EvilQuest confused me. In it, you play as the villainous Galvis, a magnificently evil bastard whose goal is to murder God and destroy the world. Let’s see: in touch with his emotions. Goal-oriented. Has a spiritual side to him. Hey hey, I think I found someone I can bring home to my folks if things don’t work out with Brian.
"Mr. Aladdin, Sir, what will your pleasure be? You ain't never had a friend like me!"
But while Galvis is at times utterly delightful to play as, what with his fondness for casual genocide, or the fact that he’ll ignore the pleads for euthanasia of a frost-bitten old man just because letting him linger in pain and suffering is that much more evil, he’s also a bit of a pussy. Despite being somewhat billed as a character who breaks all the rules, Galvis walks the line with such determination that he might as well be wearing a hall monitor sash. He still pays for items from stores with actual cash. He goes on fetch-quests for random people. Sure, he’ll occasionally knife someone after they helpfully give him an item, and in the end of the game, spoiler alert, he makes the human race extinct. But come on, paying for items? That’s not evil. Even little kids have the balls to shoplift.
So I’m going to ignore the whole “play as the bad guy” stuff because Galvis is provably less evil than Lindsay Lohan and just treat EvilQuest like the generic action-RPG that it is. And, let’s face it, that’s the only way to describe it. A lot of people are calling it “Zelda-like” but that’s a load of crap too. Zelda had some puzzles. EvilQuest is all action, all the time. You walk around killing baddies, then you walk around some more. Sure, there’s the occasional switch, or maybe a maze-like dungeon, but really, it’s just knifey-knifey, killy-killy, walky-walky for the entire length of the game.
I will admit it’s a little fun. Not a whole lot. I certainly don’t get why the XBLIG cheerleader brigade is constructing a human pyramid with only their erect penises to act as support beams over EvilQuest. It’s a bit on the busted side. As you progress through the game, you can level-up your stats. As is my typical strategy in these situations, I just pumped every single point I earned into my attack power. As a result, by game’s end I was able to kill most of the enemies in a single whack. Two tops. And bosses would take me about ten seconds to beat, even on the medium setting. There was no point in forming any strategy to take them out. I was easily able to max out the amount of health potions I had, quick-map them to the Y button, and then just tap it while attacking. I went into the last boss battle with 99 hi-potions and was able to finish all four stages of the fight in about a minute tops, only using 6 of them. In retrospect, I wish I had played the game on hard. On medium, EvilQuest was about as easy as kitten piñata.
EvilQuest would have probably been a really strong game about twenty-five years ago. In 2012, it’s basic even by the standards of modern retro-games. I will say that it at least looks the part. It successfully fends off the uncanny valley effect of looking old but having a feature that is decidedly modern ruin the entire feel of it. And I would like to thank the guys at Chaosoft for including an option to disable flashing effects so that epileptics such as myself can more comfortably play their title. It was a classy move, and hopefully the start of many developers adding similar options to their games. Of course, Galvis wouldn’t stand for that himself. He would intentionally try to set off a seizure in me, then skull fuck me while I was twitching. Or maybe not. I mean, if he’s willing to tip a stripper with a C-Note, he can’t be THAT evil.
80 Microsoft Points said, spoiler alert, if he kills every human, doesn’t that mean he mercifully put the frost-bitten old man out of his misery in the process? Wow, talk about a mixed-message in the making of this review.
Old people creep me out. And by old, I mean anyone over 50. Have an odor they do. It’s the stench of death ripening on their increasingly scaly skin. So I probably shouldn’t have played a game where the object is to escort one across a psychedelic wonderland while avoiding ninjas and alien monster thingies. Octogenarian VIP is exactly that.
The basic idea is you and up to three friends have to lead “Granny” around. Right away, I encountered a laundry list of problems. Let’s go through them.
Problem #1 is that Grandma looks more like Grandpa. So I’ll call him Grandpa, because that’s how I roll.
Grandma needs a toupee.
Problem #2 is that Grandpa looks like he’s miserable and ready to die. Why would I want to escort him to safety? I should fulfill his wishes and escort him under a pile driver.
Problem #3, and this one is pretty significant, you have no form of defense to keep him alive. Offensively, you have a cane thingie to swing around. Why Grandpa’s younger, more nimble escorts would be wielding canes when swords or guns would make more sense against ninjas and monsters is beyond me. The only explanation I could think of is senility is now contagious. Meanwhile, there are several stages where the level begins with you and Grandpa being attacked. And by that I mean the level begins and a ninja or monster is occupying the same space as you, rapidly draining away your lifebars. Perhaps an allegory for the fact that the grim specter of death is always with you once you get to that age, but more than likely it’s just shitty game design.
Maybe it is a sword. Hell, I dunno. It would have to be the dullest sword in the history of weaponry.
