Little Monsters

May 6, 2012 by Leave a comment

I loves me some physics-based puzzlers.  That’s why you won’t catch me bitching about what Angry Birds has done to the iOS market.  I couldn’t be happier.  It’s a genre that lends itself perfectly to killing time.  If I’m stuck waiting for something, I can spend five minutes with it or an hour, being able to jump in and out without consequence.  That’s why I don’t think the genre works well for consoles.  It lacks that “killing time” feel.  There’s a big difference between playing Angry Birds while waiting at the doctor’s office and playing Angry Birds on your couch.  The only time I get bored playing these games is when I have nothing to do.

By the way, that has nothing to do with why I don’t like Little Monsters.  I don’t because the game sucks.  But if it had been good, that would be the excuse of why I didn’t recommend it more.  Figured it would be fair to let you know that.

In Little Monsters, you’re given a limited number of bombs in each stage to blast all enemies off the their platforms and into oblivion.  There’s a variety of enemies, some of which jump, some of which are heavy, some of which float in the air, and some of which melt ice blocks and detonate explosives.  They’re used in clever ways through-out all 30 puzzles included.  The game scores on a 3-star system, much like Angry Birds.  The fewer bombs you use, the more stars you get.  The concept is solid.  The execution is so not solid it’s practically vapor.

Having bad physics in a physics-based puzzler is like entering a horse into a drag race with a Ferrari.  You’re just asking to be destroyed.  In Little Monsters, the enemies are round in shape and roll when they get moved.  Sometimes they would be rolling at a pretty decent speed, with nothing in their way, and just come to a complete stop for no reason.  This was especially a problem with the big monsters.  For no reason, they would stop on the edge of a cliff, stop in the middle of a platform, or once even briefly while rolling down a slope, negating all momentum it had built up.  It was weird and hugely annoying.  I can’t tell you how many times I had a stage beaten only to see the physics crap out and enemies stop moving for no reason. Oddly enough, this never seemed to happen with the “cute monster” that you have to avoid killing.  By God, if anything came remotely close to it, it seemed to scoot its ass off a cliff like it thought it was starring in Lemmings.

Maybe the big dudes lactate super glue. That sounds like something a monster would do.

The bombs aren’t accurate either.  It feels like something is off in the collision detection, or there’s an issue with the gravity.  I would set bombs on the bouncing enemies, wait for them to line up, and detonate, only for the bomb to not even budge them.  This happens way too often.  There are a few stages that involve timing, but whether the bomb would actually work the way it’s supposed to was never consistent from one attempt to the next.  It’s never fun to have to replay levels when you know the solution but have to wait until the game is willing to behave correctly.

The bombs also lack “oomph” to them.  From one stage to the next, the strength of their blasts never feels uniform.  These problems all add up to a game that feels like it’s still in the Beta stage of development.  Maybe something good can come of it, but by time it does, people will have given up and Little Monsters will lose its potential audience.  Think of every sad picture you’ve seen of a premature baby being hooked to life support, with tubes and wires all over its body.  That’s what a developer does to its own game when it releases it too soon.  Little Monsters is that sad, premature baby.  All the potential in the world, but barely a fighting chance of survival.  Again, I love this genre.  I love it.  But Little Monsters has about as much stability as a bridge being suspended by twine.

Little Monsters was developed by WhiteHawk Games

80 Microsoft Points said naming a game after a movie starring Howie Mandel was probably a sign it would be no good in the making of this review.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , ,

Dot Dash: episode 1

May 5, 2012 by 8 Comments

I’ve been stoked to play Dot Dash: episode 1 since last month when it was previewed in the return edition of Indies in Due Time.  Unfortunately, sometimes I psych myself up a little too hard before a game.  I was convinced that I would adore Dot Dash, as long as it got the controls right.  Despite somewhat succeeding there, I really am hard pressed to give Dot Dash a recommendation.  This is a tough one for me, because I really did have fun, but this game has more problems than an algebra text-book.

The idea is you’re a little wheel-thingie that has to avoid blocks that come at you from all sides.  In Marathon mode, if you touch a colored orb, you gain the temporary ability to absorb blocks of that color, for points.  Your goal is to score as many points as you can.  This is the only color-matching mode, but it’s also probably the most fun.   Time Extension is the second mode.  Grabbing colored orbs is replaced with avoiding the blocks altogether and looking for orbs that extend the time you have remaining.  Finally, there is Zone mode.  Here, a scoring zone randomly teleports around the play field and  you have to stay inside of it to rack up points.

