NYAN-TECH

I want to try an experiment.  Let’s start by having you pat yourself on the head.  Good.  Now, try rubbing your belly at the same time.  Can you do it?  Impressive.  I can’t even chew in both sides of my mouth at the same time, so I salute you, oh dexterous one.  I have one final challenge for you.  Keep rubbing your belly and patting your head, then boot up Super Mario Bros. and try playing it.  Because that’s essentially what NYAN-TECH is about.

Okay, so maybe the concept is more like Twister meets Solomon’s Key.  You play as an adorable kitty cat person thingie that has to grab a key and exit a level through a door.  The gimmick here is that the platforms you must hop across are activated by holding down various buttons on the Xbox controller.  Usually the combinations are something ridiculous, like holding the X button and left bumper down while jumping, then releasing X mid jump and pressing the right trigger.  To be perfectly frank, I’m not capable of it.  Dexterity is not something I’m famous for.  Well, unless you count my ping-pong ball trick.

I was able to finish NYAN-TECH, mostly by placing the controller on the table in front of me, freeing my hands up to do the proper stretching needed to complete the stages.  Sadly, this wasn’t nearly enough to make the game playable.  Issues with jumping physics, or to be specific, landing physics, kept me firmly grounded in misery.  The ground is slippery, as if the game is set on a glacier.  It’s not.  At least I don’t think so.  It’s kind of hard to tell, what with the camera pulled so far back that you practically need a telescope to decipher things.  My TV could be used by Godzilla as an ironing board, and yet I had trouble seeing which buttons some of the things required me to push.

Finally, I had a big issue with the time limit that is imposed.  Especially on level 3-4, which took me an hour (it felt more like days) to finish.  In NYAN-TECH, the timer only shrinks when you move.  In most of the 27 levels (excluding tutorial stages) you’ll have more than enough time remaining to finish.  But near the end of the “hard” stages, things get a bit fuck-youish.  In 3-4, you literally cannot make a single misstep.  We’re talking about a game that requires you to do things with a game controller that someone with a third arm growing out of their torso would find difficult to pull off, and that’s on top of the questionable physics.  I admit, it felt world-conqueringly amazing when I beat the stage, but then I remembered that I had lost sixty minutes of my life and felt like crying the entire time, which made me feel not so good.

I asked for an XBLIG I missed that could contend for the leaderboard here.  I got a few recommendations of NYAN-TECH, so I gave it a try.  Do I regret that?  Not completely.  After all, I started Indie Gamer Chick looking for new and experimental types of games.  Does that mean I can recommend NYAN-TECH?  Well, no.  Even if I concede that some people are better suited for the type of hand-yoga it requires, the technical flaws still outweigh the gameplay to a significant degree.  That or I’m way off base and the game is spectacular if you can walk and chew gum at the same time.  Which I can do, by the way.  It’s just that I have a 50% chance of somehow landing myself in a coma while trying.

NYAN-TECH was developed by Dot Zo Games

80 Microsoft Points need defibrillators on stand-by just to attempt twiddling my thumbs in the making of this review.

Some dude named StriderHoang made that video.  Only gameplay footage I could find.  Check out his channel I guess.

EvilQuest

EvilQuest confused me.  In it, you play as the villainous Galvis, a magnificently evil bastard whose goal is to murder God and destroy the world.  Let’s see: in touch with his emotions.  Goal-oriented.  Has a spiritual side to him.  Hey hey, I think I found someone I can bring home to my folks if things don’t work out with Brian.

"Mr. Aladdin, Sir, what will your pleasure be? You ain't never had a friend like me!"

But while Galvis is at times utterly delightful to play as, what with his fondness for casual genocide, or the fact that he’ll ignore the pleads for euthanasia of a frost-bitten old man just because letting him linger in pain and suffering is that much more evil, he’s also a bit of a pussy.  Despite being somewhat billed as a character who breaks all the rules, Galvis walks the line with such determination that he might as well be wearing a hall monitor sash.  He still pays for items from stores with actual cash.  He goes on fetch-quests for random people.  Sure, he’ll occasionally knife someone after they helpfully give him an item, and in the end of the game, spoiler alert, he makes the human race extinct.  But come on, paying for items?  That’s not evil.  Even little kids have the balls to shoplift.

