Without Escape

April 8, 2012 by 28 Comments

I really, truly don’t get the appeal in point and click games.  I’ve seen my father, a fairly jovial individual if there ever was one, lose his shit and degenerate into a snarling, swearing madman whenever he can’t find his car keys.  Somehow, the old man always misplaces them and it drives him crazy.  Point and Clickers are the video game version of “where the fuck are my keys?”  A scavenger hunt where you go from room to room looking for trinket A that goes into hole B based on the always batshit insane logic of the developer.

Without Escape cranks the nutbar meter up all the way to raving lunatic with some of its logic.  You play as a dude who wakes up in his house and everyone is gone.  It tries to present itself like one of those “escape the room” games, but it fails.  It feels like any other Plicker game, right down to the stupid “pick up the items and use them in ways you would never actually use them” idea.  I’ll give you some examples.  In one scene, there’s something shiny in a toilet, but the dude refuses to put his hand in it.  Right, because when you’re in a situation where you’re alone and terrified, you’re really worried about getting a little shit on your hands.  If I’m in the dude’s situation, shit is already in my pants by this point and probably trickling down my legs, so what does it matter?

What's the number for Ghost Busters again?

But no, Mr. Prissy wants to avoid the poop in the toilet in his own bathroom (which means it’s probably his own) and needs something to reach down and get it.  Now despite being in his house, with all his belongings, he has no idea where anything he could use to get this is.  Off the top of my head, I could rattle of multiple things I could use to fish a key out of a toilet.  Right next to the bathroom is his closet, which I’m guessing has a coat hanger in it.  Just bend the coat hanger into a fishing hook and not only do you have a way to retrieve the key, but you also have an emergency abortion kit if the need ever arises.

Oh wait, the closet door is locked.  And we’re also too much of a sissy to kick the door open.  Or any door, for that matter.  Why does nobody ever kick open doors in these games?  They search around for a key that they need to accomplish some important task when their foot and the laws of physics are right there the whole fucking time!  Hell, if someone really is fucking with you, kicking doors open might be a good way to show them who the boss is.  But no, he doesn’t want to hire someone out to fix the door, so he searches around for something he can use.  And what does he find?  A sweater.  No really, that’s what you use.  He wraps his arm in a sweater to grab the key.  The character even notes that it doesn’t work all that well.  Mind you, there’s a shower curtain right fucking there next to fucking toilet!  Shower curtains being things that repel water.  I’ve worn sweaters and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I promise you, they do everything BUT repel water.

I can’t really complain all that much, because this happens in every point and click game.  I can complain about the graphics.  The screen is too dark and you can’t adjust the settings for it.  In some rooms, the back walls are nearly completely enveloped in darkness.  After much complaining from Brian, I finally relented and adjusted the brightness on my television.  It didn’t help.  Stuff was still not viewable.  Stuff that apparently should have been.  I clicked in the darkness and my dude described a painting to me that I couldn’t see. It’s really annoying.

The ending is fucking abysmal too.  The game sets itself up as a psychological breakdown, but ends up going a bizarre Sci-Fi route involving the destruction the entire universe and you being handpicked to build the next one.  It makes no sense at all why they would choose to fuck with you the way they have.  Whatever.  The story sucks, but the game doesn’t really suck any more or any less than the average point and clicker.  If you’re into this type of thing, you’ll probably enjoy this.  If you’re like me and think they’re fucking stupid, it won’t change your mind.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hide my father’s car keys again.

Without Escape was developed by MaikelChan

80 Microsoft Points inch closer towards their inheritance, one “misplaced” set of car keys at a time in the making of this review.

See those buttons below that allow you share this review with the world?  If you enjoy my stuff, do me a favor and use them. 

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Choc-a-riffic

April 7, 2012 by 2 Comments

Easter is upon us, so I figured I would review a game based on the Easter Bunny.  Even though I’m still not sure what bunnies with colored chicken eggs has to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Quite frankly, a zombie game review would be more appropriate.  Actually, the explanation for bunnies and Easter is kind of comical.  Apparently people in the middle ages were stupid and assumed that rabbits were self-reproductive.  Thus, they would give birth as virgins and had some kind of connection to the Virgin Mary.  Okay, so I’m still not sure how this ties to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Screw it, let’s play Choc-a-riffic.

It’s a physics-puzzler where you play as a rabbit that has to push chocolate eggs to an exit.  You do this by pushing them with your body, or shifting the position of your arms with the right thumb stick.  You jump with the right bumper, because the developers decided to make things as inconvenient as possible.  And, well, that’s pretty much it.

Here comes Peter Cottontail, hoping down the bunny trail.. and he's coming for your immortal soul.

Choc-a-riffic is crap-a-riffic.  Hopefully everyone understands that I’m trying to convey that it’s terrible.  The physics are unstable.  A few times I pushed an egg, saw it bounce into another egg, and then launch into the air.  Other times, I would try to jump in the air and fling upwards like I had just huffed two condensed tons of helium.  The controls are crap, and the main character is a little creepy.  Based on the subject matter, I’m guessing Choc-a-riffic is aimed at the kiddie set.  If so, they should be warned that -I- was almost traumatized when I “accidentally” steered the rabbit into a fire, then left him there just to see what would happen.  I figured he would eventually do what every video game character in the situation would do: a backflip followed by laying down.  Instead, the little fucker caught fire and continued to walk around in screaming agony, like he was the bunny version of Freddy Krueger.   Wait a minute, Freddy kept dying and coming back from the dead.  Just like.. oh my God, IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!