All three modes are fun enough, but my desire to keep playing them was dulled once the problems with the game became more clear.  Fairness is the chief complaint I have.  Blocks and orbs spawn randomly, sometimes creating no-win situations and making Dot Dash require a little too much luck to truly be a game of skill.  During my best rounds of Marathon, I would get into a wonderful groove and show escape skills that would make Houdini proud.  Then the game would throw out a dick move by having blocks come at me from all sides with no space to escape.  This happens way too much, and it owes to the random nature of the blocks.  Dot Dash has to have a random algorithm.  I mean, it would suck if it didn’t have one.  But it has to be random in a smart way, and this is where the developers failed.  There’s no fail-safe that prevents inescapable situations.  At first, it was just annoying.  When I was closing in on a two million point game, only to be surrounded by blocks with the only gaps being smaller than my wheel, I let out what could only be described as a primal scream.  It was so loud that my parents assumed I was becoming a werewolf and shot at me with a silver bullet, but missed and hit my friend instead.  Thankfully she was a werewolf, because the silver bullet did kill her.  Huh, Hortense was a werewolf.  Who knew?

A totally different, but hugely annoying problem was highlighted in Time Extension and Zones, and funny enough, it’s something that’s meant to help.  It’s the speed-up orb.  In theory, it gives you the speed necessary to outrun the blocks.  In reality, it destroys the accuracy of the controls and makes you extremely more likely to run into a block.  In Zone, it’s worse because it makes lining up in the zone overly difficult, especially the smaller ones.   I played Dot Dash for over an hour and at no point was the speed-up ever useful.  Not even once.  And the game gets a little too generous with spitting them out.  Any game where you try to avoid getting power-ups like they’re the plague has serious problems.

As the blocks zoom by faster, you don’t always have a way of avoiding them.  It also doesn’t help that they’re not distinctive enough from the time extender orbs.   Let’s say you’re poisoned and you have five seconds to choose an antidote.  You’re given five options and told that the white ones will kill you faster, while the white one with the black stripe will save your life.  Choosing the correct one probably isn’t as easy as you think it sounds, especially when you’re under pressure and can only focus on so many separate things at once.  Chances are you’re going to be as dead as the dodo, just like I would be.

The pictures are a little misleading, because at times the entire screen seems to be filled with blocks. I did sometimes question the legitimacy of the game’s randomness. In Marathon mode, I swear most of the time the game would put only one color orb out, then throw at you nothing but blocks of the other three colors. This happened almost every time.

There’s a few minor annoyances.  The background is colorful, but it can get in the way.  I almost wish it had been shades of gray.  The blocks are colorful enough that it would be a neat visual contrast.  There’s also no online leaderboards, which is the type of thing that can make or break any score-based arcade game.  Ultimately, the biggest problem is the game just doesn’t play fair.  I don’t mean to sound like a crybaby, but when I die in a game, I want it to be because I fucked up, not because the game throws something at you that is impossible to avoid.  I have no problem with luck factoring into a game, but I would rather such situations only be to your benefit.  Bad luck in games is only good for making me want to play something else.

I still do very meekly recommend Dot Dash: episode 1 because it is genuinely fun.  But it has the potential to be so much better.  With the right adjustments, it could be something special.  As it stands, you might enjoy it, but it might give you as much trouble as my parents are having trying to fit Hortense into the crawl space.

Dot Dash: episode 1 was developed by Drop Dead Interactive

80 Microsoft Points said this shit happens every full moon and we’re running out of  space in the crawl space in the making of this review.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Adventures of Lolo, Aesop’s Garden, and Crystal Hunters

May 4, 2012 by 20 Comments

Update: Crystal Hunters is now 80 Microsoft Points.

For the first time, I’m doing a multi-review with games from different developers. This is because both of today’s titles, Aesop’s Garden and Crystal Hunters, are new takes on a classic NES game called The Adventures of Lolo, a game 82 days older than me. It actually was released on the Wii’s Virtual Console back in 2007, but I was in the middle of a World of Warcraft bender that year and missed it. I’ve dealt with a lot of clones over the last month, and my attempt at playing a game that I had no reference point on (Boulder Dash clone Gems N Rocks) left me feeling a bit weird. Yes, I do believe a game should be able to stand on its own, but if a game sets out to pay tribute to a classic, you should also measure it against the original. Was True Grit a fantastic movie because it was a remake, or in spite of it? Would anyone have known how truly awful Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes was without the Charlton Heston original? Would New Coke have caught on if people didn’t have the classic formula to compare it to?

In that spirit, let’s compare these three games.

Concept

All three games are action-logic puzzlers where you must collect a set number of things in a room that open an exit. In Lolo, it’s hearts. In Aesop, it’s weeds. In Crystal Hunters, it’s crystals. In Lolo and Crystal, the items are in plain sight, and it’s up to you to figure out how to safely reach them. In Aesop, the weeds have not yet sprouted. You have to first turn on a sprinkler. This is because the rival of the main character wanted to ruin his chances of winning some kind of gardening contest, so he went around planting weeds. Good lord, that’s spiteful. I mean, it could have been more so. The guy could have salted the ground so that nothing would ever grow back. Besides that, there’s 50 levels in this game, so how big exactly is this plot of property that Aesop has? It’s hard to feel bad for the guy when he owns so much land that you can almost call it a kingdom. At least it beats “guy just wants to get a lot of crystals” or “monster kidnaps girlfriend, presumably so he can fuck her.” What do all these evil monsters want with princesses? With all the inbreeding that takes place among royalty, they can’t be THAT good in the sack.

