Magic Racing Rally

August 26, 2013 by Leave a comment

I don’t mind racing video games, but I’m bored silly by any real form of automotive racing.  So naturally, I ended up with a boyfriend that’s a gibbering, foaming-at-the-mouth Formula One fan.  Magic Racing GP 2 was made for him, not me.  It was a game with old-school top-down gameplay, and that’s fine.  Where the game made itself inaccessible to me was in the insane attention to detail of the nuances of racing.  You had to calculate and adjust for every thing, right down to the types of wheels used.  Yea, not for me.  Then again, Brian and his F1-loving friends liked the concept more than the execution.  The controls were pretty rough for GP 2.  If they had been smoother, I think Brian and Bryce would still be playing it to this day.  Hell, I think a lot of people would have.  It had such raving devotion to the simulation aspect of F1 that I think people might have used it as an honest-to-God league, in the same way people set up Madden leagues or even Tecmo Bowl.

This is one of those games that looks better in screens than it does in motion.

This is one of those games that looks better in screens than it does in motion.

Magic Racing Rally is a much more simple game.  There’s still a wide variety of race classes and cars (based on real cars but with thinly veiled name changes) with different attributes, but it’s nowhere near as terrifying for non-fans of the sport.  Also, the controls seem more manageable.  But, I was still quite bored by it.  Mechanically, it’s just too basic.  From a graphical point of view, it reminds me of one of those preschool race car toys with the magnets.  Just a static screen with the cars and the skid marks they leave behind being the only moving parts.  It’s quite low tech and not very stimulating, even though the courses are well designed.  Hell, some of the courses are downright beautiful, but when you superimpose a little eight-bit car on them, it kind of looks silly.

The big draw of Magic Racing Rally is the sixteen-player online racing.  Giggle snort chuckle ha.  Look, kudos to them for thinking to include support for sixteen players, but you’re more likely to see Sasquatch rollerblading on UFOs before you find sixteen players at the same time.  The best I could do was three players.  Unfortunately, even with what felt like better controls, all of us kept crashing into the walls repeatedly.  Only on the slowest class were we able to come somewhat close to staying on the road.  Otherwise, it was like trying to trace a doodle in the middle of an earthquake.  I’m sure with patience and practice, I probably could have gotten the hang of it, but I was not engaged enough to want to get good at it.  I hate doing this, but I wasn’t Magic Racing Rally’s target audience.  I think fans of rally racing might enjoy it, assuming that any of the dozens currently available titles from that genre no longer “do it” for them.  The weird part is, the racing was never the best part about their original game.  It was the simulation aspect.  With that significantly toned down, I wonder who this was made for?  I didn’t really like it, and actually Bryce didn’t like it either, and he’s into this kind of stuff.  Oddly enough, as intimidated as I was about Magic Racing GP2, I think that was the better game.  The marginally better controls don’t make up for the lack of customization.  I do think the audience of devoted GP2 fans might enjoy this, but otherwise, this race is permanently stuck in a yellow flag.

xboxboxartMagic Racing Rally was developed by Magic Studios

$1 said “Rest in Peace, Microsoft Points jokes” in the making of this review. 

A review copy of Magic Rally Racing was provided by Magic Studios to Indie Gamer Chick.  The copy played by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was given to a friend to test online play with her.  That had minimal feedback in this review.  For more on this policy, consult the FAQ.

Gameplay footage via Splazer Productions

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The Last Fortune

August 17, 2013 by 7 Comments

Lots of XBLIGs look like they’ll be fun.  Then you play them, and they make you actively question whether the concept of fun is something you’ve been hallucinating this whole time.  That’s what The Last Fortune made me ponder.  I took a peek at the screen shots of it and thought it looked kind of like Wonder Boy in Monster Land, a retro gem that I picked up for $1 on PSN that was just swell.  Then I picked up Dragons Curse (which I guess is Wonder Boy 3, or possibly 4.. then again, I’m not sure which one Monster Land is either) on Wii’s Virtual Console and thought that was even better, until I hit a brick wall about halfway through and gave up in shame.  Still, fun series  It’s about time someone tried to make a tribute for them on XBLIG.  It’s just too bad this one turned out a bit warped.

It really does have a bit of a Sega Master System look to it. There was no problem with the graphics, besides item pick-ups being too small and samey.

It really does have a bit of a Sega Master System look to it. There was no problem with the graphics, besides item pick-ups being too small and samey.

The game starts with a village full of peaceable folks getting ransacked by evil doers that burn it to the ground.  Choosing to play as either a boy or a girl from the village, you seek out revenge.  Because the language of the option menu suggested that The Last Fortune might be, ahem, difficult, I decided to forgo the medium setting (my typical starting point for most reviews here) and play on casual.  But even on sissy mode, I still had a tough time with Last Fortune, because the mechanics of the game kind of suck.  Like the developers fundamentally had a good idea of what to do, but didn’t take the time to polish anything up.  The controls have issues with unresponsiveness, which makes movement a chore, especially when you get to sections of the game with long jumps and an emphasis on platforming.  I was practically praying that the game wouldn’t go nutso with jumping elements.  So naturally, there’s a boss fight that takes place during a vertical auto-scrolling section.  It’s like being on an airplane that just lost an engine, so you pray for safety and get rewarded by having a wing break off.