Choc-a-riffic was developed by Projector Games

80 Microsoft Points said Father forgive me for I have sinned.  It has been seven days since my last confession.  Well Padre, I believe I screwed the pooch this time.  I compared my Lord and Savor Jesus Christ to Freddy Krueger.  No, it wasn’t exactly directly.  More in a roundabout kind of way.  It’s not that I believe that Jesus would knife kids in their dreams or anything like that.  Wait, just to make sure, Jesus didn’t do that, did he?  Father?  Father?  In the making of this review.  God, I hope my parents never read this one.

Gameplay footage courtesy of Fredrick.

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48 Chambers

April 6, 2012 by 8 Comments

48 Chambers received a Second Chance with the Chick.  Click here to read it.  Consider the new review the definitive one.

48 Chambers is kind of fun.  It can also fuck off.  I don’t take telling stuff to fuck off lightly.  I reserve it for things that I might care about.  In the case of 48 Chambers, it has clean graphics and an interesting hook.  Think of it as a top down dexterity-tester, sort of like N or maybe a little like a previous game I reviewed here, Crazy Balloon Lite.  The idea is to navigate a ball past obstacles and to an exit before you run out of time.  If you pick up any dots along the way, they add to the timer.  Sometimes you have to first pick up keys that open doors.  All really straight-forward maze type of stuff.  But it can be fun.  I actually wish I could try it with an old-timey trackball like coin-ops had back in the day.  Apparently I could, if I bought the PC version.

But I didn’t buy the PC version.  I bought it on Xbox Live Indie Games.  And it can fuck off.  Not because of the controls, which surprisingly work well on a joystick.  When Brian and I previewed this for Indies in Due Time, my biggest fear was having loose control that would render the game unplayable.  Totally unfounded.  The controls actually lean towards the heavy side, and this works.  It makes it very unlikely that you’ll accidentally skid off into a spike.  It’s not a perfect solution to a mouse, or especially a trackball, but it does the trick.

No, the game can fuck off because it lacks two very key ingredients.  One, there’s no continues.  Once you game over, you get to start all over from level one.  I’m not a big fan of this concept for gaming.  Continuing is kind of a big deal to me, because I have an aversion towards playing things I’ve already done before.  I want to finish something and be done with it.  I don’t want to keep starting over from scratch.  48 Chambers is a game that relies somewhat heavily on trial-and-error, yet if I run out of lives twenty levels in, I have to play the previous 20 levels before I can continue to trial and error my way any further.  Fuck that.  It’s 2012.  The concept of being able to continue a game was kind of established around 1980.  I don’t see how it makes me a bitch to expect a gaming convention that has proven to be effective and valuable for over thirty fucking years.

But, I could have put up with that if 48 Chambers had online leaderboards.  Which it does.  If you have the PC version.  Which I don’t.  The excuse for the lack of one on XBLIG is the same old shit.  It’s not a real leaderboard, it’s a crappy peer-to-peer one, blah blah blah.  Who cares?  Ghettoized XBLIG leaderboards are better than none at all.  In some games, like for example the #1 game on this site, the presence of one can make the difference between being a leaderboard game and myself arranging a picket at the developer’s house.  With no continuing, the only reason I would have to press forward and continue playing the game is trying to land a spot on that board.  So 48 Chambers can go fuck off.  No continues.  No leaderboards.  It needed one or the other, and it has neither.  Why would I keep playing?  Pride?  Right, because being able to beat a video game that will have a user base somewhere south of the membership of the Mother Teresa Erotic Fan-Fiction group on Google will provide me with a real ego boost.

48 Chambers was developed by Discord Games

80 Microsoft Points would have rather had DLC for Take Arms in the making of this review.

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Arkedo Series

April 5, 2012 by 10 Comments

Thankfully the code-giveaway portion of this feature is over with.  I had a total of nineteen entrees.  Nineteen.  That’s over the course of a month.  Well, like the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him vote for a chance to win Microsoft Points.  Sigh.

Well, I’m not going to let you non-voting types spoil my fun here.  Oh no.  The voters already did that themselves with all the mediocre games they picked for me.  Sure, I liked Breath of Death and Cthulhu Saves the World, but the thing is, I already liked them, on account of having played them before I started Indie Gamer Chick.  On the other hand, I thought Lumi was fucking terrible and the Decay series was kind of a mixed bag.  A mixed bag containing dead plague rats and tampon run-off.  This week, we have the Arkedo Series.  Three games with nothing in common except they’re all XBLIGs by the same developer and they cost 240 Space Bucks each.  Oh, and they’re boring as fuck.

Well actually, JUMP! isn’t.  The first game of the series is also probably the best.  It’s a neo-retro platformer where you play as a guy that in no way resembles Indiana Jones.  There are various bombs scattered throughout the stage and you have to collect them before the timer on them reaches zero.  Once you have all the bombs, you make your way to the door.

