the goal from time to time.  Otherwise, gameplay consists of jumping around, dying on spikes, jumping around, and dying some more.  Part of this has to do with the spikes blending in a little too much with the background sometimes.  Most of it has to do with the controls being looser than the village whore.  I think the game was trying for a Super Meat Boy like feel, but Edgeland lacks the mind-numbing dexterity of SMB.  The blue ball thingie can only jump, and the physics of that are purely inertia based.  Thus, when you jump, sticking a landing is overly difficult.  Despite the floatiness, the blue ball feels a little too heavy, whereas if Meat Boy was any lighter on his the feet, Republicans would line up to buy chicken sandwiches in protest of him.

Honestly, Edgeland is not a terrible game or anything.  But this is the same shit that gets shoveled out on XBLIG on a weekly basis, and I’m getting bored with the genre.  The give-up point for me was stage thirteen.  By this point, ice was introduced to the game.  Of course it was.  I’m almost convinced that platform developers great and small are forced at gunpoint to sign some kind of pledge guaranteeing at least one section of ice stages and one section of fire stages in each title.  Because nothing says fun like having your character handle like Inspector Gadget got drunk and said “Go Go Gadget Sealegs!”  I’m not exactly sure what that means either, but it seemed funny and I’ve been dying to do an Inspector Gadget joke, so plebbbbbb.  My point was that ice levels are platforming buzzkils.  Name one time, just ONE fucking time, when they were anything but an unfun pain in the ass to play?  (Brian: CHIP’S CHALLENGE!  Me: Not a platformer, doesn’t count)

Let’s pass a law saying that developers can only include ice levels in games if they rest ice cubes on their genitals while coding them. That ought to put a stop to their production.

So in Edgeland, the guy already handled like a walrus bathed in petroleum jelly.  With the ice, they took away what little traction he had.  Not only that, but they also seemed to take away the checkpoints.  I went pretty deep into stage 13 and didn’t hit one.  I was practically tripping over them in all the other stages, and that was the only reason why I hadn’t decided to microwave my controller up to that point.  Without them, my will to press forward was nonexistent.  Maybe Edgeland isn’t as bad as I have it pegged and I’m just suffering from punisher burnout.  Okay, that’s being too nice, because the game is a sloppy handling piece of shit.

But I’m going to put a moratorium on doing any more punishers in the month of August.  I’m not sure why so many get made anyway.  They’re not huge sellers.  Hell, outside of The Impossible Game and its “expansion pack”, they almost never appear on the top 90 daily selling list on XBLIG, or if they do, they fall off fast.  This is not a genre the masses want.  And yet, you guys keep making them like they’re going out of style.  Guys, they’re not going out of style.  They are out of style, and you guys are like the last holdouts in the Garment District still making bell-bottoms and parachute pants.

Edgeland was developed by Galactic Goat Games

80 Microsoft Points said the rule regarding making fire levels will involve a Zippo and a can of hairspray in the making of this review.

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Sunflower Farm

August 1, 2012 by 3 Comments

Sunflower Farm is a voxelish minigame collection where you and up to three buddies can sit down and be bored while slogging through three games that range from dull to clunky to outright abysmal.  First up is Harvest Time, where you walk around a wheat field trying to cut as much of it down as possible.  Real quick thought, guys: if the concept of your game sounds like something that you would rather hire out illegals to do while you sip piña coladas and watch Judge Judy, chances are it won’t make for the most exciting video game.

Something tells me that Sunflower Farm doesn’t fall into the “developer always dreamed of making a game about this subject matter” category.

In single player, you have an absurdly short time limit to accomplish this.  You need to unlock higher difficulties and play those in order to unlock more stages.  I’m adverse to forcing myself to be bored for longer than I have to be and thus I decided to skip effort and go with the “give it two tries and if I fail, fuck it” approach.  Items do rain down from the sky that could help, but they come down at random and not all of them are helpful.  One of them is an airhorn, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is used for.  In the sheep herding game, it has a function.  In this one?  It seems to scare crows off, but I don’t think the crows actually do anything.  The useful stuff, like something that stops the clock or a thing that makes you run fast, don’t seem to spawn as much as that stupid airhorn.

