Robot Platformer is pretty much what the name suggests: a tactical strategy RPG where you navigate a platoon of ravenous chipmunks through the aisles of a K-Mart hoping to land a blue light special on some off-brand footwear. You control Mr. Finkies, the leader of the pack whose family was tragically cut down by nah I’m just fucking with you, it’s an utterly generic platformer made by some Danish twit. And I find the whole “robot” thing suspect. It looks more like a masked killer from a slasher movie. Personally, I liked my plot idea better. Feel free to steal it.
What makes Robot Platformer stick out is its graphics style. It looks an awful lot like a sketch book come to life. In a way, you can picture the entire game taking place between the margins of a text-book. It’s a fun look that takes a bit of the sting out of what is, at heart, a samey-bland platforming romp. There’s forty-two levels that have various goals. Most of the time you simply have to get to the exit. Sometimes you’ll have to eliminate all the baddies in a stage, and sometimes you’ll have to get to the exit before time runs out. Sometimes you’ll have to do both.
My biggest complaint is the controls are a tad clunky. Jumping feels too heavy while shooting feels too slow. Collision detection seems a bit off as well. I also don’t like how the entire stage darkens up as you take more damage. The difficulty curve is really strange too. You’ll be twenty boards into the game when, out of nowhere, it tosses you a level that feels more like an introductory stage and takes mere seconds to beat. It’s like taking a quantum physics quiz and being asked at some point which way is up.
Robot Platformer wears the art-house game badge without shame. It’s got a really awesome jazzy soundtrack that is completely out-of-place, but oddly fitting at the same time. Although the controls are a bitch at times, it should only take around an hour to finish the game, and I can honestly say that I didn’t dislike the experience. I guess I’m giving it a mild recommendation. It’s not an enthusiastic one. It’s like recommending a meal of Mexican food. It’ll be palatable enough to eat and you might even get some satisfaction out of finishing it. Then later you won’t even remember eating it at all while wondering where all this diarrhea came from.
Crazy Balloon Lite is a remake of a 1980 arcade game by Taito where you steer a balloon through a maze while trying to avoid the spiky walls. The balloon constantly sways from left to right so you have to use timing and digital agility to reach the end goal of every level. It wasn’t exactly the most popular game out there, so it’s a slightly oddball target for a remake. My father might disagree with that. He burned away many lunch hours playing this when it was first released in arcades. So anyone from Palo Alto who remembers a fat, balding Cuban swearing at an obscure arcade game circa the Reagan era, you’ll be glad to know that he’s now a fatter, balder, and thirty-years-older Cuban currently swearing at my Xbox 360. Circle of life.
I’ve already raged against nostalgia in a few previous reviews, so I’ll drop that whole bit and just talk about the merits of Crazy Balloon Lite. On its own, it’s a perfectly fine dexterity tester. As a remake, it’s pretty much what you would expect: the same game with a graphics overhaul.
Having noted all that, remaking a game in a way where it actually has less to offer than the thirty-year-old arcade original is pretty dumb in my opinion. There’s only six levels in the game, and once you beat them that’s it. There’s no extra challenges or incentives to keep playing. The original game looped, so when you beat the last board you would start from the beginning, only the balloon would sway faster. Here, once you beat stage six the game ends and you go back to the title screen. The graphics seem nice, except the background is pretty distracting. It leads to moments where it’s tough to see where the spikes are.
The biggest complaint for me is this is a game where analog controls would have potentially made a huge difference in improving the original design. Although the stick is an option, it has no true analog controls, so the slightest nudge will send your balloon on a full-speed path towards failure. Finally, there are annoying moments where the camera automatically pulls in when the game assumes that you’re turning a tight corner. It’s a feature designed to make things easier, but it does the opposite. The transition between camera angles is jarring and led to me dying more than once.
Overall, I can’t recommend Crazy Balloon Lite. Modern gamers will find it shallow and uninteresting. I know I wanted it to be over by time I beat the first level. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait very long. Fans of the original might get a very limited amount of enjoyment out of it, but if my father is any indication it will only leave them longing to play the 1980 version. It had more levels and cleaner graphics, plus it’s the actual game they fell for in the first place. All Lite is going to do is set off one of those annoying “back in my day” speeches. God I hate those. You know, back in my day they didn’t develop shitty remakes of games that would cause people to use that phrase.
80 Microsoft Points had a father who said “they ought to remake Atari’s Fire Truck too” while his daughter face-palmed and begged developers not to in the making of this review.
It’s been said that President James Garfield could write Latin with his left hand and Greek with his right hand at the same time. Pretty impressive, assuming that every single guest he performed this for could tell both Greek and Latin apart from random chicken scratches. But if it was true, it’s an amazing trick. Let’s see the smug bastard take a crack at Zombies Ruined My Day, a hoard shooter with a control scheme about as inviting as a radioactive doorbell.
The story here is your typical zombie game clap trap: zombies invade and you are able to conveniently get your hands on enough artillery to wipe out the population of a small country. The game play takes place on a single screen. There are doors that zombies march out of single-file in an orderly manner. They walk in a straight line until they hit a wall, at which point they walk the other direction. You’re a dude at the bottom of the screen who has to kill them before they get you and turn you into a zombie yourself.
By the way, isn’t that the biggest flaw with all these zombie games and films? Let’s say the zombie outbreak takes place. In most cases, it’s only a handful of people who initially start as zombies. Then they bite someone and that person becomes a zombie too. Well wait a second, if zombies are trying to eat the people, how come there’s always enough left of their victims for them to turn into zombies themselves? What, are they only sampling the people like it’s demo day at Costco? Makes no damn sense.
So back to the game. You have zombies and you have guns. You move with the left stick and aim with the right one, with the right trigger to shoot. That’s assuming you have a gun. If you’re using a grenade or putting a barrier down, you use the right trigger to increase throwing strength and the left trigger to decrease it. You press up on the D pad to throw. You cycle through your various weapons using the bumpers. And while you juggle through all that, there are dozens of zombies on-screen, all of whom will kill you in one hit. You have very limited room to move and a very limited jump button. You can never leave the bottom level of a stage, so the jumping only works to hop over zombies. The problem there is most of the time there’s a string of them coming at you with no space in-between to safely leap.
I tried playing on normal difficulty but chickened out on the second world. I switched over to easy mode and found that the game still was frustratingly hard. I thought zombie canon was well established: one shot to the head, pffph, dead. Not here. The baddies simply take way too many shots to kill. Your starter pistol might as well be shooting snap ‘n’ pops for all the good it does. Even with a shotgun you’re looking at a minimum of two shots for even basic zombies. Later in the game you do get other shooting game standbys like a rocket launcher or a minigun. Of course if you actually make it that far you’ll have lost your will to live. At some point in the game survivors are introduced and you have to protect them from being eaten as well, while juggling everything else. Yea, fuck that with an unlubricated, razor-encrusted dildo.
Even if the controls were more accessible, I don’t think it would matter much. Zombies Ruined My Day is just plain boring. The graphics are very nice, but that’s all it has going for it. The game play is repetitive, redundant, and repetitive. Oddly enough, Zombies Ruined My Day seems like it was built with co-op in mind, but that feature is nowhere to be found. Having some help might have taken the sting out a little. Not likely. Suckering someone into playing a game this dull is a quick way to lose friends. The only use I could think of for it would be a drug-free alternative for medically induced comas.
Apparently I have to shake the “newb” vibe off my indie credentials. In order to do that, I have to review games that are considered the cat’s meow of the marketplace. And no pussy furiously roars quite like I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1. I likely didn’t mean it to sound that way, but I have an aversion to using the delete button so itt wil half too stand .
Obviously this review is only to see if I Made a Game with Zombies in It! belongs on the Indie Gamer Chick Top 10. Considering it’s the only Xbox indie title to go mainstream and get included at real places like Hot Topic and Rock Band, I think trying to sway anyone’s opinion would be shouting into the wind. Besides, after replaying it, I do admit it’s pretty good in a Smash TV-on-acid sort of way. You move with one stick and shoot with the other. You pick up assorted guns that appear at random. There’s a decent amount of enemies in it, most of which aren’t really zombies at all. There’s a really bizarre song playing the whole time. That’s pretty much it.