Despite JUMP! priding itself on being old-school, it has a modern-style of pixelated graphics that looks really slick.  It also seems to want to feel like an old timey punisher, but it’s not overly difficult.  Maybe it gets that way later, but I won’t be around to find out.  You see, JUMP! also brings over a couple antiquated game mechanics, such as a lives system.  I didn’t think much of it, until I ran out of lives and the game popped up a message that said something like “Doesn’t it suck how old-school games don’t let you continue?”  At which point I sighed and declared to Brian “call for a penis-shaped U-Haul because I believe a dick move is coming.”  Indeed, JUMP! has no continue system.  When you run out of lives, you get to start the whole thing over.  And thus it can officially go fuck itself.

The second game is SWAP!  It’s a Pokemon Puzzle League sort-of clone where blocks rise from underneath the screen and you have to clear them by lining up four of them.  That’s pretty much it.  I have to say, SWAP! is well made in terms of graphics and controls (mostly), but it’s just really boring.  This same kind of game has already been done better for decades now.  Because you need to line up four blocks, it doesn’t leave you enough room to set up the types of insane combos a game like this needs to hook me in.  It doesn’t even have a versus mode.  I’m not sure why so many people assured me I would enjoy SWAP!  Yea, like all the games in this series, it has a level of sophistication typically unseen on Xbox Live Indie Games.  I just feel that it’s dull compared to other puzzlers.  Hell, it’s dull compared to that annoying kid that lives next door.  The one that chews the plastic tips of his shoelaces.

Finally, there’s PIXEL!  Before trying it, I figured I already had played it on account of it having the same character and graphics style as a PSP Mini called Pix’n Love Rush, but the two games aren’t similar at all.  Love Rush was neat variation on the endless-runner genre.  PIXEL! is an incredibly generic platformer that’s only original idea is ruined by shitty play control.  You play as a cat that has to hop and bop enemies.  The actual platforming follows every convention of the genre, stupid or otherwise.  Like SWAP! the game is competent but boring.  You’ve played dozens, maybe hundreds of games like this in your life.  PIXEL! has no potential to land itself anywhere near the top of that list.

The one original idea is being able to freeze the game with the left trigger to open up a magnifying glass.  If you click special blocks with it, you enter a maze mini-game, where you steer a cursor around looking for an exit.  Typically, you have X amount of seconds to find it or you return to the main game and lose a tick of health.  This would be fun, except the cursor is so damned sensitive that it’s easy to skip right past the exit and hit a block that will push you away from it and back to beginning.  Even as I got late into the game, I never quite got the hang of it.  Other mystery blocks involve silly things like press the A button to cut a tree down, or answering questions to get to the next area of a stage.  My gut tells me PIXEL! was meant to be a Nintendo DS game (the developer had made some games for that platform) and these were supposed to be touch-screen events.

Either way, PIXEL! is completely boring.  It’s slow-paced, it’s repetitive, the levels are clichéd, the enemies are stock, and it just isn’t any fun.  Yes, it looks really good, sounds really good, and plays really good (outside of the mazes), but it’s less than the sum of its parts.  That’s pretty much true of the series as a whole.  JUMP! might have been worth recommending, but the one problem it has is big enough to be a deal breaker.  As far as SWAP! and PIXEL! go, all I can say is they are good-looking, well made sleeping pills.

Arkedo Series – 01 JUMP!, Arkedo Series – 02 SWAP!, and Arkedo Series – 03 PIXEL! were developed by Arkedo

240 Microsoft Points apiece do recommend Pix’n Love Rush on both PlayStation Network and iPhone in the making of this review. 

Thank you to all my readers for helping to keep me motivated.  This marks the 198th, 199th, and 200th games reviewed at Indie Gamer Chick!  Here’s to 2,000 more!

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Super Ninja Warrior Extreme

April 2, 2012 by 4 Comments

Usually when people accuse me of having a bias against punishers, I point to Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes, the second game I ever reviewed here and an original member of the leaderboard.  Of course, that review was done on July 2, and I haven’t been exceptionally kind to any of its kin since then.  Well, now I have another one I can point to and say “I didn’t hate it.”  Well, except the name.  It’s called Super Ninja Warrior Extreme.  Thankfully they tacked on “Extreme” to the end of the name, because I can’t picture myself playing a game called Super Ninja Warrior.  Maybe if it was just Ninja Warrior, but I think we’ll all agree that a ninja warrior who is super but not extreme must be some kind of pussy.  The whole point of being super is so that you can also be extreme.  Of course, the flip side of that is being an extreme ninja warrior that is not super is just needlessly reckless and wrong.

The only explanation I have for why the dude has a beehive on his face is he's EXTREME!

Actually, I think the “super” part of the equation is misleading.  If your ninja dude brushes up against a spike, he explodes instantly into a mass of limbs and blood.  Yeesh.  I would hate to think of what would happen to him if he used a back scratcher.  Actually, all enemies and projectiles result in instant death.  To balance things out, you have a sword with a decent amount of reach and the ability to wall jump.  And, well that’s pretty much it.  Thirty levels, go.

I’m not really sure if being a punisher was the aim of Hyper Samurai Soldier Supreme.  I say this because most of the 30 levels aren’t really all that hard to beat.  More than half of them I finished on my first try, and that doesn’t just include the opening stages.  There were levels that left me temporarily agitated, but they are immediately followed by levels that can be solved in around fifteen seconds.  This happens even late in the game, resulting in a difficulty curve with more dips than a roller coaster.