So I’m going to ignore the whole “play as the bad guy” stuff because Galvis is provably less evil than Lindsay Lohan and just treat EvilQuest like the generic action-RPG that it is.  And, let’s face it, that’s the only way to describe it.  A lot of people are calling it “Zelda-like” but that’s a load of crap too.  Zelda had some puzzles.  EvilQuest is all action, all the time.  You walk around killing baddies, then you walk around some more.  Sure, there’s the occasional switch, or maybe a maze-like dungeon, but really, it’s just knifey-knifey, killy-killy, walky-walky for the entire length of the game.

I will admit it’s a little fun.  Not a whole lot.  I certainly don’t get why the XBLIG cheerleader brigade is constructing a human pyramid with only their erect penises to act as support beams over EvilQuest.  It’s a bit on the busted side.  As you progress through the game, you can level-up your stats.  As is my typical strategy in these situations, I just pumped every single point I earned into my attack power.  As a result, by game’s end I was able to kill most of the enemies in a single whack.  Two tops.  And bosses would take me about ten seconds to beat, even on the medium setting.  There was no point in forming any strategy to take them out.  I was easily able to max out the amount of health potions I had, quick-map them to the Y button, and then just tap it while attacking.  I went into the last boss battle with 99 hi-potions and was able to finish all four stages of the fight in about a minute tops, only using 6 of them.  In retrospect, I wish I had played the game on hard.  On medium, EvilQuest was about as easy as kitten piñata.

EvilQuest would have probably been a really strong game about twenty-five years ago.  In 2012, it’s basic even by the standards of modern retro-games.  I will say that it at least looks the part.  It successfully fends off the uncanny valley effect of looking old but having a feature that is decidedly modern ruin the entire feel of it.  And I would like to thank the guys at Chaosoft for including an option to disable flashing effects so that epileptics such as myself can more comfortably play their title.  It was a classy move, and hopefully the start of many developers adding similar options to their games.  Of course, Galvis wouldn’t stand for that himself.  He would intentionally try to set off a seizure in me, then skull fuck me while I was twitching.  Or maybe not.  I mean, if he’s willing to tip a stripper with a C-Note, he can’t be THAT evil.

EvilQuest was developed by Chaosoft

80 Microsoft Points said, spoiler alert, if he kills every human, doesn’t that mean he mercifully put the frost-bitten old man out of his misery in the process?  Wow, talk about a mixed-message in the making of this review.

Octogenarian VIP

Old people creep me out.  And by old, I mean anyone over 50.  Have an odor they do.  It’s the stench of death ripening on their increasingly scaly skin.  So I probably shouldn’t have played a game where the object is to escort one across a psychedelic wonderland while avoiding ninjas and alien monster thingies.  Octogenarian VIP is exactly that.

The basic idea is you and up to three friends have to lead “Granny” around.  Right away, I encountered a laundry list of problems.  Let’s go through them.

Problem #1 is that Grandma looks more like Grandpa.  So I’ll call him Grandpa, because that’s how I roll.

Grandma needs a toupee.

Problem #2 is that Grandpa looks like he’s miserable and ready to die.  Why would I want to escort him to safety?  I should fulfill his wishes and escort him under a pile driver.

Problem #3, and this one is pretty significant, you have no form of defense to keep him alive.  Offensively, you have a cane thingie to swing around.  Why Grandpa’s younger, more nimble escorts would be wielding canes when swords or guns would make more sense against ninjas and monsters is beyond me.  The only explanation I could think of is senility is now contagious.  Meanwhile, there are several stages where the level begins with you and Grandpa being attacked.  And by that I mean the level begins and a ninja or monster is occupying the same space as you, rapidly draining away your lifebars.  Perhaps an allegory for the fact that the grim specter of death is always with you once you get to that age, but more than likely it’s just shitty game design.

Maybe it is a sword. Hell, I dunno. It would have to be the dullest sword in the history of weaponry.