Aesop’s Garden

Game Play

Lolo and its offspring play like more actiony-versions of Sokoban, the crate-shoving puzzle genre that has been reviewed a few times here at Indie Gamer Chick with titles such as Puzzled Rabbit or HACOTAMA. The difference in these games are the addition of enemies, firepower, and environment-based puzzles. In Lolo, there’s a handful of enemies that are all carefully integrated into each level. Some of them chase you, some of them shoot fireballs at you, and others remain stationary but kill you if you cross their path. These are called “Medusas” and they are also found in both Aesop’s Garden and Crystal Hunters, albeit as scarecrows and evil treasure-chest-things that zap you like you’re a Nazi watching the opening of the Ark of the Convenient.

In Lolo, you often have to use enemies to your advantage. In some rooms, the hearts you collect give you two shots. If you shoot an enemy, it turns into an egg for a few moments. You can then shove it into place and use it as a block, or push it in the water and use it as a temporary bridge. If you shoot an enemy a second time, it dies, but it will respawn. In other rooms, you might collect the ability to create a bridge or smash a rock. Aesop’s Garden has a feature similar to the hammer.  At the halfway point in the game, carrots are introduced to summon hungry rabbits that destroy all walls in whatever line you’re standing in.

Both Lolo and Aesop’s Garden rely much more on trial and error than Crystal Hunters. In that game, crystals that give you shots are red instead of blue. In Lolo, only some hearts give you shots, and there is nothing that distinguishes them from normal hearts. In Aesop, you’re never sure where exactly weeds will sprout up. It’s never too annoying, and both games allow you to commit suicide with the select button if you fuck up. If you die in Crystal, it doesn’t take you back to the beginning of the stage, but rather to the last point you were safe, which is a cool feature. It would have come in handy in Lolo and Aesop for sure. Fuck ups there usually resulted in me dropping cyanide. Lame. If I was the hero in a puzzle game and I had to kill myself, I would totally go with seppuku.

Adventures of Lolo

Playability

This is where all three games stumble, as the control is not so smooth in any title. It’s never bad enough to be a deal breaker, but it will lead to some very aggravating moments. Lolo probably plays the best, which is appropriate given that it’s the only game that was made by professionals. Still, the controls in it felt a little loose. Whether I was using a standard Wii remote or the classic controller, I would often push blocks one half-space too far, necessitating a suicide. This led to me heel-toeing it one tap of the D-Pad at a time whenever I moved a block around. This wasn’t always an option. If you’re moving an egg, you only have a few seconds before it hatches and whatever enemy you’re pushing is frozen in place. Or maybe you’re being chased that by an enemy. Or both. In the later stages, the game demands precision movement from a controller that is anything but precise.

Aesop’s Garden is even worse. The controls feel very loose, which is partially to blame on the crappy D-Pad of the Xbox. Using the stick is no use, because it doesn’t have proper analog control. I have the silver, transforming D-Pad and even it wasn’t satisfactory. This led to multiple instances of steering off from a straight line and into the path of a scarecrow, shoving blocks to far, or in boss fights, steering myself right into the path of a projectile. It never felt quite right, and that did hurt the game.

Crystal Hunters is hurt by the game’s lack of movement parameters. In Lolo and Aesop, you move one half-space at a time, using the background to guide you. In Crystal Hunters, it’s not always clear how far you’re moving, because the game doesn’t have a “grid” feel to it like the other two do. The background doesn’t draw out spaces for you, so you’re kind of left to your own judgement, which can often be unreliable. I ended up going back to the heel-toe method of block shoving, but like Lolo, that’s not always an option here either. Sometimes enemies will be chasing you, or sometimes you’ll be moving a tree-stump and have to rush it to the spot it belongs in before it puts its roots down. In the later stages, this can be maddening. The lack of parameters also gets annoying as more Wind Waker-like light beam reflecting puzzles are incorporated, all of which require nothing short of perfect movement from an imperfect control scheme.

Puzzle Design

If there was one word I could use to describe all three games, it would be “smart.” In the case of Lolo, it’s a game made by Hal studios, the guys who later went on to make the Kirby series, Earthbound, and Smash Bros. They obviously have their shit together. Aesop’s Garden and Crystal Hunters were developed by amateur game designers, so you wouldn’t expect such a degree of sophistication from them. Then again, I wouldn’t have expected that from games like Alien Jelly or Escape Goat either. It never fails to surprise me how clever some Xbox Live Indie Game developers can be. Both games have absolutely stellar puzzle design, so much so that it actually rivals the game that inspired them. At times, they can feel a bit sprawling, especially Crystal Hunters, but it never feels like busy work. The only game I can toss a complaint at is Aesop’s Garden, which throws boss fights into the mix that are annoying, given the crappy control scheme.