It really didn’t become too much of an annoyance until later in the game. When I reached a stage called “bad medicine.” Never mind keeping Grandpa safe. I could not keep myself, the young and fit protector of the old fart, alive for more than a few minutes because all of the enemies gang-bang you all at once. The ninjas are capable of throwing stars at you, and if there are any present on the level, they will throw them at you whether you can see them or not. And they will. Without any way to block them, your only hope is to jump over them. That really doesn’t work so well, especially when Grandpa is always a bit slow to react. The ability to block would have made all the difference. Well, the game would have still sucked, but it would have been more tolerable. It’s like the difference between a kick in the shin and a saber through the throat.
Problem #4 is how bad Grandpa’s AI is. I suppose it makes sense, given that he’s old and therefor decrepit and useless. But we’re also in a video game where Grandpa is able to jump eleven feet in the air to avoid aliens and ninjas, so to hell with continuity. Either way, Grandpa is useless. He can’t defend himself when being attacked. You have to lock him into following you, but he’s not as spry as you. Your dude can jump like twenty feet in the air (good genes in this family), but if you’re still completing your jump while grandpa is landing, he’ll jump again. When you’re trying to zig-zag from platform to platform, that gets quite annoying.
Problem #5 is there’s no old-person sound effects. None at all. No moaning. No complaining. Hell, the critters in Cute Things Dying Violently were more like geriatrics than Grandpa is. What, with the random swearing and constant mumbling, it was just like being in the audience of Wheel of Fortune. All you get here is a completely out-of-place generic metal track. The graphics suck too. There’s no blood and limited animation, yet the game somehow got a 2 out of 3 in violence from the XNA community. Where is the violence that justifies that score?
Problem #6 is that ultimately Octogenarian VIP is boring. Escort missions are boring in any game, but games based around just escorting characters are fucking awful. Okay, maybe Ico is an exception to that. Fine, Resident Evil 4 was too. Kind of. That actually gives me an idea. A game where you tie Ashley Graham to the Grandpa from this game and then feed them feet-first into an industrial wood-chipper. That’s money right there.
What do you get when you cross Space Invaders with Missile Command? You get an Xbox Live Indie Game that I could play in about fifteen minutes so I could get a review up while I wait to finish EvilQuest and XBLA House Party title Warp. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Space Command. It combines the enemies of Space Invaders with the city-defense firing mechanism of Missile Command. So what does the offspring of these two iconic games look like? Well, let’s just say that I think they might have been cousins.
Really, there isn’t much I can say about it. The blast radius of your missiles doesn’t seem big enough and it disappears too fast. And the whole point of Missile Command was that it had precision aiming via use of a trackball, something a joystick can’t hope to recreate. Otherwise, it plays exactly like a mutant hybrid of Space Invaders and Missile Command would play like. So if you ever wondered, now you have your answer. As for me, I’m still longing to know what a game that mixes the rhythm and brawler genres would be like. Sigh, we shall never know.
Muuuuh. It’s hard to muster up the energy to properly convey how horrible SpaceFighter4000 Training is. It’s so boring that it sucks your ability to give a shit from you. It’s also hard on account that I only played so much of it that I might as well have lit 240 Microsoft Points on fire and just played the demo. But I wouldn’t do that. Among other reasons, Microsoft Points lit on fire smell like a combination of ethanol farts and burning hair.
Unbeknownst to me, SpaceFighter4000 is a tribute to a Playstation/Saturn/3DO title that predates my gaming history by a couple of years. I’ve never even heard of it, but it must have some form of a following. I know this because when I took to Twitter to bitch about what a miserable time I was having with it, I got a couple of people telling me that the original was better because it had homing missiles. This might seem like an insignificant thing to bring up, but actually it probably would have made the difference between a recommendation or taking a rusty chainsaw to my own hands just to avoid ever being this bored by a game ever again.
SpaceFighter4000 falls into the same category as UnBound, Cell: emergence, and Merball Tournament in that it feels more like a prototype or a technical demonstration than a commercial game. From a purely visual standpoint, SpaceFighter is a slight cut above your typical 3D XBLIG. It has an impressive draw-distance without fogging, much like Flight Adventure 2. It also maintains this without a lot of slowdown. But that’s as far as complements will go in this review. Everything else is pitiful.
What it really comes down to is the bad firing mechanics. You have three weapons at your disposal: missiles, bombs, and an unlimited laser cannon. There’s no cross-hairs, so aiming is a bitch. Also, despite the impressive draw distance, depth-perception is very bizarre. I could be tailgating an enemy ship and firing my lasers, but centering yourself for a straight-shot is almost impossible. As a result, I felt more like I was piloting a TIE-Fighter, where my lasers hit everything but the thing I was shooting at.
Even when the lasers hit, they don’t do a lot of damage. They’re also watch-Grandma-wheelchair-up-Lombard Street slow. Which is weird. I would think light would be able to travel faster. Instead, your laser shots seem to get pushed out of trajectory, as if they’re being effected by the wind. Maybe it’s not lasers you’re shooting. Maybe it’s paper-mache. Maybe it’s pink balloons. Either way, the laser is worthless. So are the missiles. Again, there’s no cross-hairs, so you can’t line up a shot. The camera is often slopped at an angle, so it’s hard to get the right feel for where the missile is going to go. And if the object you’re shooting at is at any distance greater than right on top of you, you’re bound to misfire.