It really didn’t become too much of an annoyance until later in the game.  When I reached a stage called “bad medicine.”  Never mind keeping Grandpa safe.  I could not keep myself, the young and fit protector of the old fart, alive for more than a few minutes because all of the enemies gang-bang you all at once.  The ninjas are capable of throwing stars at you, and if there are any present on the level, they will throw them at you whether you can see them or not.  And they will.  Without any way to block them, your only hope is to jump over them.  That really doesn’t work so well, especially when Grandpa is always a bit slow to react.  The ability to block would have made all the difference.  Well, the game would have still sucked, but it would have been more tolerable.  It’s like the difference between a kick in the shin and a saber through the throat.

Problem #4 is how bad Grandpa’s AI is.  I suppose it makes sense, given that he’s old and therefor decrepit and useless.  But we’re also in a video game where Grandpa is able to jump eleven feet in the air to avoid aliens and ninjas, so to hell with continuity.  Either way, Grandpa is useless.  He can’t defend himself when being attacked.  You have to lock him into following you, but he’s not as spry as you.  Your dude can jump like twenty feet in the air (good genes in this family), but if you’re still completing your jump while grandpa is landing, he’ll jump again.  When you’re trying to zig-zag from platform to platform, that gets quite annoying.

Problem #5 is there’s no old-person sound effects.  None at all.  No moaning.  No complaining.  Hell, the critters in Cute Things Dying Violently were more like geriatrics than Grandpa is.  What, with the random swearing and constant mumbling, it was just like being in the audience of Wheel of Fortune.  All you get here is a completely out-of-place generic metal track.  The graphics suck too.  There’s no blood and limited animation, yet the game somehow got a 2 out of 3 in violence from the XNA community.  Where is the violence that justifies that score?

Problem #6 is that ultimately Octogenarian VIP is boring.  Escort missions are boring in any game, but games based around just escorting characters are fucking awful.  Okay, maybe Ico is an exception to that.  Fine, Resident Evil 4 was too.  Kind of.  That actually gives me an idea.  A game where you tie Ashley Graham to the Grandpa from this game and then feed them feet-first into an industrial wood-chipper.  That’s money right there.

Octogenarian VIP was developed by Enraged Ginger

80 Microsoft Points think old people smell like spoiled mayonnaise in the making of this review.

Video footage courtesy of Aaron the Splazer

SpaceFighter4000 Training

Muuuuh.  It’s hard to muster up the energy to properly convey how horrible SpaceFighter4000 Training is.  It’s so boring that it sucks your ability to give a shit from you.  It’s also hard on account that I only played so much of it that I might as well have lit 240 Microsoft Points on fire and just played the demo.  But I wouldn’t do that.  Among other reasons, Microsoft Points lit on fire smell like a combination of ethanol farts and burning hair.

Unbeknownst to me, SpaceFighter4000 is a tribute to a Playstation/Saturn/3DO title that predates my gaming history by a couple of years.  I’ve never even heard of it, but it must have some form of a following.  I know this because when I took to Twitter to bitch about what a miserable time I was having with it, I got a couple of people telling me that the original was better because it had homing missiles.  This might seem like an insignificant thing to bring up, but actually it probably would have made the difference between a recommendation or taking a rusty chainsaw to my own hands just to avoid ever being this bored by a game ever again.

SpaceFighter4000 falls into the same category as UnBound, Cell: emergence, and Merball Tournament in that it feels more like a prototype or a technical demonstration than a commercial game.  From a purely visual standpoint, SpaceFighter is a slight cut above your typical 3D XBLIG.  It has an impressive draw-distance without fogging, much like Flight Adventure 2.  It also maintains this without a lot of slowdown.  But that’s as far as complements will go in this review.  Everything else is pitiful.

What it really comes down to is the bad firing mechanics.  You have three weapons at your disposal: missiles, bombs, and an unlimited laser cannon.  There’s no cross-hairs, so aiming is a bitch.  Also, despite the impressive draw distance, depth-perception is very bizarre.  I could be tailgating an enemy ship and firing my lasers, but centering yourself for a straight-shot is almost impossible.  As a result, I felt more like I was piloting a TIE-Fighter, where my lasers hit everything but the thing I was shooting at.

Even when the lasers hit, they don’t do a lot of damage.  They’re also watch-Grandma-wheelchair-up-Lombard Street slow.  Which is weird.  I would think light would be able to travel faster.  Instead, your laser shots seem to get pushed out of trajectory, as if they’re being effected by the wind.  Maybe it’s not lasers you’re shooting.  Maybe it’s paper-mache.  Maybe it’s pink balloons.  Either way, the laser is worthless.  So are the missiles.  Again, there’s no cross-hairs, so you can’t line up a shot.  The camera is often slopped at an angle, so it’s hard to get the right feel for where the missile is going to go.  And if the object you’re shooting at is at any distance greater than right on top of you, you’re bound to misfire.

I have no fucking clue why some form of locking-on wasn’t included.  It’s such a no-brainer move.  The game is problematic enough with controls that are slow to respond, a camera that could induce motion sickness, and the problems with perception.  There’s other weird things too.  Take the bombs.  They’re simple gravity bombs, but when you drop one they land in front of you.  How is that even possible?  I tried for over 30 minutes to land one on a target and never could accomplish it.  Nor could I shoot an enemy out of the sky.  The lasers were too slow, and the missiles are even slower.  And mind you, this is only the first stage.  Apparently enemies will start firing back at you after this.  Yea fucking right.  As it stands, I had trouble taking out the stationary ground targets without having a piece of the debris slowly drift upwards and blowing up my ship. So much for me getting drafted into the war with Xur.

$3 down the drain for a game I could have just as easily played the demo for.  I’ll never learn.  And yes, it’s another case of an unfinished, broken, clunky, glorified-tech demo that is way overpriced.  It’s beyond obnoxious.  240 fucking points for this? Are you fucking kidding me?  You know XNA developers, $3 buys a LOT in video gaming these days.  You can get three Xbox Live Indie Games for that price.  Games that are actually finished.  You can get DLC for mainstream games for that price.  If you charge $3 for a game and nobody buys it, you officially forfeit the right to complain that nobody bought your game.

And no, it’s not because it’s a race to the bottom.  Where did you guys get that term from?  There is no nice way of putting this: you sound like fucking idiots when you say that.  “CRRRRYYYY I’m not going to charge only one dollar for my game.  I don’t want to be in a race to the bottom.”  First off, you’re developing for Xbox Live Indie Games.  That is the bottom.  Second, you’re an independent game producer that nobody has heard of.  Third, you’re competing with mainstream games across various platforms that cost the same amount.  At Christmas, I could buy the entire EA catalog on my iPhone for $1 a game.  One fucking dollar a pop got me any game by the biggest video game producer in the history of the world.  Are they racing to the bottom?  Is Rovio?  Activision?  No.  It’s called smart business.  So if you’re worried about being in a race to the bottom, chances are that’s exactly where you belong.

SpaceFighter4000 Training was developed by Fednet Software

240 Microsoft Points said the only thing Rovio and Activision are in a race to the bottom of is a giant silo full of money in the making of this review.

Katana Land

Ninjas.  At one point they were the most overused cliché in gaming.  Then came zombies, and the time of the ninja had passed.  In a way, it makes sense.  Zombies are easier to shoehorn into pretty much any type of game.  I mean, can you imagine if they tried to do a DLC pack where you take on ninjas in Red Dead Redemption?  It would be fucking absurd.  Who could take that kind of thing seriously?  What is this, Shanghai Noon?  But a zombie DLC pack?  Fuckin’ A!

Ninjas are still stars on the gaming scene, but it’s only in the same way that John Travolta is still technically a movie star.  They get pulled out and dusted off from time to time to star in increasingly ignored and unsold games, usually stuff developed by Tecmo, hoping against hope that their day in the sun will come again.  Maybe once zombies are done being the flavor of the month, that day will come.  Personally, I’m betting on mutant gophers being the next big thing.  Don’t scoff, we’re one Caddyshack remake away from it.

In a way, ninjas are a perfect fit for Xbox Live Indie Games, where genres of a bygone era are the perfect training ground for the next generation of game designers, or a place where hobbyists can try their hand at getting involved in their favorite pastime.  It’s just too bad that most of their games turn out mediocre.

For example, we have Katana Land, an action-platformer where you have to save a princess from some evil ninjas.  Why can’t it ever be something more practical, like a ninja saving a country from economic downturn?  But no, save the princess and rescue the kingdom, blah blah blah.  What sets Katana Land apart is each level has a different objective.  Sometimes you’ll have to kill all the enemies.  Sometimes you’ll have to disable all the traps in a room.  Sometimes you’ll have to purpose sweeping legislation that will help begin the recovery from an economic downturn.

This would be fine, if the game wasn’t obsessed with being a total prick.  The controls are actually pretty decent, but Katana Land pulls the ultimate dick move sandwich by not granting your character invincibility when you take damage.  As a result, enemies are free to juggle your ass until you run out of life.  And they will, especially if you jump up to a ledge they’re standing on and end up occupying the same space as them.  I can see why your dude wasn’t recruited to join the more lucrative evil ninja organization, because he’s twice as slow as most of the enemies and doesn’t have their random immunity to damage.

Throwing a ninja star at common enemies is a bit of a mixed bag.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes the star hits them and does nothing.  I’m talking about a straight shot right in the middle of the enemy that they make no attempt to avoid, doing no damage at all.  When a hit registers, the enemy either dies or recoils a little.  But sometimes the star would hit them and nothing would happen other than the enemy charging at you and chopping you up. It’s not as if those characters have protection from the stars either, as I was able to kill enemies of the same class using it.  The game simply failed to register half the stars I would throw, like it has attention deficit disooooh look at the kitty cat.

Our hero has a few other annoying quirks.  If you fall too great a distance, the guy bounces and rolls to the left.  No matter which way you fall, it’s always to the left.  Did you jump off a high platform with the control stick pushed as far to the right as you can possible go and hit the ground?  Your dude is going to bounce left when you hit.  And the bounce is a fairly theatrical one.  Even when landing near the center of a large platform, there’s a good chance the bounce will be good enough to send your dude completely off of it and into a pit.  It makes me wonder if the guy really is a ninja or just plays one at the amateur dramatics society, because he over-acts every single bit of damage by flying backwards several feet.  If an enemy isn’t juggling you, there’s a good chance you’re going to fall off the stage when they hit you.

There are some things that lessen the aggravation factor.  You get a full health-restore every time you kill an enemy.  But every step in the right direction is immediately followed by a giant leap backwards.  In some of the stages you have to fight zombie ninjas.  If you kill them, they turn into ghosts that are unkillable and stalk you for the rest of the stage, charging faster than you can jump and juggling you until dead.  Thus it creates the situation of the forced-pussyfest, excuse me, pacifist section.

Fuck these guys.

If this makes the game sound overly difficult, it’s actually not.  It takes about an hour and a half to beat the whole thing.  The difficulty curve is all kinds of fucked up.  There’s four bosses.  Of them, the first boss is by far the most difficult, as he attacks you with lightning and the reaction time of your dude assures that it’s almost impossible to avoid it.  I had to restart the level several times against it.  Bosses two, three, and four were complete pansies that I beat on the first try.  The final boss in particular is embarrassing.  He just sort of slowly strolls towards you, allowing you to unload ninja stars into him.  When he takes three hits, he pauses and allows some easily avoidable fireball demon thingies to pass by the screen.  Then, you get to attack him some more.   That’s it.  That’s the only attack he has.  And then the game is over.  Thank God.

Really, Katana Land is not awful by any means.  It’s aggravating to get caught in an enemy juggle, and the level design is pretty low rent.  There’s a stage where the object is to find the hidden exit, which is marked by giant-sized flags.  I found the exit just by scrolling right until I happened across it.  You know, sort of like every fucking platform game out there.  So it’s not exactly original or inspiring, but it is a functional game.  There’s some good ideas at work here, and with some more refinement and level design to change things up, it would have been a pretty good game.  Of course, you can say that about pretty much any game.  “It would be better if only it didn’t suck in the following ways.”  But Kablammo Games actually has something here that they can build on in the future, so I’ll keep an eye out for them.  Maybe they’ll even get some courage and try something other than ninjas.  I hear mutant gophers are expected to be hot.

Katana Land was developed by Kablammo Games

80 Microsoft Points think ninjas never recovered from working with Vanilla Ice in the making of this review.