The Last Fortune simply doesn’t do a whole lot to entertain.  Progression is straight forward.  Get from point A to point B while stabbing everything in-between.  Combat is the focus of Last Fortune, which is unfortunate (pun fully intended) because the combat is shit.  The range of your attack is limited, and thus you’ll have to do most of your fighting up close.  You have no dodge, counterattack, or block.  Thus, most of the time you’ll be forced to trade damage with the enemy in a way that gets downright maddening later in the game.  I especially hated these giant red knights that looked more like a spartan from Halo brandishing a Halloween novelty sword.  You have to get too close to attack them, and they’re spongy enough and fast enough that you will take damage.  Well, unless you unload your special moves on them, assuming you have a good one.  For some reason, you can only have one type of spell at a time.  The item-picks for these are tough to distinguish from one-another, even if you’re on a TV big enough to double as an ark with two of every creature.  You can buy a charge attack that shoots a Zelda-ish beam across the room, but it’s as weak as a watered down Martini.  All the purchasable upgrades are overpriced and money is scarce even if you go out of your way to slay every enemy.  Plus, you can only access the store between levels, which are too long and boring for anyone to reasonably endure.

The Last Fortune was only one dodge or block move away from being a decent game. Alas, it was not to be.

The Last Fortune was only one dodge or block move away from being a decent game. Alas, it was not to be, making all combat an exercise in frustration and annoyance. The only way to safely fight these flying bastards is to hit once, run away, and wait for another opening. Also known as Zzzzzzword Play.

There’s just no hook to keep you going.  In fact, the game seems to go out of its way to make you want to quit.  The asinine continue system forces you to spend your coins (which again, you aren’t provided enough of to make shopping enjoyable) to continue from the beginning of whatever stage you’re on.  To salt the wounds, you have to pay extra to start midway through the stage.  Lives systems are obsolete anyway.  A continue system this punishing for a game that isn’t very fun to begin with will not add incentive or replay value to it.  It will just make people quit and find something better to play.

That’s what aggravated me the most about Last Fortune.  It looks good enough that obvious care was put into it.  The developers just forgot to bring the fun.  Gameplay is bare-bones.  Enemies are cheap.  Damage is often unavoidable.  The level design is basic and boring.  The dialog is soul-crushingly long and dull.  I truly believe the building blocks for a good game are somewhere in this mess, but Last Fortune never puts it together.  It’s like the developers were given multiple paths for each mechanic: the fun way and the boring way.  They fully intended to go down the fun way, but couldn’t read the map properly and ended up in the boring capital of the world.  And that’s a shame.  Bad game or not, nobody should be stuck in Sacramento.

xboxboxartThe Last Fortune was developed by Misty Day Games

80 Microsoft Points have friends that live in Roseville, which is right next to Sacramento and thus is a like a satellite of boredom in the making of this review. 

Gameplay footage courtesy of Splazer Productions

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One Finger Death Punch (non-review review)

August 12, 2013 by 8 Comments

I’m a dumbass.  I attempted to play One Finger Death Punch, the final Dream-Build-Play winner.  Both the developer and my boyfriend had declared the game off-limits to me due to my epilepsy.  However, that didn’t stop me from playing Charlie Murder, and I still had all the equipment I used to make it through that game (an older, fading projection TV and extra lighting in the room, in addition to sunglasses I was wearing), so why not?

Well, because it still wasn’t safe for me.  That’s why.  One Finger Death Punch was much more intense in its effects than Charlie Murder was.  I was only able to play a little past the first world before a flickery background made me feel a little off and it was decided I shouldn’t play any further.  Rats, I say.  Rats, because I was really enjoying it up to that point. The basic concept is using only two buttons, you kung-fu your way through wave after wave of stick figures.  You don’t even move your character.  All the action in the game is done using only the X and B buttons.  When an enemy enters your attack range, you hit them.  The violence is over the top, but really, One Finger Death Punch reminded me of Nintendo’s Game & Watch line of titles.  It’s just about timing and patterns.  Gameplay boiled down to its purest core.  Yet, OFDP is a total reinvention of some extremely old concepts, and it works well.

Theory #1 why this game bombed in sales: the screenshots are obnoxiously saturated with sales pitches for the game. I speak on behalf of all consumers when I say "we'll read the sales blurb for that shit. All we want to see is an unbranded, uncovered, unblemished pictures of the fucking game. Yeesh."

Theory #1 on why this game bombed in sales: the screenshots are obnoxiously saturated with sales pitches for the game. I speak on behalf of all consumers when I say “we’ll read the sales blurb for that shit. All we want to see is an unbranded, uncovered, unblemished pictures of the fucking game!” Yeesh. That goes double for all you iPhone developers.

At least it did until I got to the part that simply wasn’t compatible with my medical condition.  So I can’t vouch for the game completely.  That wouldn’t be fair.  I can say this: it seemed good enough that I think I would have ultimately awarded it the Seal of Quality.  I mean, you never know.  I really did suck at what little I got to play.  Once enemies started to come in different colors (green enemies take two hits, blue ones dodge your first hit and jump into the other button’s range, and I’m sure more colors were coming) I started to fail with more consistency.  I also was downright embarrassing against the first boss, losing three times before getting it right.  But I was enjoying my mediocrity.  I wish I could have played further.

