Heroes of Hat

May 25, 2012 by 2 Comments

Do you know what Heroes of Hat needs?  Some anti-psychotic medication.  With level design centered around over-powered enemies bombarding you with unavoidable attacks, dick move leap-of-faith jumps, and over-reliance on overly-slow special abilities, it feels like the gaming version of climbing a water tower with a telescopic rifle and going to town on the townspeople.  It’s a game that needs help, the kind of help that involves a straight jacket and a padded room.  You have to be off your fucking rocker to think anyone would find this type of utterly unfair, annoying gameplay fun.  And they expect four people to do it together!  It makes me wonder if this was really designed by the University of Utah’s game design program, or was it really by their sociology department as some kind of “how far can someone be pushed before they start killing and eating their fellow humans?” hypothesis.  If that’s the case, the answer is 51 minutes.  Don’t ask how I know.  *burp*

If there’s a storyline, I missed it.  You’re a little monster dude thingie that has to hop around levels looking for a goal.  Along the way, you’re given a variety of hats that allow you to do various special attacks.  The hats don’t really mean anything.  Once you reach a certain point, you just have the new ability and can use it as much as you want, whenever you want.  The first one is being able to fire arrows.  You just press X to release an offensive shot, or charge X for a couple of seconds and release it to create a barrage of slow-moving arrows that you can then use as a platform.  The second one is a bomb, which you can detonate under you for an extra boostie or chuck at enemies.  You can’t aim the arrows upwards, so bombs are your only option.  I have no idea what the third hat is, because I didn’t bother playing past the fourth stage, but whatever it is, I’m willing to bet it’s slow and useless.

Either way, enemies soak up damage and keep coming at you, rendering attacking moot.  I only encountered three enemies.  There were bees, which took something like eight arrows to shoot down.  They dive bomb you AND they fire projectiles at you, and you can bet your ass they’ll be strategically placed in the worst possible sections, which are typically right above narrow ledges.  There were bomb throwing guys who are unfairly accurate and don’t leave enough time between attacks.  You can kill them by lobbing three bombs at them.  Mind you, in the time it takes you to load up a bomb, charge it (you have to charge it to be able to aim it, otherwise you just drop it), aim, toss, and detonate (you have to detonate every bomb you throw), the enemy has lobbed either two or three at you, and probably killed you.  Fair?  No.  Fun?  No.  An example of developers getting too good at their own game and losing track of reality?  Probably.  I also fought one or two snails that soak up arrows and fire spikes at you.

The level design is just one instance of dick movery after another, like they went through a checklist of things an asshole would do when designing a game.  Leaps of faith?  Check.  Enemies situated in places that you can’t possibly fight them?  Check.  Needlessly confusing level layouts?  Check.  I’m half-shocked they bothered with checkpoints, but I guess those were there for the benefit of the co-op mode.  I didn’t bother with it.  I play video games to make friends, not lose them.  Even with friends, most of the things that are bad about Heroes of Hat would still be the same.  Overpowered enemies that are out of reach are still overpowered and out of reach whether you’re alone or with others.  Leaps of faith are still leaps of faith whether solo or in a group.  Actually, they tend to be worse, because if just one fucker doesn’t jump, everyone else has to wait for him.  Assuming the screen scrolls with the three and doesn’t stick with the one hold-out, which would lead to everyone else dying.  Again, I didn’t play Heroes of Hat multiplayer, so I don’t know how much better or worse (I’m guessing worse) it is with friends.  They do say misery loves company, but I want to go on the record of saying that company is rarely eager to join in on being miserable.

If you gave me all day, I could not think of one positive thing to say about Heroes of Hat.  The graphics are ugly even by the standards of 1996.  The controls are too loose.  I fell through the geometry at least once and I was only four levels in by that point.  The mechanics are clunky.  The enemies too powerful.  The level design is abysmal.  This is one of the worst games I’ve played this year and I would sooner recommend you pay someone a dollar to kick you in the face than play this.  What’s really weird is that it looks just so damn innocent.  I mean, look at it!

Adorable, isn’t it?  But, make no mistake, Heroes of Hat is horrible.  This is like the type of game that evil doers who run orphanages would give their children, just to complete the sense of being downtrodden.

Heroes of Hat was developed by Utah Game Forge

80 Microsoft Points give this game an F, tells students to write “we will not make crappy games that make Indie Gamer Chick want to cut herself” on the blackboard 100 times in the making of this review. 

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5 Minutes RPG

May 24, 2012 by 3 Comments

UPDATE: 5 Minutes RPG is now $1.