What I love best about any puzzle game is that “ta da!” moment where, after staring at the screen for ten minutes, you finally figure out the solution. The difficulty of all three games here ramps up as you go along (something that Indie Gamer Chick favorite Escape Goat doesn’t do), which leads to many of those moments. I crave those like a junkie craves smack. They top an awesome headshot in a shooter, a come-from-behind victory in a sports game, or a leveling-up victory in an RPG. For my money, nothing else in gaming tops that feeling of achievement.

Crystal Hunters

Conclusion

I know a lot of readers come here for the spectacle of a bad game getting trashed by me. I realize this wasn’t my funniest of reviews, but don’t worry, I’m sure a crappy zombie game can’t be too far off in the distance. If you come here looking to read about good games, I’ve got three right here for you. At 22 years of age, I missed the NES era and never had a chance to play Lolo. If you’re around my age, you probably missed it too. Or maybe you were one of those weird families that owned a Sega Master System instead of an NES. Either way, it’s worth your $5. For fans of the game already out there, don’t go back and replay it. Nothing about it has changed in the 23 years since its release. But, there are two brand new Xbox Live Indie Games that will satisfy your Lolo-cravings. Both Aesop’s Garden and Crystal Hunters are what you’re looking for, and they’re a bargain and $3 a pop. Yea, I probably could nit-pick them a little more. Like how Crystal Hunters has a completely needless time-system tacked on, presumably to add replay value. Why did they even bother? The fun in these games comes from solving a puzzle and moving on to the next. Once it’s solved, it’s done. You don’t expect replay from crossword puzzle books, so why should you expect replay from a logic puzzle in a video game? Just finish it and be happy. Yea, the controls are crippled, but you feel like a genius, so who cares? It’s just like being Stephen Hawking!

Aesop’s Garden was developed by Excalibur Studios

Crystal Hunters was developed by DreamRoot Studios

The Adventures of Lolo was developed by HAL Laboratory

500 Wii Points (Adventures of Lolo) and 240 Microsoft Points apiece (Aesop’s Garden and Crystal Hunters) had to remind Kairi that getting frustrated and banging her head the coffee table was probably not the best way to keep the amount of brain cells needed to play these games in the making of this review.

Filed under Nintendo eShop Reviews, Retro Reviews, XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , ,

Honey Badger – Slayer of Memes

May 1, 2012 by 5 Comments

Some XBLIGs should probably only exist as free browser-based flash games.  Honey Badger – Slayer of Memes is such a game.  It’s a fairly low-quality Punch-Out!! clone with the gimmick of being able to beat-up a handful of internet running gags.  This leads to problem #1: none of the jokes in here are funny anymore.  You can usually tell when something stops being funny because they make an episode of South Park about it.  This leaves Honey Badger to stand on its own as a game, which it simply can’t do.  Problems #2 through #891 are easy to figure out during the first fight: the game sucks.

Wow, it's the Leave Britney Alone thing. That NEVER gets old.

I’m a huge Punch-Out!! fan.  I would assume anyone who would attempt to clone it must be a fan too, but Honey Badger completely misses the point of the series.  Punch-Out!! is all about pattern recognition and quick reaction times.  Your opponent telegraphs a move in a variety of different ways.  You dodge it, then lay into your stun-locked opponent.  Honey Badger has none of that.  Your opponents don’t really telegraph moves, they’re not stun-locked when you dodge a punch, and there really is no method to the madness.  Just mash buttons, hope something lands, and pray like hell the game doesn’t get unfair later on.  Which it does.  I beat the Leave Britney Alone and Tron dudes pretty easily.  Then I ended up against a parody of the Star Wars Light Saber kid.  He just spins around, randomly jabbing at you.  If there was any pattern to it or hint of when he would stop spinning and swing at you, I couldn’t catch it.  He blocked nearly every punch I threw, and I couldn’t block his because it’s impossible to see them coming.

I didn’t really care to keep trying either.  The graphics are okayish and some of the sound effects are mildly amusing, but otherwise this game is horrible.  The controls are unresponsive, especially dodging.  There’s a noticeable delay in it, which would have been annoying if it was useful.  Since you can’t predict when a punch is coming, what use is it?  Then again, why bother blocking?  It doesn’t work either.  I went to block punches, held my gloves up, and the opponent’s punch would still seem to cause as much damage.  Ultimately, this feels like a joke game that would be free on Adult Swim’s website.  And not a very good one.  If you want to talk about memes, you might as well call this One Cup: The Game, because all it will do is feed you shit.

