LightFish

I figured LightFish would be a tough game for me to enjoy.  It’s a Qix clone, and it wasn’t too long ago that I played one of those that I really got hooked on.  It was called Cubixx HD for the Playstation 3.  It’s a marvelous little title that got started as a PSP Mini a few years back.  It takes the classic Qix formula and puts it in a 3D environment, giving new life to a game that has been worn-out for decades now.

LightFish isn’t nearly as innovative as Cubixx, but it’s good enough to stand on its own.  It takes the Qix formula back to 2D basics.  Using a little glowy fish thingie, you have to draw a line from one part of a wall to another, closing it off.  You need to fill up 75% of a level to clear it.  If a baddie touches you or your line before you reach the wall, you die.  Most of the enemies are typical staples of the genre, only with an underwater theme to them.  There are a few surprises, such as sea thingies that shit bombs out like some bizarre form of aquatic creature dreamed up by Oppenheimer.

This is one of those pictures that will seem like a uncomprehensable clusterfuck. Just watch the trailer.

Where the game really won me over was in level design.  The stages often are larger than the whole of the screen.  In a game where enemies can kill you simply by crossing your path, that sounds like it would be unfair and aggravating.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, it adds a degree of tension that can sometimes be lacking in the Qix formula.  Levels are also filled with “coral reefs” that you cannot build into, which necessitates maneuvering around them.  At first, I figured they would be annoying.  Once I learned how to use them to cage in the enemies, I was glad they were there.  A nice touch, for sure.

LightFish also features some really amazing graphics that should remind many of the Playstation Network title Flow, only here you can actually make sense of stuff.  Everything is clear, distinctive, bright, colorful, and without slowdown.  In truth, I think it has the best graphics of any Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve played yet, including TIC Part 1.  I’m a sucker for this kind of stylized art theme, especially when it’s pulled off so damn well.  The music is pretty mellow and catchy too.

But all is not great under the sea.  The controls are a tad bit sensitive.  In later levels, lava pits are added to the stages that are an instant death if you touch them.  Well I guess everything is technically an instant death here, but the problem is, sometimes the guys at Eclipse Games got a little bit carried away with some of the level designs.  For example, there is a stage where you have to go inside a giant reverse “C” made entirely of lava to be able to complete the level.  The amount of room you have to work with is so narrow that you have to hug the lava to be able to meet the required 75% of space cleared.  But the controls often lead you steering right into the damn lava because it’s not exactly clear how close you are to it.  It’s maddening, and it happens in some other stages too.  And what the fuck is lava doing underwater?  I know it’s there in the real world, but couldn’t they have come up with something else?  Write “BP” on a black pit and call it an oil spill.

This is where babies come from.

I also hated the scoring system, and not just because it lacks online leaderboards.  When you complete a stage, the game rates you on a three-star scale.  Often, the ratings seemed completely random.  I could complete a level in under a minute, kill every bad guy in the process, rope off every coral reef, not die, and still only get one star.  I fucking hate it when games do this.  Angry Birds was the same way.  Some games did it right, like Mr. Gravity for example, clearly defining what goals need to be met to get the full rating.  If you’re going to have a system like this, at least spell out for the gamer what benchmarks must be met to get the best scores.

There were one or two fun glitches as well.  The auto-save feature apparently doesn’t work, and so my first day of progress was lost because I didn’t quit out to the menu.  The developer is aware of this and is working on a fix.  The more amusing ones were situations where I watched enemies pass right through the main wall and into oblivion.  Quite helpful, actually, almost like they recognized my mad skills and just surrendered.

At the end of the day, I really enjoyed LightFish.  It’s not original, but it’s probably the best 2D Qix game made yet.  If the lava wasn’t there, this would have been a leaderboard contender.  The frustration ratio that comes into play in later stages likely sunk its chances at that.  But that shouldn’t discourage you from purchasing LightFish.  It’s fast paced, artistically well realized, and a wonderful remake of a game I figured had gone stale.  Hell, they tried to spice up Qix by throwing boobies into the mix and it didn’t work, but a glowy fish thingie did.  So the good news is I’m not bi.  The bad news is I might have a fish fetish.  That’s going to be a tough one to explain to the folks.

LightFish was developed by Eclipse Games

80 Microsoft Points can’t believe how many times Kairi typed “Gear-Fish” instead of “LightFish” in the making of this review.