I saw this same scene when I took that tour of the jerky factory.

Otherwise, it’s not a bad game by any means.  It’ll take an hour to finish, and that’s fine.  That means it doesn’t stick around long enough to wear out its welcome.  The controls are pretty good.  A touch sensitive, maybe.  In a few later stages, you’ll have to nudge the stick with a degree of delicacy that rivals giving CPR to a butterfly.  Oh, and every stage ends with the same boss that takes two hacks to kill, no more, no less.  Even the final stage has this dude in it, and thus things end without feeling climatic in the least bit.  I had planned on bitching about Super Ninja Warrior Extreme using a four-digit password system instead of saving, but given how quickly it can be finished, any save system at all is as unnecessary as a driver’s manual written in Braille.

Super Ninja Warrior Extreme was developed by Ho-Hum Games

80 Microsoft Points wonder why there is no game called Tepid Ninja Warrior Mild in the making of this review.

Did you know I’m giving away 1600 Microsoft Points on Thursday?  Oh, you did.  You don’t care.  Sigh.  Well, you can at least humor me and vote for next week’s game.  Just follow the link for a list.

Video footage courtesy of Aaron the Splazer

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We Are Cubes

March 31, 2012 by 9 Comments

This is what I made Indie Gamer Chick for. We Are Cubes is simply amazing.

There’s really no point in showing pictures, since We Are Cubes is incomprehensible unless you’re actually playing it. In fact, quit wasting your time. Just go buy it.

We Are Cubes does that thing neo-retro arcade titles tend to do, where it sort of reminds you of a Golden Age coin-op classic, but not really. Hopefully you get what I’m saying, because I really suck at putting words to it. In the case of We Are Cubes, it’s kind of like Tempest, but it’s also kind of like the 1983 Star Wars arcade game, and yet it’s nothing like those games at all. I was born in 1989, so the Golden Age of Arcades was tits up, lights out by time I hit the gaming scene. With We Are Cubes, I can sort imagine what it felt like to step up to a new cabinet in a dusty old arcade of yesteryear. Games like this make me feel like I missed out.

The idea is you’re a cube in a chute that has to shoot spheres. Also, she sells seashells by the sea-shore. The spheres come in four varieties of colors. Yellow ones take a single shot to kill, green take two, blue three, and red four. Every time you hit a shot, 10% is added to your combo. If you miss a shot, you lose 20% of your combo. If a sphere touches you, you die. If you they fall past you in the chute, they get launched back onto the play field and you lose 10% of your current combo. The hook is spheres split apart and then merge whenever they perfectly bump into each other. So a blue sphere splits into two green spheres, which split into yellow spheres, which turn back into a green sphere if they bump together, etc, etc. It’s a really cool idea, and it works.

There’s two modes of play. Arcade ends after twenty-five waves, while Survival has you fight multiple “boss” orbs that shit out little baby orbs until you run out of lives. Both modes can be played in a competitive mode, where you “work together” wink nudge while trying to kill each-other by grabbing controller-jamming power-ups. Actually, most of the items in this game are pretty cool and practical, and learning how to best use them feels rewarding. Early on, I figured the laser was the best one of have, but as enemies pile up, it can get pretty dangerous to use. The freeze item works better because it allows you to shoot at enemies and rack up a higher combo.

By this point, your thumbs will be filing for legal separation.

We Are Cubes is all about landing a spot on the online leaderboards. That’s pretty much the point of the game in its entirety. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I do have a few complaints. Sometimes, the physics seem to crap out and an orb that is bouncing around ends up stuck to the wall. If your trigger finger is as itchy as your girlfriend’s crotch, those types of situations end up with a missed shot and 20% points off your combo. Of course, the flip side of that is if you’re the patient type, you get a wide open shot. A more annoying problem is the game has a slight hiccup if you unlock a fakey achievement, causing a slight pause that did kill me once or twice. If anyone from the development team had been in kicking distance of me, they would have had a size 6 1/2 up their ass.

Yes, I have teeny feet.

Despite minor problems, and I want to stress this so I’ll use bold, italics, and underlining, minor problems, We Are Cubes is one of the best video games I’ve played in years. Not just for indie games. Not just for Xbox games. VIDEO GAMES. The whole lot of them. It ranks somewhere near the top. We Are Cubes is proof that Xbox Live Indie Games is a platform worth sticking up for. It’s a game that is oddly familiar, yet you’ve never quite played anything like it. At the end of the day, it earns it’s spot as the #1 game on my site because it feels like the quintessential video game. It’s everything gaming should be. Fast paced, reflexive, play-a-little-longer fun in its purest form. We Are Cubes feels like it fell through a hole in time, straight out of the 80s and into your living room. Kind of like the cast of the Celebrity Apprentice, only it doesn’t suck.

We Are Cubes was developed by 1BK

igc_approved180 Microsoft Points are also grateful it didn’t bring back with it tacky sunglasses and Madonna in the making of this review.

Did you know I’m giving away 1600 Microsoft Points on Thursday?  Oh, you did.  You don’t care.  Sigh.  Well, you can at least humor me and vote for next week’s game.  Just follow the link for a list.