Honey Badger – Slayer of Memes was developed by Dream Wagon

80 Microsoft Points actually wouldn’t mind playing a GOOD clone of Punch-Out!! given that Nintendo only releases a new one every 10 years in the making of this review. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

Gems N Rocks

April 27, 2012 by 11 Comments

Yesterday, I reviewed a Lode Runner clone.  Today, I review a Boulder Dash clone.  Both were early-80s computer titles that received dozens of remakes, re-skins, and ports over the years.  The difference?  I’ve never played Boulder Dash or any of its offspring.  It wasn’t even on my radar, mostly because I’ve never heard it described as a holy shit must-play industry altering super game.  It just sort of exists as one of those “did you ever play that one game” titles that gets brought up from time to time.  No matter the game, if the answer is “yes” the conversation likely ends on the spot.  If the answer is “no” the questioner usually follows up with “it was alright.”  Then the conversation ends.  Boulder Dash was one of those.

I’m kind of glad I’m going into Gems N Rocks with no experience of the franchise it’s bastardizing.  It means I’ll have no frame of reference for how the game should play and thus I’ll better be able to grasp if it can stand out on its own.

The idea is you’re a dude that has to mine for gems.  In each stage you must collect all the gems to win.  You excavate through stages like you’re Dig Dug, only instead of trying to drop rocks on dragons or balloons wearing goggles, you just have to avoid dropping them on yourself.  Whenever you dig around a boulder, it creates a cascade that takes it and all other boulders it’s holding in place with it.  This leads to hilarious situations where you can pin yourself in while collecting the last gem.  You still beat the stage, but if you’re like me and you dwell on these things, you realize your little miner dude is trapped and will slowly starve to death.  Life can be cruel.

There are forty stages here, unevenly divided into three categories.  There’s easy stages.  All you need to know about those is the very last one beats itself for you.  I guess for some developers “easy” is interpreted as “for the recently lobotomized.”  The medium and hard stages are often neither, with the solutions relatively straight forward and often based on some kind of “outrun the enemies” situation.  My favorite levels involved little heat-seeking robots that go all Terminator on your ass.  These are genuinely tense stages, made more so by how fucking horrible the controls in Gems N Rocks are.  Seriously, it’s as if the game comes bundled with an asshole that dips your controller in molasses between stages.  Movement is slow and sticky, and figuring out how to deal with it is literally the only thing that challenged me the entire game.

This is the stage that beats itself like a masochistic dominatrix.

I’m told that Gems N Rocks adds new concepts to the Boulder Dash formula like liquid puzzles based around water, bacteria, and mercury.  Again, I have no reference point to whether it’s an upgrade over the conventional design.  I will say that I would have probably enjoyed the game more if the controls were not so painfully unresponsive that my best strategy involved placing my control on a table and poking the direction I wanted to go on the D-Pad with my finger tip.  If the main challenge your game offers is fighting the controller, you should probably let it cook in development longer.

I never bothered with the included level editor, because I think those are for nerds, and I’m more of a dweeb.  Going off just the included levels, I honestly thought Gems N Rocks was mediocre, with the potential to be decent if the controls had been accurate.  When I brought up my concern to the developer, it took him by surprise, although he conceded that it was probably an example of him playing his own game so much that he never noticed there was a problem.  What he needed was a canary for his mine.  Someone like me, armed with a fork, sitting next to him while they played the game for the first time.  He would have known there was a problem when the fork became embedded in his temple.  Oddly enough, this is the absolute only way I would ever volunteer to test games myself, but nobody is willing to sign the liability waver.  Shame.  I think the Fork You method of testing could revolutionize Xbox Live Indie Games.

Gems N Rocks was developed by Fuzzy Duck Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points think Fuzzy Duck sounds like some kind of Kama Sutra thing in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , ,

Gold Miner

April 26, 2012 by 16 Comments

Gold Miner is an attempt at cloning Lode Runner.  Fair enough.  Lode Runner is a cherished classic, although the reasons for that are completely lost on me.  I always  thought it was kind of dull.  It’s probably a generational thing.  Lode Runner came out approximately six years before I was born.  Maybe in those dark times, firing up Lode Runner on your Apple II beat adjusting the rabbit ears on your television set so that you could see the latest episode of A*Team.  I don’t know.  I do know that it’s one of those series that should be allowed a graceful retirement, instead of being dragged back out into a market it no longer has a place in.  Granted, I hear that all seven people who bought the Xbox Live Arcade remake of it thought it was just peachy.  And then there was the time they dressed it up in a costume and called it Panda Craze on DSi and PSP.  Same shit, different name, still fucking boring as hell.

Gold Miner plays like a Lode Runner clone that was made by someone who got all their information on the series second-hand.  And then programmed the game using just their feet.  While submerged underwater.  In a swimming pool filled with moonshine.  It’s bad.  You have to run around collecting gold while avoiding little bush monsters.  Once you get ten piles of it, the map restarts and you keep going.  You can cut a hole on a platform with the right trigger.  If an enemy falls in it, you can smack it three times to kill it.  You can jump with A, which is a much faster and easier way to avoid enemies.  There are no Lode Runner-style puzzles here.  Gold Miner is an endless arcade game.