5 Minutes RPG, or 5MinRPG as its known on the marketplace for reasons that baffle me, is a little misleading in its name.  It’s not really an RPG in the strictest sense, nor does it only last for five minutes.  It plays more like an action-based dungeon-crawler.  At least I think it does.  This is one of those “tough love” games that mostly leaves players to figure things out on their own.  There’s a couple help screens, but they’re not much use.  The first level acts as a sort of tutorial, but ended before my head scratching did.  And trust me, I don’t have head lice.

Anymore.

The idea is you’re a wizard (or wizards, but I didn’t get a chance to play co-op, more on that later) who has to work his way through a series of randomly generated dungeons, fighting monsters, opening treasures, and slaying bosses.  There are six levels and one final boss fight.  I didn’t even make it half-way through the quest without giving up, so I can’t tell you what you fight in the end.  I will say that you better hope it’s not straight above you, because otherwise you’ll be in big trouble.

I get the impression that 5 Minutes RPG started out as a turn-based strategy game and devolved into the sloppy hack-and-slasher that ended up on the marketplace.  Screens are broken up into hexagonal segments that limit what direction your character can move and shoot.  You can go straight in a horizontal line, but you can’t move vertically up and down, only diagonally.  This makes no sense at all in an action RPG.  It makes all movement feel clunky, and lining up to attack enemies a chore.  I quit on the third boss, because I was getting surrounded on all sides by enemies.  Even with a weapon that could attack in all six directions, it didn’t really work as advertised.  I could still only damage the one enemy I was pointing at.  While the enemies on the other five sides could leisurely chew on my ass, my attack (of which the animation did seem to touch them) had no effect.  What is the point of even having something that attacks in all six directions in a hexagonal based game if the developers didn’t take the time to make sure its range actually covered all six directions?

If it wasn’t for that, I could probably recommend 5 Minutes RPG.  It wouldn’t be stellar or anything, but it would probably be a decent waste of time with a few friends.  I really do get the impression that you need to play in co-op to have a fighting chance.  Even when I took the time to kill all the enemies and level up my weapons, I couldn’t get past that third boss because I was being absolutely gang-banged on all sides by the boss and minor baddies.  If someone had been there to take the load off, I might have been able to fight off two or three guys.  By myself, I would enter the boss chamber and watch my health go from full to empty in just seconds once all the enemies spawned around me.  And this was on the normal difficulty.  I’m guessing on anything higher, the enemies would have raked my face across the pavement and then poured quicklime on my quivering body.

If 5 Minutes RPG was an experiment, let’s call it a failed one and move on.  It’s not the biggest conceptional stillbirth I’ve seen here, but it’s close.  The combat system just doesn’t work, and never really had the potential to.  I like the idea of bite-sized, randomly generated dungeons that I can complete in a couple of minutes while I wait for my bagel to get toasted.  Do you know what I like more?  Being able to move in a straight vertical line.  I find it to generally be an important aspect of gameplay.  I never liked how Q*Bert controlled either, but at least I’m young enough to say I think that game sucks and have old timers pass it off as being a smart-assed whippersnapper.  Of course, comparing Q*Bert to 5 Minutes RPG is unfair.  The only thing they have in common is you need some kind of inner-ear disorder for the controls they use to feel intuitive.

5 Minutes RPG was developed by Andreil Game

Points of Sale: Xbox Live Indie Games

$3 still have no clue what the point of having enemies drop gold was in the making of this review.


Video courtesy of Alan at The Indie Ocean

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MiG Madness

May 22, 2012 by 3 Comments

You’ll probably get 80 Microsoft Points worth of entertainment out of MiG Madness.  It’s a solid wave-shooter in the styling of Time Pilot that features four player co-op.  No storyline or bullshit cut scenes.  It’s just you, your buddies, some power-ups, and some bad guys.  There’s not a lot of meat on the bone, but what it here is fairly palatable, making MiG a solid waste of an hour.  I almost have nothing to complain about.

Almost.

MiG’s graphics are not spectacular or anything, but it does have decent character models and pretty looking clouds.  I would probably have liked these things more, but it quickly became obvious that MiG could serve as a poster child for developers allowing ascetics to get in the way of gameplay.  MiG suffers from all kinds of visibility issues.  You often can’t see your bullets, but more importantly, you often can’t see those of the enemies either.  In a game that is all about shooting things and dodging bullets, that is pretty significant problem.  The bullets just blend it too much with the background, and sometimes the planes do too, depending on what color the backdrop is.  The game constantly switches between day and night, dusk and dawn, meaning that no matter what color ship you choose, keeping an eye on it can be troublesome.  I had the best luck with yellow, even if it made me feel like I was flying a giant Twinkie.

