Defy Gravity

Gravity Week continues at Indie Gamer Chick.  Well if you count Tuesday and Thursday as the entirety of the week.  On Tuesday it was Antipole which, despite technical issues, will likely land high on my Top 10 list this coming Monday.  Today it was Defy Gravity, an 80MSP title picked out by my boy toy Brian and developed by the dude who did Wiki Read.  Considering Brian’s last choice for me was Fluffy: Operation Overkill, which I’m currently on my third rage-quit for, I had set expectations low.  This was not helped when I thought the name “Paul Fisch” sounded ominously familiar, like a dentist’s voice when he starts a sentence with “are you sure you brush and floss your teeth every day?”

And so we have Defy Gravity, a fairly generic platformer with one twist: you can create gravitational fields.  There’s two kinds, one that sucks you in like a black hole and one that pushes you away.  Using these you have to clear gaps, climb tall towers, and avoid death by electroshock.  The physics for these thankfully work pretty good and the limited amount of levels do offer unique and interesting ways to use this ability.

The controls are a bit on a the complicated side.  You use the left trigger for push-away gravity and the right trigger for sucky gravity.  You can use their corresponding bumpers to remove the fields once you no longer need them.  It does get a bit hectic at times and keeping track of what all you have on-screen can be a bit of a mess.  It took me about ten minutes to get used to the control scheme, or as it turns out, about half the game.

Yes, it only took me about twenty minutes to finish Defy Gravity.  But at only $1 I can honestly say I had a pretty good time with it.  It also included the added bonus of hilariously timed comic deaths.  It’s not that the graphics are particularly funny.  They’re not at all.  In fact, they’re not even very good.  Instead, Defy Gravity is one of those games where you realize you’ve made a bad decision almost as soon as you make it.  Thankfully it never gets so hard that this turns from comedy to frustration.  And at twenty minutes things never get boring.  Sure, it takes half the game to get used to the controls but that’s no biggie.  I call it the “Resident Evil 3 Effect.”

Up next on Gravity Week: is gravity a conspiracy by “the man” to deprive skateboarders of working limbs?  Our investigative report.

Conclusion: yes, but anything that leads to them not breeding is a-okay with us.  Gravity – is there anything it’s not good for?

Defy Gravity was developed by Paul Fisch

80 Microsoft Points used Star Crush to defeat Gravity Man in the making of this review.

Pixel Blocked!

Pixel Blocked! received a Second Chance with the Chick.  The gameplay for it has been radically altered.  Read both this review and the new to get the overall picture of the game.  Consider the Second Chance to be the definitive review of the game.

I’ll lay off of my “puzzle games belong on Xbox like a diabetic belongs at the Jelly Belly Factory tour” line just this once because the nearly two hours I spent with Pixel Blocked! were pretty fricken’ sweet.  It’s one of those games that feels familiar despite being totally unique.

In the case of Pixel Blocked, it plays like a cross between Nintendo’s Picross series and any of the many Sokoban clones out there.  You’re given a grid of blocks you can rotate at a 90° angle and a gun thingy that shoots more blocks.  The object is to fill in the missing blocks on the grid with nothing out-of-place.  The puzzles feature three different block types already in place in which to construct around.  Steel blocks are the easy ones to work with.  Magnet blocks grab any blocks that pass directly by them.  And finally crumble blocks break as soon as a block lands on them.

The above set a new record for most uses of the word “block” in a single paragraph.  Up yours, Lego people!

If you make a mistake, or you simply want to take a shortcut towards completing a puzzle, you’re given three missiles each round that can be used to destroy any non-steel blocks you want.  If you want to just breeze through the game, using missiles is the way to go.  If you want to challenge yourself, try going missile free.  All 180 puzzles can be beat without using them.  Every time I used one I felt like the game was shaking its head in disgust at me.

I actually had a really good time with Pixel Blocked!  It’s hard to find original concepts for puzzle games these days, and even harder to find ones that function correctly.  It does both.  It’s play mechanics are simple and realized without flaw.  There’s really only thirty different shaped puzzles here, each with six unique starting-variations.  When I saw this, I figured that once you knew how to solve one, you would know have to solve all its clones.  Thankfully that’s not the case at all.  I actually have to tip my non-existent hat to developer Daniel Truong for this very clever design.

I do have a few complaints, chief of which is the reward system.  You can earn three stars in each puzzle.  One for completing it, one for not using any missiles, and one for finishing under a designated time.  The problem is the target times seem pretty far-fetched to me.  Earning them isn’t necessary for progression, but I was getting annoyed at completing levels relatively quickly and still getting a frowney non-star to make me feel like a total ignoramus.  Probably another case of a developer losing grip on reality after getting too good at their own game.

I also didn’t care for the in-game music, which fails to have that catchy quality that good puzzle games practically need.  There is no option to mute it either, which is a very disappointing oversight.  The sound effects were well done but I had to skip out on them for the sake of my eardrums.  Having said that, I did enjoy the overall presentation.  The 8-bit visuals were a good choice and give Pixel Blocked! a retro charm.  The only thing I felt was lacking was some kind of indicator that a block you were shooting was going to land in a correct spot.  The designated spaces were marked with black boxes, which are not visible when you have the aiming cross-hairs on them.  So sometimes I would have to move around to see if the spot I was shooting at was part of the puzzle or a mistake waiting to happen.

Overall, I really enjoyed Pixel Blocked!  As is my personal rule with this genre, I have to recommend the portable Windows Phone 7 build if that’s an option.  No matter what version you get, you’re bound to have a pretty good time here.  Dare I say it, it’s one of the best new puzzle engines to come around in a decade.  Along with Star Ninja, it’s one of the few games that I’ve seen on the indie platform that I feel has mass-market appeal.  Pair it with a fitting license and it could do well.  How about Lucy van Pelt’s Pixel Blocked!  Get it?

You know, because she is always calling Charlie Brown a “blockhead.”  No?  Sigh, these final line jokes are tough to write.

Pixel Blocked was developed by Daniel Truong

80 Microsoft Points suffered writer’s block while coming up with the final joke in the making of this review.  Ha, writer’s block.  Get it?  Sigh.

Antipole

Antipole received a Second Chance with the Chick that noted the slowdown discussed in this review has been fixed.  Consider this article the Chick’s definitive review, but click here for her updated thoughts. 

UPDATE: Antipole is now 80 Microsoft Points ($1 USD)

When the guys at Saturnine Games asked me to review their latest title, the Catholic in me was like “Rock on!  Any game that sticks it to Pope Sidious is a-okay with me!”  And then I reread the title and realized its name was Antipole.  This was followed by me self-face-palming while I ponied up 400 points.

Antipole is in fact the first $5 game I’ve reviewed here at Indie Gamer Chick, so I admit I planned on holding it to a slightly more strict standard than others.  After seeing the still pictures, I thought “oh hip hip hooray, more generic running and shooting.”  Nothing about it looked particularly good.  I set my standards high, my expectations low, and braced myself for the worst.

As it turns out, Antipole is seriously fucking awesome.

Antipole is an action-platformer with a slight garnish of puzzle elements.  You control a dude who is running through a series of levels shooting at robots and hopping over spikes.  Been there, done that.  But what makes Antipole truly unique is that it’s one of the few Xbox Live Indie titles I’ve played to rely on a gimmick and have the gimmick work flawlessly.

In this case, you can reverse gravity by holding the right trigger.  Doing so will cause you and almost any enemies within range of you to reverse gravitational pull and float upwards.  You can use this ability to clear large gaps or offensively to defeat enemies.  This alone wouldn’t have been enough to make Antipole stand out in a very crowded marketplace full of platforming-shooters.  But designer Edward Di Geronimo Jr. and his team stayed ahead of the curve by introducing new and unique elements in nearly every one of the game’s twenty stages.

A platformer lives and dies on its play control, and Antipole is near flawless.  The jumping at first felt a little bit on the loose side, but I quickly adapted to it and learned that the mechanics work very well with the gravity abilities.  For the most part, every death I experienced was my own fault, robbing me of passing the buck to the game like the narcissistic bitch that I am.

In some levels, the strength of the default gravity changes, either being much heavier than normal or much lighter.  The first time it happened, I almost thought the game was broken.  Then I spotted a hopping robot that I had previously encountered being effected by the same forces.  Very smooth, Saturnine guys.  Good design choices are all over in Antipole.  The level layouts are all clever and provide new ways of using the gravity gimmick to its fullest potential.

Of course, I did have a few technical issues, which led to my open challenge to the XNA community regarding peer testing.  And right before that went to publication, the guys at Saturnine Games confirmed that they experienced the same problems as me, albeit in different spots in the game.  I’m told they will look closer into this and work on a fix.  Good enough for me.

Even taking into account those issues, Antipole is clearly one of the best games on the marketplace.  It strips out the bullshit and leaves us with innovative platforming at it’s very core.  It features good graphics and a really inspired soundtrack.  The concept is well realized, never being boring or tedious.  And there’s some awesome gaming homages in here, like a boss fight that will be familiar to fans of Super Metroid.  I don’t know where this will fall in my Top 10 once it’s patched, but rest assured that Antipole will gravitate towards the top.  Oh ho ho, he he he, God damn I’m such a wit.

Antipole was developed by Saturnine Games

400 Microsoft Points set off a firestorm of controversy in the making of this review.

Aliens vs. Aliens

As a rule, I try to finish all the games I review for Indie Gamer Chick whether I want to or not.  It’s not always a possibility.  I surrendered to Mr. Gravity because it was too hard and I pussied out on Plague because I couldn’t convince anyone to play it on co-op with me.  And now, in the case of Aliens vs. Aliens, I quit because after an hour of playtime nothing was fucking happening.

Aliens vs. Aliens is in theory a hybrid of third-person shooting and tactical strategy.  You control a squad of four classically designed “Greys” who have gone to war with others in their species over the fate of Earth.  You’re placed in a forest with a group of opposing aliens and attempt to find and shoot them before they find and shoot you.  You move each alien on your team individually, with a limited amount of distance allotted per a turn.  Upon finding an enemy, you must get within range and stop moving, at which point your guy will start to fire automatically for the remaining duration of your movement meter.

So it’s basically Video Hide-and-Seek, and that doesn’t sound too bad, assuming it works.  Which it doesn’t.  The first stage seemed to play fine, mostly because the enemies found me and I had numbers on them.  And then came level two, where I picked off the first of three enemies on my second turn.  This was followed by the most agonizing hour of my life since I sampled the cyanide-flavored ice cream at Baskin-Robbins*.

There’s a radar system that beeps when an enemy is nearby.  The problem is I could not get within range of them.  After you’ve moved your four dudes, the enemies get a turn that’s hidden from view.  Instead of engaging me, they seemed more interested in running away.  I tried everything to lure the damn things out.  I walked my guys as far apart from each-other as physically possible.  I tried marching them in a group.  I even skipped twenty-five consecutive turns.  That’s not exaggeration.  I did not do a anything at all with any of my guys for twenty-five turns.  I was operating under the false hope that the AI would assume I had died of a heart attack with my head slumped on the start button.

Figuring something glitched out, I restarted the mission and again quickly picked off the first enemy.  My radar went into overdrive and I thought “alright, problem solved, let’s fuck these guys up.”  And then the enemy got to move and the radar never fired up again.  Sigh.

If this game actually worked, it would have been a lot of fun.  I really liked the concept here, along with the sharp graphics and spooky techno music.   Instead, I spent over an hour with the niggling feeling that the game was laughing at me.  I’m not sure if I was doing something wrong, and the developers didn’t provide any help.  There’s no tutorial so it’s like being thrown into the deep end of the pool on your first day.  And your first day happens when you’re six-weeks old, premature, and your mother was a heavy drinker.  Maybe there really is no game here.  Maybe Aliens vs. Aliens is just a really fancy boredom simulator.  Yea, that must be it.  Trying to corner the market on Xbox before Minecraft 360 launches.

Aliens vs. Aliens was developed by Fun Factory Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points waited for an anal probe that never arrived in the making of this review.