And it’s terrible.  Really, truly awful.  The controls are slow, the jumping is floaty, there’s clipping issues, the sound effects sound like they were recorded using one of those teddy bears that you speak into, and it’s just soul-killingly boring.  I can sum up everything you need to know about how much testing went into Gold Miner with this: if you press the start button in the middle of a game, it takes you to a menu.  The menu has four options, including “new game” and “resume game.”  No matter which you choose, the game gets restarted.  Your score is lost, your lives are reset.  Disgraceful.  I only could stomach twenty minutes of Gold Miner, but with a fundamental mistake that big, I’m guessing that’s nineteen minutes longer than its own developer spent testing it.

Gold Miner was developed by Winsor Computing

80 Microsoft Points thought BurgerTime was the better game over Lode Runner in the making of this review.  I know, apples & oranges and all that. 

Gameplay footage courtesy of

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , ,

Insane Zombie Carnage

April 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

I don’t like to play iPhone or even iPad games with flimsy, fake control schemes.  I just can’t get the hang of virtual controls.  So I missed out on the Super Crate Box craze.  Well, if you can call it that.  Compared to other popular games like Draw Something, Cut the Rope, or Angry Birds, Super Crate Box is more like a mild rage than a craze.  I hadn’t given the game a second thought until Brian and I did Indies in Due Time a few weeks ago, where we previewed yet another fucking zombie game, Insane Zombie Carnage.  Several of my readers immediately recognized it as a Super Crate Box clone.  I didn’t, because I never played it.  So I went into Crazy Undead Bloodbath without any prejudice.  Except against people of all races and religions, but that’s unrelated to the game.

So the idea behind Super Zombie Box is zombies rain down and you have to shoot them while collecting crates.  Wooden crates contain weapons of varying usefulness while question mark crates alter the flow of the game.  Body count is irrelevant, and so are the question mark boxes.  The object of the game is to get as many of the wooden boxes as you can before dying.  You start with one stage and unlock alternative modes and levels based on how big a streak you can get.

So what did I think?  I played it for an hour and I would rather be dead than ever play it again.  What a boring concept.  Don’t get me wrong, if suicide was not an option, I would choose Insane Zombie Carnage over Super Crate Box, simply based on my hatred of iOS virtual controls.  Loony Brain-Muncher Brouhaha actually controls fairly decently, which shocked the fucking hell out of me.  Clones tend to skimp on such features as playability in favor of cha-chinging and rolling in the dough.  I do think it’s a touch on the sensitive side, and the collision detection seems a bit off as well.  I cut a few zombie encounters close but know I missed them and I still died.  If I had actually gave a shit about the game, I would have been pissed off about that.  But, by that point, I couldn’t have given two shits less about it.  Perhaps this was because of crates that spawn right under where the zombies drop in at, making them almost impossible to fetch.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Preposterous Poltergeist Pandemonium, but I’m sure there are some Super Crate Box fans out there who are happy to be able to play this on a console.  Even if it’s not even close to the same game.  It doesn’t have the same graphics style.  It doesn’t have that “world-wide community” feel that Super Crate Box has.  It doesn’t have the word “super” in it.  It seems more like it exists to rub in the fact that this is as close as you can get if you’re among the handful of losers out there that still haven’t been assimilated by the Apple Collective.  But again, I really liked this more than Super Crate Box.  Which is like saying I would prefer to have my head blown of with a bazooka than be slowly disembowed using a rusty, urine-soaked samurai sword.

EDIT: Super Crate Box apparently got its start as a PC game.  Um.  Yea.  Move along.  Please.  Pretty please.  With cherries on top?

Insane Zombie Carnage was developed by Geex

80 Microsoft Points says repetition is the heart of gaming, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck 90% of the time in the making of this review.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Drive Fast Think Faster

April 21, 2012 by 1 Comment

Drive Fast Think Faster was tragically born without a comma.  That’s just one of many birth defects that plague this reflex-tester.  The idea is you steer a car across a tie-dye stunt course, changing your car’s color to match whatever scheme the course is about to change to.  A changes it to green, B changes it to red, and X changes it to blue.  Y and Yellow is ignored, because fuck yellow.  Am I right?

Drive Fast is probably another example of a developer getting too good at their own game, because this thing is as hard as Jason Stackhouse after he overdosed on V.  On the first level, I got the fastest recorded time of anyone who has just finished one stage.  That’s pretty much as far as I’ll make it, because once I got to level two, the game required a level of reaction time that I simply don’t posses.  In theory, Think Faster is a color-matching game, like Guitar Hero.  In practice, you have to continuously hold the analog stick and fight the physics while matching colors.  I couldn’t do it.  I really did give it a shot, but the lack of checkpoints was too demoralizing.  If you fall through the course, you have to start the stage over from the beginning.  I have no clue how close I actually came to the finish line, but it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.  After an hour of trying, I headed over to Xbox.com to grab the screenshots I would need for this review, saw the picture below, and decided to bail while I have some sanity left.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd fuck it, I quit.