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Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World

March 30, 2012 by 18 Comments

I have no interest in making Xbox Live Indie Games myself.  But, if I were to hypothetically suffer some kind of brain trauma where side effects included a compulsion to create games that few would try and even fewer would buy, I would start by pulling out what I call the “Checklist of Annoyances.”  Everyone has their own personal list of things that are fucking stupid that pop up time and time again in gaming.  If I was to develop games, my personal goal would be to eliminate as many instances of these things as possible.  I think my homies at Zeboyd Games subscribe to that theory, because their games play like they were built around my personal Checklist of Annoyances: RPG Edition.

As many of you know, Breath of Death VII was the very first Xbox Live Indie Game I ever purchased.  I think I caught wind of it through Joystiq and figured “what the hell?”  Guess what?  I really liked it.  A lot.  I liked it so much I immediately went back to the Indie channel to see what other treasures I was missing.  Then I saw what other games were on the best-selling list at the time and decided that my Microsoft Points would be better spent on a baseball cap for my avatar.  I didn’t give the XBLIG channel a second thought until I started Indie Gamer Chick.  I did wonder if anything would become of the company that gave me the five glorious hours spent with Breath of Death VII.  As it turns out, they went on to do Cthulhu Saves the World before being tapped by Penny Arcade to do their next game.  They’re a good choice, because like Penny Arcade, Zeboyd is good at creating genuine humor that stops being funny about halfway through whatever media it’s on.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Breath of Death VII features 8-Bit graphics.

Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World are essentially the same game with different plots and graphic styles.  This is where the Checklist of Annoyance comes into the picture.  Imagine every lame RPG mechanic you’ve wished someone would do away with.  Most of them are taken care of by Zeboyd.  There’s a limited number of random encounters in every dungeon, and even in the over-world.  If you wish, you can force a battle by selecting it in the menu, and forced battles do count towards the preset number.  You get a full health-restore following every battle, and the battle system features a fun combo-based system that encourages creativity.  I especially liked the insanity system that Cthulhu has, where you can render enemies crazy to activate bonuses in your attacks.  Both games are pretty short compared to the classics they pay tribute to, and both feature fairly linear stories that are easy to follow and fun to read.  There’s no question these are the best RPGs on the XBLIG platform.

But let’s not kid ourselves.  Flawless they are not.  I really like both games, but the writing in them leaves a lot to be desired.  I’ll start with Breath of Death VII.  It lampoons the concept of a silent protagonist by starring a skeleton that has no tongue, and thus he has to be silent.  Ha, get it?  Now just imagine dozens of variations of that joke for about four hours.  Otherwise, most of the gags in Breath of Death VII are of the “drop a bad video game quote” variety, resulting in a pile of dead dogs that could rival the meat locker in a Taiwanese steakhouse.

Cthulhu’s running gag is that he has been stripped of all his power and has to become a true hero to get them back.  And it’s Cthulhu, so heroism is against his nature.  Ha, get it?  Now imagine hundreds of variations of that joke for about eight hours.  Both of these games suffer from what I like to call the “Blazing Saddles Effect.”  Blazing Saddles was 1974 satire of western films where the entire joke was a town full of white people has a black sheriff forced onto them.  That’s the entire gag in the movie.  Some people consider it a classic.  I personally feel the joke did start funny, but got old before the movie was even half-way finished.  Breath of Death and Cthulhu are the same way.

I will say that Cthulhu Saves the World has some pretty strong writing through-out, even if the overall punchline had lost its zing about an hour or two in.  I can’t say the same about Breath of Death VII.  By the end of the game, the dialog was cringe worthy and the jokes routinely fell flat.  Cthulhu actually has some really funny running themes, like encounters with “real heroes” and the hilarious banter between Cthulhu and the narrator.  Still, it never shakes that Blazing Saddles “it’s funny because he’s black” feel.  It’s funny because it’s Cthulhu.  No, it’s not.

Cthulhu Saves the World has 16-bit style graphics.

Having said all that, these are two of the best Xbox Live Indie Games ever made, and Cthulhu Saves the World especially is good enough to land a spot on the leaderboard this Sunday.  The overall package of it is perhaps the best value you can get on Xbox Live Indie Games.  You get a decent sized RPG, a second quest where Cthulhu takes the role of Charlie from Charlie’s Angels (it’s funny because he’s Cthulhu!) and orders around some chicks to save the world.  There’s developer commentary too.  I mean, this is an insane amount of content for $1.  Despite dialog problems, Breath of Death VII is no slouch either.  Both games remain pretty fun through-out, and if you’re into RPGs, it doesn’t get any better.  What I like best about them is these are games made by gamers for gamers that don’t try to be “legitimate” games with all inherit flaws.  Zeboyd seems to have checked off every convention that has no place in gaming anymore and said “why would we want to include this?”  It’s a lesson many XBLIG developers could stand to learn.  So many of them set out to make what I like to call “professional-acting” titles that include mechanics that suck on the basis that real games have them.  Don’t do that.  Focus on fun.  If something makes a game less fun by default, don’t include it.  You would think “don’t intentionally make your game less fun” would be the type of thing that goes without saying.  But then again, your average XBLIG developer is so thick you could blend them and re-purpose them as pothole filler.

Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World were developed by Zeboyd Games

80 Microsoft Points apiece said “it’s funny because she’s a chick!”  No, it’s not in the making of this review. 

You have one week to go to vote for a chance to win 1600 Microso.. ah fuck it, nobody reads past the Microsoft Points line anyway.  Way to embrace the democratic process, guys!

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The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit

March 27, 2012 by 11 Comments

The Hearts of men: Throne of Deceit is a Gauntlet clone.  As a kid, I loved Gauntlet Legends on the Sega Dreamcast.  In fact, I look back fondly on it as one of my favorite games of that era.  So I was very excited for a chance to play a loving tribute to one of my childhood favorites.  And I had good reason to be excited.  It has online play and pretty decent graphics for an Xbox Live Indie Game.  What could go wrong?

Sigh.  Sit down, COLTRAN Studios.  We need to talk about the difference between “creating challenge” and “being a dickhead.”  It’s really not that fine a line.  Here, allow me to elaborate.

  • Enemy archers who fire with 100% accuracy: Challenging.
  • Enemy archers who fire with 100% accuracy and are completely out of reach, thus making them unkillable unless you use a bomb: You’re a dickhead.
  • Enemy archers who fire with 100% accuracy and are completely out of reach, thus making them unkillable unless you use a bomb, but only placing one or two bombs in each level (if that) and not letting players buy more between stages: You’re a giant-sized dickhead.
  • Auto-scrolling: Challenging.
  • Auto-scrolling with limited visibility: You’re a dickhead.
  • Auto-scrolling with limited visibility and floor indistinguishable from non-floor: You’re a colossal dickhead.
  • Auto-scrolling with limited visibility, floor indistinguishable from non-floor, and dead-ends that lead to instant-death that make the entire game an exercise in luck: You’re a dickhead of such extreme proportions that catching even a glimpse of you through a window makes you subject to arrest under indecent exposure laws.

Impressive screenshot, huh? Check out what the next screen they selected looks like.

By the way, if you can’t tell the difference between a challenge and being a dickhead, that makes you a special-needs dickhead.  Really, when developers make shit like this, I complain about it, and then they tweet back boastfully oblivious of what a mess they’ve made of their project, it makes me wonder if the difficulty spike is some kind of Revenge of the Nerds type of deal.  The developers suddenly went on the rag around the time they started tweaking the difficulty, remembered the time that Scott Phinigus shoved them into a locker after gym class and decided this was their opportunity to take revenge on the world.  Which it’s not really revenge on the world.  It’s just a sign that the developers had their heads firmly shoved up their own anal cavities and their games should be avoided like they’re radioactive.

Here’s a tip, XBLIGers: nobody recommends a $1 indie Xbox game because it’s hard.  That’s not a point in the game’s favor.  People recommend games based on accessibility, replayability, value, and the amount of fun they have versus the amount of time they wish they were doing something else.  Nobody says “Hey Joe, there’s this game that is sort of fun 20% of the time, but 80% of the time it’s dull, repetitive, and so frustrating that you’ll wish you had paid your 63-year-old neighbor with the coke-bottle glasses $1 to flash you her lop-sided tits instead!”

Hearts of Men does so many things right that I wish I could say “hell yes, this is $1 well spent.”  But I can’t, because every good idea is followed up by at least one bad idea.  Mapping attack to the right analog stick, turning Gauntlet into a TwickS, which is the most obvious move for the genre?  Good idea!  Lack of enemy variety?  Bad idea.  Four different hero types?  Good idea!  Useless upgrades, like getting full life-refills on meat, of which there is usually only one per stage?  Bad idea.

No, this isn't the same screen. They just didn't make any effort to get a nice variety of shots for the marketplace page. Hell, one of the pictures is of the title screen. Way to half-ass it, guys!

By the way, I wasn’t joking about the developers having their heads up their ass when they designed this.  I actually believe the creation of this game began with a few guys first taking turns shoving their heads up each-others asses.  A sort of low-budget Human Centipede if you will.  Because that’s the only way I can explain how stupid the online component of this game is.  Quick: what do you want in an online Gauntlet clone?  Co-op for the campaign, right?  I mean, what kind of question is that?  You would have to be a fucking moron to answer with anything else, and the developers would have to be jumbo-sized morons so thick that even Alabama would deport them out of shame to not do such an obvious thing.

But this is XBLIG, so of course the developers dropped the ball on it.  No online co-op.  At all.  None.  Oh, there’s online in Hearts of Men.  Only it’s a bunch of unplayable, utterly useless deathmatch-type stuff.  Who would see potential in deathmatch-type stuff in a fucking Gauntlet game?  I suppose the same guys who decided to include auto-scrolling sections in a Gauntlet game.  What really sucks is the knowledge that they wasted their time on this shit when they should have been working on online co-op, which people might have actually bought the game for.  Nobody at all would buy this shit for the type of online play they included.  Hell, if you’re not going to bother with online co-op, spend the time fixing the main game.  The third boss looks just like any other normal enemy, and you know they phoned it in because they were busy jerking off with this stuff.

I admit, the first match-type (a sort of territorial-control mixed with bomb-the-base stuff) would be fun if you could get eight players into it, but again, this is Xbox Live Indie Games.  You’re more likely to see an endangered white rhino juggling zebras while riding a unicycle than ever find eight people online playing Hearts of Men.  And besides, there’s no lobby to invite people in.  People can only enter the game once it starts.  And once it ends, everyone is dumped out to the main menu.  Seriously, what a piece of shit game.

Hearts of Men is fun at times, especially with local co-op.  But, somewhere along the line, its developers forgot they were creating something designed to be fun.  My co-op partners quit after the first auto-scroll section because the developers were so busy gleefully being dickheads that they forgot to be entertaining as well.  I stuck it out, and I wish I hadn’t.  It’s a few hours I couldn’t get back.  I didn’t even finish Hearts of Men.  By the fourth world I realized nothing remotely resembling a good time had happened in hours.  Just the same enemies, the same keys, the same doors, and the same dick moves.

Yes, it's a new picture. Too late, I'm already bored.

And then my memory kicked in and I remembered that I never actually finished Gauntlet Legends either, because it stopped being fun long before the game ended.  Maybe what the Indie market should do when paying tribute to old favorites is limit the game to an hour or two.  That way, you don’t have time to get bored.  I asked some friends and they all agreed that Gauntlet Legends was the shits back in the day, and that they never beat it because it was too long and boring.  This is a contradiction that you, XNA developers, have the ability to fix.  You know, assuming you’re smart enough to make games with the correct online features and not include out-of-place auto-scrolling sequences in them.  And since we know that’s too much to ask of COLTRAN Studios, how about someone else take a crack at fixing the problems with Gauntlet.  I’ll keep them occupied by giving them some bubble wrap to pop.

The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit was developed by COLTRAN Studios

80 Microsoft Points admit this was maybe my meanest review.  Really, I don’t think the guys at COLTRAN are morons or stupid.  Well, maybe a little stupid.  I mean, no online- co-op and fucking auto-scrolling in a fucking Gauntlet game?  For fuck’s sake, you would have to be glue-sniffingly stupid to.. in the making of this review.  Deep breath.  I’m calm, calm, perfectly calm.

I blame you guys for not voting in the Katch-Up this week despite this being my best week all month in terms of page views.  You already killed the puppy of sadness.  He drank lighter fluid, sat in the highway, and lit himself on fire.  And that was before the steamroller arrived. 

A review copy of The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit was provided by COLTRAN Studios to Indie Gamer Chick.  The copy played by Kairi was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review code was given to someone else to provide her with a proper online experience.  That person was not involved at all in the writing or editing of this review.  For more information on this policy, please consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with ,

The Houchi Play 放置プレイ

March 25, 2012 by 5 Comments

Japan, what the fuck? Seriously, this is why you can’t have nice things. Well, that and the constant Godzilla attacks. The Houchi Play is the most bizarre and creepy of the “raunchy” fare I’ve tried on Xbox Live Indie Games yet. As a reminder, that includes a game featuring a giant space pussy.

The idea is you’re an admittedly perverted Japanese dude who tries to sneak up on girls playing dress up. Because really, what guy out there doesn’t fantasize about being a middle-aged man who gets his knob on by stalking females “dressed up” wink, like under-aged school girls? Come on, guys. This shit is creepy as hell. Someone told me that I need to look at the comedy value of this game. I don’t really see the joke myself. It would be different if the dude got close enough to the chick and then got maced in the face or an attack dog came and bit his scrotum off. Well, I guess guys wouldn’t find it too funny then, and it’s tough to be misogynistic if the women folk get an equal share of the yuk-yuks.

The first video game that has to legally stay 1,000 yards away from a school zone.

As for the game itself, Houchi Play is just the school-yard game of Statues done over and over and over again. The chick turns around and looks away from you and you move. She turns back around, you quit moving. That’s the entirety of game. Hilariously, moving is done by pushing the left and right triggers as fast as you can. This is tiring enough that any guys who are, ahem, really stimulated by the comedy will be struck down with “wanker’s cramp” (thanks Yahtzee) before the cow is ready for milking.

Oh, and sometimes you’ll pass a bottle of alcohol, setting off a quick-time “hit the buttons as fast as you can” sequence, where if you get them all, your Pervatar will fill with liquid courage and be able to move faster. Sounds fine, except during these sections I would end up stuck because as soon as I finished the drink the chick would inevitably turn around and face me. Who wouldn’t? When some strange little man who can barely contain his tiny erection keeps inching closer to you, it’s best not to break eye contact. Next thing you know, the guy is up in your face and asking you to come write for his crappy gaming website.

I don’t think Houchi Play is erotic, funny, or a well made game. And honestly, I don’t believe that was the point at all. It’s a novelty. It’s the kind of thing you keep around so when you have friends over, you can tell them “here, let me show you something that is fucked up.” Hell, I did that once or twice myself with Fatal Seduction. Of course, as fucked up as that game was (and it WAS), playing it didn’t make me feel compelled to go down to the courthouse and volunteer to register as a sex offender.

The Houchi Play 放置プレイwas developed by Kohei

80 Microsoft Points can be seen on Dateline NBC, check your local listings, in the making of this review.

 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

Decay

March 23, 2012 by 8 Comments

Week #2 of Kairi’s Katch-Up Thursdays (it’s still Thursday on Venus!) and the winner by a landslide was the Decay series of point-and-click games.  I know I said the popular vote count would not necessarily factor into my final selection, but when 8 out of 10 votes were for it, you kind of have to go with it.  By the way, that wasn’t a hypothetical ratio.  There are only ten people voting in this thing.  One voter will win 1600 Microsoft Points on April 5.  And some of the voters have asked to not be included in the drawing.  Sigh.  This will probably be my last contest.  Don’t make me break out the sad puppy-dog eyes at you people.

Oh that’s it.  That is it!  I hate that it’s come to this.  This will hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.  Behold the power of the sad puppy dog eyes.

Are you guys going to participate and vote more?  Good.  Don’t make me do that again.

Now then, for those of you that are not curling up in the fetal position and sobbing to yourself right now, here’s the Decay review.  You know, point & clickers are the one retro genre that I can’t figure out why anyone is interested in anymore.  2D platformers can still be fun.  Old-school sports games are usually fast paced.  Classic arcade-style drivers are typically fun for at least an hour.  Even moldy old school street brawlers can work when you dress them up and slightly modernize them like Castle Crashers did.  But point & clickers?  They only existed because you couldn’t do free-roaming 3D environments in the 80s through the early 90s.  Once technology caught up to the ambitions of adventure game developers, the genre’s time for extinction had arrived.

Of course, Xbox Live Indie Games is a virtual Jurassic Park full of fossils that should have died out long ago.  I suppose that makes the Decay series the velociraptors of the market: hunting in packs, more trouble than their worth, and at the end of the day it’s still just a dinosaur.

Yea, that was pretty much the worst analogy ever.

Decay has no shortage of spooky images. Plot, on the other hand..

Decay is split into four parts.  Part one will run you $1 and will last you between fifteen and twenty-five minutes, depending on how much fucking about you do.  It sets the mood for this story about.. um.. you know, I played all four games and I could barely grasp what the whole thing was about.  Apparently a family of three have gone missing, or perhaps the wife got sick and died, or some serial killer got them, or fuck I have a headache.  There’s just too many red herrings to keep up with.

Decay is one of those minimalist-story type of deals.  This is a problem, because Koint & Knickers typically have to have a strong story to make up for the complete and total lack of gameplay.  You’re not really fed enough narrative in Decay.  At first, that was okay, because the open-ended questions left me genuinely intrigued.  Is the dude in purgatory?  Hell?  Is he reliving an event, or dreaming of a future one?  Sadly, as the story progressed, the actual answers were nowhere near as interesting as the suspense they invoked.

Decay still managed to be pretty creepy through-out, but by the end of parts two and three, my interest in the outcome had been significantly stilted.  By time Part 4 came around, I was downright bored.  The story sucks, plain and simple.  And then it ends with a ridiculous Sophie’s Choice moment which guaranteed the presence of alternate endings.  I hate it when games do this.  Games are not movies.  They take a significant time investment.  An alternate ending in a movie is easy.  Go to the DVD menu, select the ending, watch it.  Done.  In a game, you have to replay the entire fucking thing from the beginning and hope you don’t make any mistakes that would lead you into the same ending.  Now granted, in Decay you only have to start over from Part 4, but that’s still another hour or so you’ll have to invest doing the same puzzles you just solved.  And for what?  I checked on Youtube and all the endings were fucking lame as hell.  And that’s partially because you don’t know enough about the characters to give two shits about them.

So the story was a bust for me.  The gameplay did slightly better.  It really is just typical Boink & Flick stuff, so don’t expect too many surprises.  Well, besides a really horrible brick-breaker minigame in Part 2 with terrible physics and horrible play-control.  Oh, and a dexterity tester in Part 4 that was completely out-of-place.  The guys at Shinning Gate should have stuck to the logic and word puzzles, because those worked and were fun to solve.  Whenever you actually needed to do something in real-time, the game handled like a Ford Bronco driven by a drunken warthog.

I have no clue what they were thinking when they included this awful shit.

Despite occasionally enjoying the puzzles, I really didn’t care for Decay at all.  The story was boring, the setting was uninteresting, and it actually got progressively less spooky as things went on.  But the biggest problem is the price.  Combined, the game will run you 800 Microsoft Points.  That’s $10 for a series that will take you two-and-a-half hours tops to finish.  It’s a terrible value.  If you go to Target, they have an entire rack of PC Moink & Slick games that they often have 2 for 1 or sometimes even 3 for 1 sales on.  Even if you pay the full $10 asking price on them, they’re typically better games with actual storylines, and they come on the platform the genre is suited for.  Really, why would anyone want a Point & Click adventure on Xbox 360?  It would be like buying yacht and entering it into the Kentucky Derby.

Decay was developed by Shinning Gate Studio

80 Microsoft Points (Part 1) and 240 Microsoft Points (Part 2 – 4) apiece anxiously await hearing Toink & Wick fans bitch about how I’m too young to understand the genre in the making of this review.

Remember the puppy?  Good.  Now vote for next week’s Katch-Up game.  Maybe I’ll even post it on Thursday, like I’m supposed to.  Voting enters you into a drawing to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Don’t make me post it again!  Head over to list, pick one, and vote on Twitter. 

Thanks to Michael Wilson for the banner.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , ,

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