Either way, One Finger Death Punch is, according to developer Silver Dollar Games (yep, those guys), a total bust in sales.  What sucks about that is this was their most expensive production, and their most critically acclaimed title.  These guys have been lambasted by the community, including me, and yet in the end they proved that they were real artists with real talent.  Let it be said, even though I couldn’t finish their game, Silver Dollar today made me proud that I’m Indie Gamer Chick.  Perhaps they’ll be the final reminder of how Xbox Live Indie Games cultivated talent.  These guys went from being demonized for their, how shall we say it, less than play-value-chalked titles to being demoralized by their best game doing poorly at the point of sale.  It’s almost like a microcosm of the XBLIG community as a whole.  Don’t let this get you down, guys.  You made a believer in me.  Stand up, lick your wounds, and go make something else spectacular.  I have no doubt you can do it.

Oh, and that spectacular thing you’re going to make?  Yea, can you do me a solid and try to make it something that won’t potentially kill me?  Thanks.

Theory #2 why it bombed: the box art sucks. Part of the charm of the game is its minimalist characters (literally stick figures), and this captures none of that. This looks like the type of generic cover you would expect on a clone of an Avatar: Last Airbender game. XBLIG developers are already screwed by not having trailers at the point of sale. Don't screw yourselves further by making the box art look generic. Well drawn, but generic nonetheless.

Theory #2 why it bombed: the box art sucks. Part of the charm of the game is its minimalist characters (literally stick figures), and this captures none of that. This looks like the type of cover you would expect on a clone of an Avatar: Last Airbender game. XBLIG developers are already screwed by not having trailers at the point of sale. Don’t screw yourselves further by making the box art look generic. Well drawn, but generic nonetheless.

One Finger Death Punch was developed by Silver Dollar Games

80 Microsoft Points are really bummed about this because the thing that made me feel ill was a darker, wavy-pulsing background effect.  Not my typical trigger.  Shows how unpredictable this shit can be in the making of this non-review review.

This review will not count against the Leaderboard’s percentage.  For a full review, check out my amigo Tim Hurley’s thoughts on One Finger Death Punch at TheXBLIG.com

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Fist Puncher (Xbox Live Indie Game version)

August 4, 2013 by 8 Comments

And the award for worst timing ever goes to………..

FIST PUNCHER ON XBOX LIVE INDIE GAMES!!

Team 2Bit stands up and takes a bow.  Tsutomu Yamaguchi rips up his program and walks out of the auditorium in disgust.

You see, I think Fist Puncher is probably better than your run of the mill brawler.  Think of it as Castle Crashers without having to equip weapons.  You level up.  There are a variety of special moves and combos you can pull off, and you can earn more as you make progress.  Levels aren’t always about smacking some twats around, walking ten feet to the right, then smacking more twats.  Sometimes you’re in a poisoned subway.  Sometimes you’re riding motorcycles.  This is all set in a decidedly mature world with adult themes and occasional voice-over narration.

Sadly, it’s hard for me to get excited about this when I started playing upcoming Xbox Live Arcade brawler Charlie Murder about an hour before trying this.  I haven’t yet formed an option on that game, but playing it undoubtedly soured me on Fist Puncher.  Both games intend to take brawlers in a more progressive, modern direction.  It’s as if they’re both in a race, and Fist Puncher is running at a pretty decent pace.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter because Charlie Murder is using quantum time displacement magic to have already finished the race, give Fist Puncher a wedgie, and sleep with its wife.

Oh shit, it's Scientologists!

Oh shit, it’s Scientologists!

All games should stand on their own.  I still believe that.  But, I really am having trouble separating these two games from the same genre which released this close together.  One of which is extremely modernized and the other of which is still has some firm roots in tradition.  If I hadn’t just played Charlie Murder, I think I would have liked Fist Puncher a whole lot more.  Not too much more.  I hate brawlers and I can’t hide my contempt for them.  One of the worst times I’ve had as Indie Gamer Chick was playing the Simpsons Arcade Game with my boyfriend.  It wasn’t even an indie, but I had never played it and figured I could get a decent review out of it.  Then I dragged Brian along for the ride.  I hated every moment of it, but I thought Brian was enjoying it.  Then after we finished, he said “well, that sucked.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“When was I supposed to say something?  You haven’t stopped complaining this entire time.  I’m actually surprised you could complain that much without stopping to breathe.”

The thing with 2D brawlers is, most feel like the same game with different skins.  Even popular ones.  Look, I played Streets of Rage and its sequels when they were in Ultimate Genesis Collection.  I played Final Fight on Capcom Classics Collection.  I’m happy you old school gamers still enjoy them, but I don’t get it.  It’s just button mashing the same guys, walking to the right a few feet, then button mashing more of the same guys.  Repeat this until you run into a boss with an unfair attack pattern and button mash him.  Then maybe you watch a static cut scene before repeating the whole process for seven to eight levels.  It’s boring.  Having a variety of fighting styles doesn’t take the edge off either, because usually there’s one attack that just plain works better than everything else, of which you’ll use it so much that you’ll wear out the buttons you have to hit to activate it.