I have no fucking clue why some form of locking-on wasn’t included. It’s such a no-brainer move. The game is problematic enough with controls that are slow to respond, a camera that could induce motion sickness, and the problems with perception. There’s other weird things too. Take the bombs. They’re simple gravity bombs, but when you drop one they land in front of you. How is that even possible? I tried for over 30 minutes to land one on a target and never could accomplish it. Nor could I shoot an enemy out of the sky. The lasers were too slow, and the missiles are even slower. And mind you, this is only the first stage. Apparently enemies will start firing back at you after this. Yea fucking right. As it stands, I had trouble taking out the stationary ground targets without having a piece of the debris slowly drift upwards and blowing up my ship. So much for me getting drafted into the war with Xur.
$3 down the drain for a game I could have just as easily played the demo for. I’ll never learn. And yes, it’s another case of an unfinished, broken, clunky, glorified-tech demo that is way overpriced. It’s beyond obnoxious. 240 fucking points for this? Are you fucking kidding me? You know XNA developers, $3 buys a LOT in video gaming these days. You can get three Xbox Live Indie Games for that price. Games that are actually finished. You can get DLC for mainstream games for that price. If you charge $3 for a game and nobody buys it, you officially forfeit the right to complain that nobody bought your game.
And no, it’s not because it’s a race to the bottom. Where did you guys get that term from? There is no nice way of putting this: you sound like fucking idiots when you say that. “CRRRRYYYY I’m not going to charge only one dollar for my game. I don’t want to be in a race to the bottom.” First off, you’re developing for Xbox Live Indie Games. That is the bottom. Second, you’re an independent game producer that nobody has heard of. Third, you’re competing with mainstream games across various platforms that cost the same amount. At Christmas, I could buy the entire EA catalog on my iPhone for $1 a game. One fucking dollar a pop got me any game by the biggest video game producer in the history of the world. Are they racing to the bottom? Is Rovio? Activision? No. It’s called smart business. So if you’re worried about being in a race to the bottom, chances are that’s exactly where you belong.
240 Microsoft Points said the only thing Rovio and Activision are in a race to the bottom of is a giant silo full of money in the making of this review.
Our esteemed heroine took time out of her busy schedule working on a cure for cancer and rescuing orphans from a fire to play an episodic platform game for Xbox Live Indie Games called Oozi. The graceful and magnanimous Kairi forgave the first installment for being such a generic bore that it caused joy itself, manifested corporeally as a beautiful baby koala, to commit suicide by throwing itself in the path of a steamroller. The villainous Oozi, regretful that it had erased joy from the world (and made a gruesome yet morbidly hilarious mess of a patch of forest in Queensland in the process) reformed itself with episode two. The sequel proved just fun enough to play that the puddle of gore that formerly was the Koala of Joy started to piece itself together. However, the threat of Oozi still existed. Will Episode 3 cause the Koala of Joy to re-liquify itself, or will it spring to life and bring happiness to sad children? We rejoin the mighty Kairi, already in progress.
As you can see, Oozi: Episode 3 brings us to a science lab. Ooooh, that’s bold innovation, fellas. What’s next? A castle? A desert? A sewer? I bet it’s a sewer. It can’t be an action video game if there isn’t a sewer level. It’s a sewer, right?
Okay, so originality was never what Oozi was about. I’ve actually had people explain this to me like I’m some kind of idiot. “You know, I think it’s actually supposed to be completely devoid of a personality of its own. That’s the point. I think.” Even if that’s so, let me pose this question: does anyone really think back fondly on the time they played Prehistorik Man? Gex? Spanky’s Quest? Plok? Of course they don’t. They remember playing Mario, Crash, and yes, even Sonic. Paying tribute to the also-rans of gaming sounds more like a skit from Family Guy than a potentially lucrative XBLIG concept.
All bullshit gaming philosophy aside, not a whole lot has changed for Oozi. The graphics are still far above the standards of a typical Xbox Live Indie Game. In fact, they’re so good that you can’t help but notice how many corners they’ve managed to cut. Back when I reviewed Episode 1, I noted that there’s no unique drowning animation, or gurgling sound effect that accompanies it. Episode 3 has so many situations where a comical death scene could be used for effect, yet Oozi simply disintegrates into a pile of ash or just flops up in the air. Having a larger variety of animations might have given the game some kind of personality, which is what the series desperately needs.
Really though, any complaint that I could make about Oozi has pretty much been made by me here on this site. And also through a bullhorn in front of the police station, but they asked me to quit doing that. Episode 3 doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It does try to, but it fails miserably at it. The feature that stands out the most are these annoying parts in one stage where you have to avoid security lights. If you set one off, a gate shuts and you have to walk out of the security zone and start over again. Don’t mistake this for stealth. It’s not. In fact, the security lights operate under the same principles as various traps and enemies do. The only difference is instead of taking damage, you have to just wander backwards and then start over. Some might argue that’s actually worse than death.