It’s easy to figure out why I Made a Game with Zombies in It! is the top-selling XBLIG of all time. The name is one of the chief reasons. It just sticks out, practically daring you to try it. And the game itself is functional, simple, and well-developed. I think it’s sort of weird that the game just stops after the song finishes, but otherwise I have no complaints.
So is it going to make my top 10? Nah. It’s really good, but I don’t think its one of the ten best Indie games ever. And you know what? I don’t think the guys at Ska Studios would call it one of the best ever either. It serves it’s function as the poster child of the scene very well. But there are so many more games that are complete experiences rather than a quick and dirty shooter that doesn’t last as long as the average string of movie trailers at the theater. Yea, everyone should likely own it and show it off to their non-indie-playing friends. It’s a good way to expose them to the marketplace. It’s also a good way to find out who’s the douchebag that hordes all the guns so that you can eliminate him before the real zombie apocalypse breaks out. That’s right Brian, I have my eye on you. Hording all the rocket launchers like you’re Noriega or something. A pox on thee.
I’m kind of ashamed to admit this, but for a while there I was hopelessly addicted to Bejeweled Blitz. It got to the point where “just one more game” was replaced by “the fire on my clothes can wait a second.” Repixland is more akin to the Jewel Quest series of match-three puzzlers in that you’re trying to match squares on specific parts of the game board to win. So it’s a clone of a clone. And as anyone who watched Multiplicity knows, clones of clones are born with Down Syndrome.
Repixland is technically playable. The controls work, the graphics are mostly clean, and the sound doesn’t offend. Yet there’s something very off about it. Maybe it’s the fact that this genre has been beaten into the ground so much that it’s toes are now sticking out of the other end of the Earth. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s so many better options out there, some of which are free. Maybe it’s the generic themes Flan Games chose for the game. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above.
It’s not well designed either. I experienced a full system crash while playing through the alien level. It only happened once and I was later able to complete the game, but it’s still there. And in the “really, what the fuck?” department, you can pause the game but it doesn’t stop the timer. So it’s a pause button that doesn’t do a damn thing. More over, the timer continues to run even after you beat a level. I finished one board and went to check on my lunch. When I came back, I had game-overed because of it.
So Repixland sucks, right? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Well of course he doesn’t. He shits in the bathroom like everyone else. But yes, Repixland does indeed suck. Throw a rock in any direction and you’re likely to hit a better Bejeweled clone. That or you’ll break a window. If you do that, just claim you’re crusading for social reform, then help yourself to a couple of mink coats and an iPad.
UPDATE: Blocks that Matter is now 80 Microsoft Points.
Blocks That Matter is a logic-puzzle game where you control a robot that looks like a washing machine mated with Grounder from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Christ, that’s an obscure reference. Using the robot you must drill up blocks which are added to your inventory. You then use those blocks by pausing the game and placing them in grids of four onto the screen. You hop along on them until you reach the exit for a stage.
Combining a platformer with a puzzler is always a huge risk. An element belonging to either genre being off-tune can sink the entire experience. In the case of Blocks That Matter, everything is finely tuned and well implemented. The controls are very tight and the jumping physics are near flawless. The puzzle elements are clever and brainy but not impossible or frustrating. The end result is one of the best games on the indie marketplace.
It took me about three hours to finish Blocks That Matter and it was one of the more pleasant experiences I’ve had with Xbox Live Indie Games. Key to that was the bat shit insane storyline about two game developers. Sure, it was a little bit “inside” but the dialog and characters were so sickeningly charming that I had to press on to see what crazy dribble they would spit out next. And it was totally worth it. The funny thing is I could see these two guys starring in more games, Harold & Kumar style.
Another reason to keep playing is the unlockable content. Every stage has a treasure chest in it, and drilling it gifts you with a block from a classic video game. I admit, I wanted those chests to see what game they would pay tribute to next. But the developers of Blocks That Matter should beware. One of the block awards that you unlock is the question mark block from Super Mario Bros. And I mean it is the block. It’s even identified as being from Super Mario Bros on the NES. It seems like shaking the hornet’s nest to me. Nintendo is a company that has sued people over fan art. They’ve sued people for listing their products as hobbies in porn website profiles. How do you think they will react to having one of their trademarks appear in a game on the Xbox 360? This could end badly. I’m talking locked in a closet and forced to play Urban Champion for months on end badly.
I only have a one nit-picky complaint towards Blocks That Matter: I found the music to be really annoying. It’s clicky and chirpy, like listening to a school of dolphins. Very grating, like getting your ears cleaned out by a rusty SOS pad. I should note that my boyfriend didn’t mind it at all, so maybe it’s just me. But that’s just a really minor quibble. Blocks That Matter is one of the best things you can do with 240MSP. It’s endearing, smart, well designed, and genuinely a lot of fun.
I wonder what is next for this studio? Maybe a shooting game. They could call it “Glocks That Matter.” Or how about a herding game called “Flocks That Matter.” Or a game starring a giant watch called “Clocks That Matter.” I’ll stop now.
240 Microsoft Points were accused of being slanderous towards Swing Swing Submarine in the making of this review. Not by Swing Swing Submarine themselves, mind you. I wish someone would slander me like this.
As I already said in my review for Akane the Kunoichi, 16-bit platformers had their time and place but died for a reason. I feel like I’m Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, trying to explain to people why nature selected games like this for extinction. You know what? I was bored sick by New Super Mario Bros. on both the Nintendo DS and the Wii. Mario games were favorites of mine when I was young, but gaming has gotten so much better since then. After absolutely loving the innovative Mario Galaxy titles, going back to the same old shit that I played to death when I was six years old felt like multiple giant steps backwards. Any developer, be it a juggernaut like Nintendo or some hack indie wannabe who attempts to recreate the magic of the straight-laced hop-and-bop genre is fighting windmills because the genre is as dead as Operation Rainfall.
So here we have Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 1. If it was a breakfast cereal it would come in a plastic bag instead of a box. It’s just that generic. You play as an alien that looks like rejected concept art for Toejam & Earl’s midget sidekick. He crash-lands on Earth and you have to help him find the pieces of his spacesuit and his spaceship. Well, not really the spaceship part. That’s being saved for Oozi Episode 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold. Along the way you encounter pretty much every platforming convention known to man, from double-jumping to butt-stomping and beyond. There’s absolutely zero creativity on display here. Zero. None. Zilch. There’s five levels that each take around 15 to 20 minutes to complete, plus a boss battle. Overall it took me about 90 minutes to complete, which is about 85 minutes longer then I would have liked it to have.
I’ll get to the good stuff first: the graphics are really well done. Mr. Jon Cooper and his lovely girlfriend, who follow me on Facebook (like you should be doing), suggested this to me by saying it brought back some good 16-bit memories. Truth is, Oozi looks more like the type of 2D games found on the Saturn or original Playstation to me. It’s bright, colorful, and very well drawn. Given how poorly the rest of the game turned out, it makes me wonder if the people at Awesome Game Studios should give up developing their own stuff and instead farm themselves out to other developers as graphics guys. They have talent for art. Everything else? Not so much.
If you so much as dip a toe in the water in Oozi, you die. At this time I would like to point out that it's FUCKING RAINING on the stage. Continuity, people!
The chief problem is the control is terrible. This is not a joke: when I first started playing Oozi I briefly thought I had spilled something on my controller. Every action was so sticky and unresponsive that I figured something sugary had somehow worked it’s way into the buttons. As it turns out that wasn’t the case. Oozi’s controls are just shit. The worst offender is the act of simply turning around. There’s a full second delay in doing so. When you can’t even face the other direction in an expedient manner, you have a problem. There’s also delays in jumping and movement. Sure, they are very minor, but noticeable enough to sometimes be an annoyance.
The level design is too bland and boring for anyone over the age of ten. There’s just no excitement here. And while the developers nailed the game visually, the audio leaves a lot to be desired. The sound effects especially are worth mentioning because they really aren’t there. Even after I muted the music and cranked up the effects AND turned my surround sound to full blast, the sounds were either near-muted or not there at all. It’s a fucking hop-and-bopper. It needs boings and baps and all that shit. It’s stunning to me they could make the game look this pretty and forget something as fundamental as decent sound. As far as the music goes, its way out-of-place here. There’s only one track and it sounds like a mournful lullaby. It was depressing and a very poor choice in my opinion. Something more comical and lighthearted would have been more fitting. But no, boring orchestral shit that could make even the most cheerful person on Earth contemplate suicide.