Fist Puncher, God bless it, does its very best to break up the monotony by including different objectives, branching paths, and fairly short levels.  There’s also an upgrade system that, in the tradition of Indie Gamer Chick, I attempted to abuse by simply putting all my stats into strength.  Didn’t work, because enemies become downright cheap.  I encountered a boss that has a murder of crows surround you.  If you’re unable to run away, those damn crows will stun lock you and utterly drain your health.  At this point, I had maybe two points spent on defense and I didn’t last too long.  Of course, that’s my fault and not the developer’s, but I was still pretty peeved at the cheapness of it.  Not to mention that some of the levels are clearly designed with four players in mind, like a subway that fills with poison.  You have 90 seconds to clear a few waves of bad guys and a boss.  Now, by the time I played this stage, I had nearly filled my strength meter to the brim.  It didn’t matter.  Enemies were spongy as hell, and there was only one of me to finish a stage meant to be played with friends.  The amount of enemies probably should have been scaled back a bit to accommodate solo play.

Since I missed the narration due to a glitch in the sound, I filled in the blanks myself. in my version of the story, the guy in the yellow is attempting to sell multi-colored chairs shaped like giant assholes. Someone off-screen claimed to match his low prices and he pulled a gun on them, because thems fightin' words!

Since I missed the narration due to a glitch in the sound, I filled in the blanks myself. in my version of the story, the guy in the yellow is attempting to sell multi-colored toilet seat covers shaped like giant assholes. Someone off-screen claimed to match his low prices and he pulled a gun on them, because thems fightin’ words!

When you play with friends, it does take the edge off.  But while the fighting style consists of more than punches and kicks, Fist Puncher still has a relatively low ceiling before combat gets too repetitive.  And while occasional minigames (such as a batting cage where I swear to Christ I could not line up to hit the fucking balls correctly) or hidden keys do try to make this something more, I just found Fist Puncher to be the type of generic brawler that has been done hundreds of times before and will continue to be done until the end of time.  Plus, the XBLIG port of the PC title is loaded with some awful glitches.  I died during one section of play and had to be brought back to life by being given CPR, which is done by hitting button prompts.  Once I was brought back to life, Brian was still bent over in the CPR position, unable to stand up.  This was not by design.  Weirdly, he eventually stood up, but none of the action buttons would work.  He had to intentionally let an enemy knock him down before anything would work again.  In addition to all of this, the sound effects (including the voice over narration after the first stage) would cut in and out, sometimes leading to playing whole stages without the satisfaction of hearing your fist smack against some asshole’s face.

I’m not scoring against the glitches (unacceptable as they are), because I didn’t like Fist Puncher regardless.  Indie Gamer Guy did, and it would seem many long-term fans of the genre disagree with me as well.  Having played through it, I do admit that Fist Puncher is a well crafted tribute to one of the industry’s most revered game types that does try to do a little bit more than they did.  But I never liked brawlers to begin with, so I was not who this game was aimed at, and Fist Puncher does absolutely nothing to try to convince people like me that we have it all wrong.  Its only ambition was to satisfy fans of games like Streets of Rage or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it seems to do that well.  I’ll never understand why games like this are still popular when gaming has come so very far since the mid 90s.  If anything, brawlers are having a revival, and not one of those ironic ones like people watching movies on VHS or pretending to like My Little Pony.  I’m talking honest-to-God elation.  I don’t get it.  A lot of people my age don’t get it.  Then again, people of their age don’t get how we could convince our parents to murder each-other on Black Friday to score the last booster pack of Pokemon cards for Christmas.  It’s a generational thing.

xboxboxartFist Puncher was developed by Team 2Bit

400 Microsoft Points have no opinion of Charlie Murder yet, except that it does try to do more with brawlers, and that’s a step in the right direction in the making of this review.

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Vintage Hero

July 27, 2013 by 5 Comments

I should preface this review by noting that Mega Man’s classic NES games have no nostalgic value for me, and the franchise as a whole I consider to be of little relevance to modern gaming.  I thought Mega Man 9 was alright.  I thought Mega Man 10 was alright, albeit slightly less so.  I tried and failed to get into the Battle Network series as a kid.  And if the amount of shit that I gave when Mega Man was announced for Smash Bros was any smaller, it would only be able to be studied at the Hadron Collider.  I’m not saying the series is a bad or that the games aren’t worth playing.  I’m saying Mega Man probably means a lot more to you (assuming you’re my average reader) than it does for me.

With that being said, Vintage Hero does Mega Man very well.  Mimicry can’t be as easy as people think.  If it were, there wouldn’t be so many classic gaming tributes on XBLIG or other platforms that completely miss the point of what the originals were about.  With platformers, it gets especially difficult.  Typically, even a game that comes really close to the original still has something off about it.  And once you latch onto what that one not-quite-right thing is, it’s all you notice.  Vintage Hero doesn’t have that.  It is so close to Mega Man in terms of gameplay and physics that it’s almost creepy.  Like one of those stories you hear where a famous actress meets an adoring fan who has built a life-sized statue of her made out of mayonnaise and caulking, and she has to smile through her teeth while waving to her agent to start filing for the restraining order.

Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. Lab assistant. I'm not sure who wins on points there.

Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. I’m not sure who wins on points there.

Vintage Hero’s controls are perfect Mega Man mimicry, and it makes this title a joy to play.  Of course, the spooky doppelgänger stuff comes in other forms.  The hero (with decidedly unheroic sounding name Floyd) has an arm cannon, just like Mega Man.  It fires bullets that look just like Mega Man’s bullets.  His running, jumping, and climbing animations look just like Mega Man’s.  When he dies, he explodes into smaller dots of energy, just like Mega Man.  Seriously, King Louie wants to know his secret.  If Vintage Hero had left it there, doing a very convincing Mega Man impersonation, that would have been enough to satisfy gamers.