I’ve played other games here where the graphics got in the way of gameplay.  I do get it.  Better graphics equals more commercial appeal.  However, I don’t think anyone is going to look at a game that looks like this:

And say that they’re sold on it based on how gosh darn swell the clouds look.  A person is either going to want a quirk-and-dirty wave shooter themed on vintage military planes or they won’t.  MiG is not a bad game by any means.  It’s fun in single player or co-op, has a nice variety of weapons (even if some of the missile-based stuff is too slow to be useful), and controls pretty decently.  It’s the type of game that you can spend a buck on, play for an hour, feel satisfied, and never go back to it again.  If it wasn’t for the graphics getting in the way, I wouldn’t have to include “but..” with all of that.  Sadly I do.  It’s a big but, I cannot lie.  You developers have got to try.  When a title shows up with a pretty face but busted gameplay all over the place, it is dung.

MiG Madness was developed by Bionic Shark Studios

80 Microsoft Points promise to never do that again in the making of this review. 

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Miasma 2

May 18, 2012 by 12 Comments

Having never played the original Miasma, I wasn’t sure if this would be one of those instances where I would feel like a party crasher.  But, the developer sent me a review request, the trailer looked slick, the graphics were really good-looking for an XBLIG, and I think it’s probably a good idea to only piss people off every 48 hours.  Thus, I shelved my planned Sonic 4 review again and bought Miasma 2.  I mean, how bad could it be?

Well, it’s not that Miasma 2 is bad, or at least it probably isn’t if you’re into turn-based tactics games.  I wouldn’t say I hate them, but I rarely get into them.  I finished Final Fantasy Tactics and a couple of the Advance Wars games, and I kind of, sort of dug Valkyria Chronicles.  But I wouldn’t describe my relationship with Tactical games the same way I would with Tower Defense, where I never think about them but tend to get hooked on them when I actually play them.  Tactical shit generally has to be exceptionally good for me to get into it.  Or so stupidly idiotic, like Valkyria was, that I keep playing just to ogle the train wreck.

For what it’s worth, the game really does look this good.

So I struggled with Miasma 2, because I just found the whole thing to be so damn bland.  Everything here is generic.  The character designs, the enemies, the backdrops, and especially the story.  The game allows you to choose between playing as a chick or a dude, so I chose the chick.  The opening tutorial stage requires you to take out a couple of enemies and rescue your husband.  Right from the get-go, Miasma 2 doesn’t do a good job explaining the play mechanics.  All movements and actions feel overly complex and unintuitive.  Special abilities aren’t well explained, damage ratios barely get mentioned, and it ended before most of my questions were answered.  It’s like getting swim lessons from an instructor that is secretly taking bets on what child will be the first to drown.

The tutorial ended with me saving my husband.  And then there was the story.  Lots and lots of boring story.  And inconsistent story too.  So the dude I rescued is my husband.  At some point, he asked me why I saved him, if it was because he was a soldier or if there was more to us than that.  And then you get to choose which one it is.  Well, this is kind of fucked up on account of it already being established that we’re married.  God, it would suck to serve with these two.  They’ve already tied the knot and yet all their conversations still sound like the clumsy small-talk of two preteens with puppy love in their eyes.  I only played a few levels before getting bored and quitting, so I’m trying to picture what kind of dialog I’m missing.  I would not be surprised if at some point the wife turns to her husband and asks if he wants to go steady with her.

Between levels, you navigate a small hub world from a first-person perspective, and it’s pretty well done.  I almost wish they had figured out how to add guns to that and just turned this into a Perfect Dark clone.  Once things get back to the battlefield, the tedium returns.  In the second level, you are given a tank-thing that you can barely move, a couple extra guys to move around, and some frag grenades, which I quickly used to take out a couple grunts and a mech-thingie.  Then more baddies came in, and I was already dying on account that I didn’t grasp the concept of hiding behind shit to avoid getting shot.  I decided to restart the level.  Except this time, the game forgot to give me my grenades back.  I don’t know if I somehow walked over something that picked them up and didn’t realize it, or if the game glitched out, but I had no grenades.  I also was so bored out of my fucking skull by this point that Brian suggested it might be on account of me needing a nap.  So I took a nap, woke up, restarted the game, got my grenades back somehow, finished the stage, and it still wasn’t fun.

Thankfully, you can make the whole stage’s grid visible in the options menu. Why on Earth would you want to play with it turned off?