The second game is Sheep Herding.  There’s a field of sheep, and you have to run up behind them and coral them into the center of the screen.  Getting them to move is a slow, plodding, boring experience, probably not unlike real herding is.  The third game is Tractor Racing, which is a fancy way of saying kart racing.  This one is mired by terrible handling controls.  Steering is too loose, and thus driving ends up looking like a series of quick left and right swerves, like you’re watching a teenage girl test her learner’s permit out for the first time.  And she’s slightly intoxicated.  And texting while driving.  And the car is a Dodge.

For what it’s worth, if you can get used to the steering, the courses are only barely terrible.

Whether you play these single-player or with friends, Sunflower Farm is one of the worst Xbox Live Indie Games of the year.  Harvest Time and Sheep Herding sound more like things you would punish a disobedient child with.  As for Tractor Racing, I might not have realized just how bad it was if I hadn’t already played Avatar Grand Prix 2, which was a pretty dang good game.  The tractor stuff is by far the best part of Sunflower Farm, which is like saying free body piercings is the best part of being executed by firing squad.  So I can’t recommend Sunflower Farm.  You would be way better off having your car break down in front of an old farmer’s house and having sex with his virginal daughter.  And you KNOW how those things end.

Sunflower Farm was developed by Tomlin Games

80 Microsoft Points wonder why so many cars break down in front of farms in the making of this review.  Then again, I wonder why so many strange people walk into bars as well.  Or why we’re so concerned with the amount of people required to screw in light bulbs. 

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Mirror

July 29, 2012 by 2 Comments

Mirror is one of those types of games where you play it and then wonder why nobody has done anything like it before.  For all I know, maybe someone has, but I’ve never played anything quite like it.  The idea is there is a dot on one side of a barrier, and you have to place a dot on where you think the exact mirror image side of that dot is.  It’s so simple, and yet it’s potently addictive.  I wish it was on iPad, because using a joystick to line up the dots is a bit clumsy, but otherwise I thought it was a perfectly good waste of an hour or so.  It was either that or watch Water Polo during the Olympics.  I asked Brian if they’re allowed to drown each-other.  He said no.  Mirror it was then.

Not my most in-depth review, I know, but it’s not exactly a game that lends itself well to my style.  I would like to point out that Mirror is by Silver Dollar Games, who I once kind of scorched on this site back when I first started.   It’s an editorial that I’m not really proud of, and one that I probably shouldn’t have done.  Don’t get me wrong: I think Silver Dollar squanders its talent more than it shows it, but they shouldn’t have been singled out for it.  Of course, the thing about squandering talent is you actually have to have talent to be able to do so.  If you count No Luca No, I’ve played three of their games, and I’ve placed two of those on my leaderboard.  Compare that to Team Shuriken.  I’ve reviewed five of their games, and not one of them has come remotely close to the board.

Sure, their percentage would drop like a rock if I played stuff like Who’s The Daddy? or Cassie’s Animal Sounds.  But if I review stuff like that, I’m sort of missing the point of why I started Indie Gamer Chick.  It might be fun to pick on the stuff you know is bad, like throwing water balloons filled with blue non-non-staining food coloring at the kids from juvenile hall as they do highway litter clean up, but at a certain point it loses its zing.  I don’t think I’m at that point yet, as evidenced by the blue stains on my finger tips, but the time is coming where I’ll get there.  Silver Dollar hasn’t put out a whole lot of new games lately.  They’re focusing on their Dream-Build-Play title One Finger Death-Punch, which looks pretty decent.  What I really hope from these guys is that they have one transcendent, platforming defining hit.  One that doesn’t involve trying to hold a fart in.

