Lexiv

January 16, 2012 by 9 Comments

Being a boring person, I love Scrabble.  I play it with my boyfriend.  I play it online.  I play it on Xbox.  I play it on my iPhone.  I would even watch tournaments if they showed them on ESPN.  Sure, it’s not for everyone.  People who like exciting things or have lives usually avoid it.  Being an introvert, I’m just hard-wired to love this kind of thing.  So when I saw Lexiv, I nearly exploded excrement into my undergarments.  I mean, it’s Scrabble mixed with Sim City.  If they could have shoehorned Dungeons & Dragons in there somehow, it would have been the most introvertiest thing in human existence.

Not that I ever played Dungeons & Dragons.  I do have some dignity left.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go change my underwear.

Where was I?

Lexiv.  So you’re given a rack of letters and you have to build words.  Those words make up a city.  Unlike Scrabble, parts of speech come into play.  Nouns act as residential zones for people to live in.  Verbs are the commercial zones where people work.  Adjectives and Adverbs boost the productivity of those zones.  Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections all fall under the “Etc” category and act as wildcards that boost everything.  And there’s nobody reading this anymore, is there?  Bleepy bloopy blongo blooper.  Yep, you’re all gone.  Either that was enough to sell you on the game or you heard the term “parts of speech” and fell into a coma.  Sigh.

Well, I wish you had stuck around, because I do have to sort of pick the game apart now.  I really did have a good time with Lexiv, but it does need tweaking on several levels.  Just a quick annoyance to start with: I hate that the game makes the word “Lexiv” the starting point.  V is probably the most difficult letter to work with in Scrabble, or Book Worm, or various other word building games.  I’ve spoken with professional Scrabble players (yes, they exist) who would have no problem with the letter being removed from the game.  But in Lexiv, it’s the first thing you have to deal with, every single round.  That sucks.

The game also fundamentally stifles creativity by forcing you to quickly build specific word types.  You pretty much have to get a noun and a verb on the table right off the bat.  That especially sucks when you have a rack of letters that would allow you to play them all (bingo as it’s known in Scrabble), but you have no use currently for that type of word.  You also don’t instantly get the letters replaced for you.  You have to wait maybe several intervals before you will have a full rack.  There are boosts that can help with this.  When you reach level two, you get an item that allows you to trade your current rack of any size for a full rack of fresh letters.  You also later get the opportunity to buy letters to fill up your rack faster.  Of course, your city has to be cash-flow positive to get there, and that can be tricky.  In order to get resources up, you have to be able to boost the zones you have.  Simply put, in a game that is based mostly around the luck of the draw, it’s not always possible.

Leveling up does allow you to equip "perks" that speed up the gameplay, but they take too long to get.

There’s roughly 8 to 12 hours of missions to play through, some of which use conventional Sim City themes like city defense.  Others require you to build over specific spots on the board to win.  The variety is large enough to keep things fresh through-out the playtime.  Then again, if you are into this sort of thing you probably would never get bored anyway.  I am into this sort of thing, and I didn’t get bored.

I did run into a few technical issues.  And by a few, I mean so many that it basically leaves the game broken.  When saving to the hard drive, the game had a degree of skipiness that I have never experienced in a XBLIG before.  Sometimes a game occasionally stutters, like a CD with a scratch.  Lexiv plays more like a CD that has had industrial-grade sandpaper taken to it.  In the early stages, it’s annoying.  Just a few stages later, the game is completely unplayable.  The developer is aware of this issue and is working on a patch.  Until then, placing the game’s save file on your memory card seems to clear up the problem in its entirety.  I realize that is not an option for everyone.  If that’s the case, sorry, I have nothing for you except second-hand word that a patch is in the works.

The mechanics of the game are not completely solid.  Scrolling is overly difficult and losing the cursor is too easy.  There’s also a really annoying night-and-day cycle thingie that makes visibility of the board pretty difficult.  It’s among the dumbest ideas I’ve seen a good game have on this service.  What kind of fucking moron would say “hey everyone, let’s play Scrabble with the lights turned out!  No flashlights!  You won’t be able to see anything!  This will be fun!”  No, it will be absurd and stupid, just like this gameplay idea was, and you’ll delete him from your Rolodex just as soon as he leaves the room.  Finally, the dictionary they used sucked.  Just a few quickie examples: I was forced to play “oinking” as a noun, “whim” as a verb, and “techno” isn’t even a legal word despite having been sanctioned by Websters and Oxford for more than a decade.  It needs some oinking work.

I’ve been hard on Lexiv, so I should probably make it  more clear that I really, really liked this game.  It’s so original, yet such an obvious evolutionary step for the game of Scrabble that I’m actually surprised nothing like it has come along.  For all of its flaws, which are numerous, I feel the ground work for something exceptional has been laid here.  In fact, I think it’s developer really ought to tweak the rules to make it more in line with the actual Scrabble, then place a sales call to Hasbro and license the game to them.  I could see this taking off as a licensed product called “Scrabble Cities.”  No bullshit, I really could.  So if you purchase Lexiv, you’re buying into a game that is fun already, but has the potential to be so much more.  I liked it a lot, especially because I could swear the fucking game reads my mind.