I did try the third level, but I realized quickly that there was no potential left for myself to have any entertainment with Miasma 2, so I bailed on it.  I’ve done that a few times here at Indie Gamer Chick, but this time it really wasn’t out of spite.  I just didn’t enjoy anything at all and I saw no potential for it to get better.  I’m not one of those critics who will say “yea, it wasn’t for me, but the graphics were really well done and they obviously put a lot of work into this game, so you should try it.”  I can’t do that.  I didn’t even hate Miasma 2.  I just don’t want to ever play it again.  I can say firmly that if you enjoy Tactical stuff on the same level I do (which is barely at all), this game won’t cause an epiphany.  If you’re a fan of the genre, I honestly don’t think you’ll get any amusement out of it besides the fact that it’s $1 and functional.  I might be wrong.  Maybe Alan, Tim, or Tristan will say otherwise.   I would like to see something else by ESP Games, because they clearly have the technical chops.  Now they just need to figure out how to nail down that whole “don’t make a boring game” thing and they’re set.

Miasma 2 was developed by ESP Games

80 Microsoft Points said the only thing they could have read on my mind while playing this was BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHH in the making of this review.

 

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A Madman’s Guide To Happiness.

May 17, 2012 by Leave a comment

Trying to keep regular updates on my site can be a bit of a bitch at times.  Clearing 200+ reviews in under a year was probably not the best idea, because finding time to keep up that established pace can be trying.  I had to put a slight delay on my planned massacre of Sonic The Hedgehog 4, and here it is, 11:00PM and I still haven’t done a review today.  Thank Christ for Xbox Live Indie Games, where titles that can be beaten in five minutes or less are as abundant as McDonalds, although not nearly as healthy for you.

Well, it is Thursday, and thus it’s time for a Katch-Up.  I had been given a heads-up that A Madman’s Guide To Happiness was short, shitty, and insane enough for me to get a good review out of it.  Well, they got two out of the three right.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s shitty.  That’s mostly because it doesn’t last long enough to leave any impression on me at all, really.  I hate to call any game I play a Mulligan, but Jesus, five minutes isn’t a lot to go on.

Are there any annoying kids in your life that you never want to have to speak to again? Show them that picture, tell them you turn into that whenever there’s a full moon, and you won’t have that problem ever again.

The basic idea is you’re reading the computer of some psychotic dude who sets up a couple of puzzles for you to solve.  And by puzzles, I mean stuff that seems like it was copied straight out of Highlights for Children that had its innocence stripped away by being forced to watch Nicolas Cage’s snuff film collection.  Basic math questions, a trick-question style riddle, and even one of those “count the triangles pictured, but don’t forget that small triangles make big ones” things.  It’s as if John Wayne Gacy was forced to repeat the first grade.

Between all these brain teasers that are about as stimulating as a medically induced coma, you get to read these rambling, incoherent ravings by the titular madman.  I have to say, at first I figured the game was trying to be weird for the sake of being weird, but actually I was sort of taken in by the creepiness of it all, the same way I was with Silver Dollar Games’ Fatal Seduction.  I became a little invested in it.  And then it ended in roughly half the time my average bowel movement takes.  The really weird part?  Like a good bowel movement, it was oddly satisfying.  I don’t know if that makes it worth the $1 it costs, but hell, people pay more than that for X-Lax.  Sometimes you just need a nice, satisfying dump.

A Madman’s Guide to Happiness was developed by Jaded Horizon

80 Microsoft Points honestly, truly cannot believe I ended up liking this weird ass piece of shit enough to give it a positive review in the making of this review.

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Pendulous

May 15, 2012 by 7 Comments

I’m sure there are games out there similar to Pendulous, where the idea is to swing from pendulum to pendulum trying to reach a goal in the shortest time possible.  I already had someone tell me that it’s not all that different from Jungle Hunt, a game I never played.  Jungle Hunt was a product of the Golden Age of Arcades, circa 1982.  I’m a product of unprotected sex, circa 1988.  However, as it turns out, Jungle Hunt is included in Tatio Legends for the original Xbox, which I actually own.  So I fired it up and discovered that the person was totally wrong.  Well, that was a waste of an opening paragraph.

The idea is you swing from spot to spot as a little cog thing, latching onto the nearest swing-point automatically.  Using the left and right triggers (or the stick if you’re an idiot, more on that later), you build up momentum to launch yourself to the next spot.  As you progress through the meager fourteen stages, various traps and obstacles pop up, including one annoying section featuring a red gunky sludge stuff that seemed to bubble up at random and was the only bit of  true frustration in the game.  Well, that and the fact that the developers made a liar out of me.