I don’t know if Drive Fast Think Faster was intentionally designed to be a punisher.  Probably.  The second stage starts with a trial-and-errorish series of jumps that require more luck with the physics than actual skills, but this quickly changes to more high-speed color-matching crap that gets old fast.  So, no, I don’t like Drive Fast Think Faster.  I don’t want to make a cop-out “it just wasn’t for me” review, so I do declare that it can lock itself in a garage with the motor running and choke to death on its own multicolored exhaust.

Think Faster Drive Faster was developed by Zebra Games

80 Microsoft Points want to be able to buy just the lime-colored Skittles in the making of this review.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , ,

Hidden in Plain Sight

April 20, 2012 by 18 Comments

It’s still Thursday if you just woke up from a coma that you fell into on a Thursday. Or possibly a Wednesday if you think you just went to sleep for the night.

It’s taken me a while to get onto the Hidden in Plain Sight bandwagon. This can be attributed to the fact that I have no friends. Well, that’s not entirely true. I do have a limited number of chums and pals, but the problem is getting them to play an XBLIG with me.  Perhaps it has to do with my sales pitch. This usually consists of someone asking me what I think about XBLIGs, followed by me barely squeaking out “they’re alright.” Not exactly the most ringing endorsement, unless you know me. I can barely speak up when my clothes are on fire, so declaring something to be “alright” vocally might as well be myself writing the name of the game on a piece of paper and then dry humping it.

Local four-player is hard for me to put together. At least when it comes to XBLIGs. After months of waiting, I decided to resort of bribery. Thus, I took three interns at my office, promised them time off of work and pizza in exchange for playing a game with me. And wow, that didn’t sound so pitifully sad when I actually did it.

But really, three people who aren’t exactly buddies with me or with each-other seems like the perfect fit for a party game. I mean, if people can’t bond through video games, what the fuck can they bond through? Well, besides war, nuclear holocaust, and intense sexual lust. Having said that, you should have seen the looks on their faces when I told them the game we would be playing was an Xbox Live Indie Game. They didn’t know what that was, and all three guys do own Xbox 360s. I explained to them that it was a home-brew, made by a couple of novice game developers, and it costs $1 to purchase. I swear to God you could see them mentally calculating whether signing up for this was really better than spending the day filing papers.

Their worries were for not. We had a grand ole’ time playing Hidden in Plain Sight. Well, we did when we played the first of five modes on it. It was called Ninja Party. You’re placed in a room with dozens of identical ninjas, with each player randomly being assigned to one. The first you have to do is figure out which one you are. Doing this requires a level of smoothness that a couple of the thickies working for me couldn’t grasp. They would start by spinning their control sticks around, making it obvious which ones they were.  Stanford education at work, folks. There’s two ways to win. First is murder all other players. Thanks to the spinning morons, I found this to be the easiest method. Alternatively, the first player to touch all five statues in any order wins the round. Once the interns figured out that spinning was not the best idea, I moved onto touching the statues to gain victory. At first, the interns smacked everything that moved, giving up their position and typically thinning their ranks out while I made a bee line from statue to statue. I soon noticed that the NPC ninjas did not change directions while they were moving. They walked in a straight line, paused, and then walked someplace else. The interns never caught on to this, and I used it to my advantage in the coming games.

We forgot about the smoke bombs until several rounds in. My theory is this has to do with living in California, where a person can’t smoke in their own office in a building that they own. Let freedom ring.

The second mode is called Catch a Thief, and without sounding too much like I’m bragging, I was a fucking Goddess at this one. The interns, not so much. In this mode, one or more players takes the role of a sniper, while everyone else has to play as thieves that walk over coins. Because their ability to pretend to be NPCs was lacking, I could take them 3 on 1 and win every time if I was the sniper. You only get three bullets, but all I had to do was keep a close eye on the way they walked. A straight line is hard to maintain, and even the slightest curvature of it was enough proof for me to go Lee Harvey Oswald on their asses. However, unlike the previous game, there really doesn’t feel like there’s a point to this one. The thieves have to collect coins. The snipers have to shoot the thieves. However, the sniper can only get three points, while the thieves can rack up a bunch of coins. So how do you decide who wins? And more importantly, why doesn’t the score carry over? Why doesn’t the game have a method of automatically cycling the various combinations of teams so that you can find out who an overall winner is? I mean, it would have been me regardless, but some people care about that stuff.

The third mode is Knights vs Ninjas. It’s like Ninja Party mode, only this time it’s a team game of defend the VIP. We played 2-v-2. The knights have to protect the royal family. The ninjas have to commit regicide. That is to say, they have to kill the royal family, not people named Reggie. We all found this mode to be pretty boring. Anyone the knights strike down remain dead, while anyone the ninjas strike down are only temporarily stunned. Games of this devolved into the two knights letting two members of the family die and protecting just one. They won every time. Boring.