On December 1, I’m giving away 1600 Microsoft Points to one lucky follower of my Facebook account. All you have to do is follow me for a chance to win!  Click the link, hit “Like” and you’re in!  I don’t spam with my Facebook.  I just post article updates and the occasional “thank you” when my site hits a milestone.  So what are you waiting for?  Enter already!

Asphalt Jungle 2

Back in September, I ended up with the biggest backlog of developer challenges I had ever had, at least to that point.  I’m actually a little embarrassed to admit that one fell through the cracks and never got reviewed.  That game, Asphalt Jungle 2, has since long slipped off the new release list and into obscurity.  What can I say?  My bad doesn’t seem to cover it, especially when XBLIG developers count on any tiny scrap of coverage they can get to generate sales.  For what it’s worth, I’m genuinely apologetic.

The sad thing is, despite looking like the most boring thing since a slide show on coffee tables, Asphalt Jungle 2 is pretty damn fun.  It took me a while to realize that.  At first glance, it looks like yet another take on Pipe Dream.  Here, you have to keep a car moving by rotating various pieces of road on a 6×10 grid.  Once the car drives over a piece, the piece disappears.  The car can travel through one side of the screen and out the other provided the roads are pointed in the right direction.  And finally, after a set interval of time, the screen refills with more blocks to rotate.

Christ, it even sounds boring when I describe it.  And the screen shot above looks boring.  Now I know what gaming journalists went through trying to explain the appeal of Tetris twenty years ago.  Asphalt Jungle 2 is fun.  It’s a time sink, that’s what it is!  I told Brian I would play it for an hour and be done with it.  Three hours, eleven minutes, nine seconds later (it keeps track), I finally emerge from my session, totally satisfied.  Sure, my body forgot to blink over the course of that time and thus my eyeballs felt like someone had scrubbed them out with an SOS pad, but it was worth it.

Asphalt Jungle 2 is not perfect.  The controls are too loose and its lack of online leaderboards killed any chance it had of making the top 10 list.  It’s also butt-ugly, sounds like shit, and is about as shallow as a puddle of spit.  Regardless of all of that, it’s a genuinely good video game.  Isn’t that what we’re all here for?  So give it a whirl and watch the hours disappear without explanation.  It happened to me.  Then again, my ass has been sore lately.  Maybe it was actually an alien abduction.

Asphalt Jungle 2 was developed by Hoelkosoft

80 Microsoft Points added a list of pending developer challenges to the sidebar here so that the Chick can’t pull an oopsie like this again in the making of this review.

Final Failure

As a general rule of thumb, any game that has the word “Failure” in its name is bound to be not so good.  Imagine if other games did it.  What if Halo Reach had been called Halo Failure?  Who would want to play that?  Or Gears of Failure?  Arkham Failure?  Legend of Failure: Ocarina of Failure?  Those sure sound like loser games to me.  My point is, if you can name your game anything, why name it Final Failure?  Well unless your game is in fact a failure of herculean proportions.  Which this was.  So this whole rant was a complete waste of time.  Sorry.

Final Failure is a side-scrolling shooter that’s kind of like Contra, only sucky.  You choose one of four dudes, each with specific skills, and then you have to platform your way through some of the most soul-crushingly boring levels in gaming history, slowly shooting various bullet sponges and fighting some wretchedly annoying bosses.

There are so many things wrong with this game.  Your characters are practically microscopic.  I’m sure this was done to accommodate having four people play locally, but it was a bad design choice in my opinion.  When the characters are this small, they tend to get lost in the shuffle easier.  I did only get a limited amount of time to try this with local multiplayer because nobody wanted to play while having to squint the entire time like Harry on 3rd Rock from the Sun.

Each character has a different gun and a different special ability, but you need not worry about that.  The only character worth a squirt is the Defender, who’s default weapon is a spread gun.  Everyone and their mother knows that spread guns are the be all and end all of 2D platform-shooters.  Unfortunately this gun, along with every other one, has to pause to reload quite often.  Seriously, can you imagine if they remade Contra like that?  This isn’t Halo or Call of Duty.  It’s a fucking 2D platformer with guns, and you’re making us reload them?  It breaks the flow of the game and leaves your dude wide open to attack.  And he’s got enough problems with that as it is.  All four characters move slow while enemies are speedy and eager to run all over you.

By far the biggest problem is the horrible play control.  There’s no D-Pad mapping, so you’re forced to use the analog stick, which is not actually done in analog.  It makes every movement ultra touchy, as if its on the rag.  Jumping is not responsive either, and that becomes a full-blown pain in the ass in stages that require you to scale up some unreasonably tricky platforms.  Spending a few minutes trying to climb to the top of a mountain only to misstep and fall all the way to the bottom is a proven way to drain all love from your body.  That’s right, this is less a video game and more of a Care Bears villain.