Dear Datura loving twats: that shit was NOT art. Now THIS is art.

When I reviewed Cuddle Bear, I noted that I would immediately discontinue playing any game at the first instance of a leap-of-faith moment.  So naturally Pendulous was full of those types of moments.  Only I didn’t quit the game.  I kept going.  And thus I’m a big liar.  At least my excuse is good one: Pendulous is a really well done game.  The problem is, there was no need to map the swinging mechanics to both the sticks and the trigger buttons.  The triggers work just fine, so the stick should have been used to move the camera.  There’s just too many spots where you can’t see the next object you’re swinging to.  Or traps that move up and down are off-screen, so you can’t possibly calculate when the appropriate time to jump is.  This was probably related to the porting of this game over from Windows Phone, which the developer noted to me had been the cause of a few issues.

This is where being The Chick is tough, because I have to say something that is probably devastating for a developer to hear: this game was so good that it had a spot on the leaderboard all locked up.  I really loved it.  This is exactly the kind of original, quirky type of game I expected to find in the XBLIG channel when I started this site, and it’s worth your money right now.  The length of the game didn’t bother me at all.  Fourteen quickie stages that are sublime (plus another 14 mirrored ones, snore)  is preferable to a four-hour game that struggles to tread water.  But that damn camera issue was like the iceberg to Pendulous’ Titanic.  Its chances were sunk.  All is not lost.  They already planned to add more levels, and Do Better Games are aware of my concerns, because I sent them a singing telegram.  Only I misread the job description.  It was actually a singeing telegram, who knocked on their door and proceeded to set himself on fire.

Well, they got the message.  The game needs a camera, and then they need to issue what could be the most important Second Chance with the Chick challenge in the history of this site.  They would probably get to it sooner, but because of my screw-up, they first have to clean up a hell of a mess on their porch.

Pendulous was developed by Do Better Games

80 Microsoft Points noted Polish is a nationality, not a race, so that technically makes me xenophobic, not racist, in the making of this review.

You can also read my buddy Hurley’s review at Gear-Fish for this very title.

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SEAL Team 12

May 12, 2012 by 11 Comments

SEAL Team 12 comes to us via Social Loner Studios, the nutjobs behind the hilariously absurd Bird Assassin.  I have to admit, I didn’t think SEAL would be any good.  I think my exact words to Brian were “oh great, another TwickS on XBLIG that tries to ape some 80s shooter I never played.”   Plus it was overpriced at 240 Microsoft Points, because some developers hold on to their belief that their game will sell despite that price point.  It’s kind of cute in a demented “twenty-year-old still believes in Santa Claus” kind of way.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find SEAL Team 12 to be a pretty decent game.  The idea is the world is being threatened by the Guardians Of Devastation, or GOD for short.  Ah, I see what you did there, Social Loner Studios.  Actually, Stevie Wonder can see what you did there on account of the joke being run into the ground about half-way through the game.  Sure, there’s enough anti-GOD puns to make Christopher Hitchens’ corpse obtain the rare status of “double rigor” if you catch my drift, but damn do they lay it on a little too thick.  The rest of the humor mostly works.  Every stage begins with an NPC character (that is wearing a red-shirt for double the geek points) being killed by whatever is the newest enemy added to the game.  This actually caused me to laugh out loud a few times.  The only time it fell flat was when the dead man walking was named Kenny.  I accurately predicted a horrible “oh my God, they killed Kenny” joke, and then watched in disgust as the prophecy was fulfilled.  Jesus Christ, people!  When the guys who created the joke realize it’s not funny anymore and drop it, maybe it’s time to get a fucking clue.

The game itself is a typical Commando-style “walk upwards, kill dudes, walk upwards a little more, kill more dudes” twin-stick shooter .  If this was done straight-laced, it would have been boring.  Thankfully, the game has what so many XBLIGs don’t: personality.  The witty dialog that opens every stage, the moments where you see enemy conversations, and the well done cast of characters.  Considering that the genre couldn’t possibly be more tired if it took an entire bottle of Valium, the effort to dress it up is admirable.  When you strip away all the ascetics, SEAL Team 12 is as generic as it gets.  Walk, shoot, throw grenades, pick up weapons, occasionally hop in a tank, fight a few bosses, end credits.  Quite frankly, everyone should approach a game like this with skepticism.