But developer Frog the Door Games didn’t stop there.  Instead of phoning in the level design, he took it in original directions not seen in Mega Man titles.  Instead of leaving the basic gameplay mechanics intact, he added in a modern RPG-like upgrade system.  As a result, Vintage Hero stays fresh through-out.  Of course,  it’s about half the length of a Mega Man title.  There are four standard bosses (and yes, you acquire a new weapon after killing them), then two finale stages, one of which includes a boss-rush.  Is it too short?  Perhaps.  It’s sort of hard to complain when everything before the end credits is about as perfectly handled as any game designed like this could be.  If the developer ran out of time or money or patience, at least he had the good sense to stop before the game started to stagnate.  Me?  I always prefer ninety minutes where I can’t stop smiling to three hours where my mind occasionally wanders, if not outright gets bored.

Vintage Hero isn’t flawless.  I think the biggest issue it has (besides length if that matters to you), is that the game does the copy-cat thing so well that it fails to have a personality of its own.  I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I didn’t enjoy the characters, the enemy design, or especially the bosses.  It all felt a bit generic.  The story told between missions I found to be predictable, especially the big twist reveal.  It was so poorly handled that I questioned whether it was just dead-panning parody.  Then the bleak ending made it clear that this was all meant to be serious, and I just sort of shrugged.  Of course, they couldn’t just rip off the charm of Mega Man’s absurd enemy design.  Vintage Hero already straddles the line between loving tribute and lawsuit waiting to happen.  But you simply can’t replace the lunacy of “why did Wily make such impractical things like Robo-rabbits that shoot robo-carrots to kill Mega Man?” with doodles of red tentacles growing out of the ground, or things that look like hastily-drawn fetuses.

You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

Because of that, Vintage Hero would need to have exceptionally sharp and rewarding gameplay to really stand out.  And it does.  It’s been over a year since I’ve had the privilege of saying this about a new game, but Vintage Hero is the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made.  Here’s a game so married to an established franchise that it by all rights ought to have been saddled with the label of a well-meaning tribute, and nothing more.  Instead, it serves as an honorable homage, and a game that can fully stand on its own.  Its gameplay is fine-tuned.  Its levels inspired.  It actually pays tribute to vintage Mega Man better than Mega Man 9 or 10 did.  But most important, it’s a game that anyone can enjoy.  By the time I was on the gaming scene, Mega Man’s time as an icon had pretty much passed.  Nostalgia didn’t factor into this review.  Pure, unbridled love of gaming did.  And from that point of view, no XBLIG has ever been as well made as Vintage Hero.

(spits out Vintage Hero spunk, pops a breath mint)

xboxboxartVintage Hero was developed by Frog The Door Games

Seal of Approval Large80 Microsoft Points actively wonder why Lloyd doesn’t change colors when he equips a new item in the making of this review.  Well I take it all back, this is a shitty Mega Man ripoff.  It was all about the color swapping.

Vintage Hero is Chick-Approved and is the new #1 game on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  You should probably still click the link to bask in its #1ness anyway. 

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Avatar Physics: Running

July 23, 2013 by 2 Comments

If I pulled out a gun and shot myself right now, then reincarnated, I’m pretty sure I would be running in my new body faster than I would as my Xbox Avatar if I just stayed alive and kept trying at Avatar Physics: Running.  Based on the popular (and free, and slightly less impossible) flash-based game QWOP, Running is a simple 100 meter dash, only you have to manually work the legs of your avatar to get there.  Of course, doing so is complicated in a way that makes the Impossible Game look like a preschool admission test.  After over thirty minutes of playing, the furthest I had made it was a little over two meters past the starting line.  Mostly, my character just stiffened up and fell down, like she had simultaneously suffered a stroke while catching a glimpse of Medusa.  Take a look at this video from my amigo Splazer Productions.

Splazer did better than I did.  Hell, I typically ran further backwards than I did forwards.  The only value Avatar Physics: Running has is bemusement at your own failures.  This is obviously meant to be the primary draw of the game, as evidenced by the one and only marketplace picture featuring an avatar that has cocked things up about as bad as you can.  The problem is, laughing at how hard this game is only lasts about, oh, two minutes.  After that, it’s just frustration and tedium.  I’m certain someone out there can finish the full 100 meters.  I’m also certain someone out there knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.  It doesn’t make him any less dead.

xboxboxartAvatar Physics: Running was developed by Bwoot Games (blog hasn’t been updated in over a year, always a good sign)

80 Microsoft Points could have used some performance-enhancing drugs in the making of this review.

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Fishy Warfare

July 21, 2013 by 2 Comments

Fishy Warfare in the brook –

Why does your game have no hook?

Games like Fishy Warefare have historical importance.  The Atari 2600 launched with Combat (based on the arcade hit Tank), a game where players stood on opposite sides of the screen, taking shots at each other.  The first video game to have a microprocessor (as opposed to discrete logic) was Midway’s 1975 hit Gun Fight, which was later upgraded to a similar game called Boot Hill (which hit the Atari 2600 as Outlaw).  You’ll notice these games all came out in the 70s and really don’t hold that much relevance today.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t attempt to reinvent this formula that existed a decade before my father was a US citizen.  I’m saying that you have to give it some kind of hook to make it relevant today.  Or at least attempt to be better than those moldy oldies.