Mirror was developed by Silver Dollar Games

80 Microsoft Points want to know when they can take their foot out of their mouth in the making of this review.

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

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Murder for Dinner

July 26, 2012 by 6 Comments

When I heard the name “Murder for Dinner” I thought “Oh great, PETA made a game about McDonalds.  Just what we needed.”  But no, it’s actually a first-person murder mystery game.  First-person, 3D XBLIGs are a rare beast, so I had to ignore the fact that it was a point-and-click adventure and give it a try.  Even if said graphics looked like early first-generation PlayStation stuff.  Again, I am starting to understand where you old farts are coming from on this whole nostalgia thing, but how can anyone in their right mind be nostalgic for PlayStation 1 era graphics?  That’s my generation and I don’t understand why someone would remind people of that horrible shit.  It would be like reminding someone about the time that they had to sit and watch while the Blair Witch drowned their mother.  At least Daddy said it was the Blair Witch.

Note: My Father, who shall henceforth be known as Indie Gamer Killjoy, would like me to state my mother is alive and happy and was not murdered by the Blair Witch, or anyone.   I choose to remain skeptical until the DNA tests come back showing that really IS my mom.  Nobody who watches The View can possibly be related to me.

Of course someone would get killed in a place that looks like that! The only other thing that could possibly happen there is Dracula would come back from the dead and we’d have to send the Belmonts in.

The idea is an old crone calls a dinner party where everyone present is worried that their deep dark pasts will be revealed.  Yea, I’ve seen the movie Clue too.  Unlike Clue, Murder of Dinner is unfortunately played straight, without the slightest tinge of humor.  Ironically, this makes the game cornier than all of Iowa.  The writing in this game is all kinds of fucked up, like one character who outright confesses to you that they murdered someone, but it’s not the actual victim, and that’s good enough for you to clear them as a suspect.  I love that logic, and now I’ll spend the rest of my days wondering why more murders don’t use the “Oh I’ve totally killed people for sport and/or profit, but I just didn’t kill THIS guy” defense.  It’s fucking genius in its insanity.

Actually, it’s funny that the logic of that confession-slash-alibi is so demented, because the actual puzzle logic of the game is somewhat grounded in reality.  This was done by eliminating puzzles all together, but that still counts.  Instead, Murder for Dinner relies on hide-and-seek gameplay.  First, you talk to all the house guests.  Then you walk around the house looking for places that allow you to search for stuff.  If you find something, you take it around and show it to the house guests.  This will typically eliminate a suspect or two.  Then you search the grounds for more stuff, find it, and show it off.  Just keep repeating this until you reach the credits an hour later.  If this all sounds dull, it is.

Alright, I believe you when you say you didn’t bump off the old lady. Now let me ask you this: where were you the night Mr. Body got killed? Why, is that a candlestick in your hand? You’re coming downtown with me.

I’m not a big fan of point-and-click games, but that had nothing to do with why I dislike Murder for Dinner.  The characters, dialog, and setting are all just so boring.  I’m way into murder-mysteries.  I want to do one of those cheeseball “Murder Mystery Weekend” thingies at some point before I die or grow senile.  But this was just lifeless and bland, with a cast of unlikable characters and an ending I figured out thanks to one way over-played line of dialog about three-quarters of the way through.  The ending didn’t even make any sense!  And do you know what I have to say about that?  Red ties make great zebra traps, Joey!

Murder for Dinner was developed by Detroit Game Studio

240 Microsoft Points tilted the camera downwards and then shook the stick around as I descended down the staircase, to make it look like I had tripped on it and was falling to my death, because by golly, sometimes you have to figure out ways to amuse yourself in the making of this review.

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Slick

July 25, 2012 by 17 Comments

Slick received a Second Chance with the Chick. Both reviews should be taken together.  Read my updated thoughts here.

Slick has graphics and sound that try to mimic the look and feel of the original Game Boy.  This is sort of weird to me, because I truly don’t get how anyone could want their game to look like that.  This isn’t the Atari or the NES we’re talking about here, where the delusional say “gaming was never better than back in those days” and we all have a laugh.  I thought everyone was in agreement that gaming has done better than the Game Boy.  So I find it strange, in the same way that I do when I hear that senior citizens in Russia pine for the old days when Stalin was in charge.