There is absolutely nothing fun about Final Failure.  Even with four players, it’s pitiful.  I know the argument everyone uses is “everything is better with four people!”  Which isn’t always true.  Maybe with just one person the game would be manageable.  You know, if it didn’t suck to begin with.  But with four people it’s more slow, more clunky, and more aggravating.  Sure, you might theoretically kill enemies faster, but that’s kind of irrelevant when there’s always THAT ONE IDIOT who keeps running behind, making everyone wait around for them.  God I hate that little fucker.  Especially when it’s me.

Final Failure was developed by Cobalt270

80 Microsoft Points thought “Final Failure” was the code name for Final Fantasy XII in the making of this review.

Castle of Pixel Skulls

At first glance, one might mistake Castle of the Pixel Skulls for an entry in the Platformance series of games. It’s got the same punishment-platformer gameplay in an 8-bit suit of armor vibe going for it. The controls even feel similar.  There’s three very prominent differences. The first is you have an attack button. Second, the game has multiple levels. And third, Castle of the Pixel Skulls is fucking impossible.

You play as this skeleton-knight-thingie that has to jump over spikes, avoid other spikes, hop across platforms, and occasionally fight baddies while making your way to the exit of a stage. The level design is reminiscent of the Platformance games as well, so you know what to expect. While in a stage, you have an infinite amount of lives at your disposal. If they just left it at that, I would be okay with the game. Instead, the developer Josep Monzonis decided to pull a king-sized dick move supreme by having every level run on an outrageous sixty-second timer. If the timer runs out, there’s no continues or level select option.  You have to start the entire game over from the beginning.

It’s absolutely mind-boggling that the game was designed in this way. I’m sure the argument is “well back in the old days games like Donkey Kong didn’t let you start from where you died at.” If that was the point, it’s still fucking ridiculous. This isn’t 1981. We’re thirty years into the future, and games have come a long way from those days. There are no incentives to keep playing. There are no high scores, but hell, there are no other game modes or even options to choose from either. The only thing you can do is press start to begin the game.

The far-fetched game design extends to the levels themselves. Starting with the fourth level, the check-points become further apart. If you die, you’ll have to start a ways back. As the levels get more sprawling, the time limit seems more and more impossible to accomplish. If you die once, you might as well start over because you can’t possibly hope to make up the ten seconds you just lost. And because Castle of the Pixel Skulls is a punishment-platformer, it relies on trial-and-error gameplay. That system can produce fun games (see Aban Hawkins), but being forced to start from the beginning every time you do the “error” part of trial-and-error is bullshit.

I put well over an hour into Castle of the Pixel Skulls and only made it to the fifth board. I briefly thought about carrying on just to retain whatever integrity I have left as a gamer. But then I decided that I would lose dignity playing this mess any longer. It’s not fun or original. It’s just insanely difficult. Big deal. There are lots of things I could do that qualify as that. I could try to run the Boston Marathon wearing a suit of armor. I could try to fly off the Golden Gate Bridge using a grand piano as a hang glider. Of course, people would say I’ve gone insane if I tried those things. And they would be right. So it’s my duty as a gamer to tell you that if you devote any length of time to try and beat Castle of the Pixel Skulls, you’re a raving lunatic who should be put in a padded cell.

Castle of the Pixel Skulls was developed by 2KSomnis

80 Microsoft Points could try to ski down K2 using discarded egg cartons as skis in the making of this review. 

Geoff, whom I hear smells like teen spirit, also reviewed this for the wickedly awesome Two Fedoras. 

Platform Hack

In the land of video games, it’s hard to get caught up in Mayan Calender predictions when the world as you know it ends just about every other week.  Either political stability is shaken up when a dragon kidnaps your royal family, or a meteor is going to crash into whatever planet you are on, or hostile aliens arrive and fuck shit up, or the undead inconveniently rise up around the time AK-47s are declared so street-legal that you can fish them out of garbage cans.  So your average game character would take a look at those 2012ers and call them a bunch of pussies.

In Platform Hack, the end of the world scenario befalls a young man, who doesn’t have time to catch his breath before a wizard appears to tell him that his girlfriend and family are all dead.  Apparently the story is set in some utopian society where they have no knowledge of swords or guns or violence or any of that kind of shit.  Which is odd because I thought there was already a game set in Sesame Street that had released recently.

See how little space you have to fight the dragons here? Imagine doing that 50 times a level.

Once you get to the actual game, it’s a hacky-slashy platformer.  I never would have guessed by the name.  In the early stages, Platform Hack feels kind of like Raventhrone, only not shitty.  You run around, chopping up monsters and looking for a door.  When you kill an enemy, you earn XP that you use to level up and buy upgrades.  After the first boss, you acquire a gun, which becomes more effective once you upgrade it with rapid fire and a spreader.  I never really had to swing my sword again once I had my gun pimped out.

Unfortunately, it was somewhere around this time that things started to spin out of control.  Up to this point, Platform Hack had been fairly easy.  My dude was pretty much a human panzer tank, ripping through enemies like they were tin-foil.  But then the stages reached ROM-hack levels of ridiculousness.  It all started when I had to grab a key that was well out-of-place, near the bottom of the screen, with no platforms around it.  By this point I had acquired a triple-jump through various XP upgrades, only it wasn’t enough.  I could get to the key, but I couldn’t get back to the platform with it.

As it turns out, I needed either the grappling hook or the flight-jump-thingie abilities that you can buy when you get enough XP.  Because I had no points left, I had to go back and grind out several older levels to get them, completely destroying the pace of the game.  Until then, I was ready to write off Platform Hack as a “decent bad game.”  It wasn’t very good, with frustrating controls and awkward jumping physics, but it at least had charm.  Now, it didn’t even have that.  It’s like meeting a really ugly guy who woos you with his personality, only to ruin the mood by doing armpit farts.

It only got worse from there.  The levels became more sprawling, requiring you to search for multiple keys, all while fighting the same three baddies in every stage.  In the second world, it was dragons, knights, and birds.  Platforms became more narrow, yet they would have two or three dragons stuck on every single one of them.  A good platform game allows a player to have a sense of urgency and speed, but you can’t do that if every microscopic inch of terrain is coated with enemies that you have to take the time to kill by firing multiple bullets into them.  There’s a map, but it has a limited visibility and thus it’s not all that useful in finding where the keys are located.

By the end of the second world, I had acquired the flight-jump-thingie, and it briefly restored a sense of fun.  Sure, Platform Hack is still a bad game, but those can occasionally be entertaining too.  And not just in a train-wreck sort of way.  But then I reached the third level.  Well actually, I first had to fight a giant dragon boss.  The first time it popped out, it instakilled me.  After a couple of attempts, I figured out that it couldn’t shoot it’s fire straight down the edge of the screen, so I would just wait there and shoot upwards with the gun.  In the end, it was only slightly easier than the first boss, which I killed in one shot.  I had grown sick of the same old “up in the clouds” bullshit of world two.  And then I got to world three, which made me long for more clouds and dragons.  Suddenly, even the flying creatures (now hornets instead of birds) were bullet sponges.  Combine this with scorpions and warlocks, all of whom shoot projectiles, and my good-bad game was just bad-bad.  I was suddenly in a bullet-hell, unable to move at all because you don’t get temporary invincibility when you take damage.  No matter how hard I tried, I kept getting juggled by shot after shot, all while a group of hornets were buzz-bombing me from above.  Thirty minutes later, I declared “fuck this game” and shut it off.

Quick show of hands: how many people saw this picture and thought "Super Star Wars?"

I wasn’t even half-way through Platform Hack, either.  This is one long beast of a game.  But the story is not compelling and the gameplay is repetitive.   I have no clue what the developer was thinking with a difficulty curve like this, or why items that are actually necessary towards progression have to be obtained via level grinding.  It’s a fucking platformer!  Level grinding does not belong in it!  Once the enemies became overpowered and the stages became less linear, any remaining semblance of entertainment was sucked from it.  All that’s left is a long-winded, clunky, broken mess, like a video game version of Charlie Sheen, only not as fun.

Platform Hack was developed by Daydalus

80 Microsoft Points were spent by a hack writer in the making of this review.

Hell’s House

I was a mere three-years-old when the Sega CD came out, so I pretty much missed the golden age of Full Motion Video based games, or FMVs.  And thank God for that.  It wouldn’t be until my teens that I first got a taste of what this genre really had to offer.  Which is to say, not a lot at all.  I was much younger when I played one for the first time, which was Mad Dog McCree.  It was cheesy, shallow, poorly acted, and really horrible.  Yet, at the age of seven, I thought it was the bee’s knees.

Mom?

Which proves my point that all kids are fucking stupid.  It’s one of the reasons that Dragon’s Lair could be so popular.  I’ve seen DVD menus that offer more interactivity than it, yet it’s remembered fondly as “one of the all time classics.”  My ass it is.  It has pretty Don Bluth animation, but it barely qualifies as a game.  In fact, I think one could say that if you were to lock yourself in a room with a metric ton of uranium and try to guess how long it will take for you to die of radiation poisoning, that’s more of a game than Dragon’s Lair and it’s kin.

I hear two things when people defend games like Dragon’s Lair or Night Trap.  The first is usually “you had to be there.”  Thankfully I wasn’t.  I’ve been exposed to enough 80s media that I get down on my knees and thank Jesus Christ almighty every day that I wasn’t a child of that fucking decade.  I was born in 1989, but I feel that was God’s way of telling me “you were THIS close to watching Full House and movies starring Judd Nelson.  Now be good!”

The second thing they tell me in defense of FMV was “it was good for its time!”  Again, I call bullshit on that.  I’ve yet to meet any FMV enthusiast that could tell me with a straight face that Dragon’s Lair was remotely in the same universe as stuff like Ms. Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.  I mean really people.  It was a cartoon that told you to push a button every five seconds to see the rest of the show.  If the latest Pirates of the Caribbean DVD told you that you had to hit a button on the remote control every five seconds to continue watching the movie, you would call it the worst thing in the history of the anything.  Which technically it already is to begin with on account of it being the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but I digress.

A new FMV game in 2011 seems like drinking-Pepsi-with-a-spoon madness, but this is the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace and so I guess it’s not a surprise that the absolute worst type of video game that ever existed would rear its grainy head here.  Hell’s House by BM Games is about a girl who has to spend a night in a haunted house.  The gameplay is kind of like a rhythm game.  You just press the face buttons when they line up with the indicator, all while watching the absolute most boring “scary” movie of all time.  You’re off the hook, Blair Witch Project.

Oh shit! An Italian! Run!

The movie is bad, but the not in a good way.  It’s hard to believe you can fault a game for having good acting, but one of the things that people wax nostalgically about with FMVs is their camp value.  The acting was always a big cheese sandwich and the plot was usually something horribly contrived and silly.  Here, the acting is actually not bad.  Really!  Hell, if you squint really hard, you might even confuse the girl for Sarah Michelle Gellar.  But without the cheese, there’s nothing here except a really generic fan movie.

There’s nothing really creepy about it.  The house doesn’t have an ominous feel to it.  There’s nothing special about the house, it’s decor, it’s location, anything!  It just looks like any other house.  It’s not even an old one.  Meanwhile, the game purports to have “death scenes” but there’s nothing here that will frighten or even shock.  It’s 2011!  We’ve had four Scream movies, seven Saw movies, a dozen Friday the 13ths, and we’re on our sixth season of Dexter.  Anyone attempting to do horror in this day and age has way too much desensitization to compete with.  You have got to do something spectacular.  Death by live embalming using vinegar, via IV tubes inserted into eyeballs, swabbed with alcohol to prevent infection.  That I might cringe at.  A little.

As a movie and a game, Hell’s House does absolutely nothing for me.  I admit I might not be this game’s target audience, because I don’t look back lovingly on FMVs.  I look back on them and think “God, I’m so lucky to have been born when I was.”  This isn’t even one of those cases where you can say “games have gotten so much better since FMV died out.”  Video games were always better, even before FMV came around.  Talking about the good old days of FMV is like fondly reminiscing about the time you got run over by a combine harvester.

Hell’s House was developed by BM Games

80 Microsoft Points are only scared by crows and Rosie O’Donnell in the making of this review.

Remote Viewer

Have you predicted the phone would ring right before it did? Have you ever dreamed about the winning lottery numbers the night before the drawing but forgot to buy the ticket? Have you bought a Big Mac knowing that you would win a free medium french fries from the Monopoly promotion? Neither have I. Which is weird because Cuban women are supposed to be have some kind of clairvoyance. It’s true. It’s something they brag about. Which doesn’t explain why nobody saw Castro coming. Or the Bay of Pigs.  Or Michael Moore. Hell, you would think they could smell Moore coming. That’s one of the normal senses, right? And his smell is utterly unmistakable: a combination of bacon and farts.

My mother often claims to be a psychic. For proof of that, she offers up that she knew I would be a girl when she was pregnant with me. Sure, the odds were 50/50, but she did predict right, so obviously she’s got the sixth sense. And not the spooky “I see dead people” kind.  I mean the kind that can accurately predict a coin flip about half the time. Shit, even I should have that. Here watch. Heads!

Let me try that again. Heads!

Seriously, one more try. Heads!

Okay, fuck you, maybe it skips a generation or something. Thankfully I have Remote Viewer to practice up on. For the low-cost of 80 Microsoft Points, I can hone up my ability to randomly guess things spit out by a computer. That will come in handy if the Robopocolypse ever starts.

Remote Viewer has ten “levels” that allegedly will help you fine tune your ability to read people’s minds. Or something like that.  I’m not actually sure how it’s supposed to work. I mean, what good is reading the thoughts of a machine? If I can see what it’s thinking, doesn’t that make me a Technomancer and not a psychic? I’m so confused.

Levels 1 through 6 all offer the same game: pick the card that’s covered up. Each level adds another card. In level one, you start with only two cards. In theory, the average person should finish with 50% accuracy. I finished with 40%. Six times in a row. Well, at least I’m consistent. Level 2 adds another card. In theory, I should be right 33% of the time. Instead, I got 0% on my first try. So not only am I not psychic, but I’m so far removed from it that it defies the laws of probability. I’m fairly proud of that.

Oh, is that what those letters stand for? I thought it was “A Keen Queef.”

Things really start to get weird with level 7. It’s called “Influence.” The idea is the game will spit out a number between 80 and 120 several times over the course of a minute. You’re somehow supposed to magically cause the game to select a number that’s less than or equal to 99. If you do so, you get a point, while you lose a point if it’s more. Now mind you, I’m not making anything about this game up. It really wants you to do this using the power of your mind. There’s no buttons to press or anything.

I played along and tried to focus. But, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to focus on. The TV is where the numbers show up, but the Xbox is what’s generating the numbers. I’m not one of those people who can move my eyeballs independently so focusing on both wasn’t possible. I decided I should go with the Xbox. So I stared at it, but that didn’t seem to work. The numbers kept coming up high. I tried humming. I’ve seen psychics do that before, but it also didn’t work. I briefly thought about sacrificing a virgin to the console but the cops made it clear I shouldn’t try that again. Finally time ran out and my accuracy was 40%. Goddamnitsomuch!

So I wasn’t able to manipulate random numbers vomited out by a machine using just my brain waves. I’m a total failure. But hope did come when I tried level 8. It was the same as level 7, only this time I wanted the machine to spit out high numbers. Mustering up all the brain wavage I could find, I was able to score a whopping 58% accuracy on it. Holy shit, I’m better than average! Dionne Warwick, I’m coming for you next, bitch!

Level 9 features one of those Eye of Horus pyramid thingies that is out of focus, and using the power of my mind, I had to bring the picture into focus. I briefly thought about cheating and adjusting the reception of my screen, but I realized that was a waste of time. So back to the focusing. This time I pointed at the screen while holding a finger to my temple. I see psychics do that all the time, so it must be how it’s done. And the end result was 50%. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. The game doesn’t tell me.  If a student gets 50% on a test in school, he gets an F. Did I get an F? I need to know. My self-esteem depends on it!

The final level is trying to guess the results of a three digit “lottery” drawing. You have 30 seconds to visualize the numbers before they appear. I had two thoughts while playing this test. #1: I’m a magnificent idiot for having spent a dollar on this game. #2: anyone who accurately predicts all three numbers in sequence will want to slit their wrists for doing it in a video game that offers no rewards when the actual lottery is right there and would have made them some money. Needless to say, I got zero of the numbers right in the five tries I made at it. And then I was done with this game. I’m pretty sure playing this constitutes dabbling in witchcraft, and if I’m going to be burned at the stake for that I want to at least float a couple of inches off the ground while three weirdos chant “light as a feather, stiff as a board” around me.

I did make a prediction before buying Remote Viewer: that I would immediately regret doing so. And I was right. But that doesn’t make me a psychic. THIS makes me a psychic. Pick a whole number between 1 and 10 right now. Don’t wait to see where I’m going with this. Just do it.

Do you have it? You have a picture of it in your head? Okay, highlight the space below this line.

Seven.

Told you.

Remote Viewer was developed Developer 25

80 Microsoft Points just blew the minds of about 10% of the readers here in the making of this review.

“Gameplay” footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org