Fishy Warfare is a worst XBLIG of the year contender based entirely on uselessness.  It looks ugly.  There’s no multiplayer.  The AI is brain-dead.  The gameplay is boring.  The upgrades are dull.  The final nail is the insulting 240MSP price tag.  All this for a game that was hardly ambitious in concept to begin with.  You’re on one side of a screen.  Your AI opponent is on the other.  You shoot until one of you is dead.  Then you upgrade your ship and do it again.  The game presents nothing resembling a challenge until you fight a giant alligator thing that has some kind of laser-firebreath thing that can kill you in one hit.  Until I got to it, I never needed upgrade my ship.  After dying against this, I had enough money to get the best weapon, ship, hull, and propeller.  So I did.  Then I had to fight my way back to the Alligator, because the game sends you backwards and makes you replay previous fights when you lose (just to make sure maximum boredom and repetition is achieved).  At which point, it instakilled me again.  Grumble.

This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don't spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.

This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don’t spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.

Despite what people think, I do look for good things to say about even the worst games.  But, I couldn’t find one for Fishy Warfare.  The graphics look like they were drawn in MS Paint.  The backgrounds are a bit on the loud side, which sometimes makes the projectiles hard to see.  The highest upgraded weapon is also the most visually uninteresting of the whole lot.  That’s extraordinarily nit-picky, but for some reason that stuck with me long after I finished playing.  Maybe because it sums up everything wrong with Fishy Warfare.  Everything feels so rushed and not handled with care.  I don’t know what else to say.  Boring.  Bad.  Overpriced.  You could probably buy a couple actual fighting fish for the same price and make them fight to the death, then eat the loser.  And then eat the winner too, because it probably is meatier and yummier.

xboxboxartFishy Warfare was developed by Elemental Zeal

240 Microsoft Points could buy the top three games on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard for the same price as this in the making of this review.  I don’t have a joke to go with that, just thought I would state the obvious.

 

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Dark Quest

July 17, 2013 by 7 Comments

Dark Quest is based on the early 90s cult board game hit HeroQuest.  I’ve never played the game, but after asking around on Twitter, I had a few fans of it confirm that it’s a very close facsimile of the real thing.  If that’s what you’ve been looking for over the last twenty years, this review is irrelevant to you.  Go get it.  This review is for those who missed out on it when it was played using cheap plastic characters, dice, and cardboard.

In the interest of professionalism, I looked up the original rules to the game.  And by that, I mean I watched a four-minute long video by the Angry Video Game Nerd that kind of, sort of explained the rules.  I thought “ugh, looks complicated.  Well, at least I’ll be able to learn how the game plays in the tutorial they no doubt took the time to meticulously craft.”  Which again proves that the whole Cuban women having clairvoyance thing is hogwash.  There is no tutorial for Dark Quest.  You’re thrown into the first dungeon immediately, which offers things that are sort of pointers, but not really.  Fighting enemies, discovering hidden traps, and using various weapons are mechanics the player is left to discover on their own.  I suppose if you’re familiar with HeroQuest, this might not be so bad.  For people like me, it’s clear that we’re unwelcome guests at the Dark Quest party.

Yea, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea what I was doing.

Yea, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea what I was doing.

After somehow stumbling through the first dungeon and picking up a couple secondary characters, I shamefully succumbed to boredom and ignorance in the second level.  Here, you have to find hidden jewels, insert them into statues to activate a door, and then fight roughly five million skeletons, give or take.  The problem here was my previously established “worst random luck in gaming” status was confirmed about ten fold.  I would swing at the skeletons with my barbarian and miss.  Then my dwarf and miss.  Then my wizard and miss.  Or, if I didn’t miss, something would pop up that said “CHEAT DEATH” which I think is basically a fancy way of saying “missed.”  Then, the room full of skeletons would attack.  Funny enough, they would also miss more often than hit, no matter which of the characters they attacked.  But, they had numbers on me, and slowly I would drain away until I was reduced to a pile of bones.  I either was killed by the skeletons or I died of boredom.  Not sure which.

I tried this level a few times.  There is a small instruction card, which noted that the dwarf was the best defender.  So, on my second attempt, when I would enter a room that I knew was filled with baddies, I would lead with him.  Which made sense, since he has the largest movement.  Now, here’s where it gets weird: the dwarf, the guy with the alleged best defense, was the character that the enemies missed the least.  It was un-fucking-canny.  I’m not blaming the developers for me being unlucky, but I would ask them “are you sure this guy has extra points of defense?”  What am I missing here?  Besides 3 out of 4 of my attempts at attacks?  To make matters worse, every once in a while the dungeon master would spit out a random effect, which includes such things as “lose some gold” or “lose your turn.”  What did he hit most often?  “Lose one health.”  Of course that’s what he did.  Meanwhile, I was getting my will to go on sapped by the game’s snail-like pace and unintuitive control scheme.  After giving that second dungeon a fourth go and dying in the same fucking room, I’d had enough.  Yep, I couldn’t even complete the second stage.  Shame on me, I suck as a gamer, yada yada yada.

You know what?  In this case, I don’t think it was just me.  I’ve heard from at least one other player that they were the victim of missing far too often when they went to attack.  Or sometimes a character can be next to an enemy and they can spend multiple turns swinging at each other and missing every time.  Each stage has a time limit in the form of a limited number of turns the player can take.  I never came close to the limit, but the sheer number of turns that a battle can drag out could be problematic in later levels.  Maybe.

Why the fuck do I not automatically pick up whatever gold or items I step over? Why does this game seem to go out of its way to be inconvenient? Grrrrrrrr!

Why the fuck do I not automatically pick up whatever gold or items I step over? Why does this game seem to go out of its way to be inconvenient? Grrrrrrrr!

I know I’m not who this game was made for, and that’s fine with me.  It looks good.  It sounds good.  I know HeroQuest fans are satisfied with it.  Although they’re a little puzzled by the lack of dice.  However, non-fans will find a slow, newb-hating dungeon crawler in board-game form that is about as exciting a watching paint dry.  On top of that, I also think fans of HeroQuest will find things to be disappointed in it.  There’s no multiplayer.  Granted, eliminating a player controlling the enemies is probably a logical and reasonable thing to hand off to the AI.  But, not having the option for four players to take control of the heroes is kind of silly, especially since board games such as this are built entirely around social interaction.  I guess you could hypothetically just pass the controller off to other players after making your move.  It’s not really convenient, but hey, it’s a chance to play a moderately popular  game twenty years after it dropped off the face of the earth.  I mean, it wasn’t popular enough to last more than a couple of years on store shelves.  And you would think fans of the game would still own the corporeal board and game pieces.  Okay, so I have no fucking clue at all why this game exists, since it takes almost no advantage of things that can only be done in the realm of video games.  H.i.v.e. demonstrated they can at least be used to ease people into learning a new game, but Dark Quest doesn’t even do that.  Nor does it have online support.  This was a weird one to review.  A really well produced homage to some vintage thing that I’d never heard of.  I can’t recommend it to non-fans of the thing it’s based on, but even fans might find little to get excited about.  Don’t get me wrong: there’s an audience for Dark Quest.  Twitter already confirmed that for me.  What I’m saying is, if you want to properly pay tribute to a classic gaming property, here’s a thought: use some of this space-age technology we have these days and make the original concept better.  Otherwise, it’s less a tribute and more like grave robbery.

xboxboxartDark Quest was developed by Brain Seal Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points wouldn’t mind some kind of version of Don’t Break the Ice for Wii U, but only if it involves using the touch screen and an actual mallet in the making of this review.

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Man, I Hate That Indie Game!

July 16, 2013 by 4 Comments

I get Man, I Hate That Indie Game.

I don’t like it, but I get it.

I think.

Hate That Indie comes from the developers of Don’t Die Dateless Dummy!, which is far and away the most popular review I’ve ever done here at Indie Gamer Chick.  It has more total views from search engines than the next thirteen highest games do combined.  This statistic has led to various developers threatening to jump out of windows.  And yet, that review is also responsible for me converting many Looky Loos into long-term readers.  Incidentally, that’s also why I won’t be shaking any of my fans’ hands at game conventions.  I know where those hands have been, and it ain’t pretty.

This follow-up to Don’t Die Dateless Dummy comes at a time when the views for it were finally dropping off.  The cynic crowd is decrying it as another soulless boob game designed to attract the genital tug-of-war crowd and make a quick buck.  But actually, Hate That Indie is more of an indictment against various gaming factions.  The anti-feminist crowd, cynical indie developers, and boob games (I shit you not) are all satirized in an insanely over-the-top fashion here.  The basic idea is a group of girls that are part of an indie development club recruit you to help them with their projects, and you’re put in the middle of a power struggle between them.  Your.. girlfriend I guess?.. wants to make a game just for the fun of it.  The other two are looking for profits.  And this is where the game gets touchy for some folks.

For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called "Google" now that you can use to look for boobs that don't cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.

For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called “Google” now that you can use to look for boobs that don’t cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.

There’s the Ex-Indie Developing Cynic who hates indie games because nobody tries to make good games and developers are all geeks who speak in techno-babble and make games with animated boobs.  His girlfriend is the optimistic go-getter who has no actual game design talent, and he calls her out on it.  Her two friends either want to make games for money by copying existing games or cloning stuff based on what’s trendy, or simply to build their computer science portfolio.  Dialog trees only have two options, a good one and a bad one.  If you choose the bad one, you verbally tear into the girl in just about the most mean-spirited, online-bully speak possible.  This is rubbing people the wrong way.

Guys, come on.  This is clearly a satire.  And I’m not joking about that either.  I’m not playing the sarcastically oblivious game reviewer here.  This was obviously a joke.  And, in a way, it might be brilliant.  I’ve probably talked with close to five-hundred different developers or would-be developers in the two years I’ve done Indie Gamer Chick.  Trust me, there are a LOT of people like the main character.  Jaded.  Bitter.  Fed up with the culture and ready to pack up their shit and quit.  The main lead, when you pick the “good” answers, is a near-perfect caricature of dozens of guys I’ve talked with.  It’s so spot-on that it’s spooky.

As for the “evil” dialog, again, come on guys.  You can’t be that thick.  It’s the type of over-the-top sexism that is all over the gaming community.  The kind that nobody really should take seriously.  I went two years without it, and now I’ve been getting it by the boatload ever since I announced that I was working with Indie Royale on an XBLIG-themed bundle with my name on it.  The evil options in Man, I Hate That Indie Game! sound just like the stuff I’ve been getting.  It’s uncanny.  And it’s also clearly parody.  The guys take swipes at themselves frequently in the dialog.  They make fun of boob games, when in fact this game is itself a boob game.  Get it?  This was spot on.  Perhaps too deadpan though.  There’s Leslie Nielsen deadpan and Sean Penn reading the local obituaries deadpan where anyone listening wants to crawl into a hole and die.  They did the Sean Penn thing, and it makes the game kind of depressing.

Don’t worry though, you won’t have to do too much of it.  I followed the “good” dialog and finished the game in under ten minutes.  No, really.  There are multiple endings of course.  I played a few times and got one where I died alone, one where I stole a girl’s game engine and used it for myself, and finally one where I shacked up one of the girls.  This ending even made a joke about doing a time-jump, which seemingly skipped entire chapters of the game.  Since I played Don’t Die Dateless Dummy several times and never once got an ending that didn’t die with me becoming an all-powerful virginal wizard (which is the bad ending for some reason), getting laid after approximately six minutes seemed like the total victory of Mount Midoriyama to me.  Yea, go figure.  I finally play one of these fucking games where I might give two squirts about the story and where they’re going with it and it turns out they don’t really have all that far to go with it.  My theory is they needed to make sure the game ended before the blistered hand brigade climaxed.

After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character "John Conner" and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.

After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character “John Conner” and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.

The biggest problem is that everything wrong with Don’t Die Dateless Dummy from a purely mechanic point of view is still present.  When the game ends, you can’t go back to just try the other parts of dialog.  You have to start from the beginning.  Unless you save, which is a very slow, clunky process that is also quite unresponsive to the controller for some reason.  The main draw is still clearly presented as still images of school-aged anime girls.  Combine that with the satirical take on indie gaming culture being too short and unrealized (plus an absolutely asinine $3 price tag) and there is simply no reason to get Man, I Hate This Indie Game!  You know what?  I do hate this fucking game, but not for the reasons people would have thought.  I hate it because they actually had a good idea here and didn’t take it as far as it seems they could have.  It felt like I was being pitched on this hilarious idea for a game, then the person cut themselves off after a minute by pulling out some piano wire and garroting themselves.

xboxboxartMan, I Hate That Indie Game! was developed by cupholder

240 Microsoft Points.. seriously, that’s too fucking much.. will be playing the first game by the guys behind this and Don’t Die Dateless Dummy sometime soon in the making of this review.  You know what?  It’s an RPG that actually looks good!

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Monkey Poo Flinger

July 15, 2013 by 7 Comments

No, really.

You can file Monkey Poo Flinger.. again, no really.. under novelty games. It has no real value as a game. On my most generous day, I would call its gameplay mediocre. On a less than generous day, I would probably just flip the bird and make fart noises with my mouth. But seriously, you don’t buy a game called Monkey Poo Flinger expecting the next Spec Ops – The Line. You get it because monkeys are hilarious, poo is hilarious, and monkeys throwing poo is the greatest comedy goldmine of all time.

BUT, if your game is going to be themed around a monkey throwing poo at people, it has to at least look good. Covering some gawking human with feces should be a visually satisfying experience. That’s not the case here. The graphics look crude, so any successful shot doesn’t have any zing to it. I mean, you just absolutely plastered some asshole in the face with a handful of shit. When I do that to Brian, it’s the highlight of my day. Here, it’s just hollow. I mean, look at it.

Footage courtesy of Splazer Productions

It looks horrible. It’s actually not as bad as it appears from a gameplay perspective, but it’s still not fun.  Monkey Poo Flinger is a pretty basic gallery shooter. Press the right trigger to shoot. Targets walk in front of you and you shoot them. Sometimes there are barriers between you and then. Sometimes they throw stuff back. Sometimes the game forgets to take its brain pills and takes away your ability to shoot altogether in a level that is, I shit you not, themed around being constipated. Not that I’m offended. I’ve played games where you have to feed cows prune juice to give them diarrhea and games where you use yellow snowballs as weapons. Do you know what all those games have in common? The novelty wore thin pretty fast, and you’re left with a game that was average at best (Conker) or pretty terrible (South Park 64). The novelty is a non-factor in Monkey Poo Flinger because the graphics just don’t do the concept justice. Thus, it’s boring right from the get-go.

I’ll say this: I thought I would be playing something utterly broken, and that’s not the case. There’s a real game here. It’s just not fun at all. There’s other problems too, like projectiles (especially from the seagulls) being too hard to see, or the targets not being large enough. Probably the best thing about the game is the dialog, which is like saying the best part about getting hypothermia is you get a souvenir blanket. The between-the-levels banter offers, at best, a smirk and a shake of the head. But you have to play a dull as dirt game to get those meager crumbs of entertainment. So I can’t really recommend Monkey Poo Flinger. I also have to ask a couple of questions that really ought to be addressed: where the hell is that monkey getting all that shit from? Does his anus contain a fucking zip-drive? And why does the zoo leave this monkey in such a high foot-trafficked area? I think a better concept would have been a mad monkey won’t stop throwing shit at people and we have to stop it, with the ultimate goal of dropping it off at the state department so that we can send it to North Korea as a, ahem, diplomatic gift.

xboxboxartMonkey Poo Flinger was developed by Derf ‘N’ Derf

80 Microsoft Points had a shitty day in the making of this review.

Yea, I know my reviews have sucked these last couple weeks. I promise, I’ll try to get back into form this week.

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