For what it’s worth, Slick does a pretty dang good job of looking like a Game Boy game.  It even has a mono midi soundtrack.  I guess if you’re going to do something, it’s worth doing right, even if it’s recreating garbage.  But gameplay is all that matters to me, and Slick is one of the biggest offenders of being a gleefully evil fuck that I’ve come across on Indie Gamer Chick.  It’s a punisher, which isn’t exactly my favorite genre, but this one at least had some promise to it.  I made it past the first sixteen levels and was pretty impressed by the clever level design.

And then, I got to stage 1-17.  And that’s where I quit.  I’ve never done this, but I want to do a step-by-step breakdown of where this game failed.

1. You have to start the stage by bonking your head on the ceiling in the spot where there is no spike., and then land on the floor to the right.  Then you have to hop up to platform.  Trust me, this is all a lot harder than it sounds.

2. You have to jump up, turn mid-air, and land on this block.  Slick controls fairly decent, but the one thing it doesn’t do well is handle mid-air turns, so this seemingly easy bit is a lot harder than it should be.  But this isn’t even the worst offender of this problem on this stage, or even the second worst.

3. These spiked turtle things had popped up in previous levels, but I never noticed how off the collision detection on them was until here.  It is WAY the fuck off.  See the blue box I drew around the turtle to the left?  That’s a rough approximation of the enemy’s collision detection box.  If your dude enters anywhere into that field, you die.  You’ll also notice there are blocks above them, which prevent you from getting adequate clearance when you attempt to jump them.  This causes the difficulty of this section alone to spike to unnecessarily brutal levels, never mind the frustration a player experiences when they are killed by a creature that they didn’t come remotely close to touching.  Perhaps that’s not just a spike on its back.  Perhaps it’s a mound of polonium and you’re actually dying from acute radiation poisoning.  That’s hardly fighting fair at all.

4. Once you hop across those blocks, you have to fall down this chute, swerving right-to-left to avoid fireballs.  As I previously stated, the controls do everything BUT mid-air movement to varying degrees of decency.  So naturally the main challenge of this stage tests just that.  Well, there’s an added bonus to the assholery of this section: you actually accelerate while you fall.  So the game wants you to do something it is barely capable of doing in the first place, and it wants you to do so at a multiple of the normal speed you jump.  Oh, and there’s an enemy at the bottom of the jump, but don’t worry about it.  Like Butch Cassidy said to the Sundance Kid, the fall will probably kill you.  Or, more accurately, the third fireball.

5. Was #4 fun for you?  Well now, you get to do it again, only in reverse!  Oh, and you start off with the fast acceleration here.  Oh, and there’s a twist to this part..

6. You can’t see it, but there’s an indestructible turtle enemy thingie that is walking along the spikes, and after you successfully (HA! As if!) reach the top of this chute, you have to land on it and bounce across the top of it to the goal.  I can’t really tell you if the fireball at the top of the screen is a problem because I never made it this far.  In fact, I tried over 100 times to beat this level, and made it past section #4 a whopping three times.

There are those that saw the picture above and will say to themselves “sign me up!”  But to those of you that haven’t gone off your meds today, Slick is not worth the effort.  What it offers isn’t really any more of a challenge than trying to thread a needle on the other side of the room.  You could do it, in theory, but aren’t there better uses of your time?  If you absolutely need something that plays like a punisher to justify your existence, you’re better off picking a game that gives you the proper tools needed to complete it.  It’s such a shame, because I actually liked Slick up until that point.  It was still challenging, but the level design was fun and had a lot of neat twists in it.  And then the game just went all emo and wanted you to know no joy ever again.   That’s only 17 of 100 levels in, mind you.  I’m almost afraid of how depressingly impossible this game might get.  Abraham Lincoln was famously afraid to carry a knife on him, for fear he might turn it on himself.  I used to wonder how a person gets like that, but after playing Slick, I think I know.  Which is why I just carved “bullet goes here” in the back of my head with an X-Acto Knife.

Slick was developed by Halcyon Softworks

80 Microsoft Points tried to search for videos on Slick and found Rainslick instead in the making of this review.  Cue the sirens. 

Thank you @Hamcha

Gameplay courtesy of Aaron The Splazer.

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