Speaking of which, in the really nit-picky department, the game has sections where you can drown but they neglected to include a comical death animation for it. There is a small grunt, but that’s wrong too. It should have been a glug. Don’t underestimate the value of a good comedic drowning. It can make even the most mediocre shit feel like it belongs in the Smithsonian.
Ultimately, all the little controller issues paint a broader picture of Oozi, and not a very pleasant one. If they had been more fine-tuned, I would have at least recommended Oozi for a younger set. Even with the control problems the game is easier than shooting fish retarded enough to get stuck in a barrel. It would have been the perfect introductory game for young kids. And hell, there’s some added challenge levels that, for me at least, were the highlights of the game and would have pleased the little shitheads’ parents. But with the control problems, if you give your kid Oozi, it will taint their perception of games as being difficult to work with and boring. Hmmm, actually it might be the perfect training for their future careers in middle-management at Gamestop.
MotorHEAT is my latest developer challenge, and it will likely be the last one for an older release. Because I’ve been getting so many requests, I’ve decided to limit challenges to games released within the last six months. That’s not a reflection on MotorHEAT’s quality, by the way. I actually enjoyed it well enough. I just suddenly realized that with nearly 2,000 games on the marketplace and a no-freebies policy, this could have potentially grown expensive fast, like using Fabergé eggs for BB gun practice.
So, MotorHEAT. Curious choice by Milkstone Studios to say the least. Racing games are usually reserved for guys. If a girl plays one, it normally involves at least one or two Mario brothers and losing. In my case, I’m actually a big fan of arcade style racers. I even own a Hard Drivin’ cabinet. So I wasn’t dreading MotorHEAT, nor should I have been. It’s actually really fun. For a while at least. That’s the problem with arcade racers, they get old quickly. That Hard Drivin’ cabinet I was talking about? It has more cobwebs in it than the stomach of an Ethiopian.
MotorHEAT strips out all unneeded bullshit. There’s only one car to drive. You can customize its paint colors (I went with pink and orange just to be a total flake), but otherwise learn to live with it, because it’s all you got. There’s also no acceleration button. Your car cruises along at a consistent speed, with only the trigger buttons to fire off any boosters that you earn. You get them by passing other cars as closely as possible without hitting them. You can also pick up items, and my only major complaint is that sometimes it’s hard to tell what object off in the distance is a car and which is a goodies box. This lead to some spectacular crashing and cussing on my part. Ever heard the word “fuck” used five times in a single second? I have now, and I’m ashamed of myself.
The object of the sole mode of the game is to score as many points as possible by passing other vehicles. You’re on a timer and lose ten seconds every time you crash. And that’s pretty much it. I played a few rounds of it and had a good time. Then after about thirty minutes I felt like I had played enough. Thankfully there is an online leaderboard that I managed to land a spot on. 4196th to be exact. Ha, take that, phathead81! Overall, MotorHEAT feels like it would be right at home next to the latest hunting game or Fast and Furious coin-op at the local theater, and it costs the same amount to own as those do to play a single round of. It’s certainly worth a look at. And since it’s a download game, it can’t gather cobwebs. That puts it one step above the vagina of a nun.
bumblepig by Kindling Games is perhaps the oddest challenge I’ve received from a developer yet. I feel like I’m firmly outside it’s target demographic. It plays sort of like a vertical shooter mixed with Rainbow Brite. You’re a flying pig-bee thing that has to gather pollen balls and spread them on various flowers to spread color to the land and make pocket change to decorate yourself in various get ups. Maybe I should be wearing PJs and have my hair in pigtails for this one.
For 80% of the game, things feel very Nickelodeonish. You can carry two different pollen balls at once and you must shake them over flowers with the trigger buttons. There’s a color mixing system in place here. For example, if you sprinkle red pollen on a blue flower, the petals will be purple. Creating five of the same color in a row makes your money meter fill up faster, which causes the flowers to spit out higher-valued coins. The object of the game is to collect enough money to unlock the next stage. There are fifteen stages, twelve of which are cakewalks. The final three enter bullet-hell territory, which is a little jarring. Every time a bug flies into you, it drops your meter down, decreasing the value of the coins you can collect. If you want an extra challenge you can switch to nighttime, which features more bugs and limited visibility. Like a retirement home hooker.
I have to be honest: bumblepig bored me stiff. I don’t think anyone over the age of seven would really like it too much. It looks fine and it controls well, but it’s just so vanilla ice cream. Kids might like it. Maybe. Don’t quote me on that. If you’re a parent and you buy this for your child I’m not responsible if they snap and murder you by shoving crayons up your ass. That doesn’t sound lethal? What if I told you the crayons were.. wait for it.. MADE IN CHINA! Muwahaha! Enjoy your wax-lead enema, mom!
At the time I was challenged to review Sequence, I hadn’t yet reviewed an RPG from the indie scene. I used to be huge into the genre so it’s a bit strange that it took me this long to play one for review. The only previous one I bought was Breath of Death VII, which was well before I even thought of Indie Gamer Chick. I thought it was pretty good. I’m kind of surprised I never went back to see what other stuff people cooked up.
Sequence is a bit of an oddball because it mixes rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution with RPG elements. You play as a dude who wakes up in a tower and has to fight monsters and historical figures. You’re aided by some chick on an intercom who talks you through the whole thing. The highlight of the game is the banter between the two. Well maybe “highlight” is too strong a word. I’ll say that it’s the best part of the game, sort of like how getting stabbed by Longinus was high point of the crucifixion for Jesus. The dialog is just too obsessed with being referential and sarcastic. It speaks in what I call “Sitcomese.” It renders both characters completely unlikable by the midway point of the game. They also drop the smugness at random intervals and get all touchy-feely. It’s bizarre, like watching a funeral in the middle of a circus.
The gameplay is fairly messy. There’s three grids where notes drop in and you have to shuffle between them and match arrows using the D-pad or face buttons. One grid is defensive, one restores mana, and one casts spells. Your only offensive options are spells. Once you cast one, you go to the spell grid and hit the notes. Miss just one note and the spell fails. While you’re doing this, the other grids keep dropping notes, leaving you open to take damage. There are spells that allegedly can slow down the defensive grid, but I found them to be miss-or-miss bigger. Whenever I tried to cast a spell, it seemed like only then did the defensive grid light up with notes.
About halfway through I had an epiphany that in RPGs you can’t prevent all damage. Once I figured out that I would just have to take it like a champ, it did improve the game. Marginally. The biggest flaw with Sequence is the item creation system. You synthesize items using materials dropped by baddies. Only thing is, you have to use up experience points to do it, and it’s not guaranteed to work. You have to spend more XP to increase the odds of successful creation, resulting in you deleveling. And you can never reach 100% odds. This was a dick move supreme with extra dick sauce. And I swear to God this game hated my guts because I failed more at 75% odds than I did at 50% odds. It’s completely transparent that this was done to pad out the game. But a dick move is still a dick move and in the case of Sequence I found this to be the fatal blow towards any hope I would recommend it.
The sad thing is the storyline is good enough that I wanted to push through to its conclusion. Sequence is written well enough that I did finish it, and found the ending to be satisfying. It damn well better have been. After ripping my hair out from failing to create items even with the odds pushed to 80% (the highest I went on principle), and multiple rage quits, I was pretty pissed off by time I reached the finale. I also was deeply embarrassed for myself that I had chosen to set the game to easy and forgot to switch back before I left the third floor, which is the point of no return for adjusting the difficulty. I meant to. I really did. What? Stop looking at me like that. Stop, stop, stop!
I’m not sure I could really recommend Sequence to anyone. The RPG elements are too shallow and annoying for fans of that genre. The music is, quite frankly, pretty horrible. It’s generic and rarely fits the personality of the monster it’s supposed to represent. Most of it sounds like something you would hear in an elevator. In Hell. Overall I just didn’t dig the concept. What’s next, mixing pinball with real-time strategy? Who would be that stupid?
Zombies Ruined My Day
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