Lexiv was developed by Andrew Gaubatz

240 Microsoft Points sunk my Scrabbleship in the making of this review.

Instead of a normal trailer, I’ve included the developer’s detailed walk-through of the gameplay mechanics, not all of which I covered in this review.  If you have eighteen minutes free, it’s worth a look.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , ,

Plugemons: Part 1

January 15, 2012 by 54 Comments

As is normal when an XBLIG game is horrible but pretty, I have to start my review of horrible game Plugemons: Part 1 by noting that this horrible game has beautiful graphics.  Really, really beautiful.  That gets you really far in gaming.  It’s the reason I skipped some other review requests and went straight to it.  My exact words to Brian when I saw this on the marketplace were “holy shit, look at this one!”  Even though my instinct told me that Xbox Live Indie Games with insanely good graphics are typically quite bad (Orbitron being one of the few exceptions), I latched onto it, like a sailor caught in the call of a Siren.  Within ten seconds of playing the game, I realized I’d been had.  Again.  Who would have ever thought the XBLIG marketplace could double as Sirenum scopuli?

Plugemon is a puzzle game, not a platformer or a punisher.  This was a source of confusion for me.  You see, in Plugemon you jump from ledge to ledge, swing off of other ledges, jump on enemies heads, and try to acquire various lightning bolts scattered throughout stages like coins in a Mario game.  The game’s own description, presumably written by the Plugemon’s developer, doesn’t mention the word “puzzle” until it notes things like jumping, running, and dying a lot.

See?

So when I tweeted that the game sucked, the developer took exception to this and demanded an explanation.  I gave him a few.  “The controls are horrible and very unresponsive. Scrolling is jerky. There are issues with enemy visibility.”  Now, I expect a developer to defend their product.  It’s their baby after all.  What I normally don’t expect is for a developer to claim their product is something that it is not.  Which is what the Plugemon developer did.  He noted that the game is not a platformer, but a puzzler.

You can see why I’m so confused.  It’s true that a couple of the levels featured the ability to switch from your main character to other members of its species.  Using them, you hit switches.  That’s it.  There’s no real puzzle element that I noticed.  Granted, I only made it to world 1-8 before I finally quit because the game is an unplayable piece of shit, but still.  By the way, the switching element was only in half the stages to that point.  If you’re going to claim to be a puzzle game, step one should be having puzzles.  Instead, Plugemon has fetch quests.  You have to acquire a certain amount of red lightning bolts scattered throughout each stage to activate an exit portal.  This involves searching a level for them.  That’s not really a puzzle.  That’s just a typical convention of platforming games.

Regardless of what genre you call it, bad controls will ruin any game.  Plugemons: Part 1 has terrible play control.  Your guy moves like he just took a bath in honey.  His mobility is severely limited, and he’s not all that responsive to the directions you give him.  Despite being a puzzler that is barely a platformer at all, Plugemon primarily deals with jumping from platform to platform.  The jumping physics are completely broken.  Your character feels like he’s leaping through wet cement.  It’s slow and clumsy.  There’s also some sort of issue with landing.  Sometimes, I would land on the edge of a ledge and then slip off it for no apparent reason.  This happened a lot.  The only way to avoid it is to land dead center in the middle of the platform, but that’s not always an option.

Collision detection with the baddies is a problem too.  The main enemies are spider-like thingies that do electrical charges when you get near them.  This doesn’t actually seem to kill you as long as you land on them properly.  The problem is the actual spot to kill them is too small and more often than not, I would jump on them, only to miss that microscopic hit-point and die.  Later in the game, miniature spiders appear and they are damn near impossible to land on properly.

It’s such a shame because, once again, the game is really good-looking.  And the characters have an actual personality, unlike, say, Oozi.  But the game is unplayable because of both the control issues and the overall level design.  I finally quit on level 1-8.  The idea in it is the level is shrouded almost completely in darkness.  So you have to trial-and-error your way through it.  Which is kind of a far-fetched goal because you can’t see the springs you need to get to platforms, the cannons you need to get to others, the ledges you need to stand on, or any of the traps that can kill you.  This is “GOTCHA!” gameplay.  You walked into a spike that you couldn’t see.  GOTCHA!  You tried to walk to a platform and fell to your death.  GOTCHA!  You jump down off a cliff and into a buzzsaw hidden in total darkness.  GOTCHA!  You land on a platform and an invisible enemy kills you.  GOTCHA!

When the game’s own description notes you die a lot, you would be right to assume that the game tried to be a punisher.  The developer denied this, but there was a very telling moment in our little tweet-off.  When I brought up the bad play control, this is how they responded.

I never brought up Super Meat Boy.  Nor do I ever bring up Super Meat Boy when talking with developers of punishers.  It’s just not a game that I care to invoke.  It’s alright, if a tad bit overrated, but my experience playing it is not high on my cherished gaming memories list.  It just sort of exists.  Yet, whenever I bitch about a platforming game having shitty controls, as sure as the tide comes in, the developer will bring up Super Meat Boy.  The VolChaos guy did it too.  “Your game has shitty control.”  “Blah blah blah Super Meat Boy, blah blah blah, blah blah.”