Mode four is Death Race. This is sort of like the Game of Statues (that’s Red-Light, Green-Light for you east-coasters or so I’m told, or maybe not because Brian grew up in California and says that’s what they called it too. Whatever. Statues are more culturally enlightened), where players have to race to a finish line without giving up the fact that they are not an NPC. In this mode, you hold the A button down to walk and the Y button down to run. While doing this, you have a cross-hair with a single bullet that you can use to gun down any player you think is a real player. I had a lot of fun with this, but the interns got hung up on Ninja Party and wanted to go back to it. We didn’t even get to the final game, Assassin, because nobody wanted to play it.

I can say that we played Ninja Party for two thirty-minute spurts and had a really good time doing it. I’ve never really played anything like it, or Hidden in Plain Sight on a whole. This is exactly the type of original idea I started Indie Gamer Chick for. I do wish there was some kind of ongoing scoring system, but otherwise the game is good enough to be properly stolen by a major studio any time now. It is local-multiplayer only, which is a pretty big strike against it. Not everyone is a party animal. I did fit in well with the interns and I had a good time. Mostly because I won every game of Ninja Party except one, which an accounting major named Gavin stole from me. Coincidentally, Gavin just spun cleaning the bathrooms on the job wheel for Monday, which should be fun following my planned Sunday dinner of bean burritos and cabbage.

Hidden in Plain Sight was developed by Adam Spragg Games
Point of Sale: Steam, Xbox Live Indie Games

igc_approved1$1 doesn’t actually have a job wheel or make interns clean the toilets at work, so you can start breathing again, Gavin in the making of this review.

<— What the fuck is with that box art, Adam?

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Unnecessary Violence

April 19, 2012 by 6 Comments

Unnecessary Violence is a car-combat game set on the largest stretch of straight road in the world, yet has the least diversity in vehicles.  I saw no ambulances, no motorcycles, no convertibles, and no buses.  Plenty of taxi cabs though.  Not sure why someone would be in a taxi on such a long stretch of road that has no turnoffs.  With the cost of taxis being what they are, you would think renting a car and taking it on this road would be cheaper.

I had a witty caption for this, but then I fell asleep while playing and forgot it.

The basic idea is you’re a car tricked out with various weapons.  You drive on a road, shooting at cars.  Then it tells you to shoot a specific car.  You shoot it, then shoot other cars until it tells you shoot a different specific car, rinse, repeat.  Sorry if that sounded unenthusiastic, but never before has an XBLIG with no major technical flaws gotten me so bored so quickly.  This is mostly on the fact that you’ve seen pretty much everything the game is about within the first five seconds of playtime.  The monotony wears thin quickly, and Unnecessary Violence does very little to change things up.

The weapon variety is lame.  You get a machine gun with no “oomph” to it that overheats if you use it for more than a few seconds.  You get rockets that take multiple shots to blow up a car.  If I have a rocket launcher and it takes two shots to blow up ANYTHING, I’m going to be oh so pissed at the asshole I bought it from.  Land mines are present.  I found them to be unsatisfactory, mostly because I want to actually see the shit I’m blowing up, not having to glance at the rear-view mirror.  Enemies have mines too, and they’re fucking impossible to avoid, because you’re traveling at high speeds.  There are anti-tank guns, which require you to carefully select your target, hard to do when you’re cruising at warp-speed and often rear-ending all other cars present.  There are anti-air missiles for helicopters that don’t show up until the third stage, at which point you’ll have quit and started a better game.  Finally, there’s nuclear weapons, which create a nifty explosion but otherwise I could not figure out what the fuck they’re useful for.  To activate them, you have to input a five-button code.  Again, this is while you’re in the middle of busy traffic, often pressed for time.  How could they fuck up the entire assortment of weapons in a car game?  Couldn’t they get just one right?

So bored. Please kill me. Make it stop.

By the end of the third stage, I decided I should either quit the game or kill myself.  I chose the former, obviously.  There’s just no variety in Unnecessary Violence.  Lots of weird stuff that I hated too.  Your car is able to set off a nuclear fucking explosion, but you can’t bump other cars off the road.  If you’re driving at 140 miles an hour and you bump into the back of a car, it doesn’t even nudge forward, yet it cuts your speed down to a snail’s pace.  You do have the ability to give yourself a nitrous boost, but it seems to do little more than give the appearance of moving faster.  The rate at which traffic appears while using it doesn’t seem significantly higher than it is when you’re just putting the regular pedal to the non-nitrous metal.

Despite having fairly decent graphics and control, Unnecessary Violence feels unfinished.  It’s one objective repeated in a loop in a way practically guaranteed to comatize anyone playing.  I almost wonder if the developers had more ambitious plans, but gave up once they had something vaguely resembling a decent video game running.  It needed something else to keep things fresh.  Instead, it just drags along like it’s got worms.

Unnecessary Violence was developed by Tackemon

80 Microsoft Points said you know the game is going to be bad when the FAQ is the most entertaining part of it in the making of this review.

Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and the rest.  Oh whom will be able to find me without my loyal readers forwarding me on them?  There be buttons below, and if you use them, a kingdom I shall grow. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →