X S.E.E.D

October 6, 2013 by 2 Comments

Remember that scene in the movie “Big”? No, not the one with the giant keyboard. Nor the one where a 12-year-old-in-Tom-Hanks’-body knocks boots with a businesswoman and makes me wonder if the “I swear he was 30 last week” excuse would hold up in court for her. No, I’m talking about the scene where he’s sitting at a meeting with a bunch of suits, discussing a Transformers line, and just blurts out what the 12 year-old in him is thinking in that innocent kid sort of way. The “I don’t get it” line stuck with me more than anything else in that movie because it reminds me that, hey, kids have some awesome ideas, and many of those aren’t held back by the restrictions or reasoning that many of us adults place on what we think.  Which brings us to this short conversation about one of the more innovative takes on the side-scrolling shooter I’ve seen, X S.E.E.D.:

PUT THIS KID ON THE PAYROLL.

PUT THIS KID ON THE PAYROLL.

So, just in case that didn’t sink in. The only reason we got an original idea on XBLIG among the sea of sub-par voxel miners, first-person zombie shooters, one-button platformers, and puzzle games used as vehicles for displaying morally-bankrupt pictures of undressed anime teens is because someone listened to their kid. It’s the sort of “hey you got peanut butter on my chocolate” genius that keeps gamers digging through the XBLIG marketplace for innovation like this regardless of how much fly-infested sewage they have to wade through in the process.

And what is this original idea, you ask? Well, X S.E.E.D. is an old-school run-and-gun platformer, like Contra, but instead of using the normal arsenal of machine guns and grenade launchers you summon crazy-ass mutant plants that do things like shoot fire in various directions, act as a force-field, or spring up a platform for you to stand on. Summoning these plants is your character’s only defense, as he cannot harm anything himself and will die in only one hit. So essentially you’re constantly putting out temporary turrets and shields in an effort to both mount a forward-moving offense and put up a defense that will keep your goofy-looking scientist hero from dying. There’s a plot about plants taking over the island and you being the only scientist that can save everyone and blah blah blah. If you’ve ever played a game like Contra for the plot, I’m sure there’s a support group somewhere for that. What you expect out of a game like X S.E.E.D. is running and gunning (of sorts), and that’s what you’ll get.

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“This is not what I wanted you to feed me, Seymour.”

On the downside, when you innovate, you usually don’t get everything right the first time. And this is no exception. For just about everything X S.E.E.D. gets right, it misses on something else. For example, the pixel art is vibrant and well-animated in the most retro of ways, but the music and effects are forgettable at best. I went through entire stages without even noticing the music. Another miss is on the weapon selection. You’re given a large amount of plant types over the course of the game, which is nice, but with no way to rearrange them and with some of them being completely useless inventory padding there’s a bit of difficulty getting to the right one quickly via cycling through with LB and RB. And while the old school difficulty, unforgiving with only three lives and no continues, is necessary for such a short game and forces a nice balance between the risk of dying and the reward of more points and the better of two endings, there’s no reason for a death to stick you all the way back at the beginning of the stage. This last one didn’t really make me too angry until the later stages of the game where dying at a boss battle resulted in a solid 30 seconds of little more than holding right. The worst flaw of X S.E.E.D., however, is how slow the pace gets near the end when you try to play it safe with the shield vines. You’ll find yourself inching forward and tossing out barrier after barrier out of fear, and it’s made even worse with the knowledge that the enemy plants really don’t have much they can do about it. Even the bosses only have one attack that will ignore these, and those attacks always have the same pattern throughout that boss battle. It sucks a bit of the “run” out of the “run and gun” genre in which I’d throw this game.

But even with all the little quirks and flaws, X S.E.E.D. ended up being exactly the type of game I wanted right at that moment. It’s straight old-school, it’s speed run friendly with an in-game clock, it’s short enough that the limited lives and lack of continues don’t make me feel too frustrated and helpless, it controls well, and most importantly it’s fun and innovative. The only thing I’d ask for on the XBLIG version, a high score board, is present on the free-with-option-to-donate Ouya version, but without it I’d still say that X S.E.E.D. is worth both your time and the paltry dollar that it costs.

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IGTlogo-01

X S.E.E.D. was developed by Wide Pixel Games.

$1 wants to believe that Little Shop of Horrors is the prequel to this game in the making of this review.

X S.E.E.D. has earned has been awarded the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval by Shin Hogosha. Leaderboards for Indie Game Team are coming soon.

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Star Runner

October 5, 2013 by 4 Comments

Have you ever thought you should dig out your old Game Boy and relive some old memories? Have you ever given thought to the idea that garage door openers and their one-button controls should also be able to play video games? If you answered yes to both of these questions, then do I have the game for you: Star Runner.

Their light-hearted advertisement.

Their light-hearted advertisement.

Unfortunately, Star Runner made me realize that there is a definite knack to recreating the Game Boy experience and that the guys at Revolvus do not have it. On the Game Boy you had a directional pad and two buttons to work with to create some fantastic experiences such as Wario Land, Link’s Awakening, and Kirby’s Dream Land. The creators of this game boiled what made the Game Boy great down to something between Tiger Electronics games and playing with a rock.

At the start this game had everything going for it to me: The devs seemed to have a sense of humor in their ad, it was $1, it had a female character, and she had pigtails. (Shut up, it doesn’t take much.) From the description of the game, things sounded like they were going to be great: You run from zombies, you run with parkour ninjas, and you collect pizzas from pizza delivery robots while jumping between planes that are flying in a very unsafe formation. I learned that last bit while attending a school known for its flight program. Hey, how do you know if a student is in aviation? They’ll tell you. (Go UND!)

The game itself is just flat out boring. There is only one thing you can do and that’s jump–jump over obstacles, jump over walls, and jump off the heads of other people. You’d think that with jumping being the only thing you’re able to do in the game, it would be very well refined. Nope. The hit detection when you land on an NPC, something vital to the first third of the game, is so horrible that you will constantly miss and wind up dead very quickly. It’s infuriating when, time after time, you feel as though you should have landed a jump yet wind up as zombie chow.

I tried this game three different times, and every attempt ended in a rage-quit, each caused by frustration at the jumping. My final and most ragey rage-quit happened during the ninja portion of the game. You follow a number of ninjas as they parkour their way over rooftops, timing your jumps with theirs to reach the end of each level. At first this was going better than the zombie area, and I thought that perhaps there was some enjoyment to be found in this title. That feeling faded instantly when I reached a section of the level that was completely obstructed from view, yet I was expected to avoid some obstacle. There was absolutely no way that I could discern when to jump to avoid a death caused by being unable to see my character. At that point it’s not even giving the player a chance, so I turned it off with a huff and promptly deleted the game.

I take it back. Even playing with a rock is more fun than playing this game. At least with a rock you could chuck it at some snobby aviation students.

xboxboxartStar Runner was developed by Revolvus.

At $1, you could buy batteries for your Tiger Electronics game at a discount store.

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Cooties: Patient Zero and The Heckler

October 4, 2013 by 5 Comments

Sigh.  A few months ago, the much lambasted Silver Dollar Games released their long-awaited, DREAM-BUILD-PLAY winning title One Finger Death Punch onto the market.  Despite being well received by pretty much everyone who played it, it bombed hugely.  And now Silver Dollar is back to throwing out hastily produced mini-games in short order.  This is depressing.   It would be like if Ron Jeremy quit adult films to star in a Martin Scorsese crime epic, winning the critical acclaim and the respect of his peers while sweeping the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, but the film bombed so it’s back to having bimbos suck him off to make his gas payment.  That’s what this feels like.

I’ve always said that talent is something that can’t be taught.  It’s something you inherently have.   You can improve upon it.  You can nurture it.  But you can’t create it from nothing.  I assure you all, a team that had no talent could not have come up with One Finger Death Punch.  Some people get lucky, but nobody could get that lucky.  Silver Dollar probably wishes they did have that kind of luck.  They’re heartbroken by OFDP’s performance.  I am too, and I barely got to play the game.  Everyone has their theories on why, with the most common explanation being karmic justice.  Look, I get that Silver Dollar is not the most beloved developer, but regardless of your feelings for them, OFDP under-performing is nobody’s victory, and shame of you if you feel that way.

My theory is still that the box art looked too generic, like a bad Last Airbender rip-off.  Allow me to elaborate.  Look at it.

One Finger Death Punch

It’s really good-looking.  Very professional.  A cut above your typical XBLIG release in terms of quality.  But, still kind of generic.  It looks like any other game.  And the art isn’t really representative of the quirky gameplay involving stick-figures pummeling each-other to death.  You would never guess that beautiful box art is connected to this game.

One Finger Death Punch 2

See what I mean?

More over, the box art doesn’t stick out.  Here’s a screenshot of One Finger Death Punch sitting alongside other games released around the same time.

SD2

It blends in.  Gets easily lost in the shuffle.  The box art is good, but it doesn’t do that perfect siren song that lures potential buyers in, even to get a quick sneak peek.  Really, it looks like it could be just any other game.  Now compare it to Learn to Eat, SD’s first post-OFDP rush-job that immediately was a bigger hit despite taking about 1% of the effort OFDP did to create.

SD1

Say what you will about it being lazy or rushed out, but you can’t say it blends in. It sticks out.  People would want to see what that game is.  It’s unfortunate that Silver Dollar wasn’t able to carry that over to their big, award-winning, mega-hyped title.  I truly in my heart of hearts believe that is what cost it sales.

And now, SD is having a sulk and releasing unplayable shit back into the marketplace.  Again, depressing is the word that springs to mind.  I bought two of them.  First up was Cooties: Patient Zero.  It’s a text-based adventure featuring still images instead of static anime screens like a typical game in this genre does on XBLIG.  Here, you’re a loser with touching issues.  Your billionaire father gives you an ultimatum: get laid or get cut off from your inheritance.  Wait, didn’t Chris O’Donnell already make a movie about this?

Look, at the risk of getting quoted (again) in SD’s satirical “Awards” tab they include in games that contains all the hatred and anger they’ve generated from the community, this game really sucks.  And I’m not just saying that because it’s an SD game.  There are dozens of games exactly like this on XBLIG by a variety of developers, and all of them have the same problems.  Firstly, when presented with a multiple choice question for which path you’re taking, it’s impossible to determine which answer is the bad one that will get you killed and which one is the good answer that moves the story along.  In Cooties, three wrong guesses leads to you “getting Cooties” and starting over.  And, by wrong guess, I mean the girl you’re courting physically touches you on the hand.  No, really.

The concept is the guy you're playing has can't stand any female contact. The voice actor playing him seemed miscast. The dude had a deeper voice, sort of like a bad Solid Snake knock-off, instead of a shrill, squeaky, geeky voice that would have been a better fit. But when you rush games out the door like you have a 30 minute delivery or-your-money-back guarantee, I guess casting isn't something you give a lot of thought to.

The concept is the guy you’re playing as can’t stand any female contact. The voice actor playing him seemed miscast. The dude had a deeper voice, sort of like a bad Solid Snake knock-off, instead of a shrill, squeaky, geeky voice that would have been a better fit. But when you rush games out the door like you have a 30 minute delivery or-your-money-back guarantee, I guess casting isn’t something you give a lot of thought to.

So at one point in the game, you end up in a restaurant.  The girl requests that you hand her a menu.  If you do so, you take a hit point because the girl touches you.  Later, she asks to have the salt passed to her.  Doing this does NOT result in a hit point.  Okay, how the fuck does passing a menu (which is typically a large piece of laminated paper) result in any physical contact, but passing a salt shaker, which is, you know, the size a fucking salt shaker, not result in some skin-on-skin contact?  And that’s exactly what I’m talking about.  It’s so random and so illogical that nobody can possibly guess what the correct answer is supposed to be.  All these games have this problem.  I’ve played over ten on XBLIG and not one was exempt.

Cooties: Patient Zero was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said "check points alone might have led to the game getting a very mild recommendation in the making of this review)

Cooties: Patient Zero was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said “checkpoints alone might have led to the game getting a very mild recommendation in the making of this review)

This leads to a bigger problem: no check points.  When you die, you have to start over again.  Only the opening scenes seem to be skippable.  Once you’re past those, you have to sit through the same dialog again and again until you get things right.  There’s no on-screen text here.  All the dialog in Cooties is done via voice acting from two performers that sound so bored that you can practically hear them doze off a few times.  The only thing that ever breaks up the dialog is the occasional quick-time button mashing event.  Ultimately, Cooties is just plain boring, and there is no bigger sin a game can commit.  Yea, it’s also dumb, but endearingly so.  I wanted to see how the story played out, but not so much that I would sit through endless replays of the same dialog until I hit the exact logic-string the developers used.  Beyond that, Cooties is confusing as to what you’re trying to accomplish.  The game encourages you to shack up with a girl, but discourages you from making any contact with them. It seems like a story that had no editing done before it was made.  Given the breakneck speed SD has been putting games out, I’m guessing that is the case.  They’re hardly alone in doing this, but unlike most developers that do, they’ve proven they know how to make really, really good games.  That’s why people like me get frustrated with them.

Every time you heckle, the meter fills up a little bit. If you fill it up all the way, the dude has a nervous breakdown and the game is over. It's so badly done.

Every time you heckle, the meter fills up a little bit. If you fill it up all the way, the dude has a nervous breakdown and the game is over. It’s so badly done.

So then I tried The Heckler, and it turned out to be even worse.  The idea is, a dude is on stage reading poetry and you press A to heckle him.  If you do so too much, you game over.  And that’s really it.  The poetry is hilariously pretentious and the concept of heckling someone vomiting it is solid, but there’s almost no play mechanics here.  I kind of wish there had been.  I was so mesmerized by the over-the-top dialog that I did a play-through without pushing anything, laughing my ass off at it.  But the actual game of heckling but not heckling too much, is dull.  What really sucks is that Silver Dollar provably knows how to make a game with minimalist gameplay be fun, exciting, and engaging.  I certainly wouldn’t expect it from every game of theirs, but they’ve put out three games since September 11, none of which really serve to entertain. They’ve been accused of trolling the marketplace in the past, and stuff like this just fuels that.  Why live down to that?  And why deflect everything with “we’re just having fun” or “we have no experience”.  Which, by the way, that’s tough to use when you’ve made nearly a hundred games and won prize money based on how much potential one had.

The Heckler was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said the game really needed some kind of "throw rotten fruit" mechanic in the making of this review)

The Heckler was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said the game really needed some kind of “throw rotten fruit” mechanic in the making of this review)

Silver Dollar has a reputation of not being open to criticism, and I’m fairly certain they hate my guts, but I do want to offer them this: I never say anything I don’t mean.  If I say you have talent, I would hope that means something.  I’ve reviewed over 400 games since 2011, and I’ve seen what games by people who truly have no talent look like.  You guys don’t fall into that category.  I know it must have been demoralizing to have a game you poured your heart and souls into not be well received on a commercial basis.  But you have something many out there only wish they could have: talent.  People aren’t pissed at you because you’re dumping out games in short order.  If the games were fun, nobody would care.  These games are boring, and that’s what bothers people.  One Finger Death Punch wasn’t a very complex game.  It featured minimalist play mechanics, and it was spectacular.  You guys have an eye for that play style, and this was hardly the only game of yours that was well received.  I’m not saying you should stress yourselves to death like you did with OFDP.  You need to find a healthy balance between having fun and making decent games.  Cooties and Heckler were boring.  That’s what pisses people off.  It feels like you’re not trying.  Be honest with yourselves: you’re really not.  With your amount of talent, the sky is the limit for you.  OFDP didn’t bomb because you tried too hard.  It was just shitty luck.  Don’t let that spoil your talent.  You don’t owe it to us.  You owe it to yourselves.  You can do better.

Though I admit, it does suck that OFDP bombed.  Hell, you would have been better off spending your DREAM-BUILD-PLAY prize money on hiring Patrick Stewart to do the poetry for The Heckler.  That.. that would have been fucking awesome.

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Arcadecraft (Second Chance with the Chick)

September 30, 2013 by 2 Comments

Arcadecraft has been updated three times since I last played it back in February.  Not only have a few bugs been squashed, but a lot of content has been added.  The length of the game has been extended by a full in-game year, with new machines being released during the course of it.  To give the game a more authentic arcade feel, different machine types have been added, including 2-player upright games, pinball machines, more cocktail tables, and more options to dress up your arcade.  Gameplay mechanics have been cleaned up as well, including the problematic hooligan, who is now easier to deal with.  The power doesn’t go out as much, and coin doors don’t jam as much.  Because the busy-work has been significantly toned down, Arcadecraft feels less like one of those plate-spinning things carnies do and more like an actual, professional sim game.

My arcade was never this organized. Nowhere near as bad as my Sim Cities were, but still..

My arcade was never this organized. Nowhere near as bad as my Sim Cities were, but still..

Which is not to say the game’s shelf-life is that much longer.  When Arcadecraft is done, it’s done. There isn’t a whole lot more you can do once you’ve run out the clock.  Replay value is lacking sorely.  Unless the developers could come up with scenario-style missions and side-quests, Arcadecraft probably won’t be the type of game you go back to again and again.  It also still gets off to too slow a start, though this can be negated if you have Firebase’s other game, Orbitron, or Bad Caterpillar by Kris Steele.  If you do, you can unlock cabinets for those games in Arcadecraft.  Games that you can bump up to 50 cents and push the difficulty to hard without them taking a hit.  Arcadecraft was a bit too easy to begin with.  I can’t believe I’m saying this, given that the Bad Caterpillar cabinet has what I think is a shout-out to me in it (or possibly Donna Bailey, but the narcissist in me thinks it’s me), but avoid those two cabinets if you’re looking for a challenge.

A game set in the 1980s has characters using the word "retro". That somehow seems wrong.

A game set in the 1980s has characters using the word “retro”. That somehow seems wrong.

Despite the lack of difficulty, I love Arcadecraft.  Love it.  It no longer feels like it’s in the Beta stage of development.  Arcadecraft is now a fully realized, glorious game.  It’s one of the ten best Xbox Live Indie Games ever made.  By all rights, this should be the next big simulation mega-franchise.  Unfortunately, Firebase has no plans to put Arcadecraft on PC.  Well, I simply cannot accept that.  So I propose that fans of this game line up in single file to set themselves on fire in protest of that.  Their charred remains are on your head, Firebase.  We’ll go in alphabetical order by surname.  I’ve never been happier that my real name is Cathy Zykozawitz.

xboxboxartArcadecraft was developed by Firebase Industries

IGC_Approved$1 (originally $3) have no idea how you would pronounce that in the making of this review.

Arcadecraft is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Power-Up

September 25, 2013 by 1 Comment

The timing on being asked to look over this game was impeccable as I recently watched the movie “100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience” which featured a section on the classic Japanese bullet hell shooters. I have had a craving to play one ever since, and Power-Up helped fill that need.

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Power-Up is a throwback to the classic space shoot ‘em ups of yesterday such as R-Type and Gradius. There are aliens, upgrades to your ships or weapons, and bullets galore to dodge. It’s a tried and true formula and a general description of most of these games that have come out over the past thirty years.

In Power-Up there are five weapon types that you can select at any time: straight ahead, straight back, straight up/down, a forward spread, and a plasma weapon that… does something? I’ll get back to that in a moment. Each weapon can be “powered-up” to give it an incremental boost from items that fly onto the screen as is tradition. From what I could tell, for the most part, these upgrades only increase the rate of fire and lengthen the beam for each shot. If weapons actually do increase in strength it was a small enough increase that they never felt stronger to me. Enemies appeared to take just as long to kill as with “weaker” weapons. The upgrades you collect also don’t appear to be based on anything such as killing a particular enemy; they appear on a set schedule. It took me a number of plays to realize this: “What did I just do to make the bonus points appear? Did I kill something to spawn that power-up?”

Although there are five weapons, you really only need two of them to advance far into the game: the forward spread and the reverse laser. I was able to cheese my way easily through the first three chapters by upgrading my spread weapon before I touched the reverse-firing weapon. It wasn’t until chapter 4, and those little assholes running around on the ground shooting at me, that I needed to work on the up/down-firing weapons. I felt severely outgunned when trying to play with only the single forward shot, and even worse, I never quite figured out what the plasma weapon was supposed to be good for. Its firing range is extremely short so you have to get very close to enemies to be able to use it. I thought perhaps it would deflect bullets like one of the weapons in the classic game 1942 but nope. It felt useless except to fill my screen with a pretty purple.

Purple lasers of ???

Purple lasers of ???

One final problem with the weapons: the fully-charged shots all make the outside of the screen glow white when fired — the faster the shot, the more intense the flashing. I could usually ignore it under normal conditions, but when I was playing while tired one night, the flashing really got to me to the point that I had to turn off the game.

The story isn’t going to win the award for the next Lord of the Rings (that’s an award, right?), but it feels like a classic shooter tale. You’re one of the last humans alive, trying to destroy the people who destroyed Earth. The pilot is a bit easy to rile up and gets himself into trouble. It’s amusing listening to the pilot talk with his computer AI as they determine what to do next.

You don’t have access to a high score list like I would have hoped. The game keeps track of your high score, but the only time you ever get to see it is when you lose all of your lives. It would be nice either to see this score on the title screen or to be able to see a list of them somewhere.

This is beginning to sound like a long gripe-fest but to be honest, I had fun playing this game and it’s a good piece of work for a one-person entry. There are a number of things I feel could be improved upon, but it’s a good value for the price and there is plenty of fun to be had. None of the issues I describe above really make the game bad in any sense. If you’re a fan of shoot ‘em ups, definitely give this one a try.

xboxboxartPower-Up was developed by Psychotic Software.

IGTlogo-01For $1 you, too, can shit yourself when the logo appears at the launch of the game.

Power-Up has earned has been awarded the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval by Miko. Leaderboards for Indie Game Team are coming soon.

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The Useful Dead

September 24, 2013 by 9 Comments

The Useful Dead is platform-puzzler where you must intentionally murder the current character you’re playing as in a way that allows the next character you get to finish the stage.  Perhaps a distant, platformer cousin of Lemmings, or maybe Voodoo Vince.  It’s a cool concept, but cool is as far as they get.  I certainly didn’t hate Useful Dead.  I like it enough to give it my seal of quality (spoiler alert).  But it ultimately felt more like a really good proof of concept than a fully realized game.

The biggest problem was the puzzles.  They were too damn easy.  Besides the “kill yourself to use your corpse as a platform and/or crate” gimmick, the difficulty hook comes from only having ten extra-expendable creatures throughout the length of the game.  In other words, if a level’s par is three creatures and you kill four before reaching the goal, you would only have nine expendable creatures left to beat the game.  I actually finished the game with thirteen expendable creatures, having finished a couple of stages under par.  Yea, that was in part by design, but at the same time, I’m pretty sure I was finishing more than one stage in ways the developer didn’t have in mind.  This was especially true of the last stage, which I beat after the game glitched and one of the critters clung to a platform for no reason.

The dude in the yellow circle is NOT supposed to be able to stick to the wall like that. Ironically, this would have been the only stage where I was incorrect about the solution if he had fallen to the ground.

This is the final stage of The Useful Dead.  The dude in the yellow circle is NOT supposed to be able to stick to the wall like that. Ironically, this would have been the only stage where I would have been incorrect about the solution if he had fallen to the ground.

The puzzles lack in variety as well.  Most involve impaling yourself on a spike, then maneuvering your corpse in a way that activates a button that opens the door.  Sometimes you’ll have to do this in two or three different ways.  Others might involve using wind to push corpses into switches, or jumping from high ledges in a way to die and land on a switch, or kicking corpses into switches.  Again, this is where the whole “proof of concept” thing kept beating me over the head like I was a baby seal.  There are multiple different animals, but none of them have unique abilities.  Perhaps having levels use specific animals with unique traits, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, or special maneuvers would have added to the complexity.  As it stands, all the puzzles have self-evident solutions and it’s just a matter of how much time you want to put into breaking the game and coming in under par.  XBLIG has been home to some of the most mind-bending puzzlers of this last console generation, such as Gateways, Spyleaks, and Pixel Blocked!  By comparison, Useful Dead is mere child’s play.  Easy to the point of being insulting.  And I really hate saying that about any indie developer’s puzzles.  I don’t know.  It feels like I’m telling someone that their child has funny ears.

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PETA’s favorite game.

If you think of The Useful Dead as a bare-bones prototype, possibly something you would see if you were pitching a publisher on a concept, it does soften the blow somewhat.  I did like what I saw here, but not as much as I could have.  Yea, my recommendation is as tepid as I’m capable of giving, but I still hope you try it.  And I certainly don’t want to discourage the developer from working with this more.  In fact, I would be really disappointed if The Useful Dead was a one-off experiment.  Fuck that.  There’s a great puzzler somewhere in here.  Something with potential to short-circuit your grey matter, but absurd enough to be a big, word-of-mouth hit.  The product we have here feels like something that barely made it off the drawing board.  You know, Star Wars was originally about a search for a magical crystal.  Sonic the Hedgehog was originally going to be a clown.  Woody was originally an evil bastard trying to murder Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story.  In the case of The Useful Dead, it’s like we got the early draft instead of the finished product.  So help me God, this better not be the end of this project.  If it is, I’ll demonstrate how useful the dead really are when I re-purpose the developer’s corpse as a morbid coffee table.

xboxboxartThe Useful Dead was developed by Bootdisk Revolution

IGC_Approved$1 would have entered the Name the Game Contest with “Animals: They’re Not Just for Eatin’ Anymore” in the making of this review.

The Useful Dead is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Look somewhere near the bottom.

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Strange Japanese Game Whose Name WordPress Won’t Let Me Put in the Title

September 21, 2013 by 3 Comments

Today’s game is called 一>◇.  No seriously, that’s the name.  一>◇. It’s a name that search engines and headers will not put up with, so for the purposes of today’s review, I’ll be calling this game the Strange Japanese Game. Not that anyone would actually want to Google it or see it on YouTube. It kind of sucks. Which is a shame because the concept is original and quirky, but a horrible control scheme fails the vision.

Strange Japanese Game is a God Game where you play a giant green hand. There’s little sentient beans walking around, reminiscent of Pikmin. They even grow little spouts on their head. When they have a sprout, you can poke them into the ground. Then, you grab a handful of water from the lake that is the main focal point of the game’s challenge and dump it on the sprout. The sprout then grows into a tree. You can flick the tree with your finger to knock more Pikmin-like-things out of it, but ultimately you want to masturbate the tree (I’m not joking) to shape it into a spaceship. Once you’ve beaten your bush into the shape of a shuttle, you have to load it with the Pikmin-like-things. Doing this will make the ship blast off, scoring points. The object of the game is to score as many points as you can.

After beating your bush, the tree becomes a rocket that blasts off in a shaft of fire and two black balls of smoke. Sickening thought: someone, somewhere is getting horny thinking about this.

After beating your bush, the tree becomes a rocket that blasts off in a shaft of fire and two black balls of smoke. Sickening thought: someone, somewhere is getting horny thinking about this.

First off, props to the developers for taking the God genre and trying to make a quick actiony arcade game out of it. That took a creative spark and balls, and I appreciate that. Having said that: why on Green Skinned God’s blue Earth did they map every action to the X button? The Xbox controller has four face buttons (six if count the clickable analog sticks) and four shoulder buttons. Strange Japanese Game only uses ten percent of the total available buttons, but the actions performed are very different from one another and possibly consequential. For example, flicking. You have to move the hand and press X to flick. If you stop moving and press X, it becomes grab instead. Except there’s a problem: there’s a slight delay in the game recognizing that you’ve stopped moving, even if you release the stick. Thus, there were times when I let go up the stick and pressed X in an attempt to grab a not-a-Pikmin and instead flicked it into the water, killing it. This isn’t the fucking Atari 2600. Why couldn’t grab had been one of the different available buttons?

There’s also no way to separate the little not-a-Pikmins from each-other. When they bunch up, even an action as simple as planting one in the ground can likely result in killing ones next to it. This gets really frustrating when the creatures turn evil if you let them sit around too long (perhaps they ate something after midnight when I wasn’t looking) and start to attack the good ones. If you let THOSE linger too long, they become tentacles (it’s Japanese, OF COURSE they become tentacles). In order to prevent that, you need to flick the critters into the water. Of course, that typically will result in killing a bunch of innocents. Really, imprecision is Strange Japanese Game’s biggest sin. If you grab a handful of not-a-Pikmins to drop them in the spaceship, it’s hard to line it up in such a way where all of them fall into the ship. Any that don’t die upon hitting the ground, even though they fall the same distance and land safely when you knock them out of the trees you grow.

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There’s a really cool and quirky concept at play here. Again, an arcadey God game? Madness! But the slow pace, awful play control, and imprecision of the action kills all potential it had. I truly do feel that the groundwork for something fun and addictive has been laid with this strange Japanese game. With fine-tuning to the controls and something added to the gameplay that would speed up the pace, I think this could be a sleeper hit. Maybe. I should probably note that all the gameplay mechanics above are left up to the player to figure out on their own. There are no instructions in the game, and no on-screen indicators of what to do or how to do it. The only instructions are found on the game’s marketplace page, and in Japanese. I’m a fan of quirk, but being quirky doesn’t have to mean leaving a player to figure out stuff on their own. Then again, this is a game that involves jerking off trees. I imagine writing instructions for such things is a crime in many countries.

xboxboxart一>◇ was developed by Hitmark Brothers

$1 was warned by their father that if they kept doing that, their hand would turn green in the making of this review.

Seriously: horrible name for a game. Horrible. If the game had been good, the name would have doomed it. It’s a game whose title cannot be spread by word of mouth. Sigh. 

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Mechanician Alex and Pablo’s Fruit

September 16, 2013 by Leave a comment

I’m baffled when unambitious games come along that strive only to look and play kind of, sort of like the classics of ye olden days.  All I can think of is: why?  Why not make them better, or at least give them a different hook?  Especially since those old games already fucking exist and have been played to death.  Hey, not everyone is creative.  But even if you’re uncreative, you must have actually played the games and know what works in them and what doesn’t.  I don’t expect perfection from an indie developer, but I also expect that, as gamers, they know the difference between fun and boring.

I'm going somewhere with this, I swear. This is Mechanician Alex, a game that from 2013 designed for fans of 80s PC games that fans of PC games from the 80s would have shit on. In the 80s.

Mechanician Alex, a game from 2013 designed for fans of 80s PC games that 80s PC gaming fans would have shit on.

Then you get into the realm of pure raving insanity, where you try to ape a gameplay style that wasn’t all that good to begin with.  Mechanician Alex wants to be one of those old-timey, single-screened platformers from the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum era.  I know a lot of my readers are still gaga over them.  When I reviewed the official XBLIG port of one of the all-time cherished members of that genre, Manic Miner, the old farts that read me were less than receptive to my take on it.  Fine.

But would those gamers be receptive to a game that looks like it could have been a lost game in that series, and plays almost like them, only everything is a little worse?  I’m guessing not.  Strip away the attempt at making a player nostalgic, and Mechanician Alex is simply a bad game.  The controls are atrocious.  Unresponsive controls are a signature of these type of games, and getting used to the wacky delayed timing is supposed to be part of the charm.  I guess if you’re playing a game legitimately made in that era, that’s acceptable.  Well, at least if you’re a child of that era looking to reclaim your youth.  But fans of those games aren’t in denial about the controls being shit.  Why the FUCK would a game made in 2013 try to emulate that?  Manic Miner fans aren’t going to Tweet each other saying “Oh my God, this game controls even worse than Manic Miner.  IT’S FUCKING AWESOME!!”

Mechanician Alex was developed by 3T Games ($1 got a teeny tiny chuckle out of the level where enemies consisted of Rubik's Cubes and the female symbol ♀. Perhaps the developers were not fans of me or Xona Games)

Mechanician Alex was developed by 3T Games ($1 got a teeny tiny chuckle out of the level where enemies consisted of Rubik’s Cubes and the female symbol ♀. Perhaps the developers were not fans of me or Xona Games)

And the levels are poorly designed too.  The game has a real issue with height.  For example, on one stage you’ll be walking on a cloud that is bumpy, like clouds tend to be.  There’s almost no clearance, and an enemy is scooting back and forth above your head.  Unfortunately, the collision detection is spotty enough that you’re bound to burn lives just trying to get a feel for it, and there’s so many variables on the height that never seem right.  It immediately stinks of a stage that was rushed through production.  Beyond that, if you slip off the cloud, you can’t finish the level regardless of whether you land on a platform or not.  This is really fundamental level design stuff and I shouldn’t have to have explained to you why its bad.  It’s a worst game of the year contender.

Sadly, the same developer recently went on a release spree, and they also brought out a side-scrolling platformer called Pablo’s Fruit, and it’s even worse.  Taking it a step further than Mechanician Alex, it’s a contender for worst XBLIG ever made.  Every gameplay aspect of Pablo’s Fruit is terrible.  Here, the idea is you have to collect all of the fruit in a level to open up an exit.  Movement is slow and jumping is floaty, which makes playing through the levels a tedious chore.  And then you get to the technical issues.  When you take damage, you don’t recoil from it, and you don’t get much (if any) invincibility to prevent further damage.  Thus, it’s conceivable that you could go from 5 “lives” to 0 in a second just from getting pinned next to an enemy.  That’s just utterly lazy, sloppy programming.  This is coupled with poor level design.  In one stage, the level opens with a fruit above your head, out of reach.  At the end of the stage, by the exit, there’s a teleporter that drops you back at the start.  You collect the fruit, but you have to walk all the way back to the exit.  All enemies you’ve taken out are still gone, which begs the question: WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU MAKE SOMEONE DO SOMETHING SO FUCKING BORING?  Didn’t it occur to anyone making this piece of shit?

And it’s got dumb logic too.  Enemies are beaten by jumping on their heads.  But it’s not always clear which enemies will die when you do it and which ones you’ll pass-through, taking damage along the way.  I made a video to demonstrate.

What the fuck?  By the way, that vulture that’s flying back and forth?  You die from jumping on it too.  Why the hell does a ghost (hypothetically a transparent, dimensional being) die from being crushed but not an insect or a bird?  Is this some kind of PETA subliminal message?

An annoying aspect is there are these butterflies that contentiously fly around. They're supposed to be in the background, but it's done poorly and thus they often look like enemies in the foreground.

An annoying aspect is there are these butterflies that continuously fly around. They’re supposed to be in the background, but it’s done poorly and thus they often look like enemies in the foreground.

If I sound too negative, please keep in mind that I actively, for days, tried to think of something nice to say about these games.  I came up completely empty.  The sad thing is, both these games are courtesy of the developer of Naoki Tales.  I didn’t like it either, but really, its only true sin was being boring.  These games represent a gigantic step backwards.  Pablo’s Fruit came out a day after Mechanician Alex, and those came out a few days after another game by the same guys, Paper Galactica.  I’m not doing a full review on that (click the link, because Tim Hurley did), but it was pretty fucking boring as well.  Three games, all released in one week.  If I had to ask these guys a question besides “have you ever actually played a video game?” it would be “why didn’t you guys focus on one project?”  Granted, it’s possible that all three games sat in peer review purgatory until the community came out of a coma and put them through to the market.

Pablo's Fruit was developed by 3T Games ($1 asked if Pablo washed his ass in the making of this review)

Pablo’s Fruit was developed by 3T Games ($1 asked if Pablo washed his ass)

Actually, I would have one more question, and this is the most obvious one: would you actually want to play these games if you hadn’t made them?  Would you pay money for them?  Hell, would you play them if they were free?  Yea, that’s three questions, not one, but all of them are valid.  Look, these games suck.  You’re not going to make a lot of money on them.  They don’t even have the absurdity or the charm of Silver Dollar’s low-end, quick cash stuff.  Bad games DO make money on XBLIG, but your stuff isn’t falling into those niches that have such potential.  So don’t rush your games out.  Polish up your work.  Do something wild and creative.  I’ve played four of your games.  Not one of them managed to entertain me or any of my colleagues for a single second, nor did any of them display the slightest bit of creativity.  If I had to guess, I would guess the developers were bored silly making these.  Their existence seems almost cynical.  Both are trying to capitalize on nostalgic memories.  But unless it’s a port of something, you’re not going to lure in day-dreamy nostalgic types.  Being primitive shouldn’t be confused with being a classic, and these games are so primitive that they sacrifice virgins to the sun gods.

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Magicians & Looters

September 11, 2013 by 15 Comments

UPDATE: Magicians & Looters received a Second Chance with the Chick. To say it improved the game is an understatement. I now consider this to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Click here for my updated thoughts.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Xbox Live Indie Games, where expectations are so low that there’s not sufficient clearance for microbes to hang themselves from it.  Because of this, sometimes games that are just not that good end up getting elevated beyond their actual value.  Take Magicians & Looters.  Here’s a really ambitious first effort by a group of developers with not a whole lot of experience, and it’s not terrible.  It also has, for my money, the best comedic writing ever seen on an XBLIG.

M&L is a Metroidvania.  I fucking love those, but XBLIG hasn’t been the best source for them.  LaserCat is my favorite.  It was the original #1 game on the old, ten-games-only Leaderboard.   But it’s a different breed of Metroidvania.  There’s no combat in it, only avoidance.  It’s also easier than boxing a newborn paraplegic orangutang .  But that was pretty much the cream of the crop.  Other attempts were nowhere near as successful.  There was Astroman, a Metroid-inspired adventure that came very close to hitting the mark, but wasn’t quite there.  Still, this is probably the genre that, if done right, I like the most.

Mom?

Mom?

I try not to get hyped for games, and I certainly try to avoid hearing what my fellow XBLIG critics think of a game that I intend to play.  Unfortunately, becoming good friends with them means sometimes you hear things.  Like, say, Tim Hurley putting Magicians & Looters at #5 on his Leaderboard.  Or Jed Presscott calling this game “better than Symphony of the Night.”

Hahahahahaha…………. no.

To get the good out of the way first: Magicians & Looters isn’t broken or glitchy or likely to physically materialize like that spooky chick from The Ring and murder you after seven days.  In fact, all the ingredients seem to be here, fully functional, and primed to present one of the best values a game could have.  But, for me at least, it just never came together.  By far the best aspect of Magicians & Looters is the writing.  The story is a sort of spoof of Harry Potter.  You play as three teenagers enrolled in a wizard’s school.  It gets overrun by evildoers and you must band together and save the day.  They’re also all, to put it politely, type-A personalities.  They spew out non-stop sarcasm, have endless disdain for one-another, and almost seem to speak in the language of a sitcom.  I always hate games like that.  It’s one of the things that turned me off of musical RPG Sequence.  Here?  It works.  Even better, the jokes don’t rely on referential humor.  No callbacks to bad game dialog.  No “remember that movie you’ve seen?  We’ve seen it too, and we’ll demonstrate that by quoting it verbatim, but you should laugh because we’re going to do it in an unexpected way” type of stuff.  Hell, they don’t even directly reference Harry Potter, and the game is a send-up of it.  I mean, damn.  Standing ovation right here.

The sharp writing is the ONLY thing that kept me playing, though.  Mechanically speaking, I just found Magicians & Looters to be boring.  Mostly because of the combat.  I give them props for wanting to do something different.  Here, touching enemies doesn’t inflict damage on you.  Everything is handled by actual hand-to-hand fighting.  You attack a few times, then hold block, wait for them to miss, and then continue on.  That sounds great, but there’s a reason why 2D games typically don’t do that: because it’s slow and it makes combat a plodding chore.  Of course, there’s no real reason to fight enemies.  The leveling-up system is handled entirely by finding hidden trinkets, which was another dumb idea.  For almost any game, combat will stagnate after X amount of hours.  The grind of leveling up could very well be the only thing that keeps your average player from just running past enemies.  In M&L, they do drop money that you can use to buy better weapons, but progress on that is too slow as well.

The main hook is switching between three characters, each with their own unique abilities.  Unfortunately, this also is bungled, because two of the characters (the guy and one of the girls) are too slow.  For a game that already has severe pacing issues, this one really got to me.  Most of the time, I wanted to be playing as the near-naked chick, who was faster in movement and could jump significantly higher than the other two.  But she was especially crappy at combat.  So, you have to switch between the three to open up the map, but playing as the other chick, who was so slow that I was wondering if she had Lou Gehrig’s disease, was torturous.  Also, in order to switch characters, you need to go back to a save-station.  They’re liberally scattered throughout the world, but the needless backtracking when a Castlevania III like on-the-fly switcheroo would have been so much more preferable and obvious just adds to the dullness factor.

Again, the game has all the right parts of a good Metroidvania, such as a very well done map. Unfortunately, being fun just didn't make the cut. I think this is mostly on the dull combat. For everything it borrowed from Symphony of the Night, the thing it needed the most was pushed aside in favor of something slower and blander. If it had been remotely close to Symphony of the Night's combat? Probably a top-5 XBLIG game.

Again, the game has all the right parts of a good Metroidvania, such as a very well done map. Unfortunately, being fun just didn’t make the cut. I think this is mostly on the dull combat. For everything it borrowed from Symphony of the Night, the thing it needed the most was pushed aside in favor of something slower and blander. If it had been remotely close to Symphony of the Night’s combat? Probably a top-5 XBLIG game.

My dislike for M&L has nothing to do with the hype I got from my buddies.  If anything, I spent more time with it than I would done with any other game because I was trying to find the game they both loved so much.  If you hear something unequivocally called better than one of the best games ever made, it catches your attention.  I also wasn’t looking for reasons why it’s not.  That’s what lifeless fanboys do.  No, I wanted to see what they saw.  I looked hard for it.  Instead, I found dull combat, bland level layouts, and just an overall slowness that I couldn’t get into.  I tip my hat to the guys at Morgopolis Studios.  I typically discourage first efforts from being this ambitious.  Ambition wasn’t what went wrong with Magicians & Looters.  Truth be told, it’s a well designed game.  Results will not be typical, I guess, considering that my colleagues are shaking their fist in anger that it’s a digital-download game and not on disc, meaning there is no hole for (remaining review censored by Brian for the sake of Cathy’s parents.  I don’t want them to know I taught her what THAT is)

xboxboxartMagicians & Looters was developed by Morgopolis Studios

$1 (still censored.  Sorry folks.  Her filth bled into the money joke) in the making of this review. 

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Decimation X3

August 28, 2013 by 6 Comments

I wasn’t happy with my previous review of Decimation X3, and the developers weren’t either, so I 86ed it and decided to start again.  Why didn’t the developers like it?  Well, because I accused the game of being a Space Invaders Extreme clone.  No no no, they said.  I have it all wrong.  It’s not a Space Invaders Extreme clone.  It’s a re-imagining of a remake of a clone of Space Invaders, or something like that.  Also, they created the original “extreme” Space Invaders game back in 1996 when I was seven years old and not actually playing games.  Ohhhhhhh.  And if you hand out that link to every single person who purchases the game, all confusion that the very good game you guys made is actually based off a completely different game and not the one people would reasonably assume it was based off of will be cleared up.  It also took them two years to request that clarification, right in the middle of the busiest week I ever had at Indie Gamer Chick.  I really love Matthew and Jason Doucette, but at the same time I wonder if they’re not one “H” away from having the most appropriate last name in human history.

So I played their not-a-ripoff-of-Space Invaders Extreme-that-any-reasonable-person-who-doesn’t-read-every-blog-post-by-them-would-assume-is-a-ripoff-even-though-they-actually-invented-that-idea and, surprise, I still dug the shit out of it.  Decimation X3 is a seriously good game.  It’s basically Space Invaders, only its a lot faster, has fancier graphics, lots of fire power, and bosses.  You know, sort of like NO CATHY DO NOT POKE THEM WITH A STICK LIKE THAT!  They’re Canadians.  That means they’re probably armed to the teeth with hockey sticks and moose.

From this, you can tell that I was clearly off my rocker for assuming this game was an attempt at doing a $1 XBLIG version of Space Invaders Extreme. What was I thinking?

From this, you can tell that I was clearly mentally ill for assuming this game was an attempt at doing a $1 XBLIG version of Space Invaders Extreme and not a revamped version of a remake of a clone of Space Invaders. I should also be able to figure out just from playing the game that these guys invented the concept of an extreme version of Space Invaders.

Anyway, yeah, fun game.  It supports four players, it has no online leaderboards, and the amount of bullets enemies fire becomes fucking absurd about ten minutes into it.  Oddly enough, despite being atrocious at bullet hells, I was able to play Decimation X3 relatively well, with tons of near-misses even when there didn’t seem to be enough room to squeeze through the rain of enemy fire.  Either I’ve gotten a lot better at these types of games or Decimation X3 has some of the most forgiving collision detection ever.  I vote for option A.

It’s been a while since I played Decimation X3.  I didn’t even really get a lot of multiplayer time with it the first time around.  I had enough of a good time with just that part to move Decimation X3 from #64 on the Leaderboard to #38.  That’s the biggest jump ever made.  And they’re getting that because their game is genuinely good.  Not because I called their game a clone or a ripoff of another game.  Maybe the term I should have used was “heavily inspired by.”  Though seriously, if you guys think the average gamer will see this trailer:

And not assume you guys were taking inspiration from something other than the games you were actually trying to get inspiration from, I don’t know what to tell you.  I’d never heard of you guys before Indie Gamer Chick.  I doubt 99.99999999% of gamers have heard of you.  They’re not going to know you guys came up with the idea of an extreme Space Invaders.  Besides that point, your Space Invaders ’97 doesn’t look like Space Invaders Extreme, and Decimation X3 does.  It’s not the same game, but people see it that way.  It’s like hearing Sony say “Super Smash Bros?  Never heard of it!  PlayStation All Stars was totally our idea!”

xboxboxartDecimation X3 was developed by Xona Games

$1 Probably should poke anyone with a stick that can solve Rubik’s Cubes like this in the making of this review.

Decimation X3 is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

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