Look, just because your game is hard to beat doesn’t make it Super Meat Boy.  In some cases, people think it’s a fair comparison just because of the difficulty level.  In the case of Plugemon, it’s clear they were actually trying to be close to Super Meat Boy.  Let’s review.  Advertising that you die a lot?  Check.  Levels shrouded in darkness?  Check.  A stage where you’re being chased by a giant-sized boss?  Check.  Buzzsaws as one of the primary obstacles?  Check.  Hey, I didn’t invite comparison.  They did.  I’m just pointing out the obvious.  The Twitter message is a classic example of projection.  I say the controls suck, they say I expected Super Meat Boy, a game that is nothing wink like the puzzle game nudge they made, elbow.

Insanely Shitty Shadow Planet

I do expect a game to control well though, and I could control Super Meat Boy, a far more complicated game.  In it, you had to wall jump, clear large gaps, and make precision landings on platforms.  I could do all that just fine.  In Plugemons: Part 1, it’s difficult to even leap a small gap, or correctly hit the weak spot of an enemy that’s pretty large in size.  Super Meat Boy also had smaller levels designed around its punisher style.  Here, the levels can be sprawling, yet there are no checkpoints.  If you die, you have to wait while the overly-long death animation takes over before respawning at the start of the level.  This is especially annoying in a game where most of your deaths are going to be the fault of the busted controls and not due to your lack of skills.

Overall, Plugemons: Part 1 is without any redeeming quality.  Yes, it’s pretty, which I’m sure will lead to some very thick people saying “it’s worth it just for the art.”  No it’s not.  What kind of simpleton plays games for their graphics anymore?  It’s 2012 for God’s sake!  Good graphics are everywhere.  If it’s worth it just for the graphics, that presumably that means you’re willing to pay a dollar to watch someone else play it.  Say, that gives me an idea.  Party at my house!  One dollar a head cover charge.  Watch me play this shitty game.  Bring your own beverages.  No fatties.

Oh yea, this is totally a puzzle game, not a punisher. The art work makes that very, very clear.

Plugemons: Part 1 was developed by Bionic Thumbs

80 Microsoft Points think those simpletons are the guys who run Dream Build Play in the making of this review.

By the way, how the fuck did Bionic Thumbs confuse their own game as being a puzzler?  They made a puzzler, Starzzle, and it was not bad. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

Lots of Guns

January 13, 2012 by 3 Comments

I’m so over these climber games that are saturating the market.  Maybe they fit in better on phones where they serve to kill five minutes while you’re waiting for a bank teller or the test results on if that really was blood in your stool or red dye from Christmas cookies.  But on a console?  They feel out-of-place.  Granted, most of the ones I’ve played for Indie Gamer Chick have each been successful in its own way.  There was Who Is God, which successfully married the genre to techno-style graphics and addictive online leaderboards.  There was Meep 2, which successfully made a child-friendly version of the genre for console players.  Finally, there was Niji, which was so bad that it successfully helps control the pet population by causing any puppies in the nearby vicinity to fall down dead.

I think the major problem with them is they have a very short shelf life.  Even when they have online leaderboards, I’m not really compelled to go back and replay these titles.  But they’re fun for a day if nothing else, and Lots of Guns is no exception to that.  The gimmick here is that every 30 seconds, give or take, you reach a barrier that switches the type of gun you have.  As the title implies, there is a wide variety weapons, all with varying degrees of usefulness.  The guns are used to attack a large assortment of baddies who rain down from the top of the screen.  The actual tower you’re climbing is pretty straight forward: ledge in the middle, then two ledges on the side, then repeat.  There’s no variation on this, which is a bit of a downer because it quickens the game’s progression towards staleness even faster than what is normal for a climber.  It’s like the game has that disease from the movie Jack, only it’s funnier because Robin Williams isn’t in it.

Believe it or not, the pivoting camera actually does not distract from the game play at all.

There’s three modes here.  The first is climb as high as you can get.  The second is climb as high as you can get.  The third is climb as high as you can get.  Okay, so the second mode is the same as the first, only it’s called Auto-Scroll and the screen scrolls up automatically.  Which it actually does in the first mode too.  Yes, the game is faster in the second mode, but so what?  Why couldn’t mode one be called “easy” or “normal” and mode two be called “hard?”  This is an annoying trait I’ve noticed with indie developers of all walks.  They have to get cute when it comes to naming their game modes.  Don’t do this.  For every person who gets a very mild laugh out of it, there will be two players who never bother playing past the demo.  I get that your average indie developer prides himself on being a non-conforming, pretentious ass, but just think of how much non-conforming you can do in your day-to-day life if your game actually makes money.  Money does buy a lot of non-conformity.  I hear the FortressCraft guys don’t even need to shower anymore.

Oh, and the third mode is zombie mode.  Because, by fucking God almighty, every Xbox Live Indie Game has got to have zombies in it.  Zombie mode has nothing at all to do with zombies.  Here, you get no guns and only one life.  It’s the same assortment of enemies as before and the same sterile tower to climb.  I actually did have fun with this mode as well, but I had already tried the “no shooting” thing in the previous game.  Sometimes you’ll go stretches where the guns it gives you at random are not so useful.  After this happened to me a few times, I declared to Brian that I wouldn’t shoot the guns anymore because all they did was distract me.  This was followed about two seconds later by me saying “oooh, minigun” and abandoning that strategy.

Overall, Lots of Guns is fun while it lasts.  It’s got charming retro graphics and smooth play control.  However, it is lacking things that would extend it’s shelf life.  There’s no online leaderboards, no multiplayer options, and no incentive to keep playing after more than an hour.  I could see a reason to go on if the game guaranteed that you would only get the “fun” guns after having climbed so many feet, but that’s not the case.  When you reach the point where you switch guns, there’s always two options of which gun you will trade.  Sometimes it’s tough to choose, like picking between the awesome firecrackers or an automatic rocket launcher.  Other times, the game pulls a dick move by having one side be the wimpy handgun and the other side be the utterly useless landmines.  There is a third option: kill yourself and then respawn above the gun stations with whatever weapon you were carrying still in your possession.

Replace the generic king with the Burger King king and this could have been a horror game.

Maybe Stegersaurus thought the game would too easy if you got nothing but useful weapons late in the game.  My response would be this: who cares?  With no leaderboards or competitive multiplayer experience, it’s of no consequence to anyone if your character gets overpowered.  The game will stop being fun in about an hour anyway.  Loading a player up with power weapons might have extended that by an hour or two.  In the end, Lots of Guns is like a video game porno: you use it for ten minutes, have a lot of fun, and then regret spending your money on it immediately afterwards.

Absolutely horrible box art. It looks like someone crossed Rambo with Mr. Potato Head.

Lots of Guns was developed by Stegersaurus Games

80 Microsoft Points worked that porno reference in there just to annoy Steg in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of AarontheSplazer

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Orbitron: Revolution (Second Chance with the Chick)

January 7, 2012 by 2 Comments

I enjoyed Orbitron: Revolution quite a bit when I played it last month.  I don’t really have a ton of things to talk about in this Second Chance with the Chick, because they really didn’t have all that much to fix.  My main issue was it was difficult to see some enemies because of over-reliance on bloom effects.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, those are some pretty graphics.

They’re gone now.  You can see everything much more clearly.  A good game is now better.  Orbitron is now officially a leaderboard contender.  It will still continue to have crappy sales figures because 240MSP is too much for this game and most people won’t pay it.  End of story.

Why can’t every review be this easy?

 

Even the box art had bloom.

Orbitron: Revolution was developed by Firebase Industries

240 Microsoft Points burned the land and boiled the sea, you can’t take the sky from me in the making of this review. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Inferno! (Second Chance with the Chick)

January 7, 2012 by 2 Comments

I have a couple of Second Chances to do today, so let’s get to them.  I reviewed Inferno! way back in August, and felt that it was a perfectly fine retro-themed game that had a few serious flaws in it.  You might want to read that post first before going any further.

So what has changed?  For starters, the ridiculous password system is fixed.  Now, you don’t need to ace an impossible bonus stage just to earn the right to continue.  It serves to take the aggravation factor almost completely out of the game.  Almost.  All the game play annoyances that were present before are still around.  Limited ammo in a game where sometimes there is no way to get to the exit without shooting an enemy.  The only other option is to suicide yourself into it and hope you have enough health to survive.  It’s also still difficult to control your ship, especially when you get speed-ups that were presumably put into the game to help, but only make things worse.  I tried to come up with a witty analogy for that, but completely failed.  Sorry.

Some other additions include a simplified first bonus stage and a few extra bonus stages thrown in elsewhere.  There’s also some trivial bug fixes for a few late-game issues, but I didn’t notice anything different.

The most important thing is the game has dropped in price from 240MSP to 80MSP.  That was my biggest problem with Inferno! and now that the price is more reasonable for the type of game offered here, I can give the game a more hearty recommendation.  The controls still piss me off so I’m still pinning its ribbon on with boogers and phlegm.  I do have the flu today, so the phlegm is a nice, bright yellow.  That’s extra festive!

Inferno! was developed by Archifishal Software

80 Microsoft Points fell into a burning ring of fire in the making of this review.

Well actually it was 240MSP for me, but if you buy it now for yourself it will only be 80. 

Video courtsey of Indies onPause.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

Trailer Park King Episode 2

January 6, 2012 by 6 Comments

It’s no secret that the most read review I’ve had so far was for Trailer Park King.  Which is kind of shitty because it’s not one of my better ones.  Hopefully I do better this time.  Then again, hopefully the game is better.  Not that Trailer Park King was awful.  It wasn’t.  It was alright.  It was probably the best point and click adventure game I’ve played so far on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Which isn’t saying much.  It would be like saying having your pinky toe removed was the best amputation you’ve had yet.

It was the most searched game on my site because it has boobies on the cover and if you play the demo the game teases that there is porn in it.  Don’t believe me?  14 of the top 30 search terms linking to my site have centered around Trailer Park King.  Including “Trailer Park King Porn” and “Trailer Park King Nudity.”  Of course, there is no porn or nudity in the game, because Microsoft doesn’t allow it.  I know the average Xbox Live player’s IQ is on par with some forms of kelp, but don’t you think if that kind of shit was allowed, it would have been right up Rockstar’s alley?  It certainly would have made the whole “Niko Bellic watches TV” shit less boring in GTA IV.  Or don’t you think some other XBLIG developer would have made a game called “Oh Fuck It” where you go around sexing-up ATM machines or border collies or something?

There will be a FAQ for Trailer Park King Episode 2 at the bottom of this review.  But as spoiler, there are no boobies, nudity, or porn in this game.  If you actually expected that, congratulations, you now have full confirmation that you will die a virgin.  This frees you to do other things with your time.  I hear croquet is quite relaxing.

To the game.  It picks off right where the original left off.  Well, kind of.  The ending sort of teased some nefarious plot twist, but that doesn’t actually happen.  King’s rival, Truck, wasn’t dead.  But now he’s dead again.  Or for the first time.  Maybe.  The game starts with everyone preparing for his funeral.  Only he’s not dead, but everyone thinks he’s a zombie.  Didn’t Red vs. Blue already do this whole thing?

From there, you get the usual assortment of white trash jokes, potty humor, and sexual innuendos.  I admit, I laughed a few times.  But it was never because I found something to be genuinely funny.  It was uncomfortable laughter, the type you might experience yourself if your deranged uncle stood up at Mass and declared that Moses was a closet homo.

The actual game is pretty much the same.  There’s not a whole lot to point at or click on in this point and click adventure.  You’ll never hold more than one trinket at a time and once you’ve clicked on something useless that doesn’t move the plot forward, you can’t click on it again.  That’s actually a pretty useful feature.  There are a couple of minigames this time around.  One of them is a shooting range with a shitty aiming system.  Thankfully you only have to play it once and it seems to make no difference in the story.  The second is Tic Tac Toe.  Oh well, it beats playing Raventhorne I suppose.

The storyline is so completely surreal and absurd that I’m convinced Sean Doherty could sell it as an animated series to Adult Swim and make himself a millionaire.  Yes, the writing is dumb and the voice acting is horrible, but I actually kind of like the characters, and I look forward to seeing what other stupid shit they’ll get themselves into.  Hopefully I don’t have to wait long.  It took me well under an hour to beat Episode 2.  Sean isn’t sure how he’s going to handle the progression of the series.  He had to break this episode up to keep the price at 80MSP and avoid the deadly 240MSP price tag.  And then, as soon as his game got approved for publishing, Microsoft changed their policies.  Now he’s not sure if he’s going to release the rest of the game as patched DLC or if he’s going to sell it in another episode.

I’m frugal, so the consumer in me says “just patch the game!”  But I’m also a business person, and that side of me says “you’re a God damned fucking idiot if you don’t release it as another episode.”  We’re talking about a game whose review is more popular here than all other articles I’ve done combined.  Well, that is if you exclude Temple of Dogolrak.  You know, I’ve come to the sad realization that someone is going to create the ultimate Xbox Live Indie Game.  It will combine risqué themes with a Minecraft clone and the end result will be someone at Microsoft having their head explode when they see how big of a royalty check they have to write for a game called Boobcraft.

Trailer Park King Episode 2 was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points are just as guilty as everyone else for doing this review at 2:00AM on Friday just to have the first review of this game in the making of this review. 


Psssh, they’re totally fake.

Trailer Park King Episode 2 Walkthrough FAQ Thingie

Just because I know everyone is going to want it.  Below is a list of things you’ll have to do in the game.  Highlight the space following them for the answers.  I try to keep things relatively spoiler free, because someone actually bitched at me for spoiling the game for them last time while they were looking up answers to the game’s puzzles in the fucking walkthrough.

How do I free Truck’s body from the ice?  Go to the limo and get a lighter from Vikki.  Go to your bedroom and a sheep will be waiting there.  Now go to Truck’s body and weep as gaming culture is set back at least ten years.

Where did “Zombie” Truck go?  First, you have to go to the outhouse where Truck’s body was on ice.  Then, you have to go to the bar.  The lady inside will tell you that someone locked themselves inside the strip club.  The magic store will now be open.  Go there to get the key from Dozer.  Go back to the strip club and viola!

I’m hopelessly retarded.  Please just tell me how to beat the game from here on out.  Sigh.  Okay, go talk to Truck in his jail cell thingie.  Then go talk to the spacey alien chick.  Go to the bar, then the strip club and talk to Skinny.  Go back to the jail and talk to Vikki.  Now take Truck to the strip club.  Take the book to the top outhouse.  Congratulations, “you” just beat the game. 

Seriously, no nudity?  No.

No porn either?  I fucking hate you.

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

World Wars II

January 2, 2012 by 4 Comments

It was two months ago that I first played World Wars II.  I was really looking forward to it.  It seemed more like a real-time version of Nintendo’s Advanced Wars series that I was so fond of a few years ago.  It also featured eight-person online play and multiple game types.  I was sent a couple of review copies to make sure I could experience this game at it’s finest.  Brian and I were seriously hyped.

And then we played it.  Although it wasn’t bad by any means, it’s so underwhelming that it almost seems worse than it is.

In World Wars II, you’re given a squad of various troops and vehicles to command.  The problems with the game start right away with unwieldy tutorial.  I had to replay through it a few times and I still couldn’t get a feel for the controls or the gameplay.  Everything about it seems overly complex.  Steering, turning, rotating the turrets on tanks, etc.  Nothing here is intuitive or user-friendly, making the game about as inviting as the welcome mat at Majdanek.  It doesn’t help that it’s not possible to complete the tutorial in the eight minutes a player would be allotted to demo the game.