Oh, and there’s a boss, just like the last two times. And, like the last two times, it’s fucking boring as hell to fight. Oozi boss encounters always operate like the telephone game. They do one series of attacks at you, then open themselves up to be hit. Then they repeat the same cycle of moves as last time, adding one new twist before opening themselves up for attack again. Finally, they repeat all the previous steps, add one final twist, and then leave themselves open for the killing blow. It’s so fucking tedious, and the opening attacks (the ones that get repeated the most) are so insultingly easy to avoid that I wonder what they were thinking making you go through over a dozen rounds of them. A lobotomized blind wino would brush them off. It’s just busy work. Meanwhile, the later attacks are so cheap that you’ll inevitably die a couple of times, forcing you to go through the same lazy attacks again and again.
Snore.
You know what? I really am bitching too much here. I did have fun with Oozi’s third chapter. I can’t even say I think the game got off to a slow start, like Chapter 2 did. It actually got my interest right from the start and held on until the boss fight bored me out of the mood. The level design is so much better than the previous two games, and difficulty is much sharper, if a bit inconsistent. It looks like the next chapter will be a wrap on Oozi’s tales, and by golly gee wiz, I’m actually looking forward to it. Mostly because I actually believe it will see the light of day sometime before I start collecting Social Security. Hey, Red Candy Games, we all like Valve and everything, but you don’t have to follow their lead and treat episodic gaming like you’re operating a bizarre nerd version of a time-share scam.
80 Microsoft Points believe Half Life 2 episode 3 is currently being playtested by Santa Claus, Batman, and the Koala of Joy in the making of this review.
Cell: emergence costs $5 on Xbox Live Indie Games. That’s 400 Microsoft Points. That’s the cost of some pretty good Xbox Live Arcade Games. What does it get you here? An obviously unfinished piece of shit with horrible graphics, busted play control, and antiquated gameplay. What a bargain.
"What did I tell you about licking toads?"
The story revolves around a child being infected with some kind of mystery illness. Instead of doing the sensible thing, IE calling Dr. House, you inject the kid with some kind of computerized yellow beam shooting thingie to fight off the disease. At this point, the game starts and things go downhill faster than a soapbox derby racer powered by a jet engine. The first level starts with a screen of purple voxel gunk. You’re not given any real instructions other than A shoots and Y zooms in. I wasn’t sure if the purple stuff was good or bad, and the game doesn’t explain this. Or anything, really.
Well, the purple stuff started multiplying fast, which clued me in that it might be a bad thing. So, I started shooting. However, waiting a couple of seconds proved to be too long, as the purple stuff quickly overran the screen and the child died. That’s Obamacare for you. Once I was able to restart the stage, I started firing right away and cleared it in approximately three seconds. The second stage was basically more of the same “shoot the gunk” type of stuff, and this time I earned my medical degree in Voxelgunkology and cleared everything in about five seconds. I was starting to think Cell: emergence was trying to be a Wario Ware clone, only instead of a new game loading up every second, it loaded up every three minutes.
That all changed on the third stage. A purplish ball that I guessed was a tumor was present in a white cylindrical shaft. The only instruction given was “Shoot membrane to assist antibody diffusion (projectiles coat membranes with prion gel).” What the fuck does that mean? The game doesn’t tell you what exactly the membrane is, or what the antibodys look like, or what prion gel does. It took me several rounds of failure before I realized that it meant shooting the walls, ignoring the tumor-thingie, and watching some little flickery spark thingies dance around. I guess those were the gel. After a few minutes, I actually thought I failed the level, seeings how most of the stage had still been obliterated. Instead, I had won and was moved to the next stage. Sure, the kid would have been bleeding internally, but I’m a glass is half-full type of gal. That vein wasn’t 96% dead. It was 4% functional!
The next level is where I gave up. It was another “shoot the wall” level, only this time there were germs flying in. Once again, the only instructions given were vague. “NEW ENEMY: Germ is invulnerable to all known weaponry. Defend membrane and observe.” What. The. Filth. Well, I decided I’m obviously supposed to lube up my membrane, so I started firing on it. And then the biggest problem suddenly became apparent: there is no visual indication of what wall has been “protected” and what one has not. The “membrane” doesn’t change colors. A orange-red streak does go through it, but it fades out, and the game doesn’t give off any indication of whether it’s a positive thing or not. Red is usually a sign that something has gone wrong, and the enemies, or germs, are in fact represented by simple red dots. I spent about a dozen rounds firing on the surface, adjusting the angle I shot from, and it still didn’t matter. I continuously died, or rather the little kid did. You know what, fuck you kid. It’s your mom’s fault for letting some strange “doctor” (for all she knows it’s drug dealer trying to hook the boy on smack) inject you with a needle full of God knows what instead of taking you to the emergency room.
If you think this screenshot is baffling, just wait until you actually play the fucking thing.
In case you couldn’t tell, I fucking hated Cell: emergence, so much so that I can pull out the not-at-all-hyperbolic “new worst game I’ve played on Xbox Live Indie Games” title for it. It’s that bad. The graphics are horrible. The camera is unmanageable. It’s not so much a game as it is a proof-of-concept demo for 3D gaming. Which would be fine, if this was 1992. I’ve played games on XBLIG that felt this way before. UnBound for example. But at least they had the decency to only charge a buck for them. Cell: emergence costs five bucks. 400MSP that can get you five extremely awesome titles, and the guys behind Cell: emergence expect you to instead spend it on their obviously unfinished game. That takes a lot of nerve. The hubris on display here is sickening.
Cell would be boring even if you knew what was going on. It’s a glorified gallery shooter, only the graphics are indistinguishable blobs of digital vomit. Hell, the shit you shot at in Space Invaders, a game that is thirty-four years old, actually look like things. Nothing looks like anything in Cell. The lack of direction given to a player is irrelevant. The way things were going, the child is just as likely to get bored to death. The syringe might as well have been full of air for all the good it does him, and that would have been way more humane.
Ninjas. At one point they were the most overused cliché in gaming. Then came zombies, and the time of the ninja had passed. In a way, it makes sense. Zombies are easier to shoehorn into pretty much any type of game. I mean, can you imagine if they tried to do a DLC pack where you take on ninjas in Red Dead Redemption? It would be fucking absurd. Who could take that kind of thing seriously? What is this, Shanghai Noon? But a zombie DLC pack? Fuckin’ A!
Ninjas are still stars on the gaming scene, but it’s only in the same way that John Travolta is still technically a movie star. They get pulled out and dusted off from time to time to star in increasingly ignored and unsold games, usually stuff developed by Tecmo, hoping against hope that their day in the sun will come again. Maybe once zombies are done being the flavor of the month, that day will come. Personally, I’m betting on mutant gophers being the next big thing. Don’t scoff, we’re one Caddyshack remake away from it.
In a way, ninjas are a perfect fit for Xbox Live Indie Games, where genres of a bygone era are the perfect training ground for the next generation of game designers, or a place where hobbyists can try their hand at getting involved in their favorite pastime. It’s just too bad that most of their games turn out mediocre.
For example, we have Katana Land, an action-platformer where you have to save a princess from some evil ninjas. Why can’t it ever be something more practical, like a ninja saving a country from economic downturn? But no, save the princess and rescue the kingdom, blah blah blah. What sets Katana Land apart is each level has a different objective. Sometimes you’ll have to kill all the enemies. Sometimes you’ll have to disable all the traps in a room. Sometimes you’ll have to purpose sweeping legislation that will help begin the recovery from an economic downturn.
This would be fine, if the game wasn’t obsessed with being a total prick. The controls are actually pretty decent, but Katana Land pulls the ultimate dick move sandwich by not granting your character invincibility when you take damage. As a result, enemies are free to juggle your ass until you run out of life. And they will, especially if you jump up to a ledge they’re standing on and end up occupying the same space as them. I can see why your dude wasn’t recruited to join the more lucrative evil ninja organization, because he’s twice as slow as most of the enemies and doesn’t have their random immunity to damage.
Throwing a ninja star at common enemies is a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the star hits them and does nothing. I’m talking about a straight shot right in the middle of the enemy that they make no attempt to avoid, doing no damage at all. When a hit registers, the enemy either dies or recoils a little. But sometimes the star would hit them and nothing would happen other than the enemy charging at you and chopping you up. It’s not as if those characters have protection from the stars either, as I was able to kill enemies of the same class using it. The game simply failed to register half the stars I would throw, like it has attention deficit disooooh look at the kitty cat.
Our hero has a few other annoying quirks. If you fall too great a distance, the guy bounces and rolls to the left. No matter which way you fall, it’s always to the left. Did you jump off a high platform with the control stick pushed as far to the right as you can possible go and hit the ground? Your dude is going to bounce left when you hit. And the bounce is a fairly theatrical one. Even when landing near the center of a large platform, there’s a good chance the bounce will be good enough to send your dude completely off of it and into a pit. It makes me wonder if the guy really is a ninja or just plays one at the amateur dramatics society, because he over-acts every single bit of damage by flying backwards several feet. If an enemy isn’t juggling you, there’s a good chance you’re going to fall off the stage when they hit you.
There are some things that lessen the aggravation factor. You get a full health-restore every time you kill an enemy. But every step in the right direction is immediately followed by a giant leap backwards. In some of the stages you have to fight zombie ninjas. If you kill them, they turn into ghosts that are unkillable and stalk you for the rest of the stage, charging faster than you can jump and juggling you until dead. Thus it creates the situation of the forced-pussyfest, excuse me, pacifist section.
Fuck these guys.
If this makes the game sound overly difficult, it’s actually not. It takes about an hour and a half to beat the whole thing. The difficulty curve is all kinds of fucked up. There’s four bosses. Of them, the first boss is by far the most difficult, as he attacks you with lightning and the reaction time of your dude assures that it’s almost impossible to avoid it. I had to restart the level several times against it. Bosses two, three, and four were complete pansies that I beat on the first try. The final boss in particular is embarrassing. He just sort of slowly strolls towards you, allowing you to unload ninja stars into him. When he takes three hits, he pauses and allows some easily avoidable fireball demon thingies to pass by the screen. Then, you get to attack him some more. That’s it. That’s the only attack he has. And then the game is over. Thank God.
Really, Katana Land is not awful by any means. It’s aggravating to get caught in an enemy juggle, and the level design is pretty low rent. There’s a stage where the object is to find the hidden exit, which is marked by giant-sized flags. I found the exit just by scrolling right until I happened across it. You know, sort of like every fucking platform game out there. So it’s not exactly original or inspiring, but it is a functional game. There’s some good ideas at work here, and with some more refinement and level design to change things up, it would have been a pretty good game. Of course, you can say that about pretty much any game. “It would be better if only it didn’t suck in the following ways.” But Kablammo Games actually has something here that they can build on in the future, so I’ll keep an eye out for them. Maybe they’ll even get some courage and try something other than ninjas. I hear mutant gophers are expected to be hot.
Diamond Digger is the second game by Elemental Focus, the developer of former leaderboard occupant The Cannon. The cheeky British developer was one of the first developers to endorse my arrival on the Xbox Live Indie Game scene but who I hate hate hate hate hate for that fucking “You Saved the Cannon!” song that will never leave my head. Diamond Digger is a big departure from the Cannon, as this is a logic-puzzler CUNNILI.. oh right, I already used joke.
The idea is you’re given a grid of blocks with various diamonds scattered throughout it. Each block is assigned a numerical value. If a block that is positioned directly above another block that is exactly one number higher in value, it will break that block and drop down. Diamonds are given a value of 1, and the object is to drop all the diamonds completely out of the grid. You can only move blocks by shoving an entire row one space to the left or one space to the right, and only if the move will result in a block being broken. You have to restart the puzzle if you run out of moves.
Sigh. Nobody said there would be math.
If that sounds boring, well, it is. I actually nodded off for a couple of minutes writing that description. I swear, I’m not kidding about that. I can’t really put my finger on why Diamond Digger didn’t gel with me, but I’m weird like that with puzzle games. I got into Blockt, which was about as exciting as watching wet cement dry, and yet Diamond Digger took on a chore-like quality after only a couple of minutes. It has nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the game. They work perfectly fine, even if I seemed to solve some stages by total luck, and others in ways I’m almost certain the developer did not have in mind. I used to be amused by those kind of situations, but now I find them a bit annoying. It would be like a mystery book ending with the butler being the killer, even when there was no butler in the book.
The developer did try to change things up by adding some effect blocks. Dynamite blows up an area of blocks the first time it’s moved. Lava destroys a whole vertical column of blocks. Whiskers the Magic Game Saving Tabby deletes all the blocks and replaces them with The Cannon so that you can actually have fun, or maybe that was just a daydream.
No relation to Mrs. Flufferstein
Honestly, the gimmick blocks really don’t add anything to the game. I played through the forty puzzles and felt nothing at all. No sense of satisfaction. No sense of accomplishment. Nothing. I don’t know whether or not you will like Diamond Digger. The game works, so I can’t really complain about it in any way. I guess the best way to describe it is functional but dull. But puzzle games invoke different reactions in different people. I loved Pixel Blocked but some people found it to be a snoozer. I’ve had a lot of people tell me they think Blocks That Matter is overrated too. So maybe this game will be the opposite, where I thought it was a sleeping pill but others will think swear it’s a masterpiece that opened their eyes to the genre. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Quite frankly, if this game opens anyone’s eyes it would probably be the result of a reverse-coma.
By the way, sorry this review sucked. I’ve been sitting on this game for five days, waiting for inspiration to strike. But it never came, like a old man who had his Viagra switched with NyQuil.
Nope. The name doesn’t work. It doesn’t sound like a video game. It sounds like a breakfast cereal, and a bland one at that. The type that you would need to add copious amounts of sugar to just to choke down. When you can name your game anything that your imagination can come up with and Brand is the best you can do, what does that say about the developer? It’s not one of those catchy one-word names that you can get away with, like Halo or Infamous. Brand. Seriously, the name of the game is Brand. What were they thinking?
“Brand thought Braid” says Brian. Excuse me while I untie my tongue.
Brand is a hack-and-slash platformer where you try to upgrade your starting sword to make it “fit for a king.” Once you’ve done this fifteen times (or sixteen, whatever) you move on to a final battle. There are nine ways to upgrade the sword, and you can do each upgrade up to five times. To get an upgrade, you select what one you’re going for, and then you’re sent off on a fetch-quest in one of three locations. Once you’ve met the terms of the quest, you open up an exit portal and wait five seconds, then return to the shop and activate it.
It sounds like a solid idea, and if it worked it would have been fun. But it doesn’t work. I put eight hours into Brand yesterday and I can honestly say it’s one of the worst games I’ve played on Xbox Live Indie Games. Wholly and entirely without any redeeming value whatsoever.
Let’s start with the first thing people talk about with Brand: the graphics. They seem really good. Certainly a couple notches above what people expect from an XBLIG. But really, what do those good graphics get you? In Brand, there’s only four enemy types. Those four creatures are the same in every one of the three levels. Nine Dots Studio didn’t even bother re-skinning the enemies to match the theme of each stage. Variety is achieved through palette-swapping, with the stronger enemies usually signified by darker colors, resulting in the characters lacking distinguishing features. The spitting frog-monster thingies are particularly pitiful in design. It looks like someone just vomited out a puddle of sprites on a screen and said “good enough!” If it seems petty of me to call out one creature type, I’ll remind you that creature represents 25% of the monsters you fight. Great graphics? Not when the character design is that bad.
Oooh, pretty! I can't make out anything, but damn!
Ironically, it’s the backgrounds that stand out the most. They’re rendered beautifully and would work at setting the mood for the title. They would, if they didn’t come with a tradeoff in performance. The game has major issues with lag. Especially the Castle, which scrolls very jerkily, like a first-generation Playstation 1 game. These also are probably the contributing factor in the brutal load times throughout the game. I actually used a stopwatch to time them. It takes 52.2 seconds for the Mine stage to load. If you die in the level and want to restart, the total time it will take is a 1 minute, 16 seconds. For a 2D side-scrolling indie game. The other two levels are worse, both taking over a minute to load, and about a minute and-a-half to reload if you die. It’s not unlikely you’ll spend over an hour waiting for stuff to load up, in a game that should only take a couple of hours to beat. It’s outrageous.
Once you’re actually playing the game, things go downhill quickly. Combat is relatively simple: X is weak attack, Y is strong attack, B you’ll never ever ever ever ever ever use (it’s a useless dash attack) and A jumps. Allegedly there are combos, but you’re not told what they are and I couldn’t figure out how to activate any. The one or two times I thought I had done one, they didn’t really do any damage so I didn’t bother experimenting further.
Not doing any damage to baddies was a recurring theme throughout Brand. Of the fifteen (or sixteen, whatever) upgrades you have to do, I “refined” my sword four times and strengthened it three times. I also gave it the ability to poison, I made it so a magical light sword thingie would poke out my back allowing me to fight creatures behind me, and I added a fire wave to it and upgraded that a couple of times. The end result? The starter enemies might die in one hit, but everything else remained damage sponges. Mind you, the entire game is about upgrading your offense. There’s no defensive upgrades at all. Yet, even once I had done the fifteen (or sixteen, whatever) upgrades and was dumped into the final stage, I felt like I had made no progress. My dude was still a total pussy and my sword couldn’t cut butter.
Part of it seems to be a result of the game just ignoring your actions. Direct combat seems to work best, in that about half of your attacks will result in damage. On the other hand, the upgraded effects do not want to work at all and will fight you every step of the way. As I noted, I got the fire sword thingie and then upgraded it once. I then watched as I would send a colossal wave of fire at an enemy and have it pass right through him, doing no damage at all. I know it didn’t because the enemy didn’t do it’s damage-indication flash. I wish I could say this was an uncommon occurrence, but actually it got so bad that I started keeping count of how many attacks a single enemy could fail to take. Around three seemed about average. Ten wasn’t all that rare. The most was this one mid-level wasp that was all alone in a normal room with no walls, barriers, or anything else in the way. I was swinging the sword close enough that in theory the sword itself would do damage, but if that failed the fire would get it as the wasp was dead center in the wave. Total swings before it registered damage for the first time? Twenty-fucking-two times.
In order: useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, and useless.
Again, there’s no defensive upgrades in the game. Well, there is one. It makes it so you damage a creature you block. Sounds great! Sure, the block doesn’t even work on anything past entry-level enemies, but at least you’ll be dealing them damage back! Yea, about that. If you get this upgrade and use it too much, it kills you. No really, you die from it. And once you have it, you can’t turn it off. Thus, you’ll be unable to defend yourself throughout levels for the rest of the game. Given the fact that harder enemies attack faster, cause more damage, and gang up on you, you’re already screwed without the block “upgrade.” With it, you might as well take your sword and commit Seppuku. Although if you could actually do that, it would probably take the game five or six tries before registering it. You can’t increase your lifebar, armor, speed, or jumping ability. I guess Brand wanted to prove that a good defense is a strong offense. It’s too bad a strong offense is not an option.
Once you’ve made the last upgrades to your character, you enter the final stage. Hopefully your sword will be strong enough -snicker- because you’re entering the arena. You know those stages in Zelda games where you fall down a hole and then you have to fight every single enemy in the game? Yea, that’s what this is. You fight a wave of ten or so guys off, all attacking your literally defenseless ass all at once. If you kill them, a door unlocks, you fall down a hole, and you repeat the process. There’s no situational health refills. It seems like one random enemy in each stage will restore a sliver of your bar, so naturally it was always the first enemy I killed each time. Hell, I can’t say with 100% certainty that there is a random enemy giving away a teeny tiny scrap of health each floor. I cleared whole rooms out and was always left with a micro-fraction of health left. I tried beating this for an hour yesterday and another thirty minutes today, never actually making it past the fourth wave. Perhaps I didn’t upgrade my sword correctly.
Yes, Brand has avatar support. No, I have no fucking clue why this was added instead of fixing the game.
Apparently there is some kind of boss monster at the end of it. I never found out for myself. The thing is, I’m guessing that the giant scorpion-dog thingies that were scattered throughout the normal stages are in the Arena and I just hadn’t reached them yet. If they are, I want to go on the record of saying the game is probably impossible. I encountered several of those fucking things throughout the game and I only managed to kill one. They have four attacks, three of which are maybe-unblockable quick strikes that drain your health faster than smoking the exhaust pipe of a bus. If you manage to get close enough to start swinging, they take dozens of shots before they die. The mere threat of them was enough to make me realize playing the arena wasn’t worth it, because unless the game ends with you shoving the sword through the throat of the king, then deleting Brand from your hard drive and replacing it with a better game, it’s just not worth the effort.
I could go on about the play control (meh) or the jumping (bleech) or the fact that the price of Brand is going to be raised to 240MSP in 90 days (a proclamation so fucking arrogant the developer ought to be flogged just for thinking about it) but I think I’ve said enough. If anything I’ve said about this game sounds like something you want to play, have at it, you fucking weirdo. I’ll close by going back to the graphics, because once again the usual gang of idiots are saying “it’s worth it just for the graphics!” Quite frankly, I don’t think the graphics are that good. But let’s say they were. I think saying gameplay doesn’t matter if the art is good is kind of a hypocritical stance from a community that complains about everything done by guys like Silver Dollar who phone-in nearly every title they release. How come it’s not okay for them to release busted, broken games with limited play mechanics, but a game like Brand can be nearly unplayable and still get you XBLIGers to stock up on tissues and baby lotion? I don’t get it. It would be like only being able to enter the Louvre if the curator gets to cockslap you across the face while the janitor shoves his mop up your ass.
It’s been exactly six months since I first reviewed Pixel Blocked! I thought it was essentially the basis of a good puzzle game that was in dire need of some tender loving care. Well, developer Daniel Truong took that to heart. He started taking it out to fancy restaurants and spas, writing it mushy love letters, and buying it expensive shiny jewelry. And then I said “no you idiot, I meant fix the fucking problems with it.” “Oh” responded Danny.
Just so I’m clear, I really liked Pixel Blocked the first time around. Hell, it was an original occupant on the leaderboard here. But I couldn’t ignore the numerous design flaws that held it back. Patches were promised and Danny went back to the drawing board. How did he do? Well, let’s take a look.
Graphics are nice and spiced up, but fuck graphics. This chick only cares about game play.
Original Problem: The reward system was broken due to way out-of-bounds minimum requirements.
Current Build: The reward system has been drastically overhauled. Now you’re scored on the classic Gold-Silver-Bronze system. Having said that, getting a gold on the time attack mode is still a total bitch. Pixel Blocked is a logic puzzler, so the speed fits in like Colonel Sanders taking a job at Weight Watchers.
Original Problem: The game was too easy on account of having missiles at your disposal to clear away bad shots.
Current Build: There are no missiles. At all. And this works just fine for me, because if they had been around I wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation to use them. When it came to them, I was like an alcoholic whose only hope for salvation is removing every outlet of liquor from my entire life.
Consequently, now if you fuck up you do have to start the whole puzzle over again. How do you know if you’ve fucked up? It’s simple: any time you make a wrong move, the game makes a sarcastic quip at you followed by the words PIXEL BLOCKED! It’s actually pretty motivational. I only wish there had been a wider variety of quips, or maybe the ability to customize them. I think I would have taken my time and not fucked up as much if the game told me “Wow, you’re getting dumber Cathy. Also, you’re putting on weight and your hair is ugly. PIXEL BLOCKED!”
“Wow, what an amazing fuck-up you are. PIXEL BLOCKED!”
Original Problem: The cursor had visibility issues.
Current Build: You can see it.
Original Problem: If you rotated the board after firing a shot, it would result in misfires as the blocks traveled too slowly.
Current Build: This got fixed too, so a block will go exactly where you meant it to go whether you rotate the board or not.
So as you can see, every major complaint about Pixel Blocked has been fixed. The result is a game that has completely shed its indie feel. Pixel Blocked plays like a polished title by a major studio. It makes me wonder if Mr. Truong isn’t essentially slumming-it by keeping this title on Xbox Live Indie Games and Windows Phone. Pixel Blocked is a game that’s ready for prime time. Sure, taking away the missiles left me gibbering in the corner and possibly in need of an intervention, but that’s fine. Once I got over my dependency I took the game in stride and was able to have an even better time. I never thought a game would fall off the leaderboard and then manage to climb back on, but Pixel Blocked has done that, so come back to Indie Gamer Chick on February 1. What are you waiting for? You should grab it now before Danny is turning tricks for Nintendo, learning first hand how the concept for Kirby came about.
80 Microsoft Points said “also your eyes are too close together and you smell a cross between a chimpanzee and a bucket of sweat, PIXEL BLOCKED!” in the making of this review.
EvilQuest was developed by Chaosoft
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