And it’s not like what is here is done perfectly either.  There are a few problems.  The weapon selection is limited and clichéd.  All weapon pick-ups are done via duel-wielding, mapped to the left trigger to fire, while your right hand always retains the default machine gun.  The setup works, but there’s not enough weapon drops, and what is here is limited.  Some of the guns, particularly the flame-thrower, are worthless.  You get an unlimited amount of normal grenades, but you can’t stack any special ones you pick up.  Given how outlandish the plot and characters were, they should have gone nuts with the variety of guns.  But they didn’t, and the game suffers a lot for it.

A bigger problem is the game becomes a bit of a bullet-hell in the final stages.  Let’s be clear about something:  bullet-hells work in space-shooters when you’re a nimble ship and the battlefield leaves plenty of room to maneuver.  They tend not to work if you’re a clunky, slow-moving steroid freak that has various obstacles you have to walk around.  The game got so ridiculous at the end that we had to swallow our pride and set the difficulty to easy.  Shameful for sure.  Not as shameful as, say, announcing a fake contest for a popular new release on Twitter, then creating a fake account designed to be the “winner” five minutes after you announce the contest.  Then retweeting posts from people your original account follows to pad things out.  And not remembering to try to type different than you typically do.  Or even more brazenly, only retweeting one person’s “wow, I’m so excited, I hope I win!” tweet out of the dozens you receive from gullible people who think you actually have something to give away, and having it be from the fake account you just made five minutes after your fake contest began, making the fix so obvious that a person could accurately predict to multiple witnesses the outcome of the “drawing” for the second straight contest you’ve held.  I mean, theoretically, if your contest was a real random drawing, nobody could possibly predict the outcome of the winner once, never mind twice in a row.  Finally, as soon as your fake contest is over, you never Tweet from that fake account again, just to finally and officially confirm what an oblivious loser you are for thinking nobody would catch on.  Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Despite a few hang-ups, SEAL Team 12 is really well done. Yea, it offers nothing new as a game, but it’s still fun.  In fact, I’m kind of surprised at how well it works in both single player and co-op.  Yea, the price point is kind of stupid.  Sure, some of the jokes fall flat.  You know, Social Loner Studios have been off my radar, but they’re actually 2 for 2 here at Indie Gamer Chick.  But, they haven’t made a leaderboard contender yet.  They probably have the talent to do so, so I’ll be keeping an eye on them.  Well, I’m also doing that because I think they’re fucking insane and might kill and eat me if I turn my back on them.

SEAL Team 12 was developed by Social Loner Studios

IGC_Approved240 Microsoft Points noted that nobody’s fake contest was mentioned in particular, so if you think I’m talking about you, that really says more about you than me in the making of this review.

SEAL Team 12 is also available for PC on Desura for $2.99.  This version is unverified by Indie Gamer Chick.  The XBLIG version is Chick Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Curse of the Crescent Isle

May 10, 2012 by 3 Comments

Do you know what the key to critical acclaim is on Xbox Live Indie Games?  No, it’s not having a good game.  Don’t be silly.  It’s having a retro-style graphics and gameplay that borrows mechanics from a popular 80s NES hit.  If you have that, you have a game that will have more praise dumped on it than a parrot that sings Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.  Which is ironic given that most of these new-retro titles just poorly mimic the classics the same way a parrot mimics a song.  Sometimes praise is deserved.  Stuff like Escape Goat or Aesop’s Garden comes to mind.  Most of the time, the end result is cute and charming but ultimately just kind of exists as a weird novelty.

Take today’s Katch-Up game, Curse of the Crescent Isle.  It has pretty good NES style graphics without the slightest taint of anything modern to ruin the effect.  The story is appropriately insane.  You take the role of a King who has to save the people of his land from a, um, something or another that has turned them into, some.. things.  Honestly, I’m not sure what the fuck happened, but who cares?  I couldn’t figure out why anything happened to anyone in any 8-bit game, so why should I expect to start now?  It’s all about the gameplay, which is modeled after the platforming and lifting mechanics of Super Mario Bros. 2.  Only here, the enemies you pick up can be used as tools.  It’s a sensible evolution on the established concept.

It’s hard to lift with your knees when all you have is a beet-red anus for legs.

Here’s the problem: the game sucks.  Allow me to elaborate.  Super Mario 2 overall controlled decently, as long as you picked the right character.  I never used Mario, because his jumping was too weak.  I stuck with Luigi, who wasn’t quite as pitifully slow as the Princess, but could also jump higher and further than her.  In a game that is all about jumping, it made sense to me.  Unfortunately, Crescent Isle is all about jumping too, but you’re stuck with someone who controls like Mario did.  Oddly enough, the gravity feels strong, but the controls overall feel way too loose.  I can’t tell you how many times I would jump for a vine, grab it, but then coast straight off the side of it.  It was like the King lubed his hands up with Vaseline before jumping.

The biggest issue with Crescent Isle is how badly implemented the mechanics are.  The control scheme is very clunky.  You pick up enemies with the X, but you also use X to switch between lifting them over your head or putting them below your feet.  You jump with A and throw with B.  It’s messy and never feels intuitive.  There’s also problems with the physics of lifting and throwing.  Enemies can’t really die.  If you throw them into each-other, it just knocks one out.  Once they hit each-other, they ricochet back and typically cause damage if they float anywhere close to you.

The only thing Crescent Isle does well is puzzles.  There are some clever ones that make neat use of the enemies’ skills.  Sadly, the impact of those puzzles is lost due to the lack of check-points combined with the horrible play control.  And that’s not even taking into account when the game glitches out on you.  During the second stage, there are puzzles that require you to use an ice monster to freeze fireballs shot out of a pipe, then use them as stepping-stones.  It was clever the first time they used it.  After a dozen times, it was tedious and lame.  Especially since the fireballs sometimes would just go away instead of staying in place as a block.  Or there was the time that I froze a fireball, it disappeared, and the pipe never spit out another one.  I was stuck there, and that fucking sucks.  Sure, you can pause the game and restart the level, but it had taken me around ten minutes to get to that point.  And that was just that one attempt, not counting all the lives I lost trying to get there before that.  The puzzles lose their zing when the game’s lack of debugging causes you to replay them over and over again.  Hell, I lost count of how many times an enemy pushed me through a solid wall and to my death.  No wait, I didn’t.  It was ELEVEN FUCKING TIMES!

Why does the King always look like he’s constipated?

Ultimately, Curse of the Crescent Isle just isn’t that fun.  The controls are bad, the levels are too sprawling, and the concept is just kind of boring.  Of course, Crescent Isle has 8-bit style graphics and is almost kind of like Super Mario 2, so it got critical acclaim.  When I read how this was received by other critics, I was kind of flabbergasted.  You know, there was another 8-bit clone of Super Mario 2 once upon a time.  It was called Bible Adventures.  I never played it, but I certainly know of its reputation.  I have a theory that if that game came out today and was on Xbox Live Indie Games, it would be considered really good.  Why?  Because it meets all the criteria for critical acclaim on the platform.  8-bit?  Check.  Clone of a flagship title?  Check.  Actually fun?  Who cares?  Oh, don’t scoff!  You know I’m right.

Curse of the Crescent Isle was developed by Adam the Otaku

80 Microsoft Points never played Duck Tales on the NES so I can’t accurately compare this to that in the making of this review.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , ,

Droppin’ Ballz

May 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

Droppin’ Ballz is one of those “fall as far as you can” games.  My gut tells me it was designed with tilt-controls in mind.  Because Microsoft opted to not go with a motion-controller like everyone and their mom and instead decided to create a device that plays like Minority Report as invented by the chronically unambitious, Ballz is stuck using the trigger buttons instead.  I guess this control scheme works, but it never feels quite right.   My biggest complaint, that the game moves too slowly, is easily corrected by adjusting the difficulty.  The game is set to easy on default, but it’s only really tolerable on normal or higher.  And that’s assuming you play the game on its classic mode, where you just fall from one platform to another.  I was ready to write off Droppin’ Ballz as just another phone-style faller that has no place on a console.

I think the developers were droppin’ something, but it wasn’t ballz.

And then I tried Fever mode, which feels like you’re falling through the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, only without having to drop acid.  Actually, I imagine if you dropped acid while playing this, it would be pretty fucking bad ass, but probably a little too difficult to play.  The idea is still  the same: fall from platform to platform, try to not miss the platforms, and try not to land on the black platforms.  Only in this mode, the background changes color and tries to distract you, plus there are perspective-altering “power-ups” that shift what angle you view the game from.  This is what the whole game should have been like.  It’s as if developers flipped a coin to decide if they would go the generic route or the trippin’ on mushrooms route, and the coin fell down a sewer grate.  And they couldn’t flip another because then they wouldn’t have enough change left to get a Mountain Dew, so they said “fuck it” and continued working on the inferior classic mode as well.

I actually did like Droppin’ Ballz, but I have a tough time recommending it.  There’s no online leaderboards, so there’s really no point in playing it.  Hell, even the local leaderboards are all kinds of fucked up.  In theory, there should be six boards: one for each game mode on each difficulty level.  The point values increase on the higher difficulty stages, so ranking a game played on the tedious easy mode over the medium mode is silly.  But that’s how it’s done in Droppin’ Ballz.  Even worse, it ranks games played in Classic mode against games played in the wacky Fever mode, which makes no sense at all.  I guess Fever Mode is good for a twenty-minute distraction and priced accordingly, so I do mildly recommend it.  I would rather see this game on iPhone, with online leaderboards.  I could see it being a big, word-of-mouth hit on there.  It would be a perfect fit on a platform developed by an acid-dropping, corporate hippie.  They could rename it “Jobs Ball.”

Droppin’ Ballz was developed by He-3 Software

80 Microsoft Points heard Hurley gave his hopes up when he heard that there was a way to make your balls drop for just 80MSP in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of

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Cuddle Bear

May 7, 2012 by 20 Comments

Cuddle Bear received a Second Chance with the Chick. Vast improvements have changed it from one of the worst games ever made to merely terrible. I kid. It’s not really that bad anymore.  Read the new review.

In order for Cuddle Bear to be as bad as it looks, it would have to walk around kicking puppies and luring children into discarded refrigerators. I’m not sure if it does those things, but I can’t swear it doesn’t. This is one of the worst Xbox Live Indie Games of the year. It didn’t start that bad. You play as a psychotic teddy bear that goes around killing various bugs and animals. You’re armed with a gun, you have the ability to buy more guns, and levels are usually filled with plenty of God’s creatures for you to gleefully murder.

No really, that is what the game looks like.

The first world, set inside a house, is actually not too bad. Yes, the MS Paint graphics are embarrassing, the amusement level of the sound effects gets old fast, and the floaty jumping I just fucking knew would be problematic later, but it was still kind of cute in a “oh, look at the three-legged kitten” kind of way. And then I got to the suburb level, where the game took a turn for the worst. The platforming started to rely heavily on leap-of-faith gameplay. You know what I’m talking about. It’s where you have to jump to a platform you can’t see, possibly into enemies that you can’t defend yourself against. Some levels from that point on are completely centered around that concept. You jump, wait for the platform to appear, see an enemy next to the ledge, hit the enemy, recoil hugely off it, and fall to your death. Or even worse, you don’t die, fall to the ground, and have to walk all the way back to the start of the level to try again. At this point, if I had a button in front of me that would have detonated the developer’s head, I can’t say I wouldn’t have pushed it. Actually, I probably would have had someone else push it for me. Never hurts to have a second set of fingerprints on head-popping buttons.

I’m not sure how a game gets made in this day and age with gameplay like this. Did nobody play this far and tell the developer “you know, this is kind of just a series of dick moves that isn’t fun in the slightest bit?” I’m guessing not. It sucks that it falls to me to tell the developer that Cuddle Bear is just a series of dick moves that isn’t fun in the slightest bit. At least the leap of faith stuff isn’t the only thing to complain about. The graphics are shitty, but the game somehow still comes in at 241.5MB, necessitating an insulting 240 Microsoft Point price tag. Truth be told, that’s probably a good thing. It means nobody is likely to waste any time or money on this piece of shit. The enemies end up being bullet sponges, it takes too long to upgrade guns, and the game is kind of too long and samey for what it has to offer. I was getting bored with it long before I was getting angry at it.

Pictured: Cuddle Bear after he murdered fun itself.

Cuddle Bear isn’t the first title here that featured leap-of-faith platforming, but it will be the last one that I make any effort to finish. If developers don’t want to put in any effort into their level designs, I’m not going to make any effort to play them. I did excuse the first couple dozen instances of blind jumping in Cuddle Bear, but it became apparent during the second beach level that I was wasting my time. Nothing good had come of the game by this point. It was just getting worse and worse. This kind of stuff worked in old school games where the enemies didn’t spawn until you reached the point they were meant to appear. In this game, and many other XBLIGs for that matter, the enemies are just there, walking back and forth. You can’t prevent them from being close enough to the ledge, and thus all platforming is left completely to chance. I find it odd that the developer requested I review this game. Maybe he wasn’t aware how bad it was.  Well, hopefully he knows now.  If not, I’m not sure how else to say it.  I could sing it.

Beneath the knees, hopefully nobody pees.

He’ll slurp and gag and gargle the sea.

Because that’s the day the Cuddle Bear sucked a big dick.

Cuddle Bear was developed by Happy Sock Entertainment

240 Microsoft Points read that the developer has Cuddle Bear 2 planned, says this is confirmation of the existence of evil in the making of this review.

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