This is the only game play picture chosen by the developers to represent their game on the marketplace.

It also doesn’t help that the best way to learn nearly any game is to play single-player.  That option is here, but for the life of me I couldn’t even complete the first mission in campaign mode.  Even on the easiest difficulty setting, the enemies are absolutely flawless marksmen that will accurately fire every single shot.  You, on the other hand, are just a person who has to deal with the clunking aiming and slow response time of your character.  I tried.  God knows I tried, but I couldn’t get past the first enemies I encounter on the first stage on the easiest setting possible.

I’ve had my skills as a gamer brought into question more than once since starting this site.  And while it’s true that I’m not exactly proficient in the art of throwing a dragon punch, I would still consider myself as having pretty decent gaming ability.  After my performance in  World Wars II, I seriously started to question my own skills.

And then Brian couldn’t beat it.  Huh.

Brian called his friend Cameron over and they tried it co-op.  Nope, still couldn’t beat it.

I was sent a second review code so I gave it to my buddy Alan C with the Tea, who operates his own XBLIG blog.  Guess what?  HE COULDN’T BEAT IT EITHER!

Now, I’m not going to pick on this subject too much, because even most mainstream shooting games (coughFARCRYcough) can’t get proper AI done.  But the first level, and the first baddies?  Yikes.  That’s some shitty AI coding.

So I used multiplayer to learn the mechanics of the game.  I played several games online with Brian, and it was comically awful on both of our parts.  Nothing made sense, the controls were bad, and switching between characters was a fucking nightmare.

A few days later, we played again and the results started pretty much the same way.  But then things did start to click and we kind of had fun with the game.  It wasn’t perfect by any means.  Even after putting several hours into the game, the aiming is slow and clunky.  In a game where you primarily are trying to shoot other people, that can get a bit annoying.  And while you’re fighting with these mechanics, you’re also having to juggle other factors.  You have to watch your gas tank on each car.  You have dozens of troops to position and shuffle to.  At this point, World Wars II feels more like a boring desk job than a game.

Swissplayers Game Studios helpfully included two screenshots of World Wars II’s menus on their marketplace page. Yes indeed, this does confirm the game features menus. Awesome.

We spent most of the time playing capture the flag.  The name is very misleading.  It’s actually a territorial-control game where you find a base and squat on it until your flag gets raised.  Whoever gets all the flags first wins.  There’s also a game that is more close to capture the flag.  A pile of gold is hidden inside a base.  You have to blow up the base, expose the gold, get it, and take it back to your base.  I actually found this particular game type to be boring.  But the territorial control stuff was alright.

Honestly, I can’t recommend World Wars II because it just takes too much time and effort to enjoy the whole thing.  It’s probably a lot more fun with a full roster of eight people, but so is throwing yourself out of an airplane.  The aiming system just blows.  It would probably played better as a twin-stick shooter.  The unbeatable AI cripples the single player experience.  Online multiplayer is the only way to have fun, but it won’t be possible unless every player has put in the required time to actually get good at it.  Somewhere in here was the trapping of a good game, but the final product doesn’t live up to its potential.

Oh, and one last gripe.  The four pictures selected by the developers to represent this game on the marketplace were fucking pitiful.  Only one is a screenshot of game play.  Another is a screen of someone looking at the map.  The other two pictures are of menus.  Fucking menus!  Jesus Christ, guys!  These are the pictures that you’re trying to use to sell your game.  At least try to be more picky about them than the DMV is.

World Wars II was developed by Swissplayers Game Studios

240 Microsoft Points pointed at a box of the board game Risk and declared that your online indie multiplayer strategy game should not be more complicated than that in the making of this review. 

Review copies of World Wars II were provided by Swissplayers Game Studios to IndieGamerChick.com in this review.  The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review copies was given to friends with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer.  Those people had no feedback in this article.  For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Game Type

December 29, 2011 by 16 Comments

I sympathize with Xbox Live Indie Game developers. I really do. It’s a tough little market you guys are trying to conquer. Only a select few have been truly successful in their attempts at it. It’s mostly because your games suck. But if your game is good, it’s probably because Xbox Live Indie Games are sort of buried in the dashboard. People who were hoping that the winter update would fix the issue had good news and bad news. The good news was that Xbox Live Indie Games were now on equal footing with Xbox Live Arcade Games.

The bad news was they were both kind of buried. And the worst news is how many of the new, highly touted features of Xbox Live do not work for XBLIGs.

Mommy’s Best Games wanted to express the frustration of everyone involved and created Game Type. It’s part dashboard parody, part shoot-em-up, and completely useless rubbish. If DLC Quest restored my faith that developers were able to successfully parody the gaming industry, Game Type reminds me why most shouldn’t bother. It has nothing to do with my dislike of shooters or my somewhat indifference to the whole dashboard situation. Game Type is just not funny.

So the idea is you start in a mock-up of the Xbox dashboard. You have to “find” the actual game here. Along the way you’re bombarded by stuff not related to gaming at all. Which is what Microsoft intended the Xbox to be from day one. It was Microsoft’s Trojan Horse. Gaming was just the entry point, because making a console was cheaper than acquiring a cable provider, or a telecom company. No, really! That was the point.

Oh my God, a cat! LULZ or something.

Gamers who feel “betrayed” by the new Xbox dashboard don’t get it. Gaming was just part one of their strategy of getting a consumer item into the living room. It happened to be the cheapest way to get there. And by cheapest, I still mean they took a bath somewhere in billions to get it up and running.  It’s not easy to launch a consumer product. It will probably be another decade or more before they’re not taking on any losses with the Xbox brand. But that’s how it works, and they knew that. It’s a long-term project, something most gamers didn’t realize. They just happened to be the conduit for this expansion.

The time has arrived for Microsoft to start rolling out all the other plans for Xbox, and that rubs Xbox fanboys the wrong way. I guess that’s why Game Type exists. It might aim to take the piss out of the dashboard, but it doesn’t do so very successfully. That’s mostly because they were so lazy in implementing it. There’s only a small handful of things in the fake dashboard to click on, and most of them just offer the same non-gags many times. For example, on the TV page, if you click something it takes you to a crude picture of a football player. Click something else on that page, and you get the same picture.  Um, hilarious? And why does the football player also appear in the movies part of the dash? Is this some kind of Friday Night Lights tribute?

It also doesn’t help that there are ads for other Xbox Live Indie Games all over the fake dashboard. Now wait a second. If this thing is supposed to be lampooning the actual dashboard, why on Earth are XBLIGs everywhere here? I get that these guys are all friends and that Mommy’s Best is just trying to throw some of its chums a bone here,  but you can’t rally against something for not doing something and then show the thing you’re making fun of doing exactly that!

Once you get to the actual game, the entire joke, gag, and purpose of this whole thing falls completely on its face. The game is fucking horrible. It’s a shoot-em-up where you play as the hoodie-wearing girl who occupies the actual GAME TYPE option on the real dashboard. You scroll her up and down, shooting at various guys, collecting the stuff they drop, and going for a high score on the global leaderboard.

Here’s the trick to it: hold down X. A semen geyser will erupt from the hoodie girl, destroying everything it touches. There’s no limit to the amount you can use this, so grab some duct tape and enjoy the ride. It ain’t much of a ride. There’s only one stage that repeats at a faster speed when you clear it. It says it adds some baddies too, but if it does the amount is negligible. Anyway, the game is a total piece of shit. And then once I finally died with a score close to four-million points, it didn’t record it. It recorded my previous efforts, but not that one. Bull. Shit. I had four million points, and I want my four million mother fucking points.

So in a nutshell, Game Type wanted to poke fun at the plight of all XBLIG developers. To do so, Mommy’s Best Games made an unfunny dashboard parody and then a game that would be embarrassing to own if it was a free iPhone app. Take that, Microsoft! I guess it was supposed to be a winking nod to other developers, but it still falls flat. Most of the XBLIG developers I know have practically been in a funeral-like mindset ever since the dashboard update took place. If that’s the case, Game Type is like eulogizing your best friend by walking up and farting in the widow’s face.

Game Type was developed by Mommy’s Best Games

80 Microsoft Points are really truly honestly going to post a World Wars II review this week in the making of this review. 

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

Alien Jelly

December 23, 2011 by 14 Comments

Update: Alien Jelly is now 80 Microsoft Points.

Statistically speaking, this review likely won’t be too popular.  It’s a trend I’ve noticed.  When I review a game from this particular genre, people immediately tune out and my page views seem to fall off a cliff.  Now, after careful research conducted by top scientists from one of those fancy institute places, we’ve devised a way to keep people’s attention while informing them of a really cool game.  Let’s see if it works.

Okay then.  Alien Jelly is a new logic-puzzler BOOBS on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Your goal is to navigate a series of cubes from one part of the puzzle TITS to the flying saucer at the end.  Along the way, you’ll have to shove crates around, teleport, build staircases, and all your typical puzzle RIMJOB fare.

It’s kind of a shame that I have to be so damn shameless in writing this review.  Alien Jelly has so much more going for it than your average logic puzzle KNOCKERS game.  It’s got amazing graphics and loads of personality.  Clearly taking inspiration from the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks, Alien Jelly is a game that practically begs to be played.  As a puzzle game DIRTY SANCHEZ, Alien Jelly is also well realized.  It’s quite similar to Blockt, a game I previous covered and enjoyed just well enough.  You move your cubes one space at a time.  Here, you can’t fall off the ledge.  The only way to die is to run into a trap or by maneuvering your cube onto a space of another cube’s color.

No amount of Slim Whitman will save you from this.

In most of the forty stages, you have to move more than one block.  You switch back and forth using the A button.  It was here that a very fun glitch came into effect.  On a few stages, the “jelly” around the cubes disappeared, leaving me just the brain.  I wasn’t sure at first if this was a glitch or some kind of “you fucked up” punishment.  I’m pretty sure it was a glitch, because sometimes I just couldn’t recreate it.  It never happened to more than one cube each stage, so it was just a minor annoyance, but it was present.