*Otherwise known as Daiquiri Ice

Send in Jimmy

Send in Jimmy is a first-person shooter that looks like Goldeneye and thus it’s bound to snag a few buys just off the screen shots alone.  And in a lot of ways, some positive, most negative, it serves to remind people of that bygone era known as the late 1990s, back when games were just entering 3D and Duke Nukem Forever was just entering development.

In Jimmy you run around and shoot aliens with a pistol.  Later you get the ability to throw fireballs or upgrade your gun to an Uzi.  Enemies start off only with the ability to run up and flail their arms at you.  Later, they get armed with guns that seem to hit completely at random.  There are also ones that explode when shot, which can be used to set up combinations.  The aiming system works well and head shots do seem to matter.  There’s a handful of missions that carry the playtime to around 90 minutes.

I really would have liked Send in Jimmy if not for some really bad technical issues.  The game is as foggy as Michael Jackson’s mind was around June of 2009, if you catch my drift.  What, too soon?  As a result, when enemies  start firing at you it leaves you looking frantically off into the distance hoping to catch a glimpse of the gun’s muzzle flash.  Later in the game, when you get the ability to throw fireballs quicker, the situation fixes itself.  By then I figure most people will have quit and moved on to something else.  This is the Xbox 360 after all, where the average owner has enough first person shooters to land themselves on the government’s terrorist watch list.

The game also has major issues with skipping.  It seems like every ten feet the game has to pause to load up more terrain.  As a result the game flows like a Parkinson’s patient operating a Rascal scooter.  There’s also an issue of slowdown when too many enemies are on-screen at once.  In the last stage these two problems combined to form a sort of clusterfuck version of Voltron, alternatively making everything skippy and slow.  The Blazing Sword came in the form of invisible walls that seemed to trap my character in them temporarily.  Then, hilariously, the game nearly crashed during the ending that saw dozens of aliens on-screen at once catching fire and dying.

Developer Stamp had something going here, and despite its primitive looks and outdated gameplay, there is an undeniable charm in Send in Jimmy. It’s a little like the Quasimodo of the indie marketplace.  It’s ugly and broken and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but if you do get suckered into buying it you might enjoy it while it wraps its arms around your corpse and dies of starvation.  Yea, that’s how the fucking Hunchback of Notre-Dame is supposed to end.  Up yours, Disney!

Send in Jimmy was developed by Stamp

80 Microsoft Points are like “seriously, they lived happily ever after?  What a load” in the making of this review. 

Bluebones Curse

Before I get to the review proper, I need to bring up a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been doing Indie Gamer Chick for not even a full month now and Bluebones Curse is the second game to quote Simon’s Quest since I started. The first, House of 1000 Demons was so unfunny that it’s badness might have broke through the space-time barrier and killed Sam Kinison. I’m still working to prove that and bring those responsible to justice.

The second, Bluebones Curse, actually doesn’t quote Simon’s Quest directly in the game, but rather on its blurb in the marketplace.

This has got to stop. I feel it’s time to take every XNA developer aside and hold an intervention.  So here it goes: it’s not funny, fellas. It never was. I know you think you’re going to be the talk of the forums every time you name drop some horribly translated, badly worded Japanglish game quote. But it’s just not happening. People are rolling their eyes at you. Oh, it’s a boom for optometrists to be sure. All that eye rolling can cause lots of long-term problems. But those greedy bastards are already hitting our pockets from all the flashy graphics and huge televisions that cause indeterminate damage. Why help them out more?  We should be looking out for each-other.

So, I call for an end to sarcastically quoting bad video games. No more “what a horrible night to have a curse.” No more “all your base are belong to us.” No more “master of unlocking.” Enough. You sound like parrots.

I know the average game developer prides themselves on being terribly clever, no doubt saying right now “sure, all those OTHER people doing this are dumb, but the way I’m doing it totally is original and witty!”  No, it’s not. And thus I’ve made special arrangements to prevent future occurrences of senseless quote dropping.  In the event you sarcastically use a bad video game quote, operatives from Microsoft will kick open your door and shoot your dog.

In the event you do not have a dog, one will be provided for you. You will name her Checkers and she will grow to be your best friend. You’ll take her for walks, groom her, and teach her tricks. She’ll have a litter of seven beautiful little puppies, six of which will survive to adulthood. You’ll form a bond with her the likes of which you never knew possible outside of the realm of Hollywood. At which point, operatives from Microsoft will kick open your door and shoot your dog.

And if you quote Army of Darkness, they’ll shoot you.

I’m sorry it’s come to this, but desperate times and what not.

Alrighty now, Bluebones Curse. It’s a bare-bones (no pun intended) platformer where you play as a pirate who’s turned into a skeleton by a witch. There’s no attack button, so you have to avoid these incredibly creepy skull-spider thingies, activate switches, and find the lost gold.

The platforming mechanics work very well.  The jumping is refined and accurate, with barely any hint of slipperiness.  The level layouts are generic but well done, and the mood set forth by Chounard is awesome. I was really having a great time with this one. Then, after just under thirty minutes I beat it. Huh.

Okay, so it’s only a buck and if the worst thing I can say about a game is it’s too short then I guess I really don’t have anything to complain about at all. Bluebones Curse managed to not overstay its welcome and turned out to be one of the few games that’s almost flawless from start to finish on the indie marketplace. Besides, I’m a girl and thus I’m used to having a guy’s thing climax before I’m ready.

Bluebones Curse was developed by Third Party Ninjas

80 Microsoft Points kicked open your door and shot your dog in the making of this review.

Plague

Parody games are all over the indie market like some kind of horrible sick-inducing thing whose name escapes me.  Some of them, like Breath of Death VII turn out to be quite okay.  Most of them simply exist to compensate for a lack of talent.  Plague falls somewhere in the middle.  Well, the bottom of the middle.  It can easily smell the shit piling up from where it sits is what I’m saying.

Plague is a side-scrolling shooter that borrows heavily from Contra and lampoons everything else.  You play as a group of computer thingies out to stop the spread of a computer virus through various video games.  The story is told tongue in cheek style, which might have been a poor choice because if you hold your tongue in your cheek you could begin to gag a little.  The dialog tries way too hard and the humor seems forced, like when a spoof of Luigi shows up and talks about bitch-slapping the princess.  I guess this is somehow supposed to be funny, but it’s hardly original.  Myself and every other Mario player out there have fantasized about him just chucking her needy ass into a lava pit and hooking up with Bowser.

Oh wait, that was just me?

Once you get rid of all the bad writing you’re left with a functional but bland Contra clone.  You run, you jump, you shoot stuff.  There’s a large variety of weapons, some of them themed from other games.  There’s a gun that shoots stars Kirby style.  There’s a gun that shoots Lemmings.  There’s one that shoots asteroids that break apart into smaller asteroids.  I’m pretty sure that gun was inspired by Pole Position.  Most of the guns function well, and some of them, like the Portal themed one, work really well.  Others, like the freeze gun, are practically worthless.

I had big issues with the difficulty curve.  Around level 3-3, it seemed like every single enemy suddenly had the ability to kill me in a couple of shots.  This, combined with the fact that every part of the stage seemed to be vomiting out green snot that drains your health away meant that I was dying practically before the level loaded.  I almost gave up, then I remembered that I was a girl and that Women’s Lib has been out of vogue for a couple of decades now.  So I embraced my vagina and set the difficulty to easy.  And this did help, a little.  I guess.  Not really actually.  By the next level, which was themed after Warcraft (because by God there’s a game that hasn’t been made fun of enough) I gave up after about ten seconds and legged it for the finish.  A sad moment for me, for sure.  But sadder for the developer, because my strategy worked.

I think most of the levels were designed with co-op in mind, and that’s a problem.  There are way too many enemies for one person to handle most of the time.  There was nobody around when I played Plague so I didn’t experience it using the option.  I’m not sure I could have convinced my friends to give it a try.  It would be a tough sell.  It doesn’t look bad and it doesn’t necessarily play bad.  But Plague manages to be less than the sum of its parts.  Everything about it is good enough to be functional and nothing more.  It’s a Toyota, that’s what it is.  It’ll get you there but you won’t have a good time riding it.  People desperately looking for a modern Contra who already burned through Hard Corps: Uprising might enjoy this one.  Everyone else should avoid it like the oh fuck these jokes just write themselves now don’t they?

Plague was developed by Contagious Games

80 Microsoft Points should have been vaccinated in the making of this review. 

Star Ninja

It’s easy to explain the appeal in Angry Birds, the first true gaming hit for phones and tablets. It’s got colorful graphics and an “anyone can learn it” playability factor. 250,000,000 downloads later and everyone and their creepy uncle is looking to ape its style and have a hit on their own. Most of these knockoffs completely miss the point and play about as good as three-day left-over, unrefrigerated pizza tastes. Which is to say, not very good.

Eric Cosky and his Bounding Box Games studio did what anyone with a lick of sense would do: piggybacked on a the physics-puzzle-aiming genre that Angry Birds popularized. There’s only one difference between them and everyone else: they made a better game.

In Star Ninja you’re a stationary ninja who must throw shurikens at pirates. You have a limited number of shots to knock out all the pirates on the stage. Any star you throw will bounce off the walls at high speeds until it runs out of steam, hits an explosive barrel, or gets stuck in a box. Personally, I wasn’t aware that ninja stars were made of high-density rubber. Video games: fun AND educational.

There are fifty single-screen levels that can be played in four different game modes. I played through “focus mode” which is just your basic “kill all the pirates in X amount of shots” stuff. In each level you have to carefully study the layout and figure out the best angles to throw your stars at. Sometimes it’s easier to simply throw a star directly at a pirate, while other times you’ll want to drop a box or an anchor on their head. I had lots of chuckles when a pirate would stand by all smug only to have a tiny box lightly graze their head, killing them. I can also appreciate any game where I can say the sentence “I’m juggling a pirate corpse” to my boyfriend in a totally deadpan manner and mean it. Even if he did look at me like it was time to call the nice guys with the white coats and nets.

One of the things that I felt ultimately ruined the experience of Angry Birds is the constant addition of new birds, some of whom were as worthless as an editor’s choice award from Gamespot is. There’s none of that crap in Star Ninja. What you see is what you get for all fifty levels. And that’s perfectly fine with me. It took me around two hours to finish the fifty levels, and at no point was I in danger of falling asleep and drowning in my bowl of Fruit Loops that lay in front of me. In fact, I had quite a good time. By time I was done with Focus Mode I really felt no need to play through the game in its three alternative modes, which include being able to use unlimited stars or a campaign mode where points carry over. These might have been a little overkill, but if you’re the type to truly get madly addicted to a game they’ll come in handy. There’s also global leader boards, six of which are occupied by a totally insanely cool niche game critic.

Oh yea, these will TOTALLY last forever.

I do have a couple of complaints. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which boxes are ones stars will bounce off of and which ones the stars will stick in. That can get mildly annoying, like having a fly buzz-bomb you while you try to type a review. But it’s easy enough to just start the room over again so it might not have been worth mentioning at all. Sorry. And also the game can be seemingly fickle about how much force a box requires to kill a pirate. On an unrelated note, you would think guys that survive the brutal discipline and scurvy associated with being a pirate wouldn’t be phased by having a box fall on their toe. Well, I guess it might be ingrown or something. That would hurt a lot. Carry on.

Everyone wants to make the next Angry Birds. Star Ninja is a better Angry Birds. It’s got its own charm, personality, style, and it never gets boring. It’s one of the better games on the indie marketplace and it well worth your 80 Microsoft Points.bIt also finally, once and for all, answered the age-old question of pirates or ninjas. The answer is clearly ninjas. Now let’s move on to the more pressing question: dinosaurs or Batman?

Star Ninja was developed by Bounding Box Games

80 Microsoft Points said dinosaurs because look what they did to the rich, well equipped guy in Jurassic Park in the making of this review.

UPDATE: Star Ninja is now FREE for Windows Phone 7. If you’re an especially cheap bastard and 80 MSP is too much for you, you have no excuse now. Well besides not owning a piece of shit Window Phone. Um, never mind, here’s the link. 

Lair of the Evildoer

I’ve always wondered about the evolution of becoming an evil criminal mastermind.  In order to be  profitable, you need to start early in life.  Get encouragement from your evil parents (it helps if they have evil names like Adolf or Ethel), go to an evil college (I’m thinking Dartmouth), get an evil degree (something like Marine Biology), set up shop in an evil city (anyplace in Florida will do), hire evil henchmen (usually found on Craigslist), come up with an evil scheme (phone hacking seems in these days), get an evil lair (and the prices on those are simply outrageous these days)…

Fuck, if it was me I would barely have enough motivation left after all that to be mischievous, let alone evil.

So I can sympathize with the villain from Lair of the Evildoer.  He goes through all the trouble of becoming evil, getting a lair, and coming up with a scheme and I foiled the whole thing in about three hours.  And to rub salt the wounds, I had a great time doing it.

Lair of the Evildoer is a top-down shooter where you play as some kind of mutant egg-man thingy out to exterminate all the zombies created in this evil office building, complete with evil wood paneling and blue shag carpet.  There’s twenty randomly-generated levels full of assorted baddies.  There’s a mind-blowing twenty-five weapons that can be picked up along the way, with each weapon type having variable stats similar to Diablo or Borderlands.

You move with the left stick and aim with the right one, a set up that works fairly well.  I did die several times while playing Evildoer, which my boyfriend felt might have had something to do with choosing the wrong experience upgrades.  Early on I poured all my level-up points into dexterity, which increases your aiming accuracy.  Once I had a 100% rating in that, I spent most of my points on health upgrading.  Then came the enemies who could only be killed using melee attacks.  With practically no points spent on that, fights with them resembled something out of a MMORPG , with each of us taking turns to thwap each-other until one of us wasn’t thwaping anymore.  But even when I started to accumulate points in melee strength the battles still dragged like a dog with worms and it constantly broke up the flow of the game.  This is one of my only design complaints.

The graphics are of the “looks like it was done on MS Paint” variety.  Clearly in the top-tier of such games, but they have that look none the less.  The sound effects are a bit lacking as well, but the music is cool and trippy.  The whole experience reminded me of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which was a childhood favorite of mine.  Some people had the raw nerve to call Dead Rising the spiritual modern equivalent to ZAMN.  Such people are mentally ill.  Lair of the Evildoer is as close to Zombies Ate My Neighbors as any game in the last decade has come, and it’s nearly as good.  It’s incredibly imaginative, humorous, and well designed.  And, without wishing to spoil anything, the final boss fight will go down in the annals of gaming as one of the most epic this side of Ocarina of Time.  Make sure you have a bathroom break beforehand.

As for me, being a true top-of-the-heap evildoer is too much work.  I’ll just do my part by continuing to invest in Google.

Lair of the Evildoer was developed by Going Loud Studios

80 Microsoft Points didn’t really think Dartmouth is evil in the making of this review.  Now Yale on the other hand...

The Cannon

UPDATE: This title recieved a Second Chance with the Chick.  Read it for IndieGamerChick.com’s definitive review of The Cannon.

Any of you developers out there looking for definitive proof that the peer-review system of Xbox Live Indie Games doesn’t work, the proof you’ve wanted has finally arrived.  Just point to The Cannon, a game that I couldn’t review because it crashed almost immediately both times I attempted to play it.   And I truly mean crashed, as I couldn’t even use the guide button and had to hold the power button on my Xbox to reboot.  Both times I tried to play the campaign mode and it crashed on the first level, once when I died and once when I beat the first wave of baddies.  I guess the tutorial was nice though.  Not 80 Microsoft Points nice, but nice.  Sort of like a shot of lidocaine before the catheter is inserted.

The Cannon was developed by Elemental Focus

80 Microsoft Points reenacted the 1844 USS Princeton incident (Google it) in the making of this review.

UPDATE: I’m told a fix is in the works and they’ll get back to me.