A bigger problem is the camera.  It has to be moved manually, and it’s a royal pain in the ass to position correctly.  It leads to situations where you can’t see what is on the ledge below you.  You can’t fall to your death, but if there is a ledge under you, the game allows you to drop down to it.  Depth perception proved problematic through-out, but again, you can’t die.  And if you make a mistake, there’s a nifty rewind function that allows you to quickly undo it.  Rewinding also factors into the actual puzzle process, as you keep any gems you collect, even if you erase the moment where you got them.  It’s pretty slick.

Overall, Alien Jelly is probably one of the best of its breed on XBLIG.  Yea, the camera was inexcusably horrible, but because it can’t actually kill you, who gives a shit?  The puzzles themselves are well designed, the theme is pretty good, the production values are high, and it’s just a lot of fun.  Even if you’re not into this type of game, nothing here is so insanely challenging that it should leave you too stumpified.  So give it a try, and maybe you’ll discover a love for puzzle games SEX HOOTERS MAMMARY GLANDS!

Sigh, this is probably where Tourette Syndrome comes from.

Alien Jelly was developed by Collective Mess

IGC_Approved240 Microsoft Points giggle immaturely whenever an alien says it has “come in peace” in the making of this review.

My friends at GameMarx are giving away over FIFTY Xbox Live Indie Games as part of a huge contest.  Click here for the Youtube announcement video, and then click here to enter.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Let’s Get Fiscal

December 19, 2011 by 8 Comments

It happened again.  I ran into another overly wrought and pretentious brawler for XBLIG, Let’s Get Fiscal.  What is it with Xbox Live Indie Game developers shoehorning excellent storytelling into the pure concentrated realm of boredom known as the brawler?  It would be like a movie studio taking a script guaranteed to win Academy Awards (something involving World War II and homosexuality, no doubt) and handing it over to Michael Bay.  I have to give credit where it’s due, for making me almost regret rage-quitting this piece of shit, costing me a chance to see how the story would conclude.  I even went back and tried it three fucking times.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s Get Fiscal is a Double Dragon style brawler.  You play as an accountant going on his tenth year of sobriety, but that seems like it’s coming to an end.  Throughout the adventure, he slowly falls off the wagon.  Oh, and he’s not really an accountant, but some kind of hitman.  As far as stories go, it’s not that bad.  I actually wanted to press on, but the game bored me to no end.

There’s only two buttons in Let’s Get Fiscal.  A punches, B jumps.  That’s it.  There’s a few combos you can pull off and a small handful of enemies to fight.  In games like this, you have to find ways to amuse yourself.  I did so by trying to imagine why there are hundreds of identical dudes running around.  A cloning experiment gone haywire seems a bit too obvious.  So I went with the idea that all these dudes were the result of some wacky prop bet involving five fraternity brothers and a sperm bank.

The Curtis pictured here has a large health bar. The actual Curtis in the game dies if you breathe on him.

Oh, and for some reason there is a black dude named Curtis who only takes one punch to kill.  It seemed a bit odd.  Since I’m guessing the developer isn’t just being casually racist, I figure this must be some joke that I’m not getting.

Really, as a brawler it’s nowhere near as terrible as All the Bad Parts was.  The normal enemies are easily dispatched and don’t have life bars the size of an airplane hanger.  The first two bosses gave me a hint that the difficulty curve is all kinds of fucked up.  The first boss, or should I say bosses, are annoying fucking guys who shoot lasers out of their eyes like Cyclops.  And then the second boss is some dude  that I can’t even describe because I was able to beat him in about five seconds.  It wasn’t just luck either.  Because after I rage quit on the third boss, I restarted the game and was able to beat him again in the same amount of time.  I’ve seen straight lines with better curves.

And then there was the third boss.

This mother fucker.

He has the ability to regenerate his own health.  If you get him down to his last half-healthbar, he puts on a protective shield and brings all his health back.  None of the basic attacks or the combos seem like they’re able to break the shield.  I spent three separate sessions fighting this guy, trying every tactic that seemed possible, and I couldn’t get him.  I rage quit, then restarted the game from scratch (there’s no saving) a few hours later and I still couldn’t get him.  I asked the developer if this was some kind of joke, and he assured me it wasn’t, but he didn’t offer any help.  He wants to see if anyone will figure it out themselves.

Somebody might, but it won’t be me.  Compelling as the story may be, the game itself is incredibly tedious.  There’s no saving, so if you make it as far as I did and get bored after twenty cock-guzzling minutes fighting this cunt, you’ll have to start over again too.  I didn’t bother going on.  I tried twice, failed twice, and I don’t care to try again.  A quick conversation with a few other befuddled players leads me to believe that nobody has yet quite figured out the special secret to this guy.  Or even worse, what the fuck is next in the game?  I mean, the first boss was a bitch.  The second boss literally was a bitch.  The third boss is impossible.  If this pattern continues, the fourth boss will commit suicide and the fifth boss will teleport into your room and fuck your mother.

This art has almost nothing to do with the actual game.

Let’s Get Fiscal was developed by Baller Industries

80 Microsoft Points are reviewing Sonic CD next in the making of this review.

My friends at GameMarx are giving away over FIFTY Xbox Live Indie Games as part of a huge contest.  Click here for the Youtube announcement video, and then click here to enter.

Gameplay footage courtesy of http://indies.